When technology and humanity collide, Calder is forced to make desperate decisions, but how do you destroy the monster without becoming one yourself?

The Beetle Horde by Victor Rousseau: Only Two Young Explorers Stand in the Way of the Mad Bram’s Horrible Revenge—the Releasing of His Trillions of Man-sized Beetles upon an Utterly Defenseless World. (Part One of a Two-part Novel.)

The Cave Of Horror by Captain S. P. Meek: Screaming, the Guardsman Was Jerked Through the Air. An Unearthly Screech Rang Through the Cavern. The Unseen Horror of Mammoth Cave Had Struck Again!

Phantoms Of Reality by Ray Cummings: Red Sensua’s Knife Came up Dripping—and the Two Adventurers Knew that Chaos and Bloody Revolution Had Been Unleashed in that Shadowy Kingdom of the Fourth Dimension. (A Complete Novel.)

The Stolen Mind by M. L. Staley: What Would You Do, If, Like Quest, You Were Tricked, and Your Very Mind and Will Stolen from Your Body?

Compensation by C. V. Tench: Professor Wroxton Had Disappeared—But in the Bottom of the Mysterious Crystal Cage Lay the Diamond from His Ring!

Tanks by Murray Leinster: Two Miles of American Front Had Gone Dead. And on Two Lone Infantrymen, Lost in the Menace of the Fog-gas and the Tanks, Depended the Outcome of the War of 1932.

Invisible Death by Anthony Pelcher: On Lees’ Quick and Clever Action Depended the Life of “Old Perk” Ferguson, the Millionaire Manufacturer Threatened by the Uncanny, Invisible Killer.

“Red Nails” begins in the jungles far to the south of any known civilized or barbarian lands, where Valeria of the Red Brotherhood and Conan (her would-be lover) are set upon by a “dragon” (actually a dinosaur, though described with the characteristics of a stegosaurus and an allosaur) that mauls their horses. The pair retreat to a crag the monster cannot scale, but has no food or water. Conan recognizes some poisonous fruit growing nearby; they coat the tip of a spear with its juice, and pierce the jaws of the monster with it. Although blinded, the raging monster pursues them by their scent. Overtaken, Conan whirls to face the beast and lures it to its death.

“The plot is a loosely based melange of motifs from previous Conan short stories, most notably “The Scarlet Citadel,” with which it shares an almost identical storyline. It takes place when Conan is about forty-five, during his reign as King of Aquilonia, and follows a plot by a group of conspirators to depose him in favor of Valerius, heir to Conan’s predecessor Numedides, whom he had slain to gain the throne. To accomplish this they resort to necromancy, resurrecting Xaltotun, an ancient sorcerer from the pre-Hyborian empire of Acheron. With his aid the Aquilonian army is defeated by that of the rival kingdom of Nemedia and occupied. Conan, captured, is slated for execution until the sympathetic slave girl Zenobia risks her life to free him.”

“Listeners to my podcast heard me read this story, After the Siege, as it was written, shortly after returning home from a family trip to St Petersburg. My grandmother was born there, back when it was Leningrad, and she lived through the Siege of Leningrad as a little girl. She’d never talked to us about those years, but then, walking through Petersburg, she opened up and the stories came pouring out, stories that scared and appalled me. After the Siege is a science fictional re-telling of those stories, with much artistic license.”

“During the last five years, Stross has garnered a reputation as one of the most imaginative practitioners of hard sf. Expanded from several stories originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Stross’ latest novel follows several generations of the Macx family through the rapidly transforming, Internet-enabled global economy of the early twenty-first century to the human and transhuman populated worlds of the outer solar system a half century later. The saga begins with Macx patriarch Manfred, a freelance “venture altruist,” giving away patentable high-tech ideas in exchange for endless handouts while looking forward to the day when nanotech-programmed smart matter surpasses humanity in intelligence and productivity. Fifteen years later, his adolescent daughter Amber is an indentured astronaut trolling the orbit of Jupiter, and by 2070, Sirhan is Amber’s permanently space-bound offspring, paying witness to the fruits of his grandfather’s early innovations as something ominous and nonhuman is systematically dismantling the planets from Pluto to Earth. Stross has his thumb squarely on the pulse of technology’s leading edge and exults in extrapolating mere glimmers of ideas out to their mind-bending limits. His brilliant and panoramic vision of uncontrollably accelerating technology vaults him into the front rank of sf trailblazers, alongside Gibson and Stephenson, and promises to become a seminal work in the genre.”

Carl Hays – Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

“Printcrime came out of a discussion I had with a friend who’d been to hear a spokesman for the British recording industry talk about the future of “intellectual property.” The record exec opined the recording industry’s great and hysterical spasm would form the template for a never-ending series of spasms as 3D printers, fabricators and rapid prototypers laid waste to every industry that relied on trademarks or patents. My friend thought that, as kinky as this was, it did show a fair amount of foresight, coming as it did from the notoriously technosqueamish record industry. I was less impressed. It’s almost certainly true that control over the production of trademarked and patented objects will diminish over the coming years of object-on-demand printing, but to focus on 3D printers’ impact on trademarks is a stupendously weird idea. It’s as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses. It’s true, as far as it goes, but it’s so tunnel-visioned as to be practically blind. When Nature magazine asked me if I’d write a short-short story for their back-page, I told them I’d do it, then went home, sat down on the bed and banged this one out. They bought it the next morning, and we were in business.”

In spring 2004, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf’s classic narratives.

The story is set in the type of police state needed to ensure that only one company is allowed to make robots, and only one type of robot is allowed.

The story follows single Father detective Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg while he tries to track down his missing teenage daughter. The detective is a bit of an outcast because his wife defected to Eurasia, a rival Superpower.”

~ Wikipedia