Science Fiction Anthology Short Stories

From the dawn of history onward, commanding the most powerful ship around has been a dream of admirals, sultans, emperors, kings, generalissimos, and sea captains everywhere. For what the intimidation factor alone doesn't achieve, a massive barrage from super-weapons probably will.

Mercy Thompson’s world just got a whole lot bigger... A collection of all-new and previously published short stories featuring Mercy Thompson, “one of the best heroines in the urban fantasy genre today” (Fiction Vixen Book Reviews), and the characters she calls friends...

A definitive new collection featuring all of the previously published Sookie Stackhouse stories, along with a new introduction from the number one New York Times best-selling author of the series. Return to Bon Temps, Louisiana, with these listener favorites featuring spunky telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse and her paranormal friends.

"Red Wine and Blood": The Blood Wars raged for centuries across Boston. Witness a brief glimpse into the brutal history of the Wars with Ignacio Salvatore and the vampire he loves, Ashwin Metcalfe, in 1897. "A History of Trouble": Angel was joking when he asked O'Malley if someone resurrected a mammoth. Little did he know that was exactly what someone did. "A Dragon in the City": What happens when Eroch goes adventuring in Beacon Hill without Angel? Chaos, pure chaos. "Fae's Gold": Daniel is helping the newly-resurrected fae, Ruairi Brennan, become accustomed to modern-day living.

Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery will take the classic tropes of tales of witchcraft and infuse them with fresh, feminist perspective and present-day concerns - even if they're set in the past. These witches might be monstrous, or they might be heroes, depending on their own definitions. Even the kind hostess with the candy cottage thought of herself as the hero of her own story. After all, a woman's gotta eat.

After 25 years serving as the human Monitor of the Interstellar Ark, Hermes, Orion is scheduled to be placed back into hibernation with the other crewmembers. Knowing he'll die there and be replaced before the ship's voyage is over, he decides that he won’t — can’t — accept that fate. Whatever it takes, Orion will escape Hermes and see what's beyond, even if it means defying the regulations of his only friend — the ship-wide artificial intelligence known as Dan.

Mika Tanner has loved Bailey Morrell, a beautiful Healer, since childhood. But his duty as a sentinel, a supernatural guardian of an ancient race, clashed with her rebellious spirit. Now a dangerous new anarchist group threatens life as they know it.

In this new anthology, Neil Gaiman pierces the veil of reality to reveal the enigmatic, shadowy world that lies beneath. Trigger Warning includes previously published pieces of short fiction--stories, verse, and a very special Doctor Who story that was written for the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved series in 2013--as well as "Black Dog", a new tale that revisits the world of American Gods, exclusive to this collection.

"Having the Barbarian's Baby": Megan's ready to give birth, but she's not ready to let her mate leave her side. When Cashol must go hunting to feed the tribe, they're separated for the first time since resonance. Not a problem, except the baby's ready to be born and there's a storm brewing...

Magic powers? His own mech? A whole airship of gorgeous women desperate for his genes? Yes, please! Paralyzed by a drunk driver, let go from his job, and stuck in a sad, stagnant town in the middle of nowhere, Joseph Locke was having the worst day of his life. And then he died. But considering that he wakes up with a brand new body, in the cockpit of a badass steampunk robot, on an airship of nothing but hot babes, his next life may not be all that bad. Especially when he learns that he’s a void mage—the rarest and most powerful of all mages on the world of Haven.

Allen Ming awakens in an unfamiliar realm, trapped within an unfamiliar form—feeble in body and spirit. Thrust into a world of cultivation, Allen Ming finds himself grappling with a reality of a wastrel body, and a world filled with danger and killing. With an AI-enhanced eye, he seeks his way through the dark world of cultivation. But with his newfound family haunted by a looming threat, he has to take charge of the situation even before he gets familiar with the new body.

After his son gives him a pair of "X-ray" glasses as a gift, Martin Blackstone tries them on just for the hell of it - and all they do is give him a headache...until he sees things he can’t possibly be seeing. Glimpses of things on the other side of a wall or beneath someone’s clothing. He wants to believe it’s just his overactive imagination, but the “X-ray” specs actually work.

Moon, Jade, and other favorites from the Indigo Cloud Court return with two new novellas from Martha Wells, who continues to enthusiastically ignore genre conventions in her exploration of the fascinating world of the Raksura. Her novellas and short stories contain all the elements fans have come to love from the Raksura books: courtly intrigue and politics, unfolding mysteries that reveal an increasingly strange wider world, and threats both mundane and magical.

Pass through fairy tales into the magic of invisible worlds in these opulent stories by a beloved fantasy icon and author of the classic Riddlemaster trilogy.

Word Puppets - the first comprehensive collection of Kowal's extraordinary fiction - includes her two Hugo-winning stories, a Hugo nominee, an original story set in the world of "The Lady Astronaut of Mars", and 14 other show-stopping tales.

Wounds is a confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella from Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in The Visible Filth to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table”, Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

Like the creation myths they supersede, the revelations of science are seared into our collective imagination through storytelling. From Archimedes' bath to Newton's apple, vivid accounts of scientific discovery help us understand the principles behind each theory, and add to the larger narrative of how the universe works, and how we came to be here. This anthology draws out and distils science's love of narrative from a wide range of scientific disciplines, weaving theory into very human stories.

Geralt the Witcher—revered and hated—holds the line against the monsters plaguing humanity in this collection of adventures, the first chapter in Andrzej Sapkowski’s groundbreaking epic fantasy series that inspired the hit Netflix show and the blockbuster video games.

In Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman's imagination and supreme artistry transform a mundane world into a place of terrible wonders - where an old woman can purchase the Holy Grail at a thrift store, where assassins advertise their services in the Yellow Pages under "Pest Control," and where a frightened young boy must barter for his life with a mean-spirited troll living beneath a bridge by the railroad tracks.

Glowing with narrator Virginia Leishman’s finely tuned phrasing, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye is the perfect introduction to A.S. Byatt, an author who continues to receive international awards and acclaim. Her wondrous fairy tales are iridescent stories full of spells, marvelous creatures, and beautiful princesses.