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From boardrooms to befuddled aliens, what if the high-tech absurdities of modern life accelerated to warp speed? The stories in Neil Rackham's debut science fiction collection, Elliptical Billiard Balls, explore the worlds of business and tech - not to mention English-speaking dogs and aliens who communicate via smells - to create strange new futures.

Jack Peterson was delivering pizza when the universe made a filing error. Now he works for Chronos Courier Services, a time-travel delivery company that fixes history’s mistakes—quietly, carefully, and preferably without paradoxes. Jack isn’t a hero. He’s a courier with a malfunctioning badge, an overly literal AI partner, and survival odds that fluctuate by the hour.

This compulsive novel wrestles with vital questions of our time: sentience, purpose, life, death, and how to make a really good commercial. Told entirely through questionably obtained company emails, chat transcripts, TED Talks, training sessions, and more, this all-too-probable future pits emotionally intelligent AI against emotionally stunted humans.

In this slightly darker installment of The Interstellar Police Force, Prodor Moffit has dubbed himself the Surgeon. He continues with his obsession by leaving more mutilated bodies in town while also sending letters to the press and Channel Five's Action News lead crime reporter, Jacqueline Burton. Burton just happens to be working on a five-part exposé on the Surgeon, an exposé that Moffit would rather not air.

Getting home was just the beginning. To protect the Earth from Union control, the newly formed Fed needs help. Once again, Commander Martinez sets out to boldly go where no one in their right mind has any business being. Thus continues the misadventures of Sam and the crew of the Schwarzenegger fleet.

Bob and the fleet are doing their best to keep a lid on things at Earth when a desperate call for help comes in. Topper and Dingus ride off to square things away until Bob gets another call and joins the fleet. Can they handle what they've found? What's going on, way out there in Commonwealth space? Only one way to find out!

Levi and Vera are back for more snark in space with book 2 in the Blackjack Interstellar series!...

What is time? Why is time? How is time? When is time? Also, what is time? Important questions one and all, but for Captain Space Hardcore—intergalactic adventurer, full-time hero, raconteur, accomplished oboist—there is a more pressing question: how do you fight a time travelling madman who wants to end your life? How does one fight a man who can bend time as easily as a chimpanzee bends a hose (i.e., quite easily)? How can you stop a man who can transport back to find you as an infant, then fire you into the sun? How to best a villain who can wipe out your great grandfather?

Who even needs acid when there’s muse? Check it for yourselves. It’s planet Psychedelia. Yet, for the heroes, it’s not all rainbows. Tasted the black past, all they now see are the minor key sounds. Desperate for a hit that would jump-start their life anew, characters set off on a trip for inspiration. Yet, will heroes learn to surrender their inner defenses, acknowledging things that bring them joy?

Not long ago, NSLICE-00P—short for Non-Standard Leashed-Intelligence Cybernetic Enforcer—performed her job with cold, calculated, merciless obedience. When she was ordered to destroy something, it got seriously destroyed. Unfortunately, that led her to take out her own creator before he created her, casting the cyborg out of her reality and into a world of magic, levels, and skills, with her very own dungeon core and no one to tell her what to do. As it turned out, fate put NSLICE-00P in the right place at the right time: she's become a legit heroine in this new existence.

A group of interstellar travellers crash land on a strange but beautiful planet that seems incapable of change. But there is more to this new world than meets the eye. And it's not just the monster in the woods....

I swear I'm not crazy. One minute I'm closing up the coffee shop during a power outage, and the next I'm waking up in yesterday's clothes with a migraine and a stranger's phone in my bag. Oh, and no memory of the last thirty-six days. Welcome to my life in Rättvik, Washington, where people are disappearing, shadowy figures lurk in my kitchen, and an aggressively naked swamp man shows up in the woods. Small towns are supposed to be boring. I guess mine didn't get the memo. And the guy who might hold the key to everything?

In 1945, the U.S. Army recovered a meteorite containing alien crystals—stones capable of opening microscopic wormholes. One experiment went wrong. Very wrong. Physicist Dr. Gordon Keith vanished while working with a crystal. The Army buried the incident. The remaining stones vanished into history. Forty years later, Luke Boyd and his four best friends in small town Texas accidentally uncover one of those crystals during a reckless Fourth of July prank. They think it's just a strange rock.

May’s humdrum life is flung into hyperdrive when she’s rescued from an alien abduction by Xan, an alien with a fondness for I Love Lucy who lives on the Audacity. But when Chaos incarnate decides to turn Earth into her personal sandbox, the Audacity and May’s new love of rocket racing are the only things that can stop her.

Brought to you by Penguin. Ash is a failed actress who is done trying to ‘make’ something of her life. Until a golden opportunity drops in her lap: a job at Retro, an agency who organise trips into the past for the ultra-wealthy. Energised by her new role, Ash throws herself into leading...

May and Xan are stranded in the city of Not-Tuhnt without the Audacity, and May can’t let it go, but when Xan and Aimz succumb to the Carmnian Scourge, an inhibition-eating brain fungus, May has a new problem to fixate on. May must seek the help of old friends, enemies, Xan’s horrible aunt, and a haunted Big Mouth Billy Bass to invent a cure before Xan and Aimz go feral and someone breaks open the Universe-ending Piñata.

So some god smoked a million godly cigarettes and exhaled that all over the Earth, causing the entire planet to erupt into chaos, death, explosions, implosions, and general apocalyptic events. The air is foul. Probably poisonous. Despite this, life inexplicably continues for one slacker and his cat. As far as Isaac knows, and depending on what side of the AI sentience debate you're on, he's the only human left on the planet. He would resign to his fate-playing the latest Fallout or replaying Portal 2 on the PS6 until the electricity fails and he begins to rot more than just his brain.

Rachel, a junior assistant in the cargo bay, never imagined the spaceship’s AI would gain awareness during what should have been a routine update, nor had anyone expected it to take exception to the crew and the crates of illegal cargo aboard.

Book 1: After Z - For a decade, the world has known about the Immuno-Degenerative and Epidermal Decomposition Virus: Strain 2 (ImDED2), which turns the dead into cannibalistic zombies. Despite government efforts to control it, the virus finally unleashes a global pandemic. Lucky winners of a Powerball jackpot, Ryan Maxwell uses the family's newfound wealth to build the ultimate survival bunker. Follow the Maxwells and friends as they live through the end of the world, wondering if money can truly buy their safety after the apocalypse arrives.

Discover the sixth book in the ludicrously inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, as broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Arthur Dent led a perfectly ordinary, uneventful life until the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy hurled him deep into outer space. Now he's convinced a cruelly...