A near-future thriller of a devastating alien invasion from the paleontologist who inspired Jurassic Park and the award-winning science fiction author. There were always those who disagreed with broadcasting signals into the deepest reaches of outer space, because our mere existence could be taken as a threat. They were right to be concerned . . . In the spring of 2076, just days short of America’s tricentennial celebrations, every inhabited surface in the solar system gets wiped out by a catastrophic storm of relativistic bombs, flaming swords that pierced the sky. The only two survivors left on Earth exist in a submersible that had been exploring the Titanic’s final resting place on the bottom of the North Atlantic. In space, only the settlers in small, asteroid-based colonies have gone unnoticed by the aliens—for now. But any sign of life, any call for help, might bring the Intruders straight to them. These far-flung survivors are now on their own, stalked by a ruthless, faceless enemy straight out of the nightmares of humanity’s greatest minds—those lone voices whose warnings went ignored. “[A] novel of such conceptual ferocity and scientific plausibility that it amounts to a reinvention of that old Wellsian staple, [alien invasion].” —The New York Times Book Review “Relentless . . . The ultimate disaster novel . . . A thought-experiment and warning.” —The Denver Post “A whirlwind of ideas . . . full of action and danger . . . Pellegrino and Zebrowski are working territory not too far removed from Arthur C. Clarke’s, and anywhere Clarke is popular, this book should be, too.” —Booklist

Old Earth is gone. Humanity has been scattered to the stars. Some left their dying planet in spaceship arks, in search of new worlds to inhabit. Others, nanoengineered for near-immortality, explore the far reaches of interstellar space in gargantuan macrolife mobiles. An earth-like human society endures on the environmentally volatile planet of Tau Ceti IV—a rigid community of the faithful that has declared evil the science that caused the homeworld’s destruction. The Church is the absolute power here; obedience and belief the rule. But His Holiness Peter III, the New Vatican’s most powerful figure, himself harbors doubts, engendered by his love for his unacknowledged and illegitimate rebel daughter Josepha. And suddenly there is another assault on his tottering faith—and on the sacred traditions he has devoted his life to uphold. For an emissary, Voss Rhazes, has arrived from one of old Earth’s journeying mobiles—the first off-planet human visitor ever to Tau Ceti—bearing remarkable hated technology that could shred the fragile emotional fabric of a family . . . and bring devastating chaos to their world.

The ten stories of this collection present glimpses of our near, middle, and far futures “Heathen God,” the author’s first Nebula Award finalist, reveals the consequences of learning that our solar system may have been engineered by an alien race. “In the Distance, and Ahead in Time” and “Wayside World” depict the rediscovery of a ruined Earth’s interstellar colonies by a new culture of mobile habitats. In “Transfigured Night” and “Between the Winds,” we enter two possible destinies as we tamper with human reality and humankind mutates into vastly different offshoots.

Subtitled “A Mobile Utopia,” this pioneering novel about the meaning of space habitats for human history, presents spacefaring as no work did in its time, and since. A utopian novel like no other, presenting a dynamic utopian civilization that transcends the failures of our history. Epic in scope, Macrolife opens in the year 2021. The Bulero family owns one of Earth’s richest corporations. As the Buleros gather for a reunion at the family mansion, an industrial accident plunges the corporation into a crisis, which eventually brings the world around them to the brink of disaster. Vilified, the Buleros flee to a space colony where young Richard Bulero gradually realizes that the only hope for humanity lies in macrolife—mobile, self-reproducing space habitats. A millennium later, these mobile communities have left our sunspace and multiplied. Conflicts with natural planets arise. John Bulero, a cloned descendant of the twenty-first century Bulero clan, falls in love with a woman from a natural world and experiences the harshness of her way of life. He rediscovers his roots when his mobile returns to the solar system, and a tense confrontation of three civilizations takes place. One hundred billion years later, macrolife, now as numerous as the stars, faces the impending death of nature. Regaining his individuality by falling away from a highly evolved macrolife, a strangely changed John Bulero struggles to see beyond a collapse of the universe into a giant black hole. Inspired by the possibilities of space settlements, projections of biology and cosmology, and basic human longings, Macrolife is a visionary speculation on the long-term future of human and natural history. Filled with haunting images and memorable characters, this is a vivid and brilliant work.

