検索キーワード： "Mike Allen" SF・ファンタジー

The Red Empress is the only home Erzelle has known since the day her family was lured aboard and murdered, victims of a grisly ritual meant to make the elite immortal. Erzelle plays her harp for the diners inside this ghoul-infested riverboat, knowing her own death looms, escaping through the music that’s all she has left of her parents. Her nightmare’s upended in the space of a day by the arrival of Olyssa, a fellow musician, but so much more.

Alistair Jones is an ex-Pinkerton agent roaming the West in search of work. Amy Dunston is an angry widow searching for answers. Who knows what those men with matching mustaches and bowler hats are searching for? But Alistair and Amy would both like to know why there are so many of them, why they all look alike, and why they're impervious to bullets--at least until they meet the business end of Alistair's .52-caliber 1874-pattern Sharps rifle.

What a coincidence. The mummies wake up once a millennium, and who should stumble into the pyramid but our hero? This is a fun little story about a British ne'er-do-well who has found possible wealth and prosperity by becoming engaged to the rather plain - and plain is a nice word for it - daughter of a new English nobleman. But wait. He wanders into the pyramid when the mummies have their 24 hours of life once a millennium, and he falls madly in love with the Pharaoh's daughter, who is some 6,000 years old.

In Rip-Off!, 13 of today’s best and most honored writers of speculative fiction face a challenge even they would be hard-pressed to conceive: Pick your favorite opening line from a classic piece of fiction (or even non-fiction) - then use it as the first sentence of an entirely original short story.