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A millennium from now, global warming has gone into retreat as the Sun’s dynamics convulse. The great ice returns, driving humankind back to its primitive origins. Here, bands of brutal warriors wage war in the bitter cold. Xaraf Firebridge, powerful young son of a barbarian chieftain, enrages his sire by adopting the pacifistic doctrine of an outland mystic, Darkbloom. Before he can break his vow and slay his father, he is drawn into a temporal wormline and flung a further million years into the Earth of the Failing Sun.

Clever and determined, Xaraf wanders landscapes haunted by prospects of doom and overseen by a trio of godlike Powers. Since childhood he has dreamed of a beautiful young woman. His fate, he sees, is to rescue her from captivity–and perhaps save the whole world, now moved into the outer solar system and lit by a string of tiny orbiting suns.

He has yet to meet his true foe, the dragon whose history stands opposed to humankind’s. But which will prove to be this world’s mythic Galahad?

It’s 2050, and LAPD Detective Terri Pastuzka has drawn the short straw with her first assignment of the new decade. Someone has executed one of the city’s countless immigrants, and no one (besides the usual besieged advocacy groups) seems to much care. Even Terri herself is already looking ahead to her next case before an unexpected development reveals there’s far more to this corpse than meets the eye.

And a lot already meets the eye. In a city immersed in augmented reality, the LAPD have their own superior network of high-tech eyewear-PanOpts, the ultimate panopticon-allowing Terri instant access to files and suspects and literal insertion into the crime scene using security footage captured from every angle the day the murder occurred. What started as a single homicide turns into a string of unsolved murders that tie together in frightening ways, leading Terri down a rabbit hole through Los Angeles’s conflicting realities-augmented and virtual, fantastically rumored and harrowingly true-towards an impossible conclusion.

Exploded View is the story of a city frozen in crisis, haunted by hardship and overwhelmed by refugees, where technology gives everyday citizens the power to digitally reshape news in real time, and where hard video evidence is impotent against the sheer, unrelenting power of belief. After all, when anyone can forge their own version of the truth, what use is any other reality?

The multi-species crew of the Veracity are enjoying some well-deserved R&R after informing the galaxy about spread of the time-bending Messiah drug. Now that the galaxy has been saved again, the crew begin to see each other in a new light.

Unfortunately, in the Veracity‘s wake lie a string of crimes – and someone has got to pay. Former assassin Raena Zacari is hauled back to the weapons-free pleasure planet Kai to answer charges of kidnapping, murder, and the theft of an Imperial-era diplomatic transport: the Veracity itself.

In the meantime, something is moving in the undersea city Raena destroyed on the Thallian homeworld. Has the worst mass-murderer the galaxy has ever known been cloned back from the dead? Can the Veracity’s crew lay the ghosts to rest without Raena’s lethal skills?

For fifteen years, Maria Devane has been desperately, passionately in love with Dante Romano. But Maria knows that Dante can never give everything of himself back – at least not all the time. Every month, Dante shifts shape, becoming a wild animal. He can’t choose when he shifts, the transition is often abrupt, and as he gets older the time he spends in human form is gradually decreasing.

Maria has kept his secret since the beginning, knowing that their love is worth the danger. But when a string of brutal attacks occurs in local parks while Dante is in animal form, Maria is forced to consider whether the lies she’s been telling about her life have turned into lies she’s telling herself . . .

When Bertha Harris’s husband dies she draws comfort from routine and expects the rest of her life to drift by in the same quiet, uneventful way. But she hasn’t reckoned on her nephews and niece, who are quick on the uptake that Bertha is that most desirable of relatives: a wealthy and childless widow.

It does not escape Bertha that the common thread in her young relatives’ lives is a lack of money, but she hadn’t bargained on one of them becoming impatient and orchestrating a string of accidents to claim their inheritance early. And Bertha, suspicious of everyone, is painfully aware that the familiar walls of her flat are becoming as much a prison as a refuge.

In a tale of ancient evil, Bram Stoker creates a world of lurking horrors and bizarre denizens: a demented mesmerist, hellbent on mentally crushing the girl he loves; a gigantic kite raised to rid the land of an unnatural infestation of birds, and which receives strange commands along its string; and all the while, the great white worm slithers below, seeking its next victim…

Lair of the White Worm was Bram Stoker’s twelfth and final novel.

Gill Burke is the toughest cop in New York, and he gets results. That is, until the mob decide he’s too dangerous and pull strings, seeing him dishonourably removed from the force.

But Gill is still the only cop who knows how the mob operate, and when their top people start to be put out of business – violently – Gill is persuaded by a DA, who’s running scared, to put his badge back on and find the killer.

Gill’s investigation has hardly begun when he becomes involved with Helen, who is on the syndicate’s payroll, and Helga, a Swedish blonde. But even with these diversions, Gill finds himself trapped in a bloody vendetta, pitted against a faceless assassin whose aim is destruction …

Edgar Pangborn studied music at Harvard when just 15 years old, eventually turned his back on music to focus on his writing. He flourished in the early ’50s, producing a string of highly-regarded stories for the likes of Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Ellery Queen’s Mystery magazine. His work helped establish a new ‘humanist’ school of science fiction, and has been cited as an influence by Ursula Le Guin. This omnibus contains the Hugo-shortlisted Davy, International Fantasy Award-winner A Mirror for Observers and story collection Good Neighbours and Other Strangers.

