They thought the Sturm were dead. They were wrong.

Centuries after their defeat, the enemy has returned with an overwhelming attack on the fringes of human space. On the brink of annihilation, humankind's only hope is a few brave souls who survived the initial onslaught: Commander Lucinda Hardy, commander of the Royal Armadalen Navy's only surviving warship; Booker3, a soldier of Earth, sentenced to die for treason; Alessia, a young royal forced to flee when her home planet is overrun and her entire family executed; Sephina L'trel, the leader of an outlaw band.

And, finally, retired Admiral Frazer McLennan, the infamous hero of the first war with the Sturm, who hopes to rout his old foes once and for all – or die trying.

These five flawed, reluctant heroes must band together to prevail against a relentless enemy and near-impossible odds. For if they fail, the future itself is doomed.

When a dragon brings down the Vice President's plane and fresh demons emerge across the United States, monster slayer Dave Hooper realises that the Battle of New Orleans was just the beginning. Holed up in a swanky Las Vegas hotel, Dave is enjoying the perks of his newfound celebrity. But deep in the UnderRealms, the monsters are regrouping, and it isn't long before Dave and his splitting maul are hauled into action once more. While his agent fields offers for movies and merchandise, Dave is tasked with ending a demon siege in Omaha, protecting the skies from a dragon horde and deciphering the UnderRealms' plans to take over the earth. As an ancient and legion evil threatens to destroy mankind, Dave may not be the hero humanity deserves, but he's the only one we've got.

New York is on fire, the streets are overrun, and the Demon Horde is feasting. With the city in chaos, all eyes are on Dave Hooper, the monster slayer destined to save mankind. But hero or not, Dave is just one man and he's short of allies. He soon finds himself relying on Karen Warat: art dealer and Russian spy. Smart, dangerous and armed with a magic sword, Dave knows not to trust her. He also knows that without her, New York will fall. While the United States military try desperately to hold off the Horde, Dave and Karen realise that the monsters have a powerful new weapon. And when the legions of hell reach the small seaside town his kids call home, Dave has to make a call. Save the world? Or save his family?

Centuries after they were defeated and exiled to dark space, The Sturm have returned. The Sturm, an empire of species purists, have returned from the farthest reaches of Dark Space to wage a war against what they call mutants and borgs: any human being with genetic or neural engineering. In a sneak attack on the galaxy-spinning networks, they overwhelmed almost all of humanity's defenses, blasting dark code that transformed anyone connected to the system into a mindless psychotic killer. The Sturm's victory seemed complete, their final triumph inevitable, until one small band of intrepid, unlikely heroes struck back. Commander Lucinda Hardy and Admiral Frazer McLennan used the Armadalen Navy's final surviving warship to fend off the Sturm, destroying the massed power of an entire Attack Fleet. With brilliant tactics, this ragtag crew sent the Sturm running, managing to save Princess Alessia, the sole surviving heir to the gigantic Montanblanc Corporation and perhaps Earth's only remaining senator. Now left with the remains of a fallen civilization, they must work together to rebuild what was lost and root out the numberless enemies of Earth. The Sturm invaders remain vastly more powerful - and they may not be the only threat lurking in the darkness of space...

"A seamless fusion of alternate history, postapocalyptic fiction, and espionage-fueled thriller."--"Publishers Weekly
"
When an inexplicable wave of energy slams into North America, the world is plunged into turmoil--as wars erupt, borders vanish, and the great and powerful fall.
Against this dramatic backdrop, three very different women navigate the chaos. Deep in a South American jungle, special agent Caitlin Monroe will stop at nothing to discover how a master terrorist escaped a secret detention center in French Guadeloupe to strike a fatal blow in New York City. Sofia Peiraro, a grieving teenager trying to rebuild her life in Kansas City, is drawn back to Texas by a vicious murder. And in the fashionable bars and boutiques of Darwin, the seething, growing freeport in Australia's deep north, the British-born aristocrat-turned-smuggler Lady Julianne Balwyn hides a pistol in the small of her lovely back. She is hunting for the man who is hunting her. As these women fight for survival, justice, and revenge, humanity itself struggles toward its better angels--and to purge its worst demons.

