In the year 2098, humanity has pushed beyond Earth into the solar system and unlocked the secrets of life with genetic engineering. But despite the lifesaving cures and physical improvements wrought by the mastery over human DNA, some consider the tinkering with genes an abomination and vow to destroy it.

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The Man Who Melted recounts the stunning odyssey of a man searching through the glittering, apocalyptic landscape of the next century for a woman lost to him in a worldwide outbreak of telepathic fear. It is a masterful vision of our future, of an era when people gamble for body parts; when thrills come in vast variety, ranging from a pleasure jaunt on the refitted HMS Titanic, bound again on a final, fatal cruise (suicide optional), to the ultimate exploration: experiencing electronically the thoughts of those already passed to the other side, past death.

Clifford Sawyer, investigating ghosts in a mine, finds ancient beings from another world -- and gets swept up in a titanic struggle for control of a parallel dimension. Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) was known for his literary prose and worked in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore. They met through their association with the "Lovecraft Circle," a group of writers and fans who corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft. Their work together spanned the 1940s and 1950s, mostly published under pseudonyms such as Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O'Donnell.

Steal from the real Carl Sherwood had always dreamed of being a swashbuckling hero. Alas, buckling that old swash is not so easy when the word "computer geek" could have been coined for you. And what's the use of being the sharpest AI software wizard at Manifest Inc. - purveyor of andromechs to the gentry, and the big player in virtual reality - when your social life consists of a VR suit and a six pack? But if Carl's real life scenario is a bust, his VR life is getting richer by the minute. Deep in the company computing system lurk the components of Carl's special baby, "The Sherwood Game, " complete with its welf-aware main character, Robin Hood. Carl tells himself he's just working all the bugs out before he reports the results to his boss, but the truth is, he could sooner part with a chunk of his own flesh and blood. Which is what Robin will make him do before this game is done...

Book by Meltzer, David

The controversial launching of Starswift has divided the world as humankind's first team effort with aliens and Lt. Nicole Shea's last chance to prove herself.

The year is AD 7000. The human species is nearly extinct—for the fourth time—due to its fragile nature. Krina Alizond-114 is metahuman, descended from the robots that once served humanity. She’s on a journey to the water world of Shin-Tethys to find her sister Ana. But her trip is interrupted when pirates capture her ship. Their leader, the enigmatic Count Rudi, believes that there’s more to Krina’s search than meets the eye. He’s correct: Krina and Ana each possess half of the fabled Atlantis Carnet, a lost financial instrument of unbelievable value—capable of bringing down entire civilizations. Krina doesn’t know that Count Rudi suspects her motives, so she accepts his offer to get her to Shin-Tethys in exchange for an introduction to Ana. And what neither of them suspects is that a ruthless body-double assassin has stalked Krina across the galaxy, ready to take the carnet once it is whole—and leave no witnesses alive to tell the tale…

The stories in this year's selection are sometimes grim, sometimes cheerful, sometimes quirky--but always full of emotion. Editor Takács has assembled a wide range of non-cis experiences: from an intergalactic art heist to the everyday life of a trans woman through the lens of horror movies; non-binary parenting in the far future, to a unique method of traveling back to the past. Steampunk, ghosts, even deities, all can be found in these stories that show how transness can relate to and subvert so many themes at the heart of speculative fiction. The introduction also includes a section on year-to-year changes in transgender SFF, and assembled longer-form trans highlights.

As with the first volume of Transcendent, Lethe Press has worked with a wonderful editor to select the best work of genderqueer stories of the fantastical, stranger, horrific, and weird published the prior year. Featuring stories by Merc Rustad, Jeanne Thornton, Brit Mandelo, and others, this anthology offers time-honored tropes of the genre--from genetic manipulation to zombies, portal fantasy to haunts--but told from a perspective that breaks the rigidity of gender and sexuality. A winner for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction

The Torch-Bearers tells the story of an itinerant Anarchist preacher who comes to the corrupt city of Geronta in the company of a fellow vagabond, where he begins preaching in parables, that being his preferred method of enlightenment. He hears a number of other story-tellers narrating their own parables, to which he opposes his own in order to expose their ideological flaws. Here, presented in English for the first time in a superb translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the most interesting novels of the Symbolist Movement--the elaborate fruit of author Bernard Lazare's wholehearted commitment to both Symbolist and Anarchist ideals. This striking literary experiment, testing the hypothesis that the raw materials of myth, legend and folklore, which had been redeployed and pastiched so successfully by the Movement, could be adapted to Anarchist purposes.

Footsloggers and soldiers of fortune, priests, poets, killers, and cads -- they fight for a future Galarchy, for cash, for a cause, for the thrill of adventure. Culled from the forgotten and unwanted of three galaxies, they are trained to be the most elite, and expendable, of fighting forces. Sometimes peacekeepers, sometimes shock troops, the Legion is sent into the Galarchy's most desperate internal and external conflicts. Legionnaires live rough and they die hard, tough as tungsten and loyal to the dirty end. Alien Legion creator Carl Potts on the series: "The original concept was the 'Foreign Legion in space, ' and all the legionnaires were human. The Alien Legion universe is a giant extrapolation of the American democratic melting-pot society, where different races and cultures work together for the common good while dealing with the pluses and problems that the nation's diversity creates."