DAVY: A HUGO and NEBULA AWARD nominee, this post-apocalyptic science fiction novel is Pangborn’s most acclaimed. It is set in the Northeastern United States some centuries after an atomic war ended high-technology civilization. Davy comes of age in a pseudo-medieval society dominated by a Church that actively suppresses technology.

A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS: The Martians, long exiled from their home planet, have for millennia been observers of the world of men. Forbidden by their laws to interfere with human destiny, they wait for mankind to mature. From the turmoil of mid 20th-century America, word comes to the Observers that one their renegades is hoping to encourage humanity in its headlong rush to self-destruction through the corruption of a single rare intellect. The struggle between Observer and Abdicator for the continuance of the human species is one of the classic conflicts in the annals of science fiction.

GOOD NEIGHBORS AND OTHER STRANGERS: A collection of short stories reflecting Pangborn’s fresh writing style and mastery of the short form.

The body of a woman from respectable, conservative Glendale is found stashed under a ramshackle house in the middle of the inner city. Detective Luis Mendoza marks the rising heat by the crime and violence raging through the sun-baked streets of Los Angeles – and it’s going to be a hot one . . .

A thug is shot to death. A mysterious string of robberies continues unabated . . . all without a clue. But the family-man cop knows that where there’s heat there’s fire – and a cold trail to nowhere promises to turn into a red-hot path leading straight to the damned.

‘A Luis Mendoza mystery means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times

The weather in LA hasn’t been living up to its sunny reputation – the murder of an unwanted newborn and the assault of a twelve-year-old girl don’t make things pretty for the family-man cop, especially with a new baby at home.

The most puzzling crime of all is the murder of a respectable middle-aged woman from Indianapolis. A string of hit-and-runs involving a Model A Ford, and a bizarre mugger with a penchant for footwear all add up to another high-voltage month in the city of the stars for Lieutenant Luis Mendoza.

‘A Luis Mendoza mystery means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

As usual, crime is a boom industry in Los Angeles. A gunman walks into a café and shoots a waitress dead, seemingly at random. A schoolgirl is shot from a passing car. A prostitute trying to escape her job is killed by her pimp. Then there’s the kidnapped daughter, the shot father and the strangled nurse who scrawls a clue to her assailant’s identity.

The Glendale Police Department is being kept very busy with these cases and more off-beat conundrums, including a series of burglaries in which nothing is stolen and a string of break-ins that could only have been committed by midgets or contortionists.

‘A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times

There’s no holiday from crime at the Los Angeles Police Department, not even at Christmas. Among a string of bizarre cases, there’s the very mysterious killing of Lila Askell, the young devout Mormon who was on her way home for Christmas but is found strangled and thrown out of a car.

As the Christmas trees are being decorated and the presents wrapped, Lieutenant Luis Mendoza has one of his toughest cases on his hands…

Six weeks ago, Imperial Japanese military forces conquered and occupied the Hawaiian Islands. A puppet king sits on Hawaii’s throne, his strings controlled by the general of the invasion force. American POWs, malnourished and weak, are enslaved as hard labourers until death takes them. Civilians fare little better, struggling to survive on dwindling resources. And families of Japanese origin find their loyalties divided.

Despite the victory, the strain is starting to take its toll on the Japanese. Inhabiting the islands and keeping American, British, and Australian forces at bay are pushing their supply lines to the breaking point.

Meanwhile, across the United States, from Pensacola, Florida, to San Diego, California, the military is marshaling its forces. Steel factories and fuel refineries are operating around the clock. New recruits are enlisting, undergoing rigorous training exercises.

All for the opportunity to strike back and drive the enemy from American soil…

In the slum alleys of Lambeth in 1891 a sinister silk-hatted figure lurks in the shadows – but trade is there for the taking and a girl must make a living. Now, one after another, the girls who work the Waterloo Road wake in the morning to feel the slow agony of the most vicious of poisons . . . victims of the man called Fred.

The police have only a string of ‘catch me if you can’ letters to taunt them, whilea whole mailing list of Victorian worthies find demands for money with menaces in their mail.

Inspector Swain investigates . . .

‘Original story told in a highly individual manner’ Times Literary Supplement

Sinister religions, missing physicists, super strings and retarded entropy; it’s all in a day’s work for Slippery Jim DiGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, the Universe’s greatest ever thief and con artist. But this time the stakes are rather higher than even Slippery Jim is used to. His wife Angelina has disappeared and he has nothing to go on except a pool of blood and a severed hand (formerly belonging to a physicist of stellar repute) – and the fact that she has expressed an interest in The Temple of Eternal Truth, a cult offering a sneak peek at heaven – for a price.



But there’s a job to do and the Stainless Steel Rat is the man to do it. After all, the devil makes work for idle hands…