Two great adventures in one volume:In The Sherlock Chronicles, AI meets PI...A mile a minute? Nonsense. Even a meat brain knows "mind going a mile a minute" is mere metaphor. For a quantum mind, a light-second per minute would be nearer to apt, if sadly sans alliteration. Ordinarily, I have my metaphorical fingers in hundreds, even thousands, of figurative pies. Any less stimulation than that is _boring,_ and boredom is the bane of a q-mind's existence.That events in the "real" world often strike humans as inexplicable is hardly surprising. Meat brains have limits. And so, when an opportunity presented itself, I thought: why not lend a virtual hand? Every moment of diversion was welcome, and this "case," surely, a harmless amusement.Thus began my detective phase. Only I couldn't have been more wrong about harmless...And if an AI PI isn't intriguing enough, there's also The Paradise Quartet:A triumph of ingenuity and...

One of the leading global writers of hard science fiction."—The Innovation ShowHere are the gems! The gateway to the many worlds of Edward M. Lerner!While you probably know Ed from his SF novels, including the InterstellarNet series and the epic Fleet of Worlds series with Larry Niven—Ed is also a prolific author of acclaimed short fiction. This collection showcases his finest and favorite shorter works.Faced with the common question of which of his books should someone read first, he has carefully selected these stories to cover his wide range. Now he can answer, "This one!"Alternate history. Parallel worlds. Future crime. Alien invasion. Alien castaways. Time travel. Quantum intelligence (just _don't_ call him artificial). A (sort of) haunted robot. Deco punk. In this book, you'll find these—and more—together with Ed's reminiscences about each selection and its relationship to other stories, novels, and...

"Gripping. Impossible to put down."-- Jack McDevitt "Leave it to Edward M. Lerner to take a notion, run with it, squeeze every ramification out of it, and put it altogether in an irresistible page-turner. Dark Secret is a crackerjack novel--hard science fiction at its best."-- Robert J. Sawyer When the experimental ship Clermont is urgently recalled from a long-range test flight, neither Dana McElwain nor Blake Westford, its captain and crew, imagines that they are about to embark on a much more urgent voyage--or that this new mission will determine the fate of the human race. A gamma-ray burst--the deadly beam of radiation spawned seven thousand years earlier in the death throes of doomed neutron stars--is about to wipe the Solar System clean of all life. Only the Clermont's prototype Dark Energy Drive might carry anyone, and any of humanity's legacy, to safety before that extinction. And then what? Where beyond the Solar System is safe? What if the price of survival is to become less ... human? "Dark Secret is a unique tale of catastrophe and survival on multiple levels, gripping and harrowing yet ultimately inspiring. Lerner shows what it might really be like to be forced from an out-of-control frying pan into a far worse fire, and how humanity might endure even if what the refugees bring with them is worse than what they find."-- Stanley Schmidt

No one expected the oil to last forever. How right they were…. A geopolitical miscalculation tainted the world’s major oil fields with radioactivity and plunged the Middle East into chaos. Any oil that remains usable is more prized than ever. No one can build solar farms, wind farms, and electric cars quickly enough to cope. The few countries still able to export oil and natural gas—Russia chief among them—have a stranglehold on the world economy. And then, from the darkness of space, came Phoebe. Rather than divert the onrushing asteroid, America captured it in Earth orbit. Solar power satellites—cheaply mass-produced in orbit with resources mined from the new moon to beam vast amounts of power to the ground—offer America its last, best hope of avoiding servitude and economic ruin.As though building miles-across structures in space isn’t challenging enough, special interests, from technophobes to...

When Brent Cleary, demonstrating a beta-test protective “nanosuit” to potential customers, gets trapped in a massive pipeline explosion, only the nanosuit saves him. Smart nanobots integrated into the suit will do whatever it takes to protect the wearer …. The explosion kills hundreds. It’s so destructive that—despite his protective suit—Brent suffers severe injuries. He needs first aid—and lots of it—that the bots scurry to provide …. But once inside his body, what will the bots do? Will they continue in their mission to improve and repair? How does one repair the imperfection that is a human being? Where and when does the bots’ mission end? “Suspense and action enough to fuel any thriller, and even to drive it to the big screen.”—SFRevu “An intelligent blending of science fiction and horror themes.”—Winnipeg Free Press “Smart, engaging, and tight, with all the little pieces fitting together in the long run. Highly recommended.”—Intergalactic Medicine Show

Science Fiction. 6715 words long. First published in Future Washington, ed. Ernest Lilley Black Gate Virtual Best for 2005 Award

InterstellarNet: Enigma: Omnibus EditionHumanity once feared that we might be alone in the universe. Now we know better. And we’ve learned there are worse things than being alone … Joshua Matthews has the opportunity to write the definitive history of InterstellarNet. In that history he plans to focus attention on the improbability that an interstellar community even exists. But somehow, returning home from the party thrown to celebrate his good fortune, he has lost a month of his life. Everyone is certain he’s been on an epic bender. And so, rather than promoted, he is disgraced, unemployed, and unemployable … Firh Glithwah, leader of the Hunter clan Arblen Ems, schemes to liberate her people from two decades of ignominious internment and isolation on a remote moon of Uranus. And in the process to take vengeance against their human oppressors … Reporter Corinne Elman and United Planets intel agent Carl Rowland, each in their own way, remains scarred and haunted by the bloody fiasco that was the Hunter invasion of the Solar System … And none of them suspects that their tribulations have only begun, or that their lives will entwine—across time and space—to confront the InterstellarNet Enigma. InterstellarNet: Enigma incorporates "Championship B'tok," which was just nominated for the 2015 Hugo for Best Novelette**