Samantha Kane is struggling with this thing called ‘her life’, and how it can be completely turned upside down in the span of one week. Her partner and mentor is hospitalized, followed quickly by her father, who slips into a coma, her teenage brother decides now is the perfect time to rebel, and her mom lays the guilt on thick as molasses every chance she gets. Work isn’t much better. Recently promoted to detective, her job is suddenly in jeopardy, and the cops she’s worked with for years, no longer respect her or want her around. Not to mention the fact that Ghosts, Vampires, and Werewolves are real, and apparently want her dead.

Why?

According to a crazy man who showed up out of nowhere, Sam was never meant to be a cop. She’s supposed to be a Wizard.

When Dr. Shona Taylor takes her family and her medical menagerie to her new assignment on the gorgeous planet of Jardindor, she expects it to be an easy assignment, catering to a very wealthy clientele. To her surprise, the colonists have a secret, a most unusual menagerie of their own. Shona and her family fall into danger as the owners of the planet fear that she might reveal their secrets to the rest of the galaxy.

Dave Shuster has been confronted by secret government agents over a photo taken by a Mars lander of a graveyard, complete with crosses, on Mars. Shuster claims that, in an alternate timeline, he was a low-level bureaucrat in the administration of a joint U.S.-Soviet Mars colony when he was caught up in a murder mystery involving the illegal use of robot technology.

In that timeline, the Cold War took a very different turn—largely influenced by Admiral Robert Heinlein, who was allowed to return to naval service following World War II.

When Shuster is thrown into a power vacuum immediately upon his arrival on the Mars Colony in 1985, he finds himself fighting a rogue industrialist, using his wits and with some help from unlikely sources in a society infiltrated by the pervasive presence of realistic androids.

In this astonishing, variegated assortment of tales, award-winning author Paul Di Filippo covers all the themes and modes he is best known for, and ventures into new territory as well.

—Visit a hermetic city where beauty is the only currency.

—Experience a steampunk fable in which nothing is what it first seems, and a young man’s future rests on finding his true father.

—Hang out with the techno-savvy, social-media gypsies who form the new elite in the not-too-distant future.

—Ride a wild ribofunk express train into the badlands where a man’s skin is not his own.

—Experience a counterfactual World War II where victory is achieved by amazing rays.

—Visit a haunted Italian city where the Neolithic and the present live side-by-side, and a hero who falls in love with a goddess and who must battle her ancient foe.

—Visit an Orwellian future redeemed only by the imagination and love of a tortured dissenter.

These are just some of the uncanny tales contained in this collection, incorporating comedy and tragedy, laughter and tears!