In this moody work set in a fantastical Age of Industry, Robert Borrows runs away from Bracebridge, West Yorkshire, only to find that he cannot escape from the magical secrets of his past.

While it is obvious to most Christians that there is great value and benefit in their baptism, it is not always obvious to them how they benefit from it. How can we profit from our baptism? Can we profit from it more? Ian Macleod answers these questions pastorally and biblically, pointing us to the riches of grace that have been signified and sealed to us in our baptism and showing us how the benefits derived from baptism through faith in Christ and with the Spirit’s blessing are lifelong.

"MacLeod is a brilliant writer." —Tim Powers "Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic and tragic." —Paul Di Filippo Welcome to the first half of the collected worlds of one of fiction's great myth-makers. Blending naturalistic settings with real—and unreal—histories, dark presents, strange pasts and star-flung futures, Ian R. MacLeod's multi award-winning stories defy easy classification, but are always vividly elegant, compelling, and filled with wonder. In Grownups, a young boy discovers the strange facts of life in a very different—yet also alarmingly recognizable—world, whilst New Light on the Drake Equation focusses on one man's quest to prove there is still a chance of intelligent life existing beyond Earth, and in Ephemera a very strange librarian has final charge of all the world's knowledge and culture, and The Master Miller's Tale tells of obsessive love as a bucolic past dissolves into the magics of industry, iron and steam. Nothing in MacLeod's visions is ever quite what it seems, yet they remain deeply real and involving. If you haven't read MacLeod before, you can expect to be moved and surprised. If you have, then you need no further introduction other than to say that Everywhere—and its companion volume Nowhere, which features many of his best shorter stories—represent a generous and wide-ranging summary of his work, along with many insights into the creative process which are provided by the fresh introductions and afterwords. Praise for Ian R. MacLeod "Ian R. MacLeod is rapidly becoming one of the contemporary stars of the genre." —Brian Aldiss "MacLeod is set to become a writer of the magnitude of Dickens and Tolkien." —G. P. Taylor "I have no idea what he looks like, but I picture an angle with polychrome wings, dirty hands and a well-chewed pencil." —Gene Wolfe "...in many ways the mature culmination of the New Wave's aggressive appropriation of literary tropes and techniques and the skillful integration of them into subtle, penetrating fiction that, like all true and dangerous art, can pierce and transform the reader." —Jack Dann "Stands beside the achievements of China Mieville." —Jeff VanderMeer "There are moments when you see a life entire... in a moment. And you smile, because you recognize that smell of the world, that capsule of living." —John Clute "Ian R. MacLeod is one hell of a writer—literary, inventive, always surprising. Pay attention: this guy is important." —Michael Swanwick

"MacLeod is a brilliant writer." —Tim Powers "Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic and tragic." —Paul Di Filippo Welcome to the second half of the collected worlds of one of fiction's great myth-makers. Blending naturalistic settings with real—and unreal—histories, dark presents, strange pasts and star-flung futures, Ian R. MacLeod's multi award-winning stories defy easy classification, but are always vividly elegant, compelling, and filled with wonder. In The Chop Girl, a young working at a World War Two RAF bomber airbase discovers the true meaning of luck, whilst The Discovered Country projects a world in which the dead enjoy an endless afterlife whilst the merely living struggle to survive, and The Visitor from Taured twists a modern urban myth into a tale of one man's search for a Theory Of Everything, and Snodgrass tells a very different version of the Beatles' rise to fame. Nothing in MacLeod's visions is ever quite what it seems, yet they remain deeply real and involving. If you haven't read MacLeod before, you can expect to be moved and surprised. If you have, then you need no further introduction other than to say that Nowhere—and its companion volume Everywhere, which features many of his best longer stories—represent a generous and wide-ranging summary of his work, along with many insights into the creative process which are provided by the fresh introductions and afterwords. Praise for Ian R. MacLeod "Ian R. MacLeod is rapidly becoming one of the contemporary stars of the genre." —Brian Aldiss "MacLeod is set to become a writer of the magnitude of Dickens and Tolkien." —G. P. Taylor "I have no idea what he looks like, but I picture an angle with polychrome wings, dirty hands and a well-chewed pencil." —Gene Wolfe "...in many ways the mature culmination of the New Wave's aggressive appropriation of literary tropes and techniques and the skillful integration of them into subtle, penetrating fiction that, like all true and dangerous art, can pierce and transform the reader." —Jack Dann "Stands beside the achievements of China Mieville." —Jeff VanderMeer "There are moments when you see a life entire... in a moment. And you smile, because you recognise that smell of the world, that capsule of living." —John Clute "Ian R. MacLeod is one hell of a writer—literary, inventive, always surprising. Pay attention: this guy is important." —Michael Swanwick

