Four speculative near futures by Kit Reed, author of Where and Mormama, showcasing her sharp and transgressive social dystopias where characters are pushed to their psychological limits. @Expectations Jenny lives a typical suburban life and stumbles upon an online community where people create their own lives through words. Soon she becomes so far removed from her life that she can no longer see the line between reality and fantasy. Thinner Than Thou In a world where religion says everyone must look young and perfect, the ultimate heresy is being too fat, too thin, or too old. The Baby Merchant Precipitously falling fertility rates (due to viruses and other biological complications) allow Tom Starbird to make a living finding the perfect "unwanted" baby for the perfect, very wealthy, parents. Enclave The compelling story of an isolated community under pressure, Enclave shows how men, women, and teenagers react when their hermetically-sealed mountaintop community is attacked by biological and electronic viruses. Some become heroes, some become villains . . . and some confound their own and others' expectations. This ebook contains the full text of four novels by Kit Reed. @Expectations Thinner Than Thou The Baby Merchant Enclave At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

MORMAMA is a riveting supernatural, southern gothic tale from Kit Reed, the author of Where. *2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST HORROR* *Locus 2017 Recommended Reading List* One of io9's 20 Amazing New Scifi and Fantasy Books for May Kirkus' the Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Reads for May Dell Duval has been living on the street since his accident. He can't remember who he was or where he came from. All he has is a tattered note in his pocket with an address for the Ellis house, a sprawling, ancient residence in Jacksonville. He doesn't know why he's been sent here. In the house, Lane and her son Theo have returned to the ancient family home—their last resort. The old house is ruled by an equally ancient trio of tyrannical aunts, who want to preserve everything. Nothing should ever leave the house, including Lane. Something about the house isn't right. Things happen to the men and boys living there. There are forces at work one of which visits Theo each night—Mormama, one mama too many. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

TV says it. Magazines say it. American society commands it. You must be thin. You must be young. Fad diets. Fat-purging pills. Fitness clubs. Liposuction. Breast implants. Steroids. In the tomorrow of Thinner Than Thou, the cult of the body has become the one true religion. The Dedicated Sisters are a religious order sworn to help anorexic, bulimic, and morbidly obese youth. Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps. And through hypnotically powerful evangelical infomercials, the Reverend Earl preaches the heaven of the Afterfat, where you will look like a Greek god and eat anything you want. Just sign over your life savings and come to Sylphania, the most luxurious weight-loss spa in the world, where the Reverend himself will personally supervise your attainment of physical perfection. But the glory of youth and thinness that America worships conceals a hidden world where teens train for the competitive eating circuit, where fat porn and obese strippers feed people's dark desires, and where an underground railroad of rebellious religions remember when people worshipped God instead of the Afterfat. As Annie, an anorexic, and her friend Kelly, who is so massive she can barely walk, find out, the tender promises of the Dedicated Sisters are fulfilled by forced feedings and enforced starvation in hidden prisons. As middle-aged Jeremy discovers, Sylphania is a concentration camp where failure to lose weight and tone up leads to brutal punishment. The Rev. Earl's public sympathy for the overweight conceals a private contempt . . . and, beneath that, a terrible longing known only to a select few. The inevitable decay of old age is the only thing keeping mankind from reaching perfection. Luckily, Reverend Earl has a plan that will take care of that . . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Inside the Castertown MegaMall, the biggest mall in the world, live the night children—runaways, abandoned kids, kids who got lost and were never found. They only come out at night, after all the shoppers are gone. When thirteen-year-old Jule Devereaux visits the mall after the mysterious disappearance of her aunt, she becomes a pawn in the war between two gangs of night children: the Castertown Crazies, led by the stalwart Tick Stiles, and the Dingos, whose leader is the batty Burt Arno. What the night children don’t realize is that the megalomaniacal owner of the MegaMall, billionaire Amos Zozz, knows all about them. To him, they are vermin—“rats” living in his beautiful mall—and he has plans to exterminate them. Julie, Tick, and Burt must join forces if they want to survive.…

Future and Fantastic Worlds embodies an unusual approach to the field of bibliographic research, including over 700 annotations of every DAW book published through mid-1987, with indexes by author, artist, and title, providing a massive guide to modern SF writers and their works, with much background data. Interspersed throughout the book are numerous wry, irreverent, and amusing observations offered by the late and highly respected researcher in this extremely valuable genre tool.

"Taut and elegant, carefully introspected and thoughtfully explored."—The New York Times From Hugo award-winning author Sarah Pinsker comes a novel about one family and the technology that divides them. Everybody's getting one. Val and Julie just want what’s best for their kids, David and Sophie. So when teenage son David comes home one day asking for a Pilot, a new brain implant to help with school, they reluctantly agree. This is the future, after all. Soon, Julie feels mounting pressure at work to get a Pilot to keep pace with her colleagues, leaving Val and Sophie part of the shrinking minority of people without the device. Before long, the implications are clear, for the family and society: get a Pilot or get left behind. With government subsidies and no downside, why would anyone refuse? And how do you stop a technology once it's everywhere? Those are the questions Sophie and her anti-Pilot movement rise up to answer, even if it puts them up against the Pilot's powerful manufacturer and pits Sophie against the people she loves most.

