System Fiction

It's been 10 years since Handry was wrenched away from his family and friends, forced to wander a world he no longer understood. But with the help of the Ancients, he has cobbled together a life, of sorts, for himself and his fellow outcasts. Wandering from village to village, welcoming the folk that the townships abandon, fighting the monsters the villagers cannot - or dare not - his ever-growing band of misfits has become the stuff of legend, a story told by parents to keep unruly children in line.

Even centuries later, the final decades of the 20th century are still regarded as one of the darkest and most perilous chapters in the history of humanity. Now, as an ancient and forbidden technology tempts mankind once more, Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise must probe deep into the secrets of the past, to discover the true origins of the dreaded Eugenics Wars - and of perhaps the greatest foe he has ever faced.

Arthur Ward is no stranger to loss. Life has taken from him time and time again. With the descent of the Grand System, he almost believed things might have changed. Unfortunately, the world is not so kind a place. Arthur finally knows why he's been struggling so much with his magic, and the answer reveals a fate more dire than anything he could have ever imagined. Ether is the least of his worries when death itself looms on the horizon, the destruction of his very being.

In the middle of climate-change crises, there is no mood for space-exploration stunts - but Reid Malenfant, elderly, once a shuttle pilot and frustrated would-be asteroid miner, decides to go take a look anyway. Nothing more is heard of him. But his ex-wife, Emma Stoney, sets up a trust fund to search for him the next time the Kernel returns...By 2570 Earth is transformed. A mere billion people are supported by advanced technology on a world that is almost indistinguishable from the natural, with recovered forests, oceans, ice caps.

Facing the wrath of a Transcendent, John is forced to make a choice: He can either help humanity or pay for the crimes he committed. Unaware of what this involves, he is suddenly thrown into a war that has raged for eons. But the battlefield is bleak. The stakes are high, and humanity is losing. Despite ancient cultivation methods, their steady progress in the fight against Beastmen has vanished.

Thomas Grimshaw thought the hardest part of his day was going to be scaling a sheer wall in Yosemite on his climbing trip, but the inscrutable gods had other plans. In a flash, they terraformed the planet and imposed the rules of the Great Game. Why Earth? Why do the gods compete against each other? Do the human ‘players’ have free will, or are they mere pawns? Why was he given a special class option to select from?

The System said: "everything the sun touches is yours!" Lord Leo's a simple guy, so he took the System's word for it. It's not for nothing that Major is running drills with the new recruits, Third is sharpening his trusty sapper shovel, and boar-riding Peter is digging the earth with a honed hoof.

It has been over two years since the System arrived on Earth, leaving survivors fighting to rebuild and save humanity. Thanks to the help of a creature thought to be a legend, Jason and his friends have a path to discovering the truth behind what has happened. The System has been stacked against them, but these quests give them a chance to level the playing field against those off-worlders trying to exploit Earth and its people. Although the team has never wanted to be in charge, they are now Earth’s best hope of remaining in control of their own destiny.

The U.S.S. Enterprise is the site for a wedding that will unite two powerful rival families of the Tizarin. But Captain Picard's happiness is soon cut short by the arrival of Lwaxana Troi, the nagging mother of ship's counsellor Deanna Troi, and the notorious, all-powerful Q, who has come to examine and challenge the human concept of love. Read by Majel Barrett and John de Lancie!

In 2014, the ESA spacecraft Rosetta lands a small probe named Philae on 67P, a Jupiter-family comet. The lander goes radio-silent two years later. Suddenly, in 2026, scientists receive new transmissions from the comet. Motivated by findings that are initially sensational but soon turn frightening, NASA dispatches a crewed spacecraft to the comet. But as the ship approaches the mysterious celestial body, the connection to the astronauts soon breaks. Now it seems nothing can be done anymore to stop the looming dark danger that threatens Earth....

Ominous Obelisks land on Earth with a single message: Join the Games to give humanity a fighting chance to survive... or roll over and die. Too bad for them, Warren isn't the rolling-over type. The Empire is up to something. Warren and his cohort of unlikely heroes have just discovered that the game has been stacked against them. Someone really wants to harvest Earth's resources... And Warren just might know what that resource is... Turns out that Earth has an abundance of a particular mineral that just might make it the richest planet... well, anywhere. If they survive the games, that is.

The body keeps the score. In the Russo family, the body keeps the script. When Nell Russo dies, her wheelchair sits empty at the head of the dinner table for three weeks before anyone dares move it. Her four survivors continue their choreographed existence: Jamie swimming through air when no pool exists, Dorothy walking counterclockwise orbits until her feet bleed, Martin dismantling and rebuilding the same broken drawer seventeen times, Becca framing every moment through a camera that hasn't worked in years. They call it grief. They're wrong.

Qualityland, Marc-Uwe Kling's first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly clever, illuminating satire in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and George Orwell that offers a visionary, frightening, and all-too funny glimpse at a near future we may be hurtling toward faster than it's at all comfortable to admit. So why delay any longer? TheShop already knows you're going to love this book. You may as well head to the cash register, crack the covers, and see why that is for yourself.

Youth by Isaac Asimov is a clever and heartwarming science fiction short story that captures the boundless imagination of childhood against the backdrop of an alien encounter.

Marc is all too aware that the end of the acclimatization year the System has provided to Earth is quickly drawing to a close and that others will be allowed onto the planet to start claiming areas shortly. Zeus has promised that his series of quests will get Marc, at least, to the maximum level reachable in that first year, but Marc is nervous that it isn't going to happen.

As a software developer from Texas, Tom thought he understood broken code. But when mysterious obelisks transform Earth into a glitch-riddled dungeon crawler, he discovers that debugging the apocalypse won't be as easy as turning it off and back on again. Their lifeline? Vending machines turned into miniature storefronts. These mechanical saviors dispensed everything from swords to shampoo—until they started dispensing death.

John wakes up in a familiar place, only to find a world that is different from what he knows. In order to protect those he loves, John must sift through his memories to ensure his previous ending doesn’t become true once more. He might have brought knowledge of the future back to the past, but this time, he finds his enemies much earlier. How will he tell Sarah, who does not remember the love they shared or the adventures they had, who he really is? Old debts are repaid, and new friends are made as he carves out a familiar path to the top.

The Devil's Heart is a legendary object of unsurpassed power and mystery. Worlds that believe in magic consider it Darkness's mightiest talisman; and worlds of science consider it a lost artifact of some ancient and forgotten race. Some say the Heart enables its possessor to control people's minds and to amass wealth enough for a dozen lifetimes, while others think it capable of raising the dead, perhaps even changing the flow of time itself. But to all, the location of this fabled object has remained a mystery, until now.

Das System ist da! Ein Großteil der Bevölkerung des Planeten wurde plötzlich in Zombies verwandelt. Alle anderen erhielten neue Fähigkeiten. Fähigkeiten, die es ihnen ermöglichen, vor den Zombies zu fliehen, sich zu retten, zu verstecken und zu versuchen, irgendwie zu überleben. Aber es reicht ein Biss. Denn der bedeutet fast immer den Tod. Als die Apokalypse hereinbrach, stand unser Held gerade in der Schlange. Er hatte Glück, denn zuerst steckte er mitten in einer Menschenmenge, dann versuchten die Zombies, ihn ins Bein zu beißen. Und diese Umstände verhalfen ihm zu neuen Fähigkeiten!

John de Lancie, in his role as "Q," headlines a Star Trek cast and crew (directed by Jonathan Frakes!) in this fully dramatized adventure of the future and the adventures of the heroic Starfleet officer who must save the Federation!