An unabridged collection of the “best of the best” science fiction stories published in 2013 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster. In “Zero for Conduct,” by Greg Egan, an Afghani teenager, living in a near-future Iran with her exiled grandfather, makes a game-changing superconductor discovery. A young girl struggles to survive on a planet, with a stringent class structure, where Doors are used to go off-world in “Exit, Interrupted,” by C. W. Johnson. “Pathways” by Nancy Kress, follows a teenage girl from a small Kentucky mountain town, in a near-future U. S., struggling with her family and culture as she seeks treatment for Fatal Familial Insomnia. In “Entangled,” by Ian R. MacLeod, an Indian woman, in a Britain turned upside down by a disease that links people’s minds, searches for answers to her personal catastrophe. In “The Irish Astronaut,” by Val Nolan, a colleague brings the ashes of an astronaut, who died in the Aquariusdisaster, to Ireland for final burial. In “Among Us,” by Robert Reed, a government agency goes to extraordinary lengths to identify and track the aliens among us. “A Map of Mercury,” by Alastair Reynolds, showcases the plight of a failed artist dispatched to retrieve an artistic genius from a collective of cyborgs parading across the face of Mercury. In “Martian Blood,” by Allen M. Steele, a researcher from Earth goes on an expedition into the untamed regions of Mars to extract blood from its natives. “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin,” by Michael Swanwick, set in the same milieu as Gene Wolfe’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” follows the childhoods of two sisters on a planet far from Earth. Finally, in “The Best We Can,” by Carrie Vaughn, a frustrated scientist pursues first contact among an apathetic populace.

Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke and the John W. Campbell Memorial awards for Best Science-Fiction Novel Song of Time begins with an old woman discovering a half-drowned man on a Cornish beach in the furthest days of this strange century. She, once a famous concert violinist, is close to death herself — or a new kind of life she can barely contemplate. Does death still exist at all, or has finally been extinguished? And who is this strange man she's found? Is he a figure returned from her own past, a new messiah, or an empty vessel? Filled with love, music, death and life, and spanning the world from the prim English suburbs of Birmingham to the wild inventions of a new-Renaissance Paris to a post-apocalyptic India, Song of Time tells the story of this century, and confronts the ultimate leap into a new kind of existence, and whatever lies beyond... Praise for Song of Time: "MacLeod's quiet, meditative novels and stories have been winning critical acclaim for years, and Song of Time sees him at the height of his powers. At the end of a long and eventful life, celebrated violinist Roushana Maitland orders her memories before she passes from the world of the flesh to a virtual afterlife. When she finds a mysterious stranger washed up on the beach of her Cornish retreat, he facilitates the process of remembrance. In flashback chapters we follow Roushana's turbulent life through the cataclysmic events of the 21st century, taking in the deaths of loved ones, marriage to a conductor-entrepreneur, and a final heartbreaking revelation, Song of Time is a slow, sensitive first-person account of what it means to be human and vulnerable, and confirms MacLeod as one of the country's very best literary SF writers." — The Guardian

Ian R. Macleod's fantasy short story "The Chronologist" is a Tor.com Original A boy, desperate to escape the drudgery of life in his small town, gets caught up in the machinations of a traveling time keeper, and slowly watches his town and his life unravel by the seams. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.