In sparkling Night City, a ragtag group of strangers have just pulled off a heist, robbing a convoy transporting a mysterious container belonging to Militech. The only thing the group has in common is that they were blackmailed into participating in the heist—and they have no idea just how far their mysterious employer's reach goes, or the purpose of the artifact they stole.

For millennia, the Shaa have subjugated the universe, forcing the myriad sentient races to bow to their joyless tyranny. But the Shaa will soon be no more. The Dread Empire is in its rapidly fading twilight, and with its impending fall comes the promise of a new galactic order...and bloody chaos. A young Terran naval officer marked by his lowly birth, Lt. Gareth Martinez is the first to recognize the insidious plot of the Naxid - the powerful, warlike insectoid society that was enslaved before all others - to replace the masters’ despotic rule with their own.

Aiah has fought her way out of poverty and discovers a limitless source of plasm, the mysterious substance that powers the world-city. Her discovery soon involves her with Constantine, the charismatic, dangerous, seductive revolutionary who plans to overthrow the government and upend the cosmic order.

Ex-fighter pilot Cowboy, "hardwired" via skull sockets directly to his lethal electronic hardware, teams up with Sarah, an equally cyborized gun-for-hire, to make a last stab at independence from the rapacious Orbitals.

Quillifer is young, serially in love, studying law, and living each day keenly aware that his beloved homeport of Ethlebight risks closure due to silting of the harbor. His concerns for the future become much more immediate when he returns from a summery assignation to find his city attacked by Aekoi pirates, leading to brigands in the streets and his family and friends in chains.

When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food-delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization”. Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on. What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at at least. In an alternate dimension, dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm and human-free world.

When Enae's grandmaman passes away, Enae inherits something unexpected: a diplomatic assignment to track down a fugitive who has been missing for over 200 years. No one actually expects Enae to succeed; it's an empty assignment meant to keep hir occupied. But Enae has never had a true purpose—no one ever expected hir to do more than care for grandmaman—so sie is determined to accomplish this task to the best of her ability.

William Gibson's dark visions of computer cowboys, bio-enhanced soldiers of fortune, and hi-tech lowlifes have won unprecedented praise. Included here are some of the most famous short fiction and novellas by the author of Count Zero and Neuromancer.

Jack Kernigan is having a bad day...a bad year...a bad life. After being booted out of MIT, he’s back in his Ohio hometown, working for the family business, facing a life of mediocrity. Then one day, out on a delivery, his truck hits...something. Something big...something furry...something invisible. And, it turns out, something not of this Earth. Fate can play funny tricks. Which is why Jack suddenly finds himself the planet’s best hope to unravel a conspiracy of galactic proportions that could spell the end of the human race.

Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business - deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in "half-life," a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter's face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time.

The space-faring Yherajk have come to Earth to meet us and to begin humanity's first interstellar friendship. There's just one problem: They're hideously ugly and they smell like rotting fish. So getting humanity's trust is a challenge. The Yherajk need someone who can help them close the deal. Enter Thomas Stein, who knows something about closing deals. He's one of Hollywood's hottest young agents.

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world...or you can join the service. With the colony lottery a pipe dream, Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth.

Twenty years ago, it was as if someone turned on a light. The future blazed into existence with each deliberate word that William Gibson laid down. The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer didn't just explode onto the science fiction scene - it permeated into the collective consciousness, culture, science, and technology.Today, there is only one science fiction masterpiece to thank for the term "cyberpunk," for easing the way into the information age and Internet society.

From the author of the award-winning Altered Carbon, which is now an exciting new series from Netflix. On a Mars where ruthless corporate interests violently collide with a homegrown independence movement as Earth-based overlords battle for profits and power, Hakan Veil is an ex-professional enforcer equipped with military-grade body tech that's made him a human killing machine. But he's had enough, and all he wants is a ticket back home - which is just what he's offered by the Earth Oversight organization, in exchange for being the bodyguard for an EO investigator.

Nickie Haflinger had lived several lifetimes...but technically never existed. He was originally a fugitive from Tarnover, the incredibly powerful government think tank that educated him. First he had broken his identity code - then he made his escape. Now he needed to find a way to restore sanity and freedom to the computerized masses and save a world nearing the brink of disaster. He didn’t care how he accomplished this - but the government did. That’s when his Tarnover teachers took him back into their labs, where Nickie Haflinger was set up to receive a whole new education.

In this New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a strange new life form threatens all of humanity, and only a fool would stand in its way. Katmer Al Shei has done well with the starship Pasadena, cutting corners where necessary to keep her crew paid and her journeys profitable. But there are two things she will never skimp on: her crew - and her fool. For a long space journey, a certified Fool’s Guild clown is essential, to amuse, excite, and otherwise distract the crew from the drudgeries of interstellar flight.

