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.

Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss wrote his wonderfully strange and gripping novella The Saliva Tree, as a tribute to H. G. Wells, the immortal author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, and it was honored with a Nebula Award. Included alongside this classic tale of creeping alien terror are nine other sparkling gems of short fiction—from the grisly baby steps of a novice serial killer, to the travels of a history professor through alternate worlds, to the journey of a young widow who has both a murderer and a monster vying for her attention.

Estranged friends Dean and Bethan meet after five years apart when they are drawn to a network of caves on a remote Arctic island. Bethan and her friends are environmental activists, determined to protect the land. But Dean's group's exploitation of rare earth minerals deep in the caves unleashes an horrific contagion that has rested frozen and undisturbed for many millennia. Fleeing the terrors emerging from the caves, Dean and Bethan and their rival teams undertake a perilous journey on foot across an unpredictable and volatile landscape.

Baron is a man from nowhere in a land that has forgotten its name where the dead walk. After killing a strange man in cold blood, Baron finds himself imprisoned-- and inextricably tied to an even stranger woman, Thalia. Thalia harbors a terrible secret. The daughter of immortal scientists, she knows that the zombie outbreak is cyclical; those infected will live again, and generations later, a new outbreak will run its course. And she alone might hold the key to ending the vicious cycle once and for all.

Professor Rachel Jordan dared to defy 3000 years of angelic doctrine, teaching that the ancient angels were never the saviors they claimed to be. The Redeemers, self-appointed guardians of angelic law, branded her a heretic. Hunted by zealots who would brainwash her back into the angels’ good graces, she flees to the edge of civilized space.

Roland’s mission is retrieval. The client’s promised payout cannot be ignored. The year is 2102; the kidnapping and ransom trade has exploded. The firm’s newest patron, a wealthy Emirati sheikh, has asked for his missing grandson to be found. Roland Webb, a veteran soldier, needs his team of mercenaries to come together and get creative. Time is not on their side as forces beyond their control begin to reshape the Middle East. Stepping into a burgeoning war zone, Roland is compelled to take risks—risks that push him into a collision course with an organization of unimaginable evil.

Emily Stark flees her crumbling home with baby sister Sammi and shelters with a shellshocked band of survivors. As she tends the injured and risks her life gathering supplies, she is keeping a secret… her father, her hero, caused this disaster. Fifteen years later. Against all odds, Sammi has grown up in the suffocating darkness and found love with soulmate Declan Chambers. When their hopes of a life together are jeopardised by mutiny in their commune, they slip past the guards and seek a life beyond its walls.

In a future where the Earth has been savaged by overpopulation and over-farming, robots are considered more valuable than humans, and sand must be altered to create artificially fertile soil. Ex-convict Knowle Noland, the hallucinating sea captain of the Trieste Star, finds himself wrapped up in a plot to incite a global war that will wipe out millions. War, it seems, is the only way to drastically reduce the population and create a better world for those who survive.

Maya Andreyeva is a camera, a reporter with virtual-reality-broadcasting equipment implanted in her brain. What sh esees, millions see; what she feels, millions share. And what Maya is seeing is the cover-up of a massacre. As she probes into the covert political power plays of a radically strange near-future Russia, she comes upon secrets that have been hidden from the world… and memories that AI-controlled thought police have forced her to hide from herself. Because in a world where no thought or desire is safe, the price of survival is betrayal—of your lover, your ideals, and yourself.

THE FORGOTTEN GODS TALES DRAW TO A CLOSE Heroes and villains gather for the final battle. The last battle to decide the fate of humanity and the universe. Tolde Breed has fought a long war. Having already died once, he knows what must be done to stop the evil of Amongeratix from destroying all he holds dear. Together, with a dedicated group of men and women, he takes the last steps into total war on the dead planet of the gods, Occanum. As war rages across the stars, it is here the fate of all will be settled. Can Tolde and the others do the impossible and defeat the worst threat the ...