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.

This is an amazing collection of some of the best short fiction ever written in the SF genre, by an author acclaimed as 'the mastersinger of space opera' THE TIMES. With an introduction by noted SF critic Johnathan Strahan, this collection of twenty short stories, novellettes and novellas includes MINLA'S FLOWERS, SIGNAL TO NOISE, TROIKA, and seven previous uncollected stories, including TRAUMA POD, THE WATER THIEF and IN BABELSBERG. Alastair Reynolds has won the Sidewise Award and been nominated for The Hugo Awards for his short fiction. One of the most thought-provoking and accomplished short-fiction writers of our time, this collection is a delight for all SF readers

Ethan York has unwittingly released something unspeakably evil into his world. Faced with certain destruction, Ethan must regain the trust of the only person ever to visit the world his terror came from—his life long friend Patrick Doune. In the process, they uncover numerous conspiracies and schemes by cults to us the powers from beyond for their own malicious purposes. Forming an alliance with Sophia Siene, Patrick's enemy and one desire, to destabilize one cult's strategy, the three of them discover a society so sinister it is willing to destroy humanity to prove its doctrine is the "One Truth". Mankind's only hope resides in the fate of these three unlikely companions.

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.

Every thirty-three years, a rift in space connects the Federation with a mysterious race called the Calligar who live on a planet hundreds of light years away -- much too far to travel in a Starship. Captain Kirk and the U.S.S. Enterprise™ are dispatched to transport a Federation delegation of diplomats, scholars and scientists who will travel to Calligar directly during the brief period of time that the rift will be open. Mr. Spock leads the Federation party as they travel by shuttle through the rift just as a group of the aliens arrive in Federation space. The meetings go smoothly until the Calligar take Spock's party hostage and Kirk discovers that the aliens are keeping a deadly secret. With angry Tellarite and Andorain fleets ready to attack the Calligar, Kirk must save Spock and the others before war breaks out and the rift closes for another fifty years.

The Gnostic revival of the Enlightenment witnessed the erection of what could be called the “Kantian Rift,” an epistemological barrier between external reality and the mind of the percipient. Arbitrarily proclaimed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, this barrier rendered the world as a terra incognita. Suddenly, the world “out there” was deemed imperceptible and unknowable. In addition to the outer world, the cherished metaphysical certainties of antiquity—the soul, a transcendent order, and God—swiftly evaporated. The way was paved for a new set of modern mythmakers who would populate the world “out there” with their own surrogates for the Divine. Collectively, these surrogates could be referred to as the Beyond because they epistemologically and ontologically overwhelm humanity. In recent years, the Beyond has been invoked by theoreticians, literary figures, intelligence circles, and deep state operatives who share some variant of a technocratic vision for the world. In turn, these mythmakers have either directly or indirectly served elitist interests that have been working toward the establishment of a global government and the creation of a New Man. Their hegemony has been legitimized through the invocation of a wrathful earth goddess, a technological Singularity, a superweapon, and extraterrestrial “gods.” All of these are merely masks for the same counterfeit divinity... the Beyond.

Outlines an organic chemist's long-standing efforts to bridge gaps between spirituality and twenty-first-century science, describing his experiences of working with cancer patients, his philosophies about the existence of God, and his beliefs about the universe's harmonious blending of mind and spirit.