A young Indian woman, accompanied by her infant and her cruel husband, experiences joy and heartbreak when she joins the Lewis and Clark expedition seeking a way to the Pacific.

Is there a better phrase to start a story than "No Shit, There I Was..."? If you hear someone start with that phrase, you know it's going to be worth listening carefully. That's how all the craziest - and most interesting - stories start. And then we turned a bunch of speculative fiction authors loose on that phrase.

Almost a hundred years ago, a major terrestrial event reshaped the earth’s coastlines. Goodbye entire cities. Goodbye entire states. Goodbye entire countries. And when the authorities outlawed salvaging from these sunken sites, why say hello to a new breed of criminal: underwater reclamation specialists. Even a hundred years later, there’s still a whole lot of loot for the reclaiming. After the wake of dead bodies left in the Seattle Isles, Isa and Puo retreat to Europe to gain some distance while things settle down. But even on another continent, the Ghost of Winn haunts Isa everywhere she goes. And to make matters worse, Puo won’t shut up about it. Determined to prove nothing’s wrong, Isa accepts their biggest job yet from a mysterious employer with deep pockets. The employer’s only condition: the inclusion of Liáng, an attractive, well-muscled operative to be embedded with their team. As the gravity of what Isa took on weighs on them, they learn more about this mysterious employer and that failure isn’t an option—not with the kind of bill they’re racking up. Meanwhile, the authorities are closing in as Isa’s crew isn’t getting any closer to pulling off their job. With options dwindling, it’s time to try something stupid and reckless—the Ghost of Winn be damned. Sunken City Capers is a fun post-apocalyptic series with no zombies, just criminals and mischievous ne’er-do-wells. Fans of heist novels/movies and strong female protagonists will likely enjoy this series. Sunken City Capers Books: The Solid-State Shuffle, Book 1 The Elgin Deceptions, Book 2 Leverage, Book 3 The Brummie Con, Book 4 Book 5 Coming Soon!

Thrown into the past, Charlie Pearson must find a way to save what is most precious to him. In this gripping, heartwarming tale of redemption, Charlie learns a lesson he failed to learn twenty-five years ago …

Thousands lay dead after a brutal crime wave swept through San Francisco in a matter of hours. The cause: Kerephrine, an alien compound that allegedly only Nira Rosenberg’s lab can synthesize. Forced from her lab. Watched by the authorities. Nira must race to find the answers to clear both her and her lab’s name. Answers she soon learns with much higher stakes: her brother’s life.

Victorian novels, Garrett Stewart argues, hurtle forward in prose as violent as the brutal human existence they chronicle. In Novel Violence, he explains how such language assaults the norms of written expression and how, in doing so, it counteracts the narratives it simultaneously propels. Immersing himself in the troubling plots of Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Stewart uses his brilliant new method of narratography to trace the microplots of language as they unfold syllable by syllable. By pinpointing where these linguistic narratives collide with the stories that give them context, he makes a powerful case for the centrality of verbal conflict to the experience of reading Victorian novels. He also maps his finely wrought argument on the spectrum of influential theories of the novel—including those of Georg Lukács and Ian Watt—and tests it against Edgar Allan Poe’s antinovelistic techniques. In the process, Stewart shifts critical focus toward the grain of narrative and away from more abstract analyses of structure or cultural context, revealing how novels achieve their semantic and psychic effects and unearthing, in prose, something akin to poetry.

Guilt follows all men—even into the depths of an alien ocean. Kale does what he can to keep men alive, but after three years his own guilt wears. Understaffed, underfunded and little thought of, they complete the terraforming tasks too dangerous for everyone else. Now the scientists have seeded the biggest storm yet, and its arrival will force Kale to finally face his guilt once and for all.

"The fifteen writers in this third original anthology in the Fiction River line explore everything from Chicago gangsters to Japanese tsunamis, and travel from 2013 to the ninteenth century to a vast future. Featuring work from award winners to bestsellers to a few newcomers whose time will come, Time Streams turns the time-travel genre on its head"--P. 4 of cover.

In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world in the year's best short stories. This venerable collection brings together award winning authors and masters of the field such as Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Damien Broderick, Elizabeth Bear, Paul McAuley and John Barnes. And with an extensive recommended reading guide and a summation of the year in science fiction, this annual compilation has become the definitive must-read anthology for all science fiction fans and readers interested in breaking into the genre.

From H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov to Ursula K. Le Guin, time travel has long been a favorite topic and plot device in tales of science fiction and fantasy. But as any true SF fan knows, astounding stories about traversing alternate universes and swimming the tides of time demand plausible science. That’s just what Paul J. Nahin’s guide provides. An engineer, physicist, and published science fiction writer, Nahin is uniquely qualified to explain the ins and outs of how to spin such complex theories as worm holes, singularity, and relativity into scientifically sound fiction. First published in 1997, this fast-paced book discusses the common and not-so-common time-travel devices science fiction writers have used over the years, assesses which would theoretically work and which would not, and provides scientific insight inventive authors can use to find their own way forward or backward in time. From hyperspace and faster-than-light travel to causal loops and the uncertainty principle and beyond, Nahin’s equation-free romp across time will help writers send their characters to the past or future in an entertaining, logical, and scientific way. If you ever wanted to set up the latest and greatest grandfather paradox—or just wanted to know if the time-bending events in the latest pulp you read could ever happen—then this book is for you.