Voyager

Nicola Griffith, winner of the Tiptree Award and the Lambda Award for her widely acclaimed first novel Ammonite, now turns her attention closer to the present in Slow River, the dark and intensely involving story of a young woman's struggle for survival and independence on the gritty underside of a near-future Europe.She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van de Oest was the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody. Then out of the rain walked Spanner, an expert data pirate who took her in, cared for her wounds, and gave her the freedom to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore if she didn't want to be found: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but she paid for her newfound freedom in crime, deception, and degradation--over and over again. Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and inventing her future.But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's games one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van de Oest to be paid. Only by confronting her past, her family, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be....In Slow River, Nicola Griffith skillfully takes us deep into the mind and heart of her complex protagonist, where the past must be reconciled with the present if the future is ever to offer solid ground. Slow River poses a question we all hope never to need to answer: Who are you when you have nothing left? From the Hardcover edition.

Enjoyable space opera, with a mystery- why did advanced civilizations on several planets suffer catastrophes that plunged them into chaos, death and sometimes rebirth as a primitive civilization, and why is there a huge stone fake city (Oz) on a nearby planet- what was its purpose? A team of scientists and archeologists tries to finish their work as the terraforming deadline looms on a planet chosen as a haven for select people from a devastated Earth. They discover something that prompts an exploration of another planet, which prompts yet another exploration. The team takes many risks, and several members pay the ultimate price, but the mystery is solved in the end.

Twenty stories of vampiric erotica, or more precisely depravity with sex prominently featured. People are skinned alive and a pair of women make love to a man until he dies. Edited by the author of Drawing Blood.

For the devoted followers of the dazzling Deverry and Westlands cycle, Katharine Kerr continues the magical epic saga she began in The Red Wyvern.In her latest tale, the scene shifts seamlessly between the shattered land of the Rhiddaer and the historic end of the Civil Wars, when Lilli, newly apprenticed to dweomer, fought with her untried powers to save her beloved Prince Maryn from evil.Centuries later, in the city of Cerr Cawnen, the old evil awakens yet again when the sorceress Raena schemes to destroy Rhodry Maelwaedd, her bitter enemy during life after life. But her malice will draw the intervention of astral powers--and unleash the ravaging rage of Rhodry's guardian dragon. Only another untried dweomer can buy safety for the city and the berserker himself--and only at a most fearsome price....From the Trade Paperback edition.

Kim Stanley Robinson, award-winning author of the bestselling Red Mars, Green Mars, and the soon-to-be-published Blue Mars, was called "a literary landscape artist, creating breathtaking vistas" by The Detroit Metro News. Now he confirms his reputation for brilliance and for the unexpected in this luminous short work.A Short, Sharp ShockA man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, to collapse on a moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. he know only that the woman who washed ashore with him has disappeared sometime in the night, and that he has awakened in a surreal landscape of savage beauty -- a mysterious watery world encircled by a thin spine of land. Aided by strange tribesmen, he will journey to the cove of the spine kings, a brutal race that has enslaved the woman and several of the tribesmen. That is only the beginning of his quest, as he struggles to find her identity in this wondrous and cruel land -- and seeks out the woman whose hold on his imagination is both unfathomable and unshakable.Haunting and lyrical, filled with uncommon beauty and terrible peril, A Short, Sharp Shock is an ambitious and enthralling story by one of science fiction's most respected talents.From the Paperback edition.