"Birmingham knows how to write action. . . . I enjoy world building stories as well as post-apocalyptic tales. This is definitely a little of both."--Bill Lawhorn, SFRevu
"A rollicking ride . . . fast-paced and thought-provoking."--"The Sun-Herald" (Sydney, Australia)

"On the eve of America's greatest victory in the Pacific,
a catastrophic event disrupts the course of World War II, forever changing the rules of combat. . . .
"The impossible has spawned the unthinkable. A military experiment in the year 2021 has thrust an American-led multinational armada back to 1942, right into the middle of the U.S. naval task force speeding toward Midway Atoll--and what was to be the most spectacular U.S. triumph of the entire war.
Thousands died in the chaos, but the ripples had only begun. For these veterans of Pearl Harbor--led by Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance--have never seen a helicopter, or a satellite link, or a nuclear weapon. And they've never encountered an African American colonel or a British naval commander who was a woman "and "half-Pakistani. While they embrace the armada's awesome firepower, they may find the twenty-first century sailors themselves far from acceptable.
Initial jubilation at news the Allies would win the war is quickly doused by the chilling realization that the time travelers themselves--by their very presence--have rendered history null and void. Celebration turns to dread when the possibility arises that other elements of the twenty-first century task force may have also made the trip--and might now be aiding Yamamoto and the Japanese.
What happens next is anybody's guess--and everybody's nightmare. . . .

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

'As the convoy growled and squeaked to a halt in the dark, angry militiamen and soldiers began to shout and wave at the Australians, demanding they move aside. The Brave Ones' vanguard presented as a B-movie vision of some pirate biker gang from Hell, a rat bastard outfit in black tee-shirts, camouflage pants, long hair and bandanas, with axes in their eyes and guns at the ready.' The Brave Ones follows the Indonesian Army's Battalion 745 as it withdrew from East Timor after the 1999 independence vote, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. Birmingham's unflinching account reveals the scorched-earth tactics of the retreating troops, and shows just how close Australia came to armed conflict with Indonesia.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

The world changed forever when a massive wave of energy slammed into North America and wiped out 99 percent of the population. As the United States lay in ruins, chaos erupted across the globe.
Now, while a skeleton American government tries to reconstruct the nation, swarms of pirates and foreign militias plunder the lawless wasteland where even the president is fair prey. In New York City, armies of heavily armed predators hold sway--and hold off a struggling U.S. military. In Texas, a rogue general bent on secession leads a brutal campaign against immigrants. And in England, a U.S. special ops agent enters a shadow war against a deadly enemy who has made the fight personal. While the president ponders a blitz attack on America's once greatest city, the forces of order and anarchy wage all-out war for postapocalyptic dominance--and a handful of survivors must decide how far to go to salvage whatever uncertain future awaits . . . after America.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

"The action is nonstop, the characters very real-and very different from each other-and, to coin a phrase, it makes you think."
-S. M. Stirling, author of Island in the Sea of Time
In the year 2021 a multinational fleet-experimenting with untested weapons technology-pitched through time, crash-landing in 1942. The world is thrown into chaos as Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, and Stalin scramble to adapt to new, high-tech killing tools, and twenty-first-century ways of war.
For "uptimers" like Britain's Prince Harry and the men and women who serve aboard the supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton, war is a constant struggle with their own downtime allies, who are mired in ignorance and bigotry.
As the Allies counter the Nazi assault and set off for the coast of France, Japan begins to buckle, soon every battle will be played out in a lethal dance of might and intelligence, unholy alliances and desperate gambles, and each clash will be fought with the ultimate weapon; knowledge from the future.
Thanks to the historical records, all sides know that two superpowers will emerge, while the losers will be pounded into submission. But time has shifted on its axis, so none know who will survive, or how peace will take hold in a world turned upside down. These are the questions that John Birmingham brilliantly answers in his critically acclaimed adventure of war and imagination.
Praise for John Birmingham's Weapons of Choice
"Birmingham's enthralling battleground mixes provocative historical fiction and socially conscious futurism."
-Entertainment Weekly
"High-tech intrigue and suspense similar to the works of Tom Clancy."
-Library Journal

