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.

Vasilii and Miroslava are back at work again. Czar Mikhail wants a rail line built from Ufa, the capital of his United Sovereign States of Russia, to the capital of the USSR’s newest addition, the Khazak Khanate. For that he needs a steam engineer and diplomat—Vasilii’s jobs—as well as a top surveyor. Unfortunately, the surveyor is an arrogant snob who gets himself murdered—and now the czar needs a detective as well. Fortunately, Vasilii’s paramour Miroslava came with him, so she’s there to take on the case. She and Vasilii need to solve the murder quickly without blowing up ...

Ufa is going crazy. The new capital of the legitimate government of Russia, once a trading post in the far east, is now a fast-growing boom town. Into this maelstrom come peddlers and exotic dancers, criminals and craftsmen, nobles and assassins. Crime is running rampant and the city guards that passes for policemen don't have a clue how to handle it—and wouldn’t know a clue if they stumbled right over it. They can manage to walk a beat, at least in broad daylight. But solve a crime? Not a chance. And Czar Michael Romanov and his officials aren’t any help, since they’re pre-occupied...

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 ...

The impact of the time transposition that brought a twenty-first century cruise ship to the Hellenic world right after the death of Alexander the Great continues to unfold. While President Al Wiley is building a new America in Trinidad and Captain Lars Floden is trying to use the Queen of the Sea to spread enlightenment around the world, Rome is experiencing a wakeup call—and so are its neighbors. If things don't change, the Roman republic is going to become a dictatorship. And if things don't change, the Samnites, Etruscans and other Italian states will become subjects of the Roman ...

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 ...