"Williams knows exactly what to do with Quillifer, and it's hugely entertaining." —Locus

"Walter Jon Williams is always fun, but this may be his best yet, a delight from start to finish, witty, colorful, exciting and amusing by turns, exquisitely written." —George R. R. Martin

"Chock full of derring-do, blood and thunder, swashbuckling, and other good stuff evocative of Rafael Sabatini, Sir Walter...

Following The Praxis, Walter Jon Williams' critically-acclaimed mix of space opera and military science fiction, the conflict grows for the fate of humanity…and the universe. The Dread Empire of the Shaa is no more, following the death of the last oppressor. But freedom remains elusive for the myriad sentient races enslaved for ten centuries, as an even greater terror arises. The Naxids-a powerful insectoid species themselves subjugated until the...

Blending fast-paced military science fiction and space opera, the first volume in a dynamic trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Praxis, set in the universe of his popular and critically acclaimed Dread Empire's Fall series-a tale of blood, courage, adventure and battle in which the fate of an empire rests in the hands of a cadre of desperate exiles. It's been seven years since the end of the Naxid War. Sidelined for their...

The first book in the completed Dread Empire's Fall trilogy, followed by The Sundering and Conventions of War. All will must bend to the perfect truth of The Praxis For millennia, the Shaa have subjugated the universe, forcing the myriad sentient races to bow to their joyless tyranny. But the Shaa will soon be no more. The dread empire is in its rapidly fading twilight, and with its impending fall comes the promise of a new galactic order . . . and...

With the publication of his debut novel, The Privateer, in 1981, Walter Jon Williams began one of the most varied and prolific careers in contemporary popular fiction. But much of Williams's best work takes place in the shorter forms, as this generous volume, filled to overflowing with award-winning and award-nominated stories, clearly proves. The Best of Walter Jon Williams reflects its author's affection for-and mastery of-the novella form. Elsewhere...

Fast-paced and terrifyingly real, The Rift is a blockbuster novel of destruction, heroism, and survival that is sure to grab fans of recent disaster movies. It starts with the dogs. They won't stop barking. And then the earth shrugs-8. 9 on the Richter scale. It's the world's biggest earthquake since Lisbon in 1755, and it doesn't hit California or Japan or Mexico, but New Madrid, Missouri, a sleepy town on the Mississippi River. Seismologists had...

In a frigate stolen from his own navy, Captain Favian Markham races to New Orleans with the dispatches he's captured from a British warship—dispatches making it clear that the city will soon be the target of a British fleet and an invading army. But Favian finds New Orleans a city of intrigue, where Creoles conspire against the Americans, streetfighters cloak their murders under the Code Duello, the pirate Jean Laffite defies the Navy, and a cabal...

Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, is a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening...

Orphans of Deep Space They're outlaws now. Created to serve a function grown obsolete, haunted by the holographic ghost of their father, Ubu and Maria have lived their entire lives skating along the edge of extinction. Now they and their ship Runaway are in flight both from the law and from a predatory clan of competitors. They're going to come back rich, or not at all. But what they find in the depths of space isn't wealth, but a secret so startling...

Favian Markham is a rising young American officer during the War of 1812. As commander of the small, slow brig Experiment, he must break the British blockade and take his outgunned vessel on a daring raid into the Narrow Seas of England. On his desperate journey he faces duels, rivalries, ambitious politicians, yardarm-to-yardarm combat, and the deadly beauty of a foreign courtesan. Yet his greatest battle is not with the enemy, but with his own divided...