In the fourth Quarterly Essay of 2005, John Birmingham ponders the Aust ralian way of war. After East Timor and Bali, a combination of primal fear and primal ambition has transformed attitudes to our region, to security and to war as an instrument of politics. Australian defence policy has become more assertive and our armed forces are being radically restructured and hardened. Australia now has the capacity, and even the will, to act as a military power in its region. A Time for War begins with a gripping account of Operation Anaconda, the 2002 battle in Afghanistan to which Australian special forces made a crucial contribution. Birmingham also looks at our war dreaming- the sanctification of Anzac Day and the eclipse of the Vietnam Syndrome. Ranging from Sir John Monash to Peter Cosgrove, from Rudyard Kipling to The One Day of the Year, he finds that our armed forces can now do no wrong, and that politicians have taken note. The new militarism is not simply a response to September 11, he argues - it marks a deeper shift in the culture. 'It being an RSL, we would stand each night at six o'clock for the prayer of remembrance. It was always a moving occasion, a strange suspended moment when the pokies and racing channel, the piped music and the drunken bullshitting all fell away ...Friends from overseas who witnessed the quiet ceremony never failed to be impressed. One, a poet from Czechoslovakia, had always thought Australians to be a shallow, soulless, materialistic people, but she changed her mind after her first experience of the ode to the fallen among the half-empty schooners and chip packets.' - John Birmingham, A Time For War

"On the eve of America's greatest victory in the Pacific,
a catastrophic event disrupts the course of World War II, forever changing the rules of combat. . . .
"The impossible has spawned the unthinkable. A military experiment in the year 2021has thrust an American-led multinational armada back to 1942, right into the middle of the U.S. naval task force speeding toward Midway Atoll--and what was to be the most spectacular U.S. triumph of the entire war.
Thousands died in the chaos, but the ripples had only begun. For these veterans of Pearl Harbor--led by Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance--have never seen a helicopter, or a satellite link, or a nuclear weapon. And they've never encountered an African American colonel or a British naval commander who was a woman "and "half-Pakistani. While they embrace the armada's awesome firepower, they may find the twenty-first century sailors themselves far from acceptable.
Initial jubilation at news the Allies would win the war is quickly doused by the chilling realization that the time travelers themselves--by their very presence--have rendered history null and void. Celebration turns to dread when the possibility arises that other elements of the twenty-first century task force may have also made the trip--and might now be aiding Yamamoto and the Japanese.
What happens next is anybody's guess--and everybody's nightmare. . . .

In the second Quarterly Essay, John Birmingham takes apart the folly of twenty-five years of Australian policy on East Timor. How did Gough Whitlam and Richard Woolcott in 1975 saddle this country with a policy that was bound to lead to the intervention of 1999? Why were shrewder voices ignored and why did we persist with an unworkable model? Where does this leave us with an Indonesia still dominated by the old power elites? And what was the tragedy like for the people of East Timor? John Birmingham has written a passionate narrative history of the East Timor question which never turns away from the slaughter and sorrow of the people who suffered it. 'Appeasing Jakarta is an analysis of what happened in 1975 when we condoned Indonesia's intervention and what happened in 1999 when we stood against it ...John Birmingham is deadly in his disdain for the way a defunct paradigm...was clung to like a dogma...but this is also an essay about the human cost...written in flowing colours with a strong narrative streak and a swashbuckling power of dispatch...' - Peter Craven, Introduction 'It was a policy of wilful blindness, made possible only because we were always somewhere else when the trigger was pulled.' - John Birmingham, Appeasing Jakarta

