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.

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.

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.

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.

Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.

Antigonus One-eye has murdered Susan Godlewski. He did it on camera as a political statement of dominance. The Ship People, the people from the twenty-first century who had arrived in this time on the Cruise ship Queen of the Sea, had to respond. Or they would be the meat for any bandit chief from the tag end of the fourth century BCE. Captain Lars Floden declared Antigonus One-eye dead, but despite the magical beliefs of this time, just saying it didn't make it so. Making it so would demand courage, and commitment, misdirection, and impossible technology from the twenty-first century. As ...

Twice before, mysterious cosmic catastrophes have sent portions of the Earth across space and back in time - first, with the Grantville Disaster in West Virginia, and then again with a maximum security prison in southern Illinois. Now, the planet is struck with yet another such cataclysm, whose direct impact falls upon the Queen of the Sea, a cruise ship in the Caribbean. When the convulsions subside, the crew and passengers of the ship discover that they have arrived in a new and frightening world. They are in the Mediterranean now, not the Caribbean.

A few years ago Eric and I talked about doing a 1632 WarSpell crossover. The idea was that a bunch of gamers playing WarSpell would set their game in a copy of the 1632 universe, but with a little bit of magic. Paula and I wrote the book and then Eric decided that he didn't want to do the crossover. The story was fine and Ring of Fire Press would have published it, but he wanted it changed so that it was no longer a 1632 crossover. That was because he didn't want people starting to think that this was part of the 1632 Canon, At the time I had been thinking that I would have to change ...

Not every hero stands at the forefront of battle, chopping up, or gunning down the foe. Johan Kipper, an old and worn mercenary who had done more than his share of chopping up and gunning down, finally found his hero, his liege lord, not in a great captain, but in David Bartley, a fourteen year old boy who was just trying to make sure his family could get by. A lad who was trying to protect his family by making rather than taking, by building rather than destroying. And, more, a lad who didn't need to knock Johan down to feel tall or make Johan afraid to feel brave. Never in his long life ...

The Back to the Past senseis were killing them in the ratings. So the sensory channel decided to do their own. They couldn't afford the variances to send the primitive back without their consent, so they had to have a contract with the primitive. To be sure they would get the contract they chose a primitive who was about to die of natural causes. Dan Baker was having a stroke so he didn't have many options. They assigned the project to Orgaet a producer of scripted dramas. An Artist. It was a punishment for going over budget. Orgaet hated the project and wanted it to fail fast so he could ...

Miroslava Holmes, the one and only licensed private detective in the United Sovereign States of Russia, has a new case. She's been called in on a locked room murder—and to make things worse, it's the locked room of an agent of the Embassy Bureau, a 17th century Russian James Bond. This is a political case, and the Embassy Bureau isn't talking to anyone. Solving the case is going to leave Miroslava at the crossroads where law and justice part ways. But not everything is murders and spies. No, sometimes it's the theft of a piece of costume jewelry from a girl at the Happy Bottom Club. And ...

The West Wing meets the X men. How does politics deal with people, often citizens, who are suddenly gifted with special powers—and an extra set of memories. Magic has started working! But it's not legitimate magic. Not the magic of Merlin or the powers of psychics. Instead it is the magic of a silly game. A Role Playing Game called Warspell and other games like it. The sort of games played with oddly shaped dice and little lead figurines by even odder people. And now not only is this silly sort of magic working, but the oddballs who play the games suddenly have special powers. Some of ...

This anthology includes ten stories from four universes. They all deal with selling stuff or the value of stuff, if you stretch a point. And they are all fun reads and you don’t have to stretch a point to see that. “Signs” from the 1632 universe deals with what money is and what it will and won’t buy. It’s one of my favorites in Eric’s 1632 world. A short fun story to get us started. The second story comes first. “The Sewing Circle” is my first professional sale. It’s what got me into writing and what got me interested in economics. It’s a full-fledged novella at over ...

This is the fourth Miroslava Holmes book and all the Holmes books have dealt with Russian politics, but this one deals with them even more. Events from 1638: The Sovereign States are included in this novel and from there it continues the story of the main Russian thread of the 1632 Universe. Czar Mikhail Romanov of the United Sovereign States of Russia has problems by the score. The Embassy Bureau is run by an incompetent from an important family, who is possibly a traitor. Sheremetev is gone, only to be replaced by Mikhail's Uncle Ivan, who, if he's as corrupt as Sheremetev was, is a lot ...

Sam Merchantson rode into the Badlands trying to lose a posse. He should have died, but his luck was in, and the sensors were out. Sam lived in a world of cattle-rustling and muzzle-loading pistols. But it hadn’t always been that way. Once it had been a colony world, filled with the fruits of advanced technology . . . then the enemy came. They got most of the colonists and almost all the tech. There will be new things coming into the world when Sam returns. He’ll bring medicines and machines, history and hope, fear and freedom and—like it or not—he’ll be bringing WAR! When he ...