I’m a Virginia-based science fiction and fantasy writer who’s lived variously-enriching lives as a coroner’s assistant, customer service manager, university lecturer, secretary, factory technician, and clerk. I’ve bounced all around the Midwest, from Minnesota to Ohio to Colorado to Missouri and now out on the East Coast.
One of the most compelling parts about time-hopping science fiction is vicariously experienced through the culture clash of past and present. It’s even better if it’s happening in the head of a single character. Mendoza was rescued from the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century and thrust into the world of the Company, a civilization-spanning corporate agency operating behind the scenes of history for the profit of far-future shareholders. Time travel in this universe only goes one way, backward, and Mendoza will take the long way to the future: an engaging, sprawling, harrowing journey through centuries.
This is the first novel in what has become one of the most popular series in contemporary Science Fiction, now back in print from Tor. In the twenty-fourth century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company. One of these is Mendoza the botanist, who is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden. Her quest is jeopardized by Nicholas Harpole, who stirs unfamiliar emotions within her about her…
It’s too easy, in time travel fantasies, to imagine that you would feel a step above the people around you... that you alone know what’s coming, and just, in general, have your advanced-future-person perspective on the world. That’s not how history should feel. The All Clear series’s time-traveling historians arrive to observe the London Blitz and have that comforting certainty ripped out from underneath them. They’re left lost, alone, and isolated in a well-painted portrait of a world on the edge of collapse.
Award-winning author Connie Willis returns with a stunning, enormously entertaining novel of time travel, war, and the deeds - great and small - of ordinary people who shape history.
Sometimes history is just as dizzying and alienating as physics, astronomy, and contemplating the end of the universe. Unraveling the chains of could-have-beens and strange possibilities is tempting, but too big for the human imagination. In Darwinia, the Earth of 1912 becomes even more. Europe and large parts of other continents have vanished, replaced by pieces of another, much more hostile planet - and the alternate history only gets stranger from there. It perfectly captures that dazed, giddy feeling of trying to understand just how big our universe really is.
In an alternative history of the twentieth century, Europe is replaced by a land of nightmarish jungle and monsters that contains the secret of human destiny.
Not all books about the past have to be set in the past. In the far-flung future, deep in interstellar space and surrounded by impossible living technologies, an amnesiac takes part in a sociological experiment to reconstruct twentieth-century middle-class living. Glasshouse is, among other things, a playful, bitter, and funny takedown of both the era and the impossibility of actually reconstructing history. The paranoia engendered by twentieth-century living is only far too justified by the interstellar conspiracy that’s ensnared the study’s participants.
“ONE NIGHTMARISH PANOPTICON.” – The New York Times
When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn’t take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him. It’s the twenty-seventh century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees’ personalities—including Robin’s earlier self.
On the run from a ruthless pursuer and searching for a place to hide, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity: the Glasshouse, a simulated pre-accelerated culture where participants are assigned anonymized identities. But what looks like the…
Ammonite starts in space and lands on an alien world but brings plenty of Earth’s history along with it. Human settlers that lost an age ago, transformed by a virus that only women survive but allows them to reproduce, have spread across this world. Anthropologist Marghe Taishan faces down nomadic horse archers and gets lost in pastoral folkways both new and familiar. She deconstructs her future and rebuilds herself out of the past. Ammonite’s new world shows us how our world might have looked if different paths were taken.
Winner of the Lambda and Tiptree Awards • “A knockout . . . Strong, likable characters, a compelling story, and a very interesting take on gender.”—Ursula K. Le Guin
Change or die. These are the only options available on planet Jeep. Centuries earlier, a deadly virus shattered the original colony, killing the men and forever altering the few surviving women. Now, generations after the colony lost touch with the rest of humanity, a company arrives to exploit Jeep—and its forces find themselves fighting for their lives. Terrified of spreading the virus, the company abandons its employees, leaving them afraid and…
Quietus, a science fiction novel set in the midst of the Black Death. It features a transdimensional anthropologist who can’t keep herself from interfering with one of the darkest periods of Earth’s history, a young Carthusian monk who’s the only survivor of his monastery, and a worlds-spanning conspiracy to topple an empire larger than the human imagination can contain.
Quietus and its sequel, Terminus, were published in March and November of 2018 (the timing for books about a plague could have been better, could have been worse…). I also write prose novels for Marvel with Aconyte Books.
I first went to Berlin after college, determined to write a novel about the German Resistance; I stayed a quarter of a century. Initially, the Berlin Airlift, something remembered with pride and affection, helped create common ground between me as an American and the Berliners. Later, I was commissioned to write a book about the Airlift and studied the topic in depth. My research included interviews with many participants including Gail Halvorsen. These encounters with eyewitnesses inspired me to write my current three-part fiction project, Bridge to Tomorrow. With Russian aggression again threatening Europe, the story of the airlift that defeated Soviet state terrorism has never been more topical.
Stopping Russian Aggression with milk, coal, and candy bars….
Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians will starve unless they receive food, medicine, and more by air.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin. They are about to deliver milk, flour, and children’s shoes instead. Meanwhile, two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and abandoned children to freedom in the West. Until General Winter deploys on the side of Russia...
Based on historical events, award-winning novelist Helena P. Schrader delivers an…
In the second book of the Bridge to Tomorrow Series, the story continues where "Cold Peace" left off.
Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians in Hitler's former capital will starve unless they receive food, medicine and more by air.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin. They are about to deliver milk, flour and children's shoes instead. Meanwhile, two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and abandoned children to freedom in…