In Tek Money, Jake Cardigan tries to relax. But as he enjoys a rare night out at the theater, his son Dan has a frightening experience at the Cardigans' beachfront home. A seemingly deranged man, muttering to himself about nightmare visions that torment him, comes looking for Jake - and then dies suddenly, as Dan tries to find out what he wants. So begins an unwelcome sequence of events. First Dan is accused of murdering the man. Once the police realize that accusation is ridiculous, suspicion falls on Jake: the dead man is Peter Traynor, a Tek addict, a friend of Jake's from the bad old days, when the drug had a strong hold on them both. The murderer did Traynor in with a Tek "sizzler", a powerful chip that plugs directly into the user's brain, starts by giving him wonderful visions, and ends by producing uncontrollable hallucinations. Traynor has literally died of fear. Jake had not seen Traynor in years, but the police are still suspicious. In the meantime, it appears that everybody else in Traynor's past wants Jake's help in solving the crime. The dead man's sister, who has no money but does have a tremendous chip on her shoulder, wants to hire Jake - as long as somebody else pays. The dead man's ex-wife, a mysteriously wealthy woman, also wants to hire Jake, and she'll pay plenty - but it isn't exactly clear that a solution to the crime is what she wants for her money. Jake knows that his own good name is on the line until he finds the real killer.

"MERGE Raleigh Redman loved Nicci Charbon until she left him heartbroken. Then he hit the lotto for $26 million, quit his minimum wage job and set his sights on one goal: reading the entire collection of lectures in the Popular Educator Library, the only thing his father left behind after he died. As Raleigh is trudging through the eighth volume, he notices something in his apartment that at first seems ordinary but quickly reveals itself to be from a world very different from our own. This entity shows Raleigh joy beyond the comforts of $26 million dollars....and merges our world with those that live beyond. DISCIPLE Hogarth "Trent" Tryman is a forty-two year old man working a dead-end data entry job. Though he lives alone and has no real friends besides his mother, he's grown quite content in his quiet life, burning away time with television, the internet, and video games. That all changes the night he receives a bizarre instant message on his computer from a man who calls himself Bron. At first he thinks it's a joke, but in just a matter of days Hogarth Tryman goes from a data entry clerk to the head of a corporation. His fate is now in very powerful hands as he realizes he has become a pawn in a much larger game with unimaginable stakes--a battle that threatens the prime life force on Earth. "--

Simeon Krug has a vision--and the vast wealth necessary to turn dream into reality. What he wishes is to communicate with the stars, to answer signals from deep space. The colossal tower he's constructing for this purpose soars above the Arctic tundra, and the seemingly perfect androids building it view Krug as their god. But, Krug is only flesh-and-blood, and when his androids discover the truth, their anger knows no bounds...and it threatens much more than the tower. "...a multi-levelled work of high adventure, considerable tension and social consciousness."--Harlan Ellison.

Edward Davis, a rookie of the Time Service, has already made several successful jumps to the past. Now he is given his most important mission. *** Two members of the Service have disappeared in ancient Egypt and Edward Davis's assignment is to locate and rescue them. *** But is he ready for all that Egypt has to offer and for the surprising truths he discovers as he explores this ancient land of myths and mysteries-truths that jeopardize his own mission and return back to the future?

Book by Silverberg, Robert

Somehow, for all my outward pretence of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I've discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there's more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to my-what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly, I have to admit, I wrote these stories because I couldn't not write them. Well, so be it. They involved me in a lot of hard work, but for me, at least, the results justify the toil. I'm glad I wrote them. Writing them, it turns out, was important for me, and even pleasurable, in a curiously complex after-the-fact kind of way. May they give you pleasure now too. -Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

It promises to be the greatest voyage of exploration in human history. From the stagnant, placid society of twenty-third-century Earth comes an idea so powerful that it seizes the imagination of all humankind. A starship will be sent deep into the unknown galaxy in search of habitable worlds, with the hope that the challenge of colonization will somehow rekindle the dying human spirit. Fifty men and women are chosen to crew the Wotan, each nursing his or her own secret dreams and fears. Their leader is the stoic year-captain, drawn to the dangerous mission by his lifelong quest for meaning. The single most important member of the crew is the blind Noelle, whose telepathic link with her blind twin sister on Earth provides the Wotan's only contact with Earth as it speeds through the pearl-gray twilight of unfathomable nospace. The worlds that the Wotan encounters are both strange and inhospitable, and with each disappointment its mission seems more and more hopeless. Then Noelle's mind-link with Earth is inexplicably broken, and the crew begin to despair, fearing they've been condemned to wander alone through the vastness of space forever, cut off from any contact with humankind. But when Noelle unexpectedly senses a massive alien presence in the vast vacuum of deepest space, the crew suddenly realize that their every assumption about life and the universe may prove dead wrong.

