Physicst Philip Quine is pulled into the byzantine world of a nuclear weapons lab as it struggles to maintain its mission and its funding in the post-Cold War world.

Since his debut in Terry Carr’s legendary Ace Specials of the 1980s, Carter Scholz has occupied an enviable, if demanding, position on the cutting edge of modern speculative literature (vulgarly called SF). Proudly debuting in this volume, Gypsy is his first major work since his 2002 nuclear thriller Radiance. An interstellar adventure grounded in the hard science of accurate physics and biology, Gypsy soars far beyond the heliosphere of conventional science fiction. Jettisoning the easy warp-drives of fantasy and space opera, Scholz chronicles with chilling realism the epic voyage of a team of far-seeing scientists, who crowdsource a secret starship and abandon the doomed Earth for the Alpha Centauri system, our nearest stellar neighbor and last desperate chance. Heartbreak and hope collide in this moving and visionary tale. Plus... An epistolary story about a story, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” uses a classic SF text to deconstruct literary deconstruction itself, with hilarious results. In the wickedly droll “Bad Pennies,” a spy tasked with trashing a foreign economy testifies before a complacent Congress. Quietly furious, “The United States of Impunity” is an alarming look under the tent of today’s political sideshow. Adults only. And Featuring: “Gear. Food. Rocks.”—our Outspoken Interview, in which a postmodern Renaissance man charts the synergies and dissonances of a career that embraces both literary and musical composition, reveals the hidden link between winemaking and deep space astronomy, and tells you how to steal his car.

In this collection of twelve stories, Carter Scholz reveals his truly remarkable range and prodigious narrative gifts. Traveling from the surface of the moon to the New Jersey suburbs, they explore the places in the human mind where science and fiction merge. Here are stories that disturb the universe, probe the worlds we call home, and measure the degrees of our alienation. Mind-expanding, entertaining, and often richly disquieting, the stories in The Amount to Carry are bravura performances of the imagination.

Short novels are movie length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This unabridged collection presents the best-of-the-best science fiction novellas published in 2015 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of story-telling. In “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls,” by Aliette de Bodard, set in the author’s Dai Viet interstellar empire, an Empress orders her scientific Grand Master to search deepest space and track down the missing Citadel, along with its technologies, to help defend against enemies amassing on her borders. In “The New Mother,” by Eugene Fischer, a freelance journalist pursues the career-making opportunity to write a feature article for a major publication following a contagion that turns human ova diploid, capable of parthenogenesis—reproduction without the need for sperm. In “Inhuman Garbage,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, set in the author’s popular Retrieval Artist series, a detective investigates the murder of a body found in a recycling/composting waste disposal crate in a dome on the moon. In “Gypsy,” by Carter Scholz, a meticulously rendered, slower-than-light, starship flees a totalitarian Earth on a mission whose outcome is not a clear-cut success or failure. Finally, in “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear,” by Bao Shu, Xie Baosheng and his lifelong love, Qiqi, are small children as the countdown to the 2008 Beijing Olympics has begun. Their lives in China are prosperous but then history starts to run backwards.

Previously published only in a signed, limited edition, "Kafka Americana" has achieved cult status. In an act of literary appropriation, the authors seize a helpless Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of 20th century America.

While exploring an ancient site used by Neanderthal Man, a young anthropologist stumbles upon a mysterious metal cube made of an unknown alloy, an artifact that can yield a clue to the secrets of time travel