Space-opera heroines, gender-bending aliens, post-apocalyptic pregnancies, changeling children, interplanetary battles of the sexes, and much more: a groundbreaking new collection of classic American science fiction by women from the 1920s to the 1960s SF-expert Lisa Yaszek presents the biggest and best survey of the female tradition in American science fiction ever published, a thrilling collection of twenty-five classic tales. From Pulp Era pioneers to New Wave experimentalists, here are over two dozen brilliant writers ripe for discovery and rediscovery, including Leslie F. Stone, Judith Merril, Leigh Brackett, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin. Imagining strange worlds and unexpected futures, looking into and beyond new technologies and scientific discoveries, in utopian fantasies and tales of cosmic horror, these women created and shaped speculative fiction as surely as their male counterparts. Their provocative, mind-blowing stories combine to form a thrilling multidimensional voyage of literary-feminist exploration and recovery. CONTENTS Introduction by LISA YASZEK CLARE WINGER HARRIS The Miracle of the Lily (1928) LESLIE F. STONE The Conquest of Gola (1931) C. L. MOORE The Black God’s Kiss (1934) LESLIE PERRI Space Episode (1941) JUDITH MERRIL That Only a Mother (1948) WILMAR H. SHIRAS In Hiding (1948) KATHERINE MACLEAN Contagion (1950) MARGARET ST. CLAIR The Inhabited Men (1951) ZENNA HENDERSON Ararat (1952) ANDREW NORTH All Cats Are Gray (1953) ALICE ELEANOR JONES Created He Them (1955) MILDRED CLINGERMAN Mr. Sakrison’s Halt (1956) LEIGH BRACKETT All the Colors of the Rainbow (1957) CAROL EMSHWILLER Pelt (1958) ROSEL GEORGE BROWN Car Pool (1959) ELISABETH MANN BORGESE For Sale, Reasonable (1959) DORIS PITKIN BUCK Birth of a Gardner (1961) ALICE GLASER The Tunnel Ahead (1961) KIT REED The New You (1962) JOHN JAY WELLS & MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY Another Rib (1963) SONYA DORMAN When I Was Miss Dow (1966) KATE WILHELM Baby, You Were Great (1967) JOANNA RUSS The Barbarian (1968) JAMES TIPTREE JR. The Last Flight of Dr. Ain (1969) URSULA K. LE GUIN Nine Lives (1969)

So begins one of the most celebrated stories in fantasy literature . . . packed full of mystery, deep themes and incredible prose, meet Severian the Torturer and follow him on his journey across the great world of Urth Severian is a torturer, born to the guild and with an exceptionally promising career ahead of him . . . until he falls in love with one of his victims, a beautiful young noblewoman. Her excruciations are delayed for some months and, out of love, Severian helps her commit suicide and escape her fate. For a torturer, there is no more unforgivable act. In punishment he is exiled from the guild and his home city to the distant metropolis of Thrax with little more than Terminus Est, a fabled sword, to his name. Along the way he has to learn to survive in a wider world without the guild - a world in which he has already made both allies and enemies. And a strange gem is about to fall into his possession, which will only make his enemies pursue him with ever-more determination . . . Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1981 Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1982 Readers can't stop reading The Shadow of the Torturer: 'Full of rich characters and great imagination' Mark Lawrence, author of Red Sister 'A dark jewel . . . He has a mastery of language not often seen in fantasy writing . . . Couple this with an original and unique, highly imaginative and complex worldbuilding and the high praise is warranted' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'This is a picaresque fantasy with a difference, for our hero Severian is no wide-eyed country boy from the shire, but an apprentice torturer, thoroughly schooled in his trade' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'There are certain books that can be considered life-changing experiences. Gene Wolfe is an author who has written one of those for me' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'The Book of the New Sun Tetralogy is one of the great achievements in science fiction and is a MUST READ for fans of the genre. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'In addition to being unique in style, The Shadow of the Torturer is a gorgeous piece of work: passionate storytelling (heart-wrenching in places), fascinating insights into nature and the human condition, beautiful prose' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'Genre fiction at its finest. Original, difficult and well-crafted, it is easy to see how Wolfe is regarded as a writer's writer' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Among careerists who postpone parenthood, fertility problems abound. Adoptions have always been difficult and now America's borders have been closed by the Centers for Disease Control. Babies are high end commodities in this economy, microchipped at birth to protect them from theft. Tom Starbird rescues "unwanted" babies--but he's tired of meeting wealthy would-be parents' demands for "perfect" children. Tom is shutting up shop when Jake Zorn, the Television Conscience of Boston, blackmails him into doing one more job. Desperate to find one last perfect baby, Tom finds the lovely and very pregnant Sasha Egan. Stalked by her unborn child's father, on the run--Tom guesses she will be glad to be rid of her burden. Neither he nor Sasha could predict that the baby she never wanted is the one thing in her life she will do anything to keep.