Douglas Smith

The harrowing, little-known story of the ARA, an American effort to save the newly-formed Soviet Union from a disastrous famine.

Aurora Award Finalist When James Mackaby, respected scholar, husband and father, accepts a dinner invitation from an old rival who has fallen on hard times, he has no idea that revenge is on the menu. During this singular evening, three very separate and very different dinners will take place, all at the same time, all in the same place, all with the same guests. And by the end of the last course, no one's life will ever be the same again.

Aurora Award Finalist. On the anniversary of his wife's death, Liam makes a startling discovery. The particle accelerator experiments that he is conducting for the university are capable of opening a window back in time. Can he tune that window to the night his wife died? Can he actually go back in time to save her? But what of the strange radio broadcasts he keeps hearing? Broadcasts that warn that changing the past could produce a very dark future...

As First Officer on the part passenger ship, part space freighter, The Fiscal Restraint, Jack Dexter (Dex to his friends) thinks he knows all there is to know about "Murphy's Law": If anything can go wrong, it will. And on the perpetually under-staffed, under-funded Restraint, it generally does. But he never expected to actually meet Murphy. The real Murphy. Dex hires Orville Sod onto the Restraint just before the ship makes the jump to deep space....

Aurora Award Finalist. Alexander King has everything-wealth, power, a business empire over which he rules. But lately, the corporate game in which he excels has lost its thrill for him. He needs a new game. And then, on the crowded streets of Toronto, in the dead cold of winter, she appears before him. The Dancer. Achingly beautiful, half-naked, and dancing to a song that only she and King seem to hear, she becomes King's new obsession, an obsession...

Aurora Award Finalist. The colony ship, The Last Chance, has fled a plague-poisoned Earth with the remnants of the human race. Launched before completion of its biosphere, the ship is only partly self-sustaining. Humanity has to find a new home-and time is running out. It isn't called The Last Chance for nothing. When they find the planet, it seems a dream come true. Earth-like, breathable atmosphere, unpopulated. They name it Aurora, for the beauty...

Paulo and Dino run a quiet little bar in Toronto, happily retired from their former gig of being immortal gods on Olympus...and Asgard...and... Well, let's just say they've been around. But their peaceful retirement ends when Pop drops in. And the Father of the Gods has brought company. Unwanted company.

Think of human emotion as a geography, with peaks of pleasure and valleys of pain. Imagine a drug that flips the valleys and makes them peaks, too. You react now to an event based not on the pleasure or pain that it brings, but solely on the intensity of the emotion created. Pain brings pleasure, grief gives joy, horror renders ecstasy. Now give this drug to a soldier. Tell them to kill. Not in the historically acceptable murder of war, but in a systematic...

Aurora Award Finalist Think of human emotion as a geography, with peaks of pleasure and valleys of pain. Imagine a drug that flips the valleys and makes them peaks, too. You react now to an event based not on the pleasure or pain it brings, but solely on the intensity of the emotion created. Pain brings pleasure, grief gives joy, horror renders ecstasy. Now give this drug to a soldier. Tell them to kill. Not in the historically acceptable murder of...

Charlie the Pearl-con man, gambler, and ever absent father-is about to catch the dream that he's chased his entire life-the secret of good luck. But it's a secret that could cost Charlie the only thing in the world that he loves more than a winning streak-his daughter.