A peaceful organization of civilized planets is faced with a threat to their very existence. Desperate to save themselves, they turn for help to the most brutal, backward, violent species in the known galaxy: humans.

Sinclair Rutherford is a young Seattle cop with a taste for the finer things. Doing menial tasks and getting hassled by superiors he doesn't respect are definitely not "finer things". Good police work and bad luck lead him to crack a case that changes quickly from a career-making break into a high-profile humiliation when footage of his pursuit of the suspect - wildly inappropriate murder weapon in hand - becomes an Internet sensation.

For some it’s an opportunity. For others it’s a moment to question their faith: In God, in science, in everything. Still others try to keep the world running in the face of absurdity and uncertainty. And then there are the billions looking to the sky and wondering how a thing that was always just there is now... something absolutely impossible.

What's worse than a child with a magnifying glass, a garden full of ants, and a brilliant mind full of mischief? Try Al, a well-meaning but impish artificial intelligence with the mind of a six-year-old and a penchant for tantrums. Hope Takeda, a lab assistant charged with educating and socializing Al, soon discovers that day care is a lot more difficult when your kid is an evolving and easily frightened A.I.

The question is, how can you tell the President's brain is missing? And are we sure we need it back?

24/7 Demon Mart: Publisher's Pack features two books from the 24/7 Demon Mart series: The Graveyard Shift, book one, and Monster Burger, book two. It also includes the bonus Hell for the Holidays, a 24/7 Demon Mart Christmas special. Lloyd Wallace is the most clueless crossing guard the intersection of hell and earth has ever seen. So clueless, that he doesn't even realize the beer cave in the corner store where he works is the gateway to hell.

In October of 2013, Drew Hayes began posting a story to his website. Written over the thirteen days leading up to Halloween, when each chapter ended the next step was chosen by the readers. Sometimes this led to great discoveries and triumphs, other paths led to Dead Ends, though even in those there was much to be gleaned. For ten years, this tradition occurred, until in the year of 2022, the readers chose a finale. This is their story: a tale of deaths and decisions that spanned a decade.

Caesar, an undercover operative, enters Carmichael with the briefest of orders from his boss and a countdown on his phone. What will happen when the clock strikes zero? Deputy Amelia Miller is dispatched from a nearby city, and a series of events keeps her around much longer than she'd expected. In the middle of the night, something shifts, and the whole town disappears off the face of the Earth. Who caused the shift, and what lies beyond the veil of their settlement?

Equipped with the entirety of human knowledge, a sentient ship is launched on a last-ditch journey to find a new home for civilization. Trillions of miles. Tens of thousands of years. In the space between, the AI has plenty of time to think about life, the vastness of the universe, everything it was meant to do, and—with a perspective created but not limited by humans—what it should do.

There are angels, and they are not beneficent or loving. But they do watch over us. They watch our lives unfold, analyzing us for repeating patterns and redundancies. When they find them, the angels simplify those patterns and remove the redundancies, and the problem that is "you" gets solved.

After losing her mother, thirteen-year-old Opal moves in with her uncle Roscoe on the family farm. There, Opal bonds with Uncle Roscoe over music and befriends a group of orphaned, music-loving bats. But just as the farm is starting to feel like home, the bats’ cave is destroyed by a big mining company with its sights set on the farmland next.

The ex-planet Pluto has a few choice words about being thrown out of the solar system. A listing of alternate histories tells you all the various ways Hitler has died. A lawyer sues an interplanetary union for dangerous working conditions. And four artificial intelligences explain, in increasingly worrying detail, how they plan not to destroy humanity. Welcome to Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi.

Here is Old Man's War author John Scalzi's sendup of the heroic fantasy genre, now a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

New York Times best-selling and Hugo Award-winning author John Scalzi gift-wraps 15 short takes on the holiday season - interviews with holiday notables, "informational" articles about TV specials and Christmas carols, short stories and poems, and even a couple of nods to Thanksgiving and New Year’s - and puts them all into a stocking stuffer-sized package that makes the perfect gift for friends, family, or yourself.

It’s Sunset Station! Where astronaut Kris Standard and her crack team of fellow astronauts work tirelessly to bring us the future of space travel for a fraction of the cost! On Sunset Station! cost-effectiveness is baked into in the design specs! Really! “Ask not how to do it, ask how to do it for less” is our motto! When it comes to Sunset Station! keeping six people alive in space on a budget is no problem! Just as long as everything continues to work exactly right! Because if something goes wrong…? Dear God, nothing better go Sunset Station! Nothing ever goes wrong! Ever!

Sinclair Rutherford is a young Seattle cop with a taste for the finer things. Doing menial tasks and getting hassled by superiors he doesn't respect are definitely not "finer things". Good police work and bad luck lead him to crack a case that changes quickly from a career-making break into a high-profile humiliation when footage of his pursuit of the suspect - wildly inappropriate murder weapon in hand - becomes an Internet sensation.

