Russian billionaire Nikolai Shostakovitch makes an offer to the former crew of the spaceship ILSE. He will finance a return voyage to the icy moon Enceladus. The offer is too good to refuse - the expedition would give them the unique opportunity to recover the body of their doctor, Dimitri Marchenko. Everyone on board knows that their benefactor acts out of purely personal motivations... but the true interests of the tycoon and the dangers that he conjures up are beyond anyone's imagination.

Late in the 21st century, Earth receives what looks like an urgent plea for help from planet Proxima Centauri b in the closest star system to the Sun. Astrophysicists suspect a massive solar flare is about to destroy this heretofore-unknown civilization. Earth's space programs are unequipped to help, but an unscrupulous Russian billionaire launches a secret and highly-specialized spaceship to Proxima b, over four light-years away.

NASA finally made it. The very first human has just set foot on the surface of our neighbor planet. This is the start of a long research expedition that sent four scientists into space. But the four astronauts of the NASA crew are not the only ones with this destination. The privately financed "Mars for Everyone" initiative has also targeted the Red Planet. Twenty men and women have been selected to live there and establish the first extraterrestrial settlement.  

Quinn Black is having the worst day ever...over and over again. The same car blocking his driveway, the same horrific accident he witnesses, the same cop that keeps preventing him from saving his boss from dying in it, and the same memory of a girl from his past that gets sharper each time. Then he realizes he has the power to travel through time and change the future. Could he prevent terrorist attacks? Natural disasters? The deaths of friends? Before long, Quinn is thrust into the greatest race in human history.

Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade his mind in the war. And one of humanity’s heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers. Eighty years ago, Earth was destroyed by an alien enemy. Many escaped, but millions more died. So mankind created enhanced humans ­such as Idris - who could communicate mind-to-mind with our aggressors. Then these ‘Architects’ simply disappeared, and Idris and his kind became obsolete.

In 2018, Canadian archaeologist Ron Jackson makes a mind-boggling discovery in Antarctica - right before disappearing without a trace, leaving behind only his controversial theory that humans have lived on Earth far, far longer than we think they have. Decades later, in 2042, when Jackson's wife dies under mysterious circumstances, an unlikely pair of investigators, Agatha Devenworth and Pano Hofer, begin investigating whether her death might be connected to Jackson's disappearance. 

Synthetic Intelligence. Thought impossible, but Dr. Wallace Theren has pushed the boundaries of computational science, creating an artificial mind capable of conscious thought. If the first synthetic intelligence is to survive its early years, it'll need friends, but more importantly, it'll need a family. And together, they'll need to show their enemies they're worth saving...or fearing.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, the endlessly-mysterious moon is explored in this reprint short science fiction anthology from award-winning editor and anthologist Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld, The Best Science Fiction of the Year).

The Galactic Star Alliance has been alive and well for millions of Earth years. Hundreds of thousands of worlds and trillions of beings move across the many home worlds of the Alliance. This revelation invites many questions: How is faster-than-light speed travel possible, and could cohesive, interstellar civilizations exist without it? Is it conceivable to govern a coalition not of different countries but of different species?

Theodorus was a dreamer. As a child, he dreamed of aeroplanes, rockets and outer space. When the wild card virus touched him and transformed him into a monstrous snail centaur weighing several tons, his boyhood dreams seemed out of reach, but a Witherspoon is not so easily defeated. Years and decades passed, and Theodorus grew to maturity and came into his fortune...but still his dream endured.

Set to embark on NASA's first expedition to the outer planets, the crew of the spacecraft Magellan learns someone else has beaten them by a few decades: a top-secret Soviet project codenamed Arkangel. Now during their long race to the Kuiper Belt, astronauts Jack Templeton and Traci Keene must unwind a decades-old mystery buried in the pages of a dead cosmonaut's journal. The solution will challenge their beliefs about the nature of humanity, and will force the astronauts to confront the question of existence itself. 

More than a century ago, Earth was suffering under the weight of overpopulation and ever-dwindling resources. Humanity’s best and brightest were commissioned to create a means to escape the overcrowding of Earth, and to branch out and live among the stars. Their efforts were hampered by the seeming impossibility of faster-than-light travel, until a team of researchers discovers an usual answer they call “the Lightrail”.  On the eve of Earth’s first successful jaunt to the stars, however, a powerful organization called Earth First commits a horrible act of terrorism.

The Galactic Empire has prospered for 12,000 years. Nobody suspects that the heart of the thriving Empire is rotten, until psychohistorian Hari Seldon uses his new science to foresee its terrible fate. Exiled to the desolate planet Terminus, Seldon establishes a colony of the greatest minds in the Empire, a Foundation which holds the key to changing the fate of the galaxy.

Commander Scott McNabb and the crew of the science vessel, Hermes, are three years into a five-year-long survey of the asteroid belt when they discover a derelict spaceship in orbit around a binary asteroid. The ship contains an experimental quantum device, lost while en route to a research colony on Europa.

After a mysterious global event known only as “The Change”, six strangers wake up in an underground research facility where they learn that they’re part of the Extinction Trials - a scientific experiment to restart the human race. But the Extinction Trials harbors a very big secret. And so does the world outside.