A BOY MEETS A GIRL. THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE. A FINGER MEETS A TRIGGER. THE BEGINNING MEETS THE END. ENGLAND IS FOREVER. ENGLAND MUST FALL.

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering 'expats' from across history to test the limits of time-travel.

Her role is to work as a 'bridge': living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as '1847' - Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as 'washing machine', 'Spotify' and 'the collapse of the British Empire'. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more.

But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?

A thrilling anthology of short stories from the Sunday Times bestselling author of the Scholomance Trilogy and Uprooted, spanning each of her realms and including a sneak peak into the world of her next series.

From the gothic, magical halls of the Scholomance trilogy, through the realms next door to Spinning Silver and Uprooted, and the dragon-filled Temeraire series, this stunning collection takes us from fairy tale to fantasy, myth to history, and mystery to science fiction as we travel through Naomi Novik’s most beloved stories. Here, among many others, we encounter:

• A mushroom witch who learns that sometimes the worst thing in the Scholomance can be your roommate.
• The start of the Dragon Corps in ancient Rome, after Mark Antony hatches a dragon’s egg and bonds with the hatchling.
• A young bride in the middle ages who finds herself gambling with Death, for the highest of stakes.
• A delightful reimagining of Pride & Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennet captains a Longwing dragon.
• The first glimpse at the world of Abandon, the setting of Novik’s upcoming epic fantasy series―a deserted continent populated only by silent and enigmatic architectural mysteries.

They travelled into the unknown and left themselves behind . . .

Professor Arton Daghdev has always wanted to study alien life in person. But when his political activism sees him exiled to the planet Kiln, condemned to work under an unfamiliar sky until he dies, his idealistic wish becomes a terrible reality.

Kiln boasts a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem. Its monstrous alien life means Arton will risk death on a daily basis – if the camp’s oppressive regime doesn’t kill him first. But, if he survives, Kiln’s lost civilization holds a wondrous, terrible secret. It will redefine life and intelligence as he knows it – and might just set him free.

Meet Adina: a woman who has never felt at home on Earth

Born at the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space, Adina is a baby of unusual perception. Tiny and jaundiced, she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognises she is different, not least because of her strange knowledge of a faraway planet. Then a fax machine arrives at home. Her mission is clear: she must report on the oddities of humankind.

As Adina grows up, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and delights of human existence. But then she starts to wonder. Is there a chance there are others like her out there?

Adina sees our world differently. And her gentle, perceptive – and funny – observations offer a quietly joyful new view of life on Earth, the challenge of knowing ourselves and the miracle of finding our people in this vast universe.

From the #1 Kickstarter campaign of all time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson adds to his Cosmere universe shared by Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive with a standalone novel that combines fantasy and science fiction.

Years ago he had comrades in arms and a cause to believe in, but now the man who calls himself Nomad knows only a life on the run. Forced to hop from world to world in the Cosmere whenever the relentless Night Brigade gets too close, Nomad lands on a new planet and is instantly caught up in the struggle between a tyrant and the rebels who want only to escape being turned into mindless slaves-all under the constant threat of a sunrise whose heat will melt the very stones.

Unable to understand the language, can he navigate the conflict and gain enough power to leap offworld before his mind or body pay the ultimate price?

From New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, In the Lives of Puppets is a queer retelling of the Pinocchio tale, inviting you deep into the heart of a peculiar forest and on the extraordinary journey of a family assembled from spare parts. In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees live three robots – fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. They’re a family, hidden and safe. The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled ‘HAP’, he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio – a past spent hunting humans. When Hap unwittingly alerts robots from Gio’s former life to their whereabouts, the family is no longer hidden and safe. Gio is captured and taken back to his old laboratory in the City of Electric Dreams. So together, the rest of Vic’s assembled family must journey across an unforgiving and otherworldly country to rescue Gio from decommission, or worse, reprogramming. Along the way to save Gio, amid conflicted feelings of betrayal and affection for Hap, Vic must decide for himself: can he accept love with strings attached? Inspired by Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, In the Lives of Puppets is a masterful standalone fantasy adventure from the author who brought you The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door.

Vern, a hunted woman alone in the woods, gives birth to twins and raises them away from the influence of the outside world. But something is wrong - not with them, but with her own body. It's changing, it's itching, it's stronger, it's... not normal.

To understand her body's metamorphosis, Vern must investigate not just the secluded religious compound she fled but the violent history of dehumanization, medical experimentation, and genocide that produced it. In the course of reclaiming her own darkness, Vern learns that monsters aren't just individuals, but entire histories, systems, and nations.

Sorrowland is a memorable work of Gothic fiction that wrestles with the tangled history of racism in America and the marginalisation of society's undesirables. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house. What does it mean?

It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world. What would that actually be like?

In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?

And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?

Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.

From Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony of the moon three hundred years later. The Sunday Times bestseller, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is a story of parallel worlds and possibilities that plays with the very line along which time should run.

Lives separated by time and space have collided, and an exiled Englishman, a writer trapped far from home, and a girl destined to die too young, have each glimpsed a world that is not their own.

Travelling through the centuries, between colonies on the moon and an ever-changing Earth, together their lives will solve a mystery that will make you question everything you thought you knew to be true.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is the second part in Douglas Adams' smash hit sci-fi comedy and cult classic series. This stunning gift edition is illustrated by Costa Award winning Chris Riddell.

If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the end of the Universe?

