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.

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.

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.

Ashley Perrin is fresh out of college and starting a job as a community liaison for the Third District–the city’s only sector with more alien residents than humans. Ashley’s barely found where the paper clips are kept when she’s beset with constituent complaints–from too much noise at the Annual Lupidian Celebration Parade to a trip-and-fall chicken to a very particular type of alien hornet that threatens the very city itself. And if that’s not terrifying enough, Ashley is next up at the office karaoke night.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Captain Andy Blacklock was overseeing the change of shifts at the state of Illinois' maximum-security prison when the world outside was suddenly ripped apart. They thought it was an earthquake until they found that the Mississippi River had disappeared, along with all signs of civilization. Then the sun came up - in the wrong direction. And a dinosaur came by and scratched its hide against the wall of the prison.... Something had thrown the prison back in time millions of years. And they were not alone.

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 ...

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 ...

New York Times best-selling author Eric Flint has received glowing critical praise for his Ring of Fire alternate history series. In this first installment, a West Virginia town is transported from the year 2000 to 1631 Germany at the height of the Thirty Years’ War. Thrust into conflict, the town residents must also contend with moral issues such as who should be considered a citizen.

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 ...

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 ...

In the year 1635, the Rhineland is in turmoil. The impact of the Ring of Fire, the cosmic accident which transported the small modern West Virginia town of Grantville to Europe in the early 17th century, has only aggravated a situation that was already chaotic. Perhaps nowhere in central Europe did the Thirty Years' War produce so much upheaval as it did in the borderlands between France and Germany. Archbishop Ferdinand of Cologne shares the religious fanaticism of his older brother, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria.

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 ...

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.

The Star Kingdom's ally Erewhon is growing increasingly restive in the alliance because the new High Ridge regime ignores its needs. Add to that the longstanding problem of a slave labor planet controlled by hostile Mesans in Erewhon's stellar back yard, a problem which High Ridge also ignores.

A WarSpell novel, in a world where war ships are just starting to make the change from ballistas to cannon that use a magically created gunpowder. Tensy Teasdale is forced by financial hardship to give up her studies of magic and join the Kingdom Navy as a midshipman. It's a hard life for her. While women have been serving in the Navy for decades, not everyone accepts them. It's even harder if you're a studious introvert who incurs the ire of a brute of a senior Midshipman who's just failed his Lieutenant’s test again. And that's just the first of Miss Midshipman Teasdale's misadventures....

This is the other side of the Jerry Garman merge from Space Race. It takes place in a rough analog of 14th Century England. Freedric the Incompetent—now with the memories of Jerry Garman an aeronautical engineer—want's to build an airplane. I almost named this "Life is what happens while your designing your airplane, because a bunch of other stuff keeps effecting the building of the airplane. Three of the other players in the game also Merged Alvin the Bard, Pip the thief, and Yahg the half orc. Each of the Merged characters brings something to the table. Yagh and Pip bring financial ...