The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds.

This collection of nine stories from the Grand Master of Science Fiction charts the course of humanity from the near future onward through millennia. In Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Brian W. Aldiss tells the tale of mankind’s future over the course of forty million years. Each of these nine connected short stories highlights a different millennia in which man has adapted to new environments and hardships. This ebook includes a new introduction from the author.

A diary and the remains of three people are found on the Japanese island of Hatoma in 1958. In 2011, a university student decides to investigate the diary's story and learn the fates of its four subjects, including sixteen-year-old Hiromi, the American soldier and Japanese soldier both under her care--and both deserters from the conflict of World War II.

Longlisted for the National Book Award "Mind-blowing." —Kim Gordon DEADPAN, EPIC, AND SEARINGLY CHARISMATIC, A Sand Book chronicles climate change and climate grief, gun violence and bystanderism, state violence and complicity, mourning and ecstasy, sex and love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, tracking new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times.

How do you delight in a God-Who-Speaks-Promises when those promises seem as distant as the stars in the sky? Holding onto faith when everything is falling apart is a difficult task at best. Drawing from Scripture and her own personal walk through sorrow, the author of Counting Grains of Sand leads you through a journey of discovering the Lord's kindness, even from the middle of loss. Counting Grains of Sand takes a real look at faith, hope, and trust in the face of loss, heartache, and incredible joy.

Legend has it that a magical spring lies dormant in the heart of the Khuzar desert. Said to be a gift from the gods, the spring holds the cure to all mortal woes. As mercenaries from everywhere try in vain to find the mystical spring, 17-yearold Desert Rose is on the run after her chieftain father is overthrown and captured by rebel clans. Now out for revenge, she sets out alone to the Oasis Capital to assassinate the person instigating the rebellion: the corrupt Emperor Zhao, who will stop at nothing to possess the elixir of life from the spring. To infiltrate the Imperial Guard, Desert Rose must pass a series of trials to test her wit, mettle, and her loyalty. But the real test lies in navigating the cut throat court politics with no ally but a rogue prince and a latent magic stirring in her - magic that can bring a kingdom to its knees or destroy her from within.

In this far-future classic, sexual attraction is a science, gender is a whole new construct, and information is both precious and perilous . . . With a burst of radiation to the brain, an angry young man is transformed into a dim-witted slave—suitable only for the most brutal work. But the tragedy of Rat Korga is the prologue to the story of Marq Dyeth, an “industrial diplomat,” who travels from world to world in this exciting, sprawling future, solving problems that come with the spread of “General Information.” The greatest fear in this future is Cultural Fugue, a critical mass of shared knowledge that can destroy life over the surface of an entire world in hours. In this dizzyingly original novel, information is perilous, but without it a human is only a rat in a cage. Campbell Award winner Jo Walton described this science fiction landmark as being “like pop rocks for the brain. . . . Things sparkle and explode all over, and it’s not entirely comfortable but it is quite wonderful.” This classic read predicted the Internet and is packed with themes that still resonate today. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.