What would you do first if you were elected President of the United States? Hope is the story of Alexander Hope, a young American who comes back from Vietnam, falls in love with a bright, beautiful girl, and with her starts a pioneering computer business. Thirty years later he's a billionaire, and alone in life. He decides to leave behind everything he created to write books and teach history at a private college. A handful of admiring students half-jokingly enlist him as a candidate for a third party Presidential nomination. In an astonishing but plausible scenario, Hope wins the Presidency, and commences an ambitious program of enforcing the Constitution and Bill of Rights as they were written. Enemies arise from all sides aiming to obstruct, discredit, impeach, and even assassinate him. It's a story of one man's love for his country -- and for the principles that brought it into being -- for his family, for his friends, and especially for the lovely and brilliant young Internet reporter who believes in him. 440 pages.

"If you have any interest at all in satire, science fiction's new wave, the '60s, pop music, comic books, or the picaresque tradition of literature, this book is for you...32 years after its composition, this roaring tiger of a book still has the capacity to shock, amuse, enlighten, and provoke, more so than many a "bold, experimental novel" published just yesterday to waves of praise by the short-sighted and historically illiterate. This is a book that spits in the face of death and despair." -- Paul Di Filippo

From the Introduction by Ed Gorman: If there's one thing Dick Lupoff understands (with perverse glee) it's the sorry state of the human condition. In this collection you'll find a wide variety of humans whose conditions leave much to be desired. A pit bull owner who's just as nasty as his dog A thief who believes his father-in-law was a real Nazi A dead-end boxer who has come back in a boxing movie A detective named Caligula Foxx who might be Nero Wolfe in drag A crooked corporal whose payoff is death Not only are the storylines original, the writing is indelibly stamped with Dick's vision and voice. Dick's writing talents really can't be defined by the usual means. Yes, he writes science fiction. Yes, he writes fantasy. Yes, he writes mystery. But what he really writes are Lupoffs. Long, short, hilarious, whimsical, dark, mysterious-they're all Lupoffs. Richard A. Lupoff is the author of many books including the popular Lindsey-and-Plum mysteries. The next of these, The Emerald Cat Killer, will be published by St. Martin's Press in October, 2010. His most recent collection of mysteries is Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix, published by Crippen & Landru.

Product Description Spanning four decades from the 1940s to the present and set against the backdrops of Paris, Jerusalem, Cambridge, and Toronto, this novel focuses on a sensuous female astronomer's attempt to free herself from the past From Library Journal Jumping back and forth over four decades with settings in Paris, Toronto, England, and Jerusalem, this novel blends storytelling with a dash of science and philosophy. It centers around its narrator, Nadine Santangel, orphaned when her parents are sent to concentration camps shortly after her birth in Paris in 1941. She becomes an astronomy student and teacher in Canada, but she is haunted by what happened during her early years. Wielding a not always benign influence are a half-uncle, Stefan, and a fellow student, D.B. Miller. Nadine relates events as encountered and as told to her, adding her interpretations. Although the story is not always compelling, some characterizations are oddly fascinating, and the reader can identify with Nadine's efforts to fit all the influences and incidents of her life into an understandable whole. Ellen Kaye Stoppel, Drake Univ. Law Lib . , Des MoinesCopyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Mild and sensitive Richard Hieck endured a quietly difficult childhood in Germany. Raised in humble circumstances, Richard was profoundly influenced by his withdrawn mother and by his father, an enigma whose devotion centered not on his five children but on his mysterious career. From his father, Richard inherited an interest in the night sky, learning to love the constellations and to take comfort in the strength of Orion and the warm radiance of Venus. Richard's shadowy, elusive father also influenced him to pursue studies in mathematics, a field offering Richard the discipline he had craved as a child." "Published in 1933, The Unknown Quantity is Hermann Broch's study of the underlying chaos - and, finally, the impossibility - of life within a society whose values are in decay. As Richard seeks to reconcile the conflicting demands of love and science, of passion and reason, societal and family values begin to undermine him and those in orbit around him." --Book Jacket.

"A breathtaking historical novel that recreates the intimate milieu around Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm from 1907 through the 1930s, a period of great human suffering and destruction and also of enormous freedom and creativity, a time when the remnants and artifices of the old word still mattered, and yet when art and the social sciences were pirouetting with successive revolutions in thought and style. Set in a time when many men in the upper classes in Europe were gay, but could not be so publicly, Jews Queers Germans revolves around three men: Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II's closest friend, who becomes the subject of a notorious 1907 trial for homosexuality; Magnus Hirschfeld, a famed, Jewish sexologist who gives testimony at the trial; and Count Harry Kessler, a leading proponent of modernism, and the keeper of a famous set of diaries which lay out in intimate detail the major social, artistic and political events of the day and allude as well to his own homosexuality. The central theme here is the gay life of a very upper crust intellectual milieu that had a real impact on the major political upheavals that would shape the modern world forever after"--