Midnight Robber

It’s Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked “Midnight Robbers” waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. To young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival-until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgiveable crime.

Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen’s legendary powers can save her life . . . and set her free.

Infinity Beach

We are alone. That is the verdict, after centuries of Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence missions and space exploration. The only living things in the Universe are found on the Nine Worlds settled from Earth, and the starships that knit them together. Or so it’s believed, until Dr. Kimberly Brandywine sets out to find what happened to her clone-sister Emily, who, after the final, unsuccessful manned SETI expedition, disappeared along with the rest of her ship’s crew.Following a few ominous clues, Kim discovers the ship’s log was faked. Something happened out there in the darkness between the stars, and she’s prepared to go to any length to find answers. Even if it means giving up her career…stealing a starship…losing her lover. Kim is about to discover the truth about her sister — and about more than she ever dared imagine.

Forests of the Heart

In the Old Country, they called them the Gentry: ancient spirits of the land, magical, amoral, and dangerous. When the Irish emigrated to North America, some of the Gentry followed…only to find that the New World already had spirits of its own, called manitou and other such names by the Native tribes.

Now generations have passed, and the Irish have made homes in the new land, but the Gentry still wander homeless on the city streets. Gathering in the city shadows, they bide their time and dream of power. As their dreams grow harder, darker, fiercer, so do the Gentry themselves–appearing, to those with the sight to see them, as hard and dangerous men, invariably dressed in black.

Bettina can see the Gentry, and knows them for what they are. Part Indian, part Mexican, she was raised by her grandmother to understand the spirit world. Now she lives in Kellygnow, a massive old house run as an arts colony on the outskirts of Newford, a world away from the Southwestern desert of her youth. Outsider her nighttime window, she often spies the dark men, squatting in the snow, smoking, brooding, waiting. She calls them los lobos, the wolves, and stays clear of them–until the night one follows her to the woods, and takes her hand….

Ellie, an independent young sculptor, is another with magic in her blood, but she refuses to believe it, even though she, too, sees the dark men. A strange old woman has summoned Ellie to Kellygnow to create a mask for her based on an ancient Celtic artifact. It is the mask of the mythic Summer King–another thing Ellie does not believe in. Yet lack of belief won’t dim the power of the mast, or its dreadful intent.

Donal, Ellie’s former lover, comes from an Irish family and knows the truth at the heart of the old myths. He thinks he can use the mask and the “hard men” for his own purposes. And Donal’s sister, Miki, a punk accordion player, stands on the other side of the Gentry’s battle with the Native spirits of the land. She knows that more than her brother’s soul is at stake. All of Newford is threatened, human and mythic beings alike.

Once again Charles de Lint weaves the mythic traditions of many cultures into a seamless cloth, bringing folklore, music, and unforgettable characters to life on modern city streets.

Crescent City Rhapsody

Kathleen Ann Goonan’s first novel, Queen City Jazz, propelled her into the front ranks of speculative fiction. Her lyrical and imaginative renderings of a near future transfigured by the wonders and dangers of nanotechnology provide readers tantalizing glimpses of scientific advances just beyond the cutting edge…and the unpredictable human consequences following in their wake. Now comes Goonan’s most ambitious, penetrating look yet into the exotic future already flowering around us–and perhaps within us.

It begins with silence. A powerful electromagnetic pulse high in the atmosphere triggers a communications blackout, causing electronics and computers to fail the world over. In that moment of anachronistic quiet, a brilliant astronomer named Zeb Aberly, scouring the heavens with equipment of his own design, makes the discovery of a lifetime: the pulse originated in space–and it carried a message from an intelligent source. But Zeb is not alone. Shadowy forces within the government seek to decipher the message and to keep its existence secret at all costs. Fleeing for his life into the back streets and alleys of Washington, D.C., Zeb embarks on an odyssey that could cost him his family, his sanity, and everything he loves.

And it begins with murder. In New Orleans, mob boss Marie Laveau–a descendant of the famous voodoo priestess–is brutally gunned down by nameless, faceless enemies. But Marie’s vast wealth has purchased the best life insurance of all: resurrection. Reborn by means of nanotechnology, Marie discovers that her husband and young daughter were also hit, their bodies too badly damaged to be repaired. Now she will stop at nothing to track down and punish those responsible. But her quest will lead beyond vengeance, into the very technology that saved her…and a conspiracy linked to the mysterious event now known as the Silence.

Recurring at unpredictable intervals, the Silence renders electronic-based technology unreliable and dangerous. A substitution must be found before civilization collapses; breakthroughs in nanotech and advances in genetic engineering give hope of a new kind of communication in the future. But now, as babies born around the world in the months following the first Silence grow to adulthood, demonstrating uncanny physical and mental characteristics that bring suspicion and violence, nanotech plagues unleashed by ecoterrorists and fearful governments wreak havoc on an already panicked populace.

The eye of the apocalyptic storm is a radically transformed New Orleans, where Marie Laveau works feverishly to build a safe haven for the hunted and oppressed, gathering the best and the brightest to build her utopia dream. But time is running out. With the military might of a new and repressive world order ranged against her, Marie’s only hope lies in the most dangerous piece of nanotechnology ever devised: A technology capable of saving the human race–or destroying it.It begins with silence. A powerful electromagnetic pulse high in the atmosphere triggers a communications blackout, causing electronics and computers to fail the world over. In that moment of anachronistic quiet, a brilliant astronomer named Zeb Aberly, scouring the heavens with equipment of his own design, makes the discovery of a lifetime: the pulse originated in space–and it carried a message from an intelligent source. But Zeb is not alone. Shadowy forces within the government seek to decipher the message and to keep its existence secret at all costs. Fleeing for his life into the back streets and alleys of Washington, D.C., Zeb embarks on an odyssey that could cost him his family, his sanity, and everything he loves.

And it begins with murder. In New Orleans, mob boss Marie Laveau–a descendant of the famous voodoo priestess–is brutally gunned down by nameless, faceless enemies. But Marie’s vast wealth has purchased the best life insurance of all: resurrection. Reborn by means of nanotechnology, Marie discovers that her husband and young daughter were also hit, their bodies too badly damaged to be repaired. Now she will stop at nothing to track down and punish those responsible. But her quest will lead beyond vengeance, into the very technology that saved her…and a conspiracy linked to the mysterious event now known as the Silence.

Recurring at unpredictable intervals, the Silence renders electronic-based technology unreliable and dangerous. A substitution must be found before civilization collapses; breakthroughs in nanotech and advances in genetic engineering give hope of a new kind of communication in the future. But now, as babies born around the world in the months following the first Silence grow to adulthood, demonstrating uncanny physical and mental characteristics that bring suspicion and violence, nanotech plagues unleashed by ecoterrorists and fearful governments wreak havoc on an already panicked populace.