Which is exactly what Arthur Dent and the crew of the Heart of Gold plan to do. There's just the small matter of escaping the Vogons, avoiding being taken to the most totally evil world in the Galaxy and teaching a space ship how to make a proper cup of tea.

And did anyone actually make a reservation?

Murderbot meets Redshirts in a delightfully humorous tale of robotic murder from the Hugo-nominated author of Elder Race and Children of Time.

To fix the world they must first break it, further.

Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot discovers they can also do something else they never did before: They can run away.

Fleeing the household they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose.

Sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming.

In a future much nearer than you think, where scientific experimentation is exploited for commercial profit, unwisely under-supervised cutting-edge technology creates a menace that threatens the very fabric of human existence. Wrath is the story of a lab rat instilled with human genes whose supersized intelligence helps him to engineer his escape into the world outside the lab: a world vastly ill-equipped to deal with the menace he represents. Modified through advances that have boosted his awareness of humankind's cruelty in the name of science, and endowed with a rat's natural proclivity to procreate regularly, Sammy has the potential to sire a rodent army capable of viciously overwhelming the human race.

Welcome to Scion. No safer place.

The year is 2059. For two centuries, the Republic of Scion has led an oppressive campaign against unnaturalness in Europe.

In London, Paige Mahoney holds a high rank in the criminal underworld. The right hand of the ruthless White Binder, Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare and formidable kind of clairvoyant. Under Scion law, she commits treason simply by breathing.

When Paige is arrested for murder, she meets the mysterious founders of Scion, who have designs on her uncommon abilities. If she is to survive and escape, Paige must use every skill at her disposal – and put her trust in someone who ought to be her enemy.

A lone astronaut. An impossible mission. An ally he never imagined.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it's up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery-and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he's got to do it all alone. Or does he?

A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation. "Greg Egan is perhaps the most important SF writer in the world."-Science Fiction Weekly "One of the very best "-Locus. "Science fiction with an emphasis on science."-New York Times Book Review Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships. And there are the holdouts: the fleshers left behind in the muck and jungle of Earth-some devolved into dream apes, others cavorting in the seas or the air-while the statics and bridgers try to shape out a roughly human destiny. But the complacency of the citizens is shattered when an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers and reveals the possibility that the polises themselves might be at risk from bizarre astrophysical processes that seem to violate fundamental laws of nature. The orphan Yatima, a digital being grown from a mind seed, joins a group of citizens and flesher refugees in a search for the knowledge that will guarantee their safety-a search that puts them on the trail of the ancient and elusive Transmuters, who have the power to reshape subatomic particles, and to cross into the macrocosmos, where the universe we know is nothing but a speck in the higher-dimensional vacuum. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Dr. Sunyata Song must travel across the Milky Way to learn to communicate with the greatest discovery of her century: an artificial intelligence the size of a stellar system, in Hugo Award-winning author Bear's next science fiction epic.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to vanish without a trace. Sunya Song's job is to stop that from happening.

She's an archinformist: a specialist historian whose job usually involves sitting at a console at her university job near the Galactic Core, sorting ancient documents and restoring corrupted files. But now, the research opportunity of a lifetime has sent her - and her family - halfway across the galaxy to save the archaeological find of the century: an ancient alien artificial intelligence called the Baomind.

As vast as a stellar system, the Baomind orbits a dying red giant, and the star's time has nearly ended.

The remote research station and its small fleet of ships come under attack by fanatic Freeport pirates who believe that artificial intelligence is an abomination that must be destroyed, putting the lives of Sunya and her family at risk.

Tens of thousands of light years from home, isolated from all help, Sunya is the only one who can save them all.

On a planet run by escapees from a mental institution, the doctors who arrive to restore order may be the craziest of all.

For years, the third moon in the Alphane system was used as a psychiatric hospital. But when war broke out between Earth and the Alphanes, the hospital was left unguarded and the inmates set up their own society, made up of competing factions based around each mental illness. When Earth sends a delegation to take back the colony, they find enclaves of depressives, schizophrenics, paranoiacs, and other mentally ill people coming together to repel what they see as a foreign invasion. Meanwhile, back on Earth, CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his wife Mary are going through a bitter divorce, with Chuck losing everything. But when Chuck is assigned to clandestinely control an android accompanying Mary to the Alphane moon, he sees an opportunity to get his revenge.

In a near-future world addled by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. Desperate to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking reprieve from her recent hardships and her family’s addiction to their devices, May splurges on passes for her family to spend three nights respite in the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals still thrive. But when her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives to save her family.

Written with “precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Hum is a “striking new work of dystopian fiction” (Vogue) that delves into the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.

A frightening new danger arises to threaten the Twilight. . . .

For a millennium, the Others have maintained an uneasy peace that has protected them and the Twilight, a shadowy parallel world beneath our own. But the battle for supremacy between the forces of the Light and the Darkness is far from over. . . .

Now older and more powerful, Light magician Anton Gorodetsky has risen to the top levels of the Night Watch. He is also father to a ten-year-old girl who is destined to become a magician of unprecedented power. When he hears a young boy at the airport screaming that a plane will crash, Anton suspects the child is a prophet--a rare type of Other who portends catastrophe.

If Anton is right, then the boy has awakened a terrifying danger--a rare, multifaced beast that exists to stop the prophecy from coming true. With their lives in mortal peril and time running out, Anton must find a way to keep his gifted young daughter safe . . . and save the Twilight itself.