The fifth volume in the Science Fiction Megapack series collects 25 tales of high adventure through other worlds and times, including 5 Hugo and Nebula Award-winners and nominees. Featured this time are:AGAPE AMONG THE ROBOTS, by Allen SteeleTHE STARSHIP MECHANIC, by Jay Lake and Ken ScholesPEACEMAKER, by Gardner DozoisOR ALL THE SEAS WITH OYSTERS, by Avram DavidsonGRANDMA, by Carol EmshwillerTHE GIFT BEARER, by Charles L. FontenayI, ROBOT,...

It is the 1930s and John P. Moore, an ambitious author, has just had his first story, a science fiction tale featuring the adventures of scientists and journalists taking the first trip to the planet Mars, published in Amazing Stories.But you won't find that story, along with its two sequels, inside the pages of any copy of Amazing Stories – not in a pulp magazine collector's vault, not on the internet archive and that is because the Amazing Stories that published ...

We're part of the cover-up!Did you know that there is a secret government agency dedicated to creating conspiracy theories? It's true! It's on Facebook!But it's not in this book. Our conspiracy theories are all fiction. At least, that's what we want you to think! Certainly, we did invite fiction writers to weigh in on conspiracy theories. The result includes (of course) the Masons and dragons (David Clements), the Bavarian Illuminati (Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald) and t...

More than 25 of the greatest Science Fiction stories ever written—many in eBook form for the very first time. More than four hundred pages of top flight fiction selected by the editors at www.fantasticstoriesoftheimagination.com, including 'Ticking' by Allen M. Steele; 'All Cats are Gray' by Andre Norton; 'The Velvet Glove' by Harry Harrison; 'The Day of the Boomer Dukes' by Frederic Pohl; 'The Troubadour' by Peter Sherman; 'Riya's Foundling' by Algis Budrys; 'Asleep in the Forest of the T...

Winner of the Locus Award: Space-station workers discover a shocking global surveillance plot in this novel from "the master of science-fiction intrigue" ( The Washington Post).Popeye Hooker knows that space isn't all it's cracked up to be. A former fisherman who takes a job building low orbital stations to escape a failed relationship, he finds that in space, construction work is still a grind. And when they aren't building the space stat...

An interstellar adventure of earthborn people seeking freedom from tyranny on another world from a Hugo Award–winning author.The totalitarian United Republic of America rose from the ashes of a nation that once represented democratic liberty on Earth. Its rulers wish to expand their ideological ambitions to the stars where they will establish a new colony on an inhabitable moon known as Coyote.The crew and colonists aboard the Alabama undertaking thi...

A standalone Coyote Universe story from the Hugo Award–winning author that's "the best first contact novel in a long time" ( Rocky Mountain News)." Spindrift is classic SF in the best sense." —Nebula Award-winning author Jack McDevittThe year is 2288. Earth scientists have picked up a transmission originating from outside the solar system. Eager to confirm that the signal may have been sent by an alien civilization, Europe d...

Earth's past and future are altered by twenty-fourth-century time travelers in this "significant work of science fiction" from the author of Arkwright ( Rocky Mountain News).Chrononaut Franc Lu has come a long, long way—from the twenty-fourth century, in fact—to be in New Jersey on the evening of May 6, 1937. Traveling four hundred years into the past, he and his partner have been sent by the Chronospace Research Centre to observe the infamous expl...

The future of an orbiting space colony is threatened by a fugitive and the assassin on her trail in this science fiction adventure from three-time Hugo Award winner Allen SteeleSkycorp has always expected the near-Earth space colony Clarke County to serve as a cash cow, bringing the corporate behemoth a substantial return on its investment through food production and tourism. Now that the Church of Elvis is planning a major revival meeting on the colony, the execs a...

On Mars, a research team encounters an ancient puzzle that only a guitarist can solveIn 2029, an American research team ventures to Mars to investigate an astounding find: a labyrinth older than humanity itself, whose maze of rooms conceals the deepest secrets of the red planet. In the final chamber, strange music plays, as chilling as it is beautiful. It will be the last thing the scientist who discovers it ever hears. As the music rises to a climax, the chamber do...

Short stories and science writing from a Robert A. Heinlein Award winner: "Allen Steele is among the best." — St. Louis Post-DispatchIn Rude Astronauts, Allen Steele presents some of his finest stories—including the Diamondback Jack Trilogy and his first published story, "Live from the Mars Hotel"—along with excerpts of the nonfiction science writing with which he made his name. In Steele's universe, the stars are cold, space is big, and it's the ...

At the edge of the Solar System, CAPTAIN FUTURE and the Futuremen discover a plot of interstellar proportions as they confront THE GUNS OF PLUTO."Cold Hell" was what they called the Sputnik Planitia Penal Colony on Pluto: the toughest, deadliest penitentiary in all of space, a lock-up so remote and forbidding that it was built within an immense iceberg and is guarded by a race of cannibals. Considered escape-proof, Cold Hell was where the worst of the worst were se...