Showing results by author "Eric Flint" in All Categories

After peacefully and complacently expanding for centuries, the Centran Empire comes face to face with their first major obstacle, the stubborn and warlike inhabitants of Earth, and decides to use Earth warriors to pacify difficult planets throughout the galaxy, but they soon discover a new problem - the humans could end up running the Central Empire itself.

New York Times best seller, master-class alternate historian, and creator of the Ring of Fire saga Eric Flint delivers an explosion of tales filled with well-turned action, wit, and wonder.

Russ Tabor is one of the top security specialists in the galaxy. Much against his will, he finds himself assigned to provide protection for Rupert Medawar Narayan Shenoy - "Lord Shenoy", as he likes to style himself - who is probably the human race's most brilliant savant. Shenoy has become convinced that the race of ancient aliens known as the Old Ones possessed powers unknown to any modern intelligent species.

Conquered by the Jao twenty years ago, the Earth is shackled under alien tyranny - and threatened by the even more dangerous Ekhat, one of whose genocidal extermination fleets is coming to the solar system. The only chance for human survival is in the hands of an unusual pair of allies: a young Jao prince, newly arrived to Terra to assume his duties, and a young human woman brought up amongst the Jao occupiers. But, as their tentative alliance takes shape, they are under pressure from all sides.

Known for his New York Times best-selling alternate history novels, Flint is equally a master of shorter forms, and this second large volume gathers more of Flint's shorter works. Including several stories and a short novel set in Flint's celebrated Ring of Fire alternate history series. A commemorative novelette set in Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos universe. A story with Dave Freer, set in his and Flint's popular Rats, Bats, and Vats series. Several humorous short stories addressing Biblical literalism. A long novella in a Martian steampunk setting.

The passage of Halley’s Comet in 1759 is catastrophic. The comet appears to strike the Earth, sundering the New World from the Old. A chain of mountains rises in the Mid-Atlantic. No ship from the Old World arrives in America. No ship from the New World can find a passage to the Old - and most who try simply disappear. The comet has also unleashed magic forces, which soon spread everywhere.

AD 751: The being from the future known as Aide has brought technology to Byzantine Rome in an attempt to oppose another nefarious AI from the same future. This is a Roman Empire with the telegraph, muzzle-loading rifles, and steam-powered ships. In the midst of this transformed world: Calopodius Saronites, 17 years old and a Constantinople aristocrat who has gone to the front with General Belisarius to seek glory.

War is a serious business - or is it? Christopher Anvil turns his sardonic sense of humor loose on the subject. Hard-SF legend and Analog regular Christopher Anvil brings together mind-bending ideas and grim-but-true black humor in the face of war's utter destruction in this mega-compilation.

Vaughan Roberts and his two companions had been trapped on a crime-ridden, chaotic planet until they bamboozled the population with a gigantic hoax - which brought them to the attention of the Interstellar Patrol, who were looking for a few good con men, capable of ingenious improvisation and adept at playing dirty tricks on the bad guys.

Something new is brewing in the 17th century! Fans of the 1632 series have often asked “What's going on in North America?” Herbert Sakalauks has set out to let you know in his short novel The Danish Scheme. Christian IV, King of Denmark, Sir Thomas Roe, the English Ambassador to Christian's court, various elements of the extended Nasi/Abrabanel family have arranged an unusually well-funded and well led expedition to North America.

Sergeant Samuel Morgan Campbell had been in plenty of tight spots before, but nothing like this. It had happened in a few terrifying seconds: the starship he and his crew travelled on, the Outward Initiative, shattered to pieces before their eyes and disappeared, leaving them stranded in the endless night of deep space on Lifeboat LS-88 - all systems dead, light-years from any known colony.

A mysterious pyramid appears in Chicago, oozing fantastic creatures and sucking humans into our own mythological past. It's an alien invasion from within! When a special forces team sent to capture an AWOL official gets into deep trouble with a certain one-eyed Norse god, redoubtable comparative mythologist Jerry Lukacs must rescue them, strike a deal with the droll and dangerous Loki, and risk bringing on Ragnarok itself to once again save human myth from alien domination.

Here for the first time the stories and short novels of the war with the Outs are collected into a novel-length chronicle. The Outs had mental powers they could use to make humans see illusions and convince them to change sides. Obviously, they were unbeatable - until some troublesome humans found their Achilles' heel.

The Kimei family and a second group of castaways, led by Sergeant Campbell, had finally joined forces after both had been forced to land on the bizarre planet Lincoln, whose continents were huge floating coral colonies, inhabited by even stranger lifeforms. They had survived crash-landings and venom-filled bites and disease, their own despair, and even the destruction - and consumption! - of one of their floating islands, and had learned to live, even prosper, in their strange new home.

Humans - there's no understanding them, and no dealing with them either. Or even their planet. Pity the poor aliens, whose shape-changing ability should let them take over the planet Earth before the humans even know they're there - if it weren't for all that omnipresent pollution. Or consider another set of invaders, from a planet where the weather is always mild and the changing of the seasons is hardly noticeable. They land in force; their weapons more powerful than those of the primitive humans, but they've never had to deal with below-zero temperatures, flash floods, or tornadoes.

Humanity is first subjugated by haughty alien colonizers calling themselves the Jao when Earth is unexpectedly attacked by the implacable and nearly-unstoppable Ekhat, exterminators of all intelligent life not their own. Now the fragile Human-Jao alliance is put to the test. A devastating encounter with the Ekhat in a distant nebula reveals a powerful alien society that may hold the key to defeating the Ekhat once and for all. There’s one big problem: they utterly loathe humanity's ally, the Jao.

Oh ye civilized of Earth: Send forth your outcasts, your primitive throwbacks, your religious fundamentalists, your sexual separatists - and heck, you can even toss in your totalitarian crackpots in the bargain. Pack them all in sealed habitats, rocket them into space, and pronounce good riddance to those lunatics, oddballs, and losers! But if you happen to be an alien explorer stranded on that ship and looking to find a way home, well then, your one chance lies in seeking out the true iconoclasts in a sea of nutcase societies.

The youthful artist-swordsman Benvenuti Sfondrati-Piccolomini arrived in the city of Goimr just in time for disaster to strike. The evil sorcerer Zulkeh had driven the King of the realm insane, then fled from the city! Things were not as they seemed. The wizard Zulkeh and his apprentice Shelyid were, in fact, guiltless. Zulkeh had been summoned to interpret the King of Goimr's mysterious dream, which the sorcerer came to realize foretold an impending catastrophe for civilization. Zulkeh and Shelyid had actually left Goimr to discover the really important implications of the dream.

After the extinction asteroid does not strike Earth, the dinosaurs keep evolving - but so do the mammals. We mammals have achieved humanlike shapes, but now it's cold-blooded, magic-using reptiles against the hot-blooded, hot-tempered descendants of cats. In a heroic, Bronze Age world similar to 300, the Mrem Clans expand their rough-and-tumble territory, but now they face the Lishkash, reptilian masters of a cold-blooded empire of slave armies and magic.

A new wonder drug has the unexpected side effect of making people happy. But should people be happy all of the time? Suppose being happy required you never to disappoint anyone, no matter what they're requesting.... Then there was the energy source for every home that would free the country from its dependence on foreign oil - except that the prototype was rushed into production a bit too fast. Back on the bright side, another device not only couldn't possibly work, but didn't have any obvious uses. Then alien invaders landed and suddenly the crackpot device was the world's only hope.