New Release Books by William Ledbetter

In the mountains of Pakistan, a high-tech mission aimed at preventing another nuke on US soil goes off the rails - with deadly results. At a Wall Street investment firm, a computer intelligence takes the first tentative steps to free itself from its digital restraints. In a basement workshop, an engineer sees visions of a god who instructs him to defend the human race - by any means necessary. In Level Five, the debut near-future thriller by Nebula Award winner William Ledbetter, AIs battle for dominance, and nanotechnology is on the loose. And all that stands in the way of the coming apocalypse is a starry-eyed inventor who dreams of building a revolutionary new spacecraft and an intelligence agency desk jockey faced with the impossible choice of saving her daughter - or saving the world.

The Texans are back! A man sent to stop the world's first zero-G birth. A deep space pilot who runs headlong into Einstein's theory of relativity. A synthetic human fighting for survival in a world that sees her as disposable. All these stories and more can be found in A Lone Star in the Sky, the second anthology from the Future Classics speculative fiction writers' group of North Dallas. Featuring eighteen stunning stories of science fiction and fantasy, including works by Nebula winner William Ledbetter ("The Long Fall Up"), and Nebula nominees Jake Kerr ("Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince") and Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam ("The Orangery"), A Lone Star in the Sky covers the gamut of speculative fiction and proves once again that everything is bigger in Texas.

Is there a better way to start a story than "No sh!t, there I was..."? If you hear that phrase, perk up, because you know you're in for a heck of a tale. That's how all the craziest - and most interesting - stories start. And then we told a bunch of authors to make sure their stories started with that very phrase Grab a pint of your favorite beverage and gather round. We've got two dozen stories here to horrify, amuse, and mystify, each with their very own illustration. Hard to believe, but no sh!t... there I was.