Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive - and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. But Mark isn't ready to give up yet.

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.

It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.

Two astronomers have detected a strange, pulsing signal from deep space. Within hours, the US government goes into lockdown, restricting airspace and scrubbing scientific data. Was the signal an intercepted communication revealing alarming plans for an enemy’s military strike? Or has humanity at long last found proof of extraterrestrial life?

They came up on us like a gravy crap. We was just down by the creek dranking and shooting when them ugly suckers flanked us. My name is Lick. They call me Lick cause when I was a baby I used to lick everything. This is the story of me and my buddy Fanger. We call him Fanger cause when he was a kid he broke his panky fanger on his right hand and his mom and deddy didn't git it fixed right. Now it sticks out all the time like a fancy yankee or English man dranking tea. Anyway, this is the story of our first encounter and how we ended up on the run. Just like everybody else.

An ancient derelict yields some unexpected small surprises, and the crew acquires some unusual new crew members. Mee Keralatazaku, the rather troublesome ruler of the planet Kanpripticon, has them take her to a very strange and secretive location. When they return, all hell breaks loose as the Kipitz try to kill Mee Keralatazaku and everyone else on Kanpripticon. She, who must not be annoyed, is now very, very angry.

Maryn Alessi retired from mercenary service after her last assignment went horribly sideways and settled down on a quiet planet with the love of her life. Unexpectedly widowed, Maryn must fulfill a promise to return her mate’s ashes to zer home planet for funeral rites, but a brutal civil war has destabilized space travel.

Whenever a breach was reported in one of the company’s many transdimensional transport tubes, he would conscientiously rush to the scene to repair it. Brobding had a bad feeling about these frequent breaches; while he was relieved that there hadn’t been any interdimensional rifts so far, he thought that it was only a matter of time before something serious happened. Brobding was from the planet Measel.

Life isn’t so terrible for newly-coined physicist Mira Verborgen when she’s chosen for a cushy internship at CERN, located at the France-Switzerland border. After all, she gets to work side by side with dreamy physicist, Giancarlo Colombo, and be on the cutting edge of the latest particle accelerator experiments... That is, until she inadvertently becomes part of Dr. Orlov’s bonkers plan for world domination. Instead of exploring her budding relationship with Giancarlo, their relationship is cut short—along with their material existence. Indeed, the pair develop a startling and ...