Sunburst Award Finalist | Aurora Award Finalist | CBC Bookies Award Finalist Chimerascope [ki-meer-uh-skohp] — a story of many parts... A young artist hungers to draw you. A dinner conversation takes three lifetimes to finish. A geologist faces a planet-sized, eons-old puzzle to save her crew. The hero of the Fall of Earth must choose between love and revenge. A mysterious dancer leads a businessman to a most exclusive nightclub. A man is born each day into a new life — only to die each night. A sentient aurora threatens the last of humanity. A Norse god’s bar in Toronto hosts an unplanned family reunion. A woman descends into insanity — or is it the end of the world? A house as big as the world. Chimerascope is the first full collection of short fiction from the multi-award winning Douglas Smith, containing sixteen of his best stories, including an award winner, a Best New Horror selection, and eight award finalists. Sixteen stories of fantasy and science fiction that take you from love in fourteenth-century Japan to humanity’s last stand, from virtual reality to the end of reality, from alien drug addictions to a dinner where a man loses everything.

Vaya is an immortal Valkyrie and favorite daughter of Odin All Father, sworn to carry dead heroes from the battlefields of Earth to live forever in Valhalla. One day, she intervenes on the battlefield to save the life of a soldier who has captured her heart, and is forced by Odin to choose between immortality and the man she loves. Vaya chooses love, not knowing that the hardest choice still lies ahead of her. "...exemplifies the best elements of Douglas Smith’s writing. A Valkyrie falls for her hero, gives up her immortality for him then has to make that inevitable and awful choice afterwards. As always, even for such a brief time, there is so much life in these characters. I don’t bother to marvel at how quickly I come to care for Douglas Smith’s people anymore, it’s a given." —SF Crowsnest Reviews "A gripping portrayal of Vaya, a Valkyrie, and the ultimate sacrifices one makes for love." —SFRevu

The man known only as Stranger lived and died in a town with no name. Each day he lived. And each night he died... “...absolutely masterful...a kind of much, much creepier Quantum Leap: the amnesiac protagonist awakes in a new body each morning only to die in it by nightfall.” —Strange Horizons “Another superb story ... unpredictable and with a great ending, this story is another highlight of the [Chimerascope] collection (A++).” —Fantasy Book Critic “...wonderful...has a taste that lingers...” —SF Crowsnest “A charming tale about a man cursed to die every day and be reborn as someone else.” —SFRevu “A fascinating fabulist premise...” —Internet Review of SF

Aurora Award Finalist Think of human emotion as a geography, with peaks of pleasure and valleys of pain. Imagine a drug that flips the valleys and makes them peaks, too. You react now to an event based not on the pleasure or pain it brings, but solely on the intensity of the emotion created. Pain brings pleasure, grief gives joy, horror renders ecstasy. Now give this drug to a soldier. Tell them to kill. Not in the historically acceptable murder of war, but in a systematic corporate strategy--of xenocide. They will kill. And they will revel in it. Welcome to the world of Scream. Jarrod is a Scream-addicted soldier forced to take part in the destruction of entire races. But when his unit encounters the Be’nan, aliens who hold the secret to true enlightenment, no one is prepared for the result. "...reaches far past the muddled mediocrity of swashbuckling tales forgotten before the page is turned to the next story. I enjoyed the alien anthropology and the details are tremendous...in this tale of tremendous sacrifice" —Tangent Online "My favourite of the selection was 'Enlightenment' by Douglas Smith. A strange story indeed about Earth people engaged in strip-mining planets and relocating indigenous populations. ... The end is horrific in many respects but it's also thought-provoking." —SF Crowsnest Reviews "...[tells of] a spiritual undertaking by a member of a brutal planetary occupation force who "goes native" in which Douglas Smith provides a riff on Ray Bradbury's famous rationale of space travel: for Man to find God in the cosmos. A science fictional depiction of the mistreatment of "aliens" to subvertly criticize the atrocities of imperialist colonization." —SF Site "... unexpected twists and a superb ending; the story is as powerful as any in the [Chimerascope] collection (A++)" —Fantasy Book Critic "Douglas Smith...succeeds in evoking an alien society with mythic/religious overtones in his moving tale ‘Enlightenment’." —New Hope International Review Online "Another strong story, looking at humanity's treatment of indigenous people." —Best SF "...oppressed inhabitants of distant worlds making the ultimate sacrifice in order to bring mankind back to the realisation of what right and wrong truly mean." —Whispers of Wickedness reviews "Nicely judged depictions of alien customs..." —SF Site "...was my favourite of the issue. ‘Enlightenment’ went exactly where I expected it to, but that was where I wanted it to go--I was there for the ride" "Stories [were] great, particularly ‘Enlightenment.’ [I] was just engrossed in the whole thing...and applaud it thoroughly!" "...just blew me away...I was taken away by the lovely prose." "...provoked some really interesting ideas..." "...mind-blowing..." —InterZone readers forum

Aurora Award Finalist. When the Shogun’s soldiers burn his village and kill his parents, young Asai is rescued by a strange red hawk and led to a fabled temple. Here, he trains under Ikada, the Warrior of the Red Bird and seeker of the Hidden Light. Asai will be the last Warrior, and unless he can succeed where all other Warriors have failed—to discover the Hidden Light—then his people will suffer a thousand years of misery. But when Sawako, a beautiful young woman, challenges him, Asai must choose between his heart, his people, and his destiny. "I loved this tale. ... It has the feel of a myth or legend about a boy who finds that his destiny is closely entwined with the destiny of a people. But rather than repeat a tale we’ve all read before, the author has written something subtly new. ... Honestly, I could have read it forever. The ending was that perfect combination of sadness and hope." —SF Crowsnest Review "A spellbinding piece of writing set in a Japan-that-never-was that is both well-plotted and elegantly paced" —Strange Horizons "A superbly told, involving, and brilliantly paced short story, complete with an ending made more tragic by its inevitability... Worth the price of the issue." —Tangent Online "A mini-epic about a young boy named Asai and the phoenix that saves him from death while his village is being raided... If you love Japanese and Samurai stories, this one will give you goose bumps." —Tangent Online "Powerful, moving and not quite predictable (A+)" —Fantasy Book Critic "A wonderfully recounted story, with an excellent pace and a perfect ending." —Bibliopolis

Aurora Award WINNER. The Walker is a child of the two Realms of the Continuum, a prince of Order and of Chaos—and a rebel against both. When he falls in love with an ephemeral, a mortal woman who is the key to the balance between the Realms, he triggers a struggle for her life—and the fate of her universe. "A very different sort of tale. ... A cosmic story of gods which seems to be inspired by the works of Michael Moorcock, and I think he would not be ashamed of it." —SF Crowsnest Reviews "A tale of epic love when a mortal gets caught between a battle of the gods. Smith reminds us that we have the potential to change the world around us and that self-sacrifice can be a means of making the world around us better." —Speculating Canada "The descriptions here have cosmic sweep..." —Locus Online