Love and duty come in many guises ... When everything falls apart around Raphael, he starts over anew. As an immortal mage responsible for our world’s magic, this has happened more times than he cares to count. He no longer finds it exciting. In a modern London where magic hides around every corner, he awaits the end of the Great Game, a magical contest he is playing with the enchantress Circe. The Game’s prize is the world’s magic, and its price almost certainly Armageddon. Win or lose, Raphael is willing to sacrifice his power, his soul, and his life to prevent the end of the world. His heart doesn’t even enter his calculations. Three days before the crux of the Game his long-lost brother comes to find him—and along with unwelcoming memories brings a gift far more dangerous than any enemy: hope. Till Human Voices Wake Us is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a story where love, like duty, like Raphael himself, has many unexpected faces. Keywords: contemporary fantasy, mythological retellings, literary fantasy, mythopoeic fantasy, Orpheus and Eurydice, Greek myths

In such groundbreaking novels as Crache and Idolon, Mark Budz established his reputation as one of science fiction’s most exciting and innovative writers. Now he surprises us again with an ambitious new thriller set in three realities at once, where three different lives hang in the balance. . . . What if your world were rapidly running out of tomorrows? And what if the only way to save the future was to relive the past? But which past holds the key to survival? That’s the life-and-death question faced by three desperate people separated by the past, present, and future but who share a single terrifying reality. A tortured soul, brain-damaged in a motorcycle accident, issues a pirate broadcast out of a van in near-future California. In Depression-era San Francisco an architect with an inoperable brain tumor seeks a mystical cure. A post-human space traveler caught in a cosmic accident searches for a way to reconstruct himself and the future. In Mark Budz’s spellbinding narrative, their lives–and deaths–are drawn together by a force even more powerful than destiny.

It’s a post-everything world, so how could everything possibly go wrong? When the ecotecture starts to degrade on the asteroid of Mymercia–killing a workgroup on the surface–Fola Hanani miraculously survives. A former missionary, she’s hacked a living out of a gengineered ecology built after the Armageddon of overheating, overpopulation, over-everything. Now she has to find out what’s causing a catastrophic biosystem failure before everyone else on Mymercia is killed. Meanwhile, onworld, in a trailer park of migrant workers, a washed-out one-hit wonder named L. Mariachi plays the guitar for a community suffering from a contagious form of soul loss. It’s a song that Fola’s implanted IA—information agent—thinks she needs to hear. Because what is happening to these lost souls is spreading at quantum speed to everyone else. Something or someone is trying to reprogram the system with the ultimate virus. And as virtuality becomes reality in this post-ecocaust world of plug-in sex components, old-world medicine women, and the cheesiest pop culture, humanity itself is about to crash. . . .