This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Skillfully combining complex science with finely executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the always-shifting border between the known and the alien. The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in stories that are by turns dark, satiric, bold, and introspective. A seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter’s The Thing reveals the true villains in an Antarctic showdown. An artificial intelligence shields a biologically-enhanced prodigy from her overwhelmed parents. A deep-sea diver discovers that her true nature lies not within the confines of her mission but in the depths of her psyche. A court psychologist analyzes a psychotic graduate student who has learned to reprogram reality itself. A father tries to hold his broken family together in the wake of an ongoing assault by sentient rainstorms. Gorgeously saturnine and exceptionally powerful, these collected fictions are both intensely thought-provoking and impossible to forget.

We all become monsters at the edge of the breach. In a post-apocalyptic world where season of birth determines power -- spring healers, summer mages, fall shapeshifters, and winter shields -- a man and a woman emerge from tragic childhoods to lead humanity on opposite sides of an interrealm war. ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ There is a hole in the sky. They call it the Rift. A portal to the gods. The scar of a suffering world. Through it, the gods rule the last scraps of civilization, harkening war. As chaos beckons, two leaders emerge from the ashes of a dying planet. Julian Kyder is the son of an abusive rape victim who compensates for his abandonment through psychopathy. Sira Rune is a cancer survivor who dedicates her life to living free and fearless while experiencing the taboo and the unorthodox. Rune is the only one unafraid of Kyder, and that terrifies him, because he only knows how to function through fear. Even though she gives him more chances than he deserves, how much violence can she forgive? When is a person beyond redemption? While he struggles to control his demons and she struggles to find purpose, the gods drag the ruined world into war. Amazon #1 Top Free Bestseller LGBT SF Top 20 New Releases LGBT SF CONTENT WARNING: The Rift Cycle is a highly graphic series intended for mature audiences. TAGS: science fiction, fantasy, grimdark, horror, LGBT, mental illness ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ READ AN EXCERPT Chapter 1: Pain Made a Man Kyder, Age 9 - July 7, 7009 Her body is stone. Her eyes glass. She doesn''t see me. Doesn''t want me. Yet her blood runs through me, a river of pain. I call her mother, but she calls me nothing. She hopes to forget me. Hopes I will disappear. Conceived in violence, I am a constant reminder of the crime that made me. "Come," she orders me. Like a dog. And I jog at her heels, obedient. She won''t use my name. It''s a reminder I exist. The meaning behind it is empty, anyway. She refused to name me, so the hospital staff did. Julian Kyder -- Julian after the doctor who delivered me and Kyder after the hospital. Forever marked by the circumstances of my birth. She tried to abort, but I survived. She put me up for adoption, but no one took me. She tried to release me into the system, but they were already at overcapacity. We''re trapped. Stuck together as two halves of misery. The doctor told me I am a miracle. She told me I am a curse. "This way." She leads me along the edge of the Shelf toward the market. With each step, my feet crunch along the parched gravel. To our left, cliffs drop hundreds of meters into the Ruined Sea, a toxic cesspool that encircles the island. In the distance, Mount Erebus puffs ash into the blanched sky, a grandfather smoking the last bit of a cigar. We mutilated our world, bombarded the planet for centuries with nuclear weapons until we ran out of missiles, until Earth flipped upside-down. The only habitable continent is Antarctica, now the North Pole, and even here, the war melted the desolate wasteland into a scorching desert. Humans near extinction, huddled near the top of the planet like exiles. But we deserve it. Sweat trickles down my back. I pull my robe tight around myself, hoping to block out the sun. It''s summer, so there''s no respite from the heat. The days are endless. They bleed into each other like ink on a page, no distinction between the lines. Night won''t come for another few months, and soon after it does, it won''t leave till winter''s done. Some call it balance. Day and night. Light and dark. Sun and stars. Birth and death. People look for meaning when it''s only chaos disguised as order... ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ WELCOME TO THE BREACH.

In an open cart Elspeth Huxley set off with her parents to travel to Thika in Kenya. As pioneering settlers, they built a house of grass, ate off a damask cloth spread over packing cases, and discovered—the hard way—the world of the African. With an extraordinary gift for detail and a keen sense of humor, Huxley recalls her childhood on the small farm at a time when Europeans waged their fortunes on a land that was as harsh as it was beautiful. For a young girl, it was a time of adventure and freedom, and Huxley paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up among the Masai and Kikuyu people, discovering both the beauty and the terrors of the jungle, and enduring the rugged realities of the pioneer life.

In an age where reality and science fiction are colliding, Richard Cox’s extraordinary debut thriller takes its place as an all-too-believable novel of white-knuckle adventure. For when an ordinary man makes one great leap for mankind, he triggers a chain of events that endangers his life, fractures his certainty, and plunges everyone he knows into a place where nothing is what it seems. Cameron Fisher is bored. With his wife, Misty. With his job as an accountant at NeuroStor, the high-tech microchip firm. With everything about his life—until he is offered five million dollars to test a secret new technology that uses a wrinkle in quantum physics to transmit matter from one place to another. His employer’s high-stakes brainchild is ready for its first human test. And Cameron Fisher is all too happy to oblige. One moment Cameron is sitting naked in a seven-by-seven-foot metal room in Houston; the next second he is in a laboratory in Phoenix—trembling now not with fear but joy. Within hours, Cameron will be free to go home. But first there is a celebratory drink—and a strange and scintillating meeting with a spectacularly beautiful woman. Then he’s being followed by men with guns . . . and suddenly Cameron is running, stumbling, falling into a world that looks like his own, but in which he has become a ragged stranger, accused of murder and pursued by people who want him dead. It appears that NeuroStor’s invention has changed Cameron. Next, it will change the entire world. With its stunning twists, sensual adventure, and raw, psychological suspense, Rift takes readers on a thrill-a-second ride to one last amazing choice for Cameron Fisher. A gripping and utterly satisfying work of storytelling magic, Rift asks the ultimate question: What if you had to die to find out what it really means to be alive?

Running the Rift follows the progress of Jean Patrick Nkuba from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save his life. A naturally gifted athlete, he sprints over the thousand hills of Rwanda and dreams of becoming his country’s first Olympic medal winner in track. But Jean Patrick is a Tutsi in a world that has become increasingly restrictive and violent for his people. As tensions mount between the Hutu and Tutsi, he holds fast to his dream that running might deliver him, and his people, from the brutality around them. Winner of the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Naomi Benaron has written a stunning and gorgeous novel that—through the eyes of one unforgettable boy— explores a country’s unraveling, its tentative new beginning, and the love that binds its people together.