Neither Anne nor Emily remembered choosing the book at the library, but when as they read it, the boundary between their world and the one described in the book disappears. Suddenly they are in Sherwood Forest, where they join Robin Hood's band. The further adventures that await Anne, Emily, and their brother, Will, are the kind they had always dreamed about. They had yearned for magic as strong as the spell cast by the stories they loved best. But then an uninvited guest turns up at their parents' garden party. The sinister man snatches the book with the intention of using its powers for evil, and the siblings find themselves engaged in a battle to regain possession of the book. Richly detailed black-and-white drawings enliven this intriguing literary fantasy, which pays homage to some of the heroes of the author's childhood, among them E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, and Leo Tolstoy.

Twelve-year-old time traveler Eli Sands continues his search for his missing mom, encountering new characters and trying to save the free world from tyrannical rule.

A masked terrorist has brought London to its knees ' there are bombs inside books, and nobody knows which ones. On the day of the launch of the first expedition to Mars, by giant cannon, he outdoes himself with an audacious attack.For young poet Orphan, trapped in the screaming audience, it seems his destiny is entwined with that of the shadowy terrorist, but how?Like a steam-powered take on V for Vendetta, rich with satire and slashed through with automatons, giant lizards, pirates, airships and wild adventure, The Bookman is the first of a series.File under: Steampunk [Serial killer | Alternate Victorian London | Exploding Books | Historical Crime]

"Discovered by Dr. Dahlia Black, the mysterious Pulse was sent by a highly intelligent intergalactic species that called themselves the Ascendants. It soon becomes clear this alien race isn't just interested in communication--they are capable of rewriting human DNA, in an astonishing process they call the Elevation. Five years after the Pulse, acclaimed journalist Keith Thomas sets out to make sense of the event that altered the world. Thomas travels across the country to interview members of the task force who grappled to decode the Pulse and later disseminated its exact nature to worried citizens. He interviews the astronomers who initially doubted Black's discovery of the Pulse--an error that critics say led to the world's quick demise. Thomas also hears from witnesses of the Elevation and people whose loved ones vanished in the Finality, an event that, to this day, continues to puzzle Pulse researchers, even though theories abound about the Ascendants' motivation." --Amazon.com.

"In this final installment of the Tankborn series, Kayla has been kidnapped by the group that has been bombing GEN warehouses, and she must pretend to sympathize with them in order to escape"--

The colony on the red planet had no need for heroes. It wanted people who knew how to solve the problem of simple survival. More than anything else it wanted independence form a doomed Earth-and it was in deadly danger of succeeding. A gripping tale of adventure, survival, and defiance set on a future Mars.

"Stefin-Dae should have died on Slabour, like all good Diggers do ... but he got lucky, or maybe it was just his destiny. He escaped and stumbled on the key to the universe ...."--p. [4] of cover.

Suspended in the jade depths of an ancient Earth sea. Chrono-hurled to a steep winter planet swept by an eerie future war. Middle-aged (at 26), tiger-tough (at 4'9"), walking a wild Universe on Time-long legs. This is the story of a woman named Alyx.

The Very Best of Australian Speculative Fiction! Russell Blackford Paul Brandon Damien Broderick Simon Brown Isobelle Carmody Paul Collins Stephen Dedman Sara Douglass Terry Dowling Andrew Enstice Kerry Greenwood Robert Hood David J. Lake Chris Lawson Rowena Cory Lindquist Rosaleen Love Sean McMullen Ian Nichols Steven Paulsen Jane Routley Cecily Scutt Aaron Sterns Dirk Strasser Lucy Sussex Norman Talbot George Turner Wynne Whiteford Cherry Wilder Sean Williams Tess Williams