Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Anthologies & Short Stories

Ribofunk contains 11 masterful and surprising works of imagination. In all of them, biology is the science that drives the engine of life and of story: the Protein Police patrol for renegade gene-splicers; part-human sea creatures live in the Great Lakes and clean up toxic spills; a river has become sentient; there is a bodyguard who is part wolverine and a thrill-seeker climbs a skyscraper and gets stuck, literally.

A young boy's dreams of glory and war turn into a bitter nightmare as his father's kingdom is overrun by an invading army. Lost and alone in the woods, he finds an ancient sword that promises him the ability to claim his vengeance. As he begins to take that vengeance, he comes to realize the price that the sword will demand of him. Enemies soon become allies and strange bedfellows abound as the prophesies of an age swirl into chaos.

Queen Victoria's Book of Spells is an anthology for everyone who loves works of neo-Victorian fiction and wishes to explore the wide variety of ways that modern fantasists are using nineteenth-century settings, characters, and themes. These approaches stretch from steampunk fiction to the Austen-and-Trollope inspired works that some critics call "fantasy of manners", all of which fit under the larger umbrella of gaslamp fantasy.

Today's hottest urban fantasy authors come together in this delicious brew that crackles and boils over with tales of powerful witches and dark magic! For anyone who's ever wondered what lies beyond the limits of reality, who's imagined the secret spaces where witches wield fearsome magic, come and drink deep. Let yourself fall under the spell of this bewitching collection!

Tales of guardian spirits and divine powers by Seanan McGuire, Ken Liu, Alethea Kontis, Laura Anne Gilman, Scott Edelman and more. Guardian spirits. Divine presences. Demonic powers. Ghosts. The concept of "genius loci" is indeed an ancient one, found in nearly every human mythology. Genius Loci is a huge anthology of 31 all-new fantasy and science fiction stories drawing on the rich tradition of place-as-person. In it, the authors present stories of sentient deserts, beneficent forests, lonely shrubs, and protective planetary spirits.

A 300-year-old story collector enlists the help of the computer hacker next door to save her dying sister. A half-resurrected cleanup man for Death’s sprawling bureaucracy faces a phantom pachyderm, doll-collecting sorceresses, and his own ghoulish bosses. Gordo, the old Cubano who watches over the graveyards and sleeping children of Brooklyn, stirs and lights another Malaguea. Down the midnight streets of New York, a whole invisible universe churns to life in Daniel José Older’s debut collection of ghost noir.

Whether they are undeniably heroes and heroines or bloodthirsty monsters (or something in between), the undead are a lively lot. This anthology offers some of the best short fiction ever written by the "blood sisters" who know them best: stories you can really sink your teeth into.

The second novel of the Codex of Souls furthers explores the strange occult world first introduced in Lightbreaker. Mark Teppo’s vision of a magical underworld is a non-stop adventure that continues to bring new light to the occult origins of our history. Markham returns to Paris where he lost his love, and nearly his life. The ancient order of manipulative magicians that once cast him out is now in turmoil...a turmoil made all the greater by the swaths of destruction that Markham tried to avert.

These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even a nuclear Armageddon, which serve as comic foils for Lain's everyman characters. Here is an America where packets of Sea Monkeys arrive in the mail containing secret messages, and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week's Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.

The Iron Kingdoms is a land dominated by mighty warcasters, arcanists who command the terrifying war machines called warjacks. While these epic figures lead armies and shape the futures of their nations, other powerful individuals, no less skilled, forge their own destinies in steam and steel. Called to Battle is a collection of stories focused on the Iron Kingdoms’ unsung heroes, its skilled mercenaries, and even the horrifying villains who haunt its darker reaches.

A brand-new collection of chilling stories by master of horror Kim Newman, in which Jack the Ripper still stalks the streets, Frankenstein's monster rises from the Arctic ice, and the terrifying legacy of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde haunts fog-shrouded London. This volume also includes a brand-new exclusive Anno Dracula story, 'Yokai Town: Anno Dracula 1899', which sets the scene for the forthcoming novel Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju.

These are stories that explore the scarred outposts of desperation and desire, sickness and death, sex and decay. Within this audiobook, you will also find the acclaimed novella Nearly People (nominated for awards by the International Horror Guild and the British Fantasy Society), in which a woman's search for food in a nightmarish city brings her attention from an enigmatic man known as The Dancer, and a host of terrible epiphanies.

Whether he's breaking into an impregnable fortress, fighting pirates, or striking the final blow in political war, Ahren is the man for the job. After being framed for murder, his reward posters have named him The Black Raven. In order to survive, Ahren finds himself drafted into the Tyenee, a secret criminal organization whose influence stretches across the world. Their missions are the most daring and most dangerous, and the penalty for failure...is death.

Spurn Babylon is a short story from the collection Tides from the New Worlds. Caribbean-born novelist Tobias Buckell established himself as a gifted new voice in science fiction with his stunning first novel, Crystal Rain. Now, in his first collection, Buckell demonstrates his strengths in the short form, offering listeners a collection of stories that are compelling, smart, wonderfully imagined, and entertaining.

Humans have always been fascinated by darkness. Especially the darkness of a city at night, when the black sky is made ever more inky by the pools of illumination dropped under streetlights. Whether the mean streets be in an alternate past charmed with dark magic or the dirty alleyways of futuristic crowded space stations, the city—and its darkened streets—will always fascinate us. Here then, an anthology of all new stories of science fiction and fantasy with a hardboiled noir twist that acknowledge that the city is a living, breathing entity...and it isn’t always on our side.

For Ahren, it's no longer a question of someone trying to kill him; it's who will try next. Still on the run for a murder he didn't commit, Ahren adapts to life as an outlaw as his reputation of the Black Raven grows. Yet nothing comes easily. Dogged by bounty hunters, he finds himself crossing steel with pirates on the high seas and battling monsters in subterranean cities. If that wasn't enough, he's paid to assassinate an immortal and must break out of a heavily fortified prison.

Terak is an orphaned elf who has been raised by the severe order of monks known as the Enclave. Inside the walls of the Black Keep, he is an outcast in more ways than one. In a world of magic, he must learn how to survive with no magic of his own. Can the very thing that makes him despised save those that would rather he didn't exist at all?

When the English journalist named Cave visits the island of Autotelia, he finds the dockyards of the old harbor gentrified and the island’s famous ruins a tourist attraction. When he gets to know the alluring Julia Vicente, a former film actress, he discovers that her life has been marked by the childhood disappearance of her brother. Was she guilty of his death, or was it an accident after all? As Cave’s life grows entwined with hers, he tries to answer these questions, while his new lover seems determined to perpetuate the mystery.

The outcast elf with no magic will be the only one who can overcome a magical apocalypse, but first, he must embrace the very thing he has been running from.

A follow-up to his 1970 science fiction collection, The General Zapped an Angel, Fast’s book of 13 new science fiction stories is brisk and engrossing. In "The Hoop", a scientist builds a portal to an unknown destination, which the mayor of New York City hijacks to use as a garbage dump until the location’s surprising, and hilarious, revelation. And in "The Egg", set 3,000 years in the future, a research team discovers an egg, something they have never seen before, cryogenically frozen in a nuclear bunker. These 13 stories are bizarre, hilarious, poignant, and sure to entertain.