What's worse than a child with a magnifying glass, a garden full of ants, and a brilliant mind full of mischief? Try Al, a well-meaning but impish artificial intelligence with the mind of a six-year-old and a penchant for tantrums. Hope Takeda, a lab assistant charged with educating and socializing Al, soon discovers that day care is a lot more difficult when your kid is an evolving and easily frightened A.I.

A peaceful organization of civilized planets is faced with a threat to their very existence. Desperate to save themselves, they turn for help to the most brutal, backward, violent species in the known galaxy: humans.

It is the distant future, and Baird is a loner, a part time spy, and a notorious alleged thief. “Notorious” for the audacity of her crimes; “alleged” because nobody has ever been able to legally prove she committed any of them. When the hush-hush agency known as the Toolbox recruits Baird, being a clandestine operative seems like a great way to get paid to do what she already does anyway. That is, until a mission goes wrong, and Baird is infected with a deadly virus.

Even when finding oneself engaged in interstellar war, good form must be observed. Our story is set thousands of years after the Terran Exodus, where two powerful, planet-dominating families - the elegant House Jakabitus and the less refined Hahn Empire - have reached a critical point in their generations-long war. Master Hennik, the Hahn ruler's only son, has been captured, and the disposition of his internment may represent a last and welcome chance for peace.

Physicist Philip Moray is having a good day. He’s chipping away at his big work project. The lunch in the cafeteria is at least edible. And he’s looking forward to his end-of-the-day drink and a soak in the hot tub. Then, a strange device turns up in his office. A piece of technology he has never seen before–and shouldn’t even exist. Suddenly, corpses start turning up, eco-activists go on the attack, random people suffer bizarre symptoms. And every time the authorities get a lead, it traces right back to Philip and his colleague, Celia Hunt.

Flying dark, a plane carrying a team of mercenaries crash-lands on a remote snowy summit. When they come across a mazelike stone fortress, it’s no refuge from the wolves and the freezing wind. It’s more like a trap. What they discover can stop the heart—or worse. As terror takes a new shape, the real battle for survival begins in this unrelenting serialized novel from Academy Award–winning filmmaker and writer Guillermo del Toro.

Jack Bennet returns from the war to find the life he left behind has moved on without him. The only option he has to make ends meet lies in a military surplus junkyard starship. What’s a former Combat Search and Rescue soldier to do? Fix up the ship, hire the cheapest pilot—a notorious drunk—and take the first contract that comes up: collect a bounty on one of the most ruthless killers in the Pirate Worlds, a place crawling with thieves, cutthroats and con artists whose primary language is violence. Jack must abandon his nice guy persona, or exploit it, if he is to survive.

Special Operations Chief Tyler Brooks might not know quantum mechanics, or have an eidetic memory, but he is the very best in the world at one thing: leading covert ops. When an unpredictable enemy causes the catastrophic loss of his entire SEAL team, Brooks is recruited by Pat Moody to lead a new elite squad, Task Force Omega. Moody’s promise—access to mind-bending tech that grants a glimpse of the future.

It was no secret that journalist Jack Sparks had been researching the occult for his new book. No stranger to controversy, he'd already triggered a furious Twitter storm by mocking an exorcism he witnessed. Then there was that video: 40 seconds of chilling footage that Jack repeatedly claimed was not of his making, yet it was posted from his own YouTube account. Nobody knew what happened to Jack in the days that followed - until now.

It's not every afternoon that an enigmatic, comely blonde named Stilton (like the cheese) walks into the scruffy gin joint where Sammy "Two Toes" Tiffin tends bar. It's love at first sight, but before Sammy can make his move, an air force general named Remy arrives with some urgent business. 'Cause when you need something done, Sammy is the guy to go to; he's got the connections on the street.

When the apocalypse comes, a mysterious entity grants Theo Spencer the gift of reincarnation. The gift of a quiet life as an alchemist. He awakens in a small town in the southern reaches of a small kingdom in a non-human body. Broken Tusk doesn't seem like much, but his legendary alchemy skills will soon turn their fortune.

The War of the Worlds gets turbocharged in this nonstop action-packed thriller about a group of survivors thrust into extraordinary circumstances. When aliens arrive on Earth, the tiny town of Little Creek isn't any more prepared than the rest of the planet. Without warning or provocation, the otherworldly creatures begin to lay waste to everything.

Equipped with the entirety of human knowledge, a sentient ship is launched on a last-ditch journey to find a new home for civilization. Trillions of miles. Tens of thousands of years. In the space between, the AI has plenty of time to think about life, the vastness of the universe, everything it was meant to do, and—with a perspective created but not limited by humans—what it should do.

A character so outrageous he could only have come from the ingenious imagination of Elmore Leonard, lewd, lecherous, law-bending Florida jurist Judge Robert "Maximum Bob" Gibbs has been judged guilty by a grudge-bearing malefactor and sentenced to death - by alligator, if necessary.