To Inquisitor Angel Xia, it was just another corporate killing on a backwater planet. But as the bodies begin to pile up and she finds herself a target, she realizes she's stepped on one toe too many. Barely escaping attempts on her life by powerful agents with seemingly limitless reach and influence, Angel senses even her co-Inquisitors can't be trusted. But as the web tightens, she receives a cryptic message from a computer program claiming to be a little girl in desperate need of her help.

After a decade of piloting interstellar patrol ships, former captain Chasidah Bergren, onetime pride of the Sixth Fleet, finds herself court-martialed for a crime she didn't commit and shipped off to a remote prison planet from which no one ever escapes. But when she kills a brutal guard in an act of self-defense, someone even more dangerous emerges from the shadows. Gabriel Sullivan alpha mercenary, smuggler, and rogue is supposed to be dead.

It is 2019. NASA astronaut Nigel Walmsley is sent on a mission to intercept a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Ordered to destroy it, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe - a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal….

Humans made a deal with the Stryxian males: Help us defend Earth, and when the war is over, we’ll send you women to help rebuild your dying species. Now, the war appears to be over and Trinity Bentzer’s number has been called in the lottery. Only, instead of winning a boatload of money, she’s getting some badass winged alien she’s never met. Trin’s not thrilled to be shipped off and matched up, until she meets Raig. Maybe she hit the jackpot, after all.

Geoff and his friends live in Phocaea, a distant asteroid colony on the Solar System's frontier. They're your basic high-spirited young adults, enjoying such pastimes as hacking matter compilers to produce dancing skeletons that prance through the low-gee communal areas, using their rocket-bikes to salvage methane ice shrapnel that flies away when the colony brings in a big (and vital) rock of the stuff, and figuring out how to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance motes.

This two-story compiliation, read by Stefan Rudnicki, offers two stories from David Drake's popular Hammer's Slammers series. In At Any Price, Col. Alois Hammer's indomitable Slammers are called in to support human colonists against a native uprising in this novel-length adventure. But even though the natives' off-world weapons are no match for the Slammers, their ability to teleport gives them a frightening advantage! In Rolling Hot, the battle-crazed troop of recruits and vets, led by Captain Ranson, must cover 300 miles of hostile enemy territory.

Jake Ramsey - an unassuming yet talented archaeologist - has been given the chance of a lifetime. Hired to investigate a recently unearthed Xel'Naga temple, he knows this latest assignment will open up whole new possibilities for his career. Yet when Jake discovers the remains of a long-dead protoss mystic, his hopes and dreams are irrevocably drowned in a flood of alien memories. Bonded to the spirit of the dead protoss, Jake has become the sole inheritor of the protoss' total history - every event, every thought - every feeling.

Rogue hackers Petal and Gabriel are low on food and water. Their reputation precedes them and they are no longer able to hustle the crime community for supplies. With survival becoming harder, they’re left with no other choice but to accept a risky job from a dangerous individual. The two will have to negotiate with the Tinker - a woman whose reputation for psychotic behaviour is known across the nuclear-blasted Abandoned Lands; infiltrate a town overrun with killers; and recover a cache of exceptionally rare information.

Rhoma Grace is a 16-year-old student from House Cancer with an unusual way of reading the stars. While her classmates use measurements to make accurate astrological predictions, she looks up at the night sky and makes up stories.

It's the eve of the 22nd century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans. And it's all under surveillance by an alien presence. Daniel Bruks is a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational.

Welcome to Los Angeles - where anger, hunger and disease run rampant. Jonny is a black-market dealer in drugs that heal the body and cool the mind. All he cares about is his own survival. Until a strange new plague turns L.A. into a city of death, and Jonny is forced to put everything on the line to find the cure... if it can be found on Earth.

Solara Brooks needs a fresh start, someplace where nobody cares about the engine grease beneath her fingernails or the felony tattoos across her knuckles. The outer realm may be lawless, but it's not like the law has ever been on her side. Still, off-world travel doesn't come cheap; Solara is left with no choice but to indenture herself in exchange for passage to the outer realm.

Carson Mach, a former war hero turned freelancer, seeks the biggest payday of his life when he's tasked to hunt down a ghost ship that has echoed through the centuries. The legendary Atlantis ship has become a reality, appearing at the Commonwealth frontier and obliterating an orbital station.

Beneath the roiling surface of Betelgeuse, scientists anxiously await the one man essential to the success of Starmuse, the greatest engineering project in human history. But on Kantano’s World, Willard Ruskin battles invisible agents for control of his life, his physical form, and even his memories. Drawn into a conflict from which not even death will free him, Ruskin must find a way to reach Betelgeuse before his enemies sabotage Starmuse—and humanity’s future among the stars. A harrowing journey from inside the human cell... to the mind of a dying star.