Clarkesworld Magazine is an American online fantasy and science fiction magazine. It released its first issue October 1, 2006, and has maintained a regular monthly schedule since
Why do we call it crazy? There are no limits inside CRAZY TOWN. Here you can bet or buy the farm in the same breath. Ain’t nobody believin’ anyone here’s playing with a full deck. Every one’s stacked, and in this town, some got less and some got more cards. If you stop in for a visit, you’ll find 13 daring folks who step into the dark, then poke the dirtiest corner of it; 13 inquisitive minds who dig into the slime, then stir up whatever twitches; 13 cynical souls who may not be able to save themselves but just might redeem something outta their miserable lives.
Ya gotta be crazy to hang ’round these parts. This town? Lotsa crazies; coming here might not be just what the doc ordered.
13 authors deliver explosive, haunted action high on adrenaline and low on morals. Sin, sex, shots, secrets: it’s all here in spades. Think Mike Hammer meets Roger Rabbit in Karl Edward Wagner’s story “Into Whose Hands.” Then take it a notch closer to crazy. These are definitely not Mayberry’s streets. Pray they aren’t yours. You’ve been warned.
The story takes place thousands of years in the future when humankind has spread out and settled much of the galaxy. A powerful new technology called rhodomagnetics has emerged. On a distant planet called Wing IV, the new science resulted in weapons that wiped out most of the population. The inventor, wracked with guilt, then used rhodomagnetics to build the “humanoids”, perfect sleek black androids, all identical and all controlled by a central transmitter on Wing IV..He imbued them with a Prime Directive: “To Serve and Obey, And Guard Men From Harm”. But the robots were too powerful and their prime directive robbed human life of meaning wherever they went. They are rapidly spreading throughout the galaxy, and they appear to be irresistible..
Clay Forester is a scientist working in a weapons laboratory on a distant planet, when a vast army of robotic “humanoids” land and, as they have done on countless other worlds, take control of every aspect of human society. The official line is to “guard men from harm”, but in fact the humanoids deny any meaningful freedom to their human victims. Forester tries to fight back, with the help of a vagabond band of “psychophysical” adepts with amazing transphysical powers. Forester’s long fight against the strictures and despotic “protections” offered by the humanoids makes a fascinating tale, which Damon Knight called “without a doubt, one of the most important science-fantasy books of its decade.”
Author’s self-revealing Afterword, “Me And My Humanoids”, also included.
“Without a doubt, one of the most important science-fantasy books of its decade.”
– Damon Knight
“On looking back over his long and influential career, I have no hesitation in placing Jack Williamson on a level with the two other American giants, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.”
– Arthur C. Clarke
Centuries after the ecological collapse of Earth, humanity has spread among the stars. Under the governance of the League, our endless need for resources has driven us to colonize hundreds of planets, all of them devoid of other sentient life. Humanity is apparently alone in the universe.
Then comes the sudden, brutal decimation of Kassa, a small farming planet, by a mysterious attacker. The few survivors send out a desperate plea for aid, which is answered by two unlikely rescuers.
Prudence Falling is the young captain of a tramp freighter. She and her ragtag crew have been on the run and living job to job for years, eking out a living by making cargo runs that aren’t always entirely legal.
Lt. Kyle Daspar is a police officer from the wealthy planet of Altair Prime, working undercover as a double agent against the League. He’s been undercover so long he can’t be trusted by anyone—even himself.
While flying rescue missions to extract survivors from the surface of devastated Kassa, they discover what could be the most important artifact in the history of man: an alien spaceship, crashed and abandoned during the attack.But something tells them there is more to the story.
Together, they discover the cruel truth about the destruction of Kassa, and that an imminent alien invasion is the least of humanity’s concerns.
Pushing Ice is the brilliant tale of extraordinary aliens, glittering technologies, and sweeping space opera from award-winning science fiction author Alastair Reynolds.
2057. Humanity has raised exploiting the solar system to an art form. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclear-powered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. And they’re good at it.
The Rockhopper is nearing the end of its current mission cycle, and everyone is desperate for some much-needed R & R, when startling news arrives from Saturn: Janus, one of Saturn’s ice moons, has inexplicably left its natural orbit and is now heading out of the solar system at high speed. As layers of camouflage fall away, it becomes clear that Janus was never a moon in the first place. It’s some kind of machine — and it is now headed toward a fuzzily glimpsed artifact 260 light-years away.
The Rockhopper is the only ship anywhere near Janus, and Bella Lind is ordered to shadow it for the few vital days before it falls forever out of reach. In accepting this mission, she sets her ship and her crew on a collision course with destiny — for Janus has more surprises in store, and not all of them are welcome.
Part science fiction thriller, part interstellar adventure, and part noir crime, Century Rain is an astonishing international bestseller of “blistering powers and style” (SF Revu).
Three hundred years from now, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable due to the technological catastrophe known as the Nanocaust. Archaeologist Verity Auger specializes in the exploration of its surviving landscape. Now, her expertise is required for a far greater purpose. Something astonishing has been discovered at the far end of a wormhole: mid-20th-century Earth, preserved like a fly in amber.
Somewhere on this alternate planet is a device capable of destroying both worlds at either end of the wormhole. And Verity must find the device, and the man who plans to activate it, before it’s too late – for the past and the future of two worlds.
For short-lived ‘quick’ races like humans, space is dominated by the complicated, grandiose Mercatoria, whose rule is both military and religious. To the Dwellers who may live billions of years, the galaxy consists of their gas-giant planets – the rest is debris.
Our human hero, Fassin Taak, is a Slow Seer privileged to work with the Dwellers of the gas-giant Nasqueron in his home system Ulubis. His work consists of rummaging for data in their vast, disorganised memories and libraries. Unfortunately, without knowing it, he’s come close to an ancient secret of unimaginable importance….
A notorious criminal pursues peace—and power—with alien enemies in this sci-fi novel from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Damned Trilogy.
No one knows the true motives of Kees vaan Loo-Macklin. He’s a mastermind criminal who gave up his place at the head of the dark underworld to become a legitimate member of Evenwaith’s cities. But soon he was reaching out to powerful enemies—-the slimy aliens called the Nuel. Loo-Macklin negotiates an illusory peace agreement and gains precious alien secrets in the process. Is he after peace, power or pure evil? With enemy starships beginning to amass, we won’t have to wait long to find out.
Alan Dean Foster is the uncredited ghostwriter for Lucas novelization of Star Wars
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was the second novel to be used as a basis for a low-budget sequel to Star Wars in case the film was not successful
but by the time it was published, Star Wars had broken box office records. The film adaptation of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was abandoned in favor of Lucas’s vision of a big-budget sequel (The Empire Strikes Back)
From bestselling author Alan Dean Foster, an exciting early Pip and Flinx novel that shows the origins of a certain boy with special powers—and the mini-dragon that becomes his devoted sidekick. . . .
Flinx was just a freckle-faced, redheaded kid with green eyes and a strangely compelling stare when Mather Mastiff first saw him an the auctioneer’s block. One hundred credits and he was hers.
For years the old woman was his only family. She loved him, fed him, taught him everything she knew—even let him keep the deadly flying dragon he called Pip. But when Mother Mastiff mysteriously disappears, Flinx tails her kidnappers on a dangerous journey. Across the forests and swamps of the winged world called Moth, their only weapons are Pip’s venom . . . and Flinx’s unusual talent.
