Douglas Smith

Home is behind, the world ahead. - J.R.R. TolkienOld gods outwitted by heroes. Magical weapons that bring good and evil. Dragons winging over the city or walking upon the earth. A wizard witnessing endless battles. These stories and more explore the theme of Re-Quest.Leave home behind and wander magical worlds in these 16 fantasy tales from an international roster of authors. Featuring fiction from Robert E. Howard, Douglas Smith, James Dorr, Lillian...

The second half of life invites us to experience new growth such that we live an even more fulfilling life. But often the invitation isn't all that attractive, with changes in our families, our health, our relationships and our increasing grasp that the journey does have an ending. Many of us refuse the invitation to evolve, hanging on to old ways that may not serve us well in the second half. In Doug Smith's best-selling first book, Happiness: The...

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...

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 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...

When the Shogun's soldiers burn his village and kill his parents, young Asai is rescued by a strange red hawk and led to a fabled temple. Here, he trains under Ikada, the Warrior of the Red Bird and seeker of the Hidden Light. Asai will be the last Warrior, and unless he can succeed where all other Warriors have failed-to discover the Hidden Light-then his people will suffer a thousand years of misery. But when Sawako, a beautiful young woman, challenges...

The man known only as Stranger lived and died in a town with no name. Each day he lived. And each night he died...

Mary and her teenage son, Jase, survive by their own wits in a post-plague Earth. On the run from a vicious gang, they are saved by Bishop, a man with mysterious powers who just may be the Dead Man, the legendary hero of the Fall of Earth. But Bishop's dark past catches up with them all, forcing Bishop to choose between his love for Mary and Jase, or revenge against the men who killed his family.

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...

A woman tries in vain to convince those around her that the world is ending. Is she right...or is she losing her mind?