Showing results by author "Walter Jon Williams" in All Categories

It starts with the dogs. They won’t stop barking. And then the earth shrugs - 8.9 on the Richter scale. It’s the world’s biggest earthquake since Lisbon in 1755, and it doesn’t hit California or Japan or Mexico, but New Madrid, Missouri, a sleepy town on the Mississippi River. Seismologists had predicted the scope of the disaster - but no one listened. For hundreds of miles around, dams burst, engulfing entire counties in tidal waves of mud and debris. Within minutes, there is nothing but chaos and ruin from St. Louis to Vicksburg, from Kansas City to Louisville.

Ex-fighter pilot Cowboy, "hardwired" via skull sockets directly to his lethal electronic hardware, teams up with Sarah, an equally cyborized gun-for-hire, to make a last stab at independence from the rapacious Orbitals.

Rogue. Joker. Lover. Reluctant conspirator. The ambitious young Quillifer was been knighted for services to the crown, but was then banished from court by a queen who finds him obnoxious. Now, after a two-year voyage to improve his fortunes, Quillifer returns to court and is plunged immediately into a maelstrom of intrigue that triggers duels, plots, amours, and rollicking adventure. Bounding back and forth from the high councils of state to the warm bed of his mistress, Quillifer must exert every ounce of seductive charm and low cunning in order to survive.

Working on opposite sides of the galaxy - one in deep space, the other undercover on an occupied planet - and haunted by personal ghosts, Captain Gareth Martinez and Lieutenant Lady Caroline Sula fight to save the Empire from the vicious alien Naxid. In a desperate, audacious bid to stop the Naxid fleet, Martinez makes a move that could win the war…and lose his career. Meanwhile, Sula’s guerilla tactics may not be enough to stop the Naxid - until she tries one deadly final gambit.

Blending fast-paced military science fiction and space opera, the third and final volume in a dynamic trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Praxis, set in the universe of his popular and critically acclaimed Dread Empire’s Fall series, comes a tale of blood, courage, adventure, and battle in which the fate of an empire rests in the hands of two lovers.

It’s been seven years since the end of the Naxid War. Sidelined for their unorthodox tactics by a rigid, tradition-bound military establishment, Captain Gareth Martinez and Captain Lady Sula are stewing in exile, frustrated and impatient to exercise the effective and lethal skills they were born to use in fighting the enemy. Yet after the ramshackle empire left by the Shaa conquerors is shaken by a series of hammer blows that threaten the foundations of the commonwealth, the result is a war no one planned, no one expected, and no one knows how to end.

Steward is a clone, a beta. His memories are 15 years old, because his alpha never did have a brain-scan update. And in those 15 years, the entire world has changed. An alien race known as The Powers has established relations with humanity, and the Orbital Policorp that held his allegiance has collapsed.

The Praxis, the empire of now extinct Shaa, has again fallen into civil war, with desperate and outnumbered humans battling alien species for survival. Leading the human forces are star-crossed lovers Gareth Martinez and Caroline Sula, who must find a way to overcome their own personal history to defeat the aliens and assure humanity’s survival. But even if the human fleet is victorious, the divisions fracturing the empire may be too wide to repair, as battles between politicians, the military, and fanatics who want to kill every alien threaten to further tear the empire apart.

Quillifer is young, serially in love, studying law, and living each day keenly aware that his beloved homeport of Ethlebight risks closure due to silting of the harbor. His concerns for the future become much more immediate when he returns from a summery assignation to find his city attacked by Aekoi pirates, leading to brigands in the streets and his family and friends in chains.

The Dread Empire of the Shaa is no more, following the death of the last oppressor. But freedom remains elusive for the myriad sentient races enslaved for 10 centuries, as an even greater terror arises. The Naxids - a powerful insectoid species themselves subjugated until the recent Shaa demise - plan to fill the vacuum with their own bloody domination and have already won a shattering victory with superior force and unimaginable cruelty. But two heroes survived the carnage at Magaria: Lord Gareth Martinez and the fiery, mysterious gun pilot Lady Caroline Sula.

In the war against the ruthless Yuuzhan Vong, the fall of Coruscant leaves the New Republic divided by internal strife, and on the verge of bowing to conquest. But those who steadfastly refuse to consider surrender - Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia Organa Solo, and their children and comrades-in-arms - are determined to seize victory against overwhelming odds.

“Investments” finds Gareth Martinez has accepted a meaningless post as Inspector General of Chee, a newly settled world. Intending nothing more than a pleasant vacation with his family, he first stumbles across a murderous conspiracy. In “The Stickpin,” set in the Naxid War, Caroline Sula leads the resistance against the Naxid occupiers, and shows how a pleasant afternoon stroll can have deadly consequences to the enemy. Then in Impersonations, Caroline Sula has been posted to the planet Earth, a dismal backwater where careers go to die.

For millennia, the Shaa have subjugated the universe, forcing the myriad sentient races to bow to their joyless tyranny. But the Shaa will soon be no more. The Dread Empire is in its rapidly fading twilight, and with its impending fall comes the promise of a new galactic order...and bloody chaos. A young Terran naval officer marked by his lowly birth, Lt. Gareth Martinez is the first to recognize the insidious plot of the Naxid - the powerful, warlike insectoid society that was enslaved before all others - to replace the masters’ despotic rule with their own.

Imagine a game with no boundaries - waiting in parking lot, sitting at your computer, walking down the street. You could be called at any moment - and you'd better be ready. This is not a game. This is a novel of greed, betrayal, and social networking.

Quillifer has risen high at court. The butcher’s son is now a lord, and now is the confidential agent of the state, the caretaker of the kingdom’s secrets, and the secret lover of the young and brilliant Queen Floria. He finds himself surrounded by perils. The nobles are at odds with one another, but united in despising Quillifer. Someone has brought deadly poison into court, and Quillifer fears the Queen may be the intended victim. Another assassination plot is aimed at Quillifer himself, and an enemy nation has landed troops intending to topple Floria by force.

Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, is a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare scenario, perhaps even bringing about the ultimate existential crisis: the end of civilization itself.

Orphans of deep space... They're outlaws now. Created to serve a function grown obsolete, haunted by the holographic ghost of their father, Ubu and Maria have lived their entire lives skating along the edge of extinction. Now they and their ship, Runaway, are in flight both from the law and from a predatory clan of competitors. They're going to come back rich or not at all. But what they find in the depths of space isn't wealth, but a secret so startling that Ubu and Maria will need every last reserve of guile, cunning, and intelligence just to survive.

Aiah has fought her way out of poverty and discovers a limitless source of plasm, the mysterious substance that powers the world-city. Her discovery soon involves her with Constantine, the charismatic, dangerous, seductive revolutionary who plans to overthrow the government and upend the cosmic order.

With the publication of his debut novel, The Privateer, in 1981, Walter Jon Williams began one of the most varied and prolific careers in contemporary popular fiction. But much of Williams' best work takes place in the shorter forms, as this generous volume, filled to overflowing with award-winning and award-nominated stories, clearly proves. The Best of Walter Jon Williams reflects its author's affection for - and mastery of - the novella form.

Short novels are movie length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2012 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form.