It's World War II and the A-bomb is here to stay.
The only question: Who's going to drop it first?
The Battle of Midway takes on a whole new dimension with the sudden appearance of a U.S.-led naval task force from the twenty-first century, the result of a botched military experiment. State-of-the-art warships are scattered across the Pacific, armed to the teeth with the latest instruments of mass destruction.
Nuclear warheads, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, computer-guided missiles-all bets are off as the major powers of 1942 scramble to be the first to wield the weapons of tomorrow against their enemies. The whole world now knows of the Allied victory in 1945, and the collapse of communism decades later. But that was the first time around.
With the benefit of their newly acquired knowledge, Stalin and Hitler rapidly change strategies. A Russian-German ceasefire leaves the Fuhrer free to bring the full weight of his vaunted Nazi war machine down on England, while in the Pacific, Japan launches an invasion of Australia, and Admiral Yamamoto schemes to seize an even greater prize . . . Hawaii.
Even in the United States the newcomers from the future are greeted with a combination of enthusiasm and fear. Suspicion leads to hatred and erupts into violence.
Suddenly it's a whole new war, with high-tech, high-stakes international manipulations from Tokyo to D.C. to the Kremlin. As the world trembles on the brink of annihilation, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, and Tojo confront extreme choices and a future rife with possibilities-all of them apocalyptic.

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

The Second World War was turned on its head at the moment Admiral Kolhammer's ultra-modern stealth warships were hurled back through time from 2021. But no one could have predicted just how much of a nightmare would ensue . . . Only months after the Transition, the great powers scramble to develop the weapons of tomorrow. The year 1942 is now a world of crude jet fighters, monstrous attack helicopters, and unholy dirty bombs - a mongrel technology, born decades prematurely. Then, in a radical rewriting of history, Japanese forces sweep into Australia, foreign agents begin a campaign of terror in the USA, and Germany prepares for an all-out attack on Britain. The twenty-first-century forces must resort to the most extreme measures yet and face a future rife with possibilities - all of them apocalyptic . . . Picking up from where he left off with Weapons of Choice, John Birmingham shocks and awes us with this gripping second instalment in the Axis of Time trilogy.

John Birmingham is a master of good writing and funny lines. He has written a thousand stories, some true, some not so much. These are the best ones and they're so good, and so funny, there has been no barrel-scraping involved. Really, this book could have been much longer. The pieces contained within these pages run the gamut from the early felafel days to the shiny age we live in where Donald Trump is the President of the USA. And it does not shy away from the greatest controversy of our age: potato cake vs potato scallop. These hilarious pieces cover a wide range of topics from food to fitness and politics to pork, in all its glories. And, of course, fashion. Ever the equal opportunist, John Birmingham skewers them all. Sales Points John Birmingham has 60,000 twitter followers and a devoted blog following. Local and International fans of John Birmingham's blog will jump on this hilarious collection. Extraordinarily diverse collection of pieces ends up being more than a sum of its parts. He can be politically-charged one minute and make observations about home life that will make readers grimace and guffaw at once. The book will appeal to Gen-X readers as well as those - older and younger - who are into Richard Glover, Benjamin Law, David Sedaris, Amy Schumer. Pieces are both timeless (yes to a '90s revival) and timely (imagine Paul Keating on the phone to Donald Trump). Quite a few of them will make you snort coffee through your nose from laughter. Really. The title 'Stranger Thingies' is inspired by the popular TV series Stranger Things, binge-watched by millions, but stands on its own.

This gonzo guide isn't for the faint-hearted. In high-octane style, best-selling author John Birmingham provides tried-and-tested tips for writing well - and getting paid. Topics covered include 'how to slay writer's block', 'what the hell is workflow', 'how to write 10,000 words in a day' and 'the best apps for writers'. How to Be a Writer is a writing guide with a toughlove approach, written for the internet generation. John Birmingham is lauded as a prolific writer working across multiple genres. Here he shares his secrets.