This collection of stories showcases the work of George Zebrowski, one of science fiction’s masters and a writer Hugo and Nebula Award winner Robert J. Sawyer has called “one of the most philosophically astute writers in science fiction.” Like the writers Olaf Stapledon, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stanislaw Lem, Zebrowski explores the “big questions”—the expansion of human horizons, and the growth of power over our lives and the world in which we live. In the title story, scientists push the boundaries of human mentality to keep pace with ever-evolving AIs. In “The Eichmann Variations,” a finalist for the Nebula Award, exact copies of captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann stand trial for his crimes against humanity, while in “The Word Sweep,” all speech must be rationed because spoken words take on physical form. In “Wound the Wind,” another Nebula Award finalist, unchanged humans roam freely until captured by those who know what’s best for them, and in “Stooges,” a visiting alien hijacks the persona of Curly Howard. From hard science fiction (“Gödel’s Doom”) to alternate history (“Lenin in Odessa”) to first alien contact (“Bridge of Silence”), and with an introduction by renowned physicist/writer Gregory Benford, this collection presents one of the most distinctive voices writing in the field of science fiction today.

A detective discovers bodies without brains—and wonders if he’s losing his mind—in this tale of nightmarish terror. What do you tell yourself when impossible things begin to happen? What can you say? You’re a police detective, but maybe you’re just not good enough and that’s what you have to admit, whether you like it or not. You see evidence of things that can’t be real, but you just don’t observe well enough to explain it in any natural way. Can you ask rational questions and still be crazy? Does it help any that you know your mind is gone? You’re trapped in a black comedy with a beautiful but fatal woman right out of an old poem by Keats, hoping to wake up from the nightmare, even if on a cold hillside—as long as you wake up sane. Detective William Benek is faced with an impossible crime: bodies are turning up without their brains and without any indication of how the organs were removed. His only lead—an attractive woman—becomes more than a lead, and then drives him into a world of terror, where his sanity is questioned and he must stop a monster he can barely comprehend. Listed as a Best Book of 2009 by Edge Boston.

In this masterful collection of horror stories, George Zebrowski divides these nineteen tales into personal, political, and metaphysical terrors—stories to scare you individually, stories to frighten you as a social animal, and stories that should terrify the entire human race. In “I Walked with Fidel,” a young man encounters a once politically powerful zombie; “Jumper” focuses on a young woman with a dark and troubled past, while in “The Coming of Christ the Joker,” the lighthearted banter of a celebrity TV talk show becomes something far more serious. “A Piano Full of Dead Spiders” is an eerie story of genius, its demands, and its delusions; in “Passing Nights,” the truth behind a recurring nightmare is revealed; “The Soft Terrible Music” depicts a man who must hide his past even from himself. And in the title story, the novella “Black Pockets,” Zebrowski asks: What happens to a man when his desire for revenge becomes all-consuming? With an introduction by Howard Waldrop and an afterword by the author, George Zebrowski reveals himself in Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts as a writer who can play on our more disturbing emotions even as he impels us to deeper thoughts.

The orbiting tachyon detector was designed by physicist Juan Obrion to identify life in other star systems, but even though he expected to find some signs of life, he certainly didn't expect to find any life on Earth. When Obrion discovers that a culture has been concealed for many years far below Antarctica, he ventures out as part of a four-man team to explore the unknown. Juan, Lena, Malachi, and Magnus are awestruck when they discover a myriad of portals to parallel lands, but the maze they fall into makes them wonder if their journey will ever come to an end.

Two hundred million kilometers across, with a surface area that exceeds that of a quarter-billion worlds, the Dyson sphere is one of the most astounding discoveries the Federation has ever made. Now the U.S.S. Enterprise™ has returned to explore the awesome mysteries of the sphere. Intrigued by what is possibly the greatest archaeological treasure of all time, Captain Jean-Luc Picard hopes to discover the origin of humanoid life throughout the galaxy -- or perhaps the ultimate secret of the Borg. But when a neutron star approaches on a collision course with the sphere, a mission of discovery becomes a desperate race against time. The many sentient species inhabiting the sphere face extinction -- can even the Starship Enterprise save them all?

The Sunspacers Trilogy is a trio of novels of an alternate, earth-based civilization. In Sunspacer, young and idealistic philosophy student Joe Sorby must come to terms with adulthood while negotiating the gross injustices of interplanetary commerce. In Stars Will Speak, an alien signal is broadcast from the farthest reaches of the known galaxy . . . but will the scientists of earth decipher its warning in time? In Behind the Stars, young Max Sorby returns to Earth after spending all of his life on a mobile space habitat, fearing that the only home he has ever known will be lost to him forever.