Dreams Series

Selena's dreams are more than just ominous visions, but a gateway to powers only thought to be fictitious, like the fantasy novels and shows she's always been drawn to.  Girls start disappearing from her college campus, and her dreams become darker - more twisted than before. When life seems like it can't get any more complicated, the arrival of four hot football players who insert themselves into Selena's life. But how can she choose just one, when they're all so great? And with the danger her Mom and Grandma warned her about, college life just got even harder for Selena.

"[These stories are] beautiful, they're fresh, and they are painful. This is not an anthology that begs to be read in one sitting; not that it doesn't merit such a binge, but because each story requires a breath between them, and, frankly, deserves to be savored... it never ceases to be a pleasure to read" —Locus Magazine   "This anthology offers seriously admirable work. Highly recommended." —Lightspeed Magazine   "24 impressive stories of healing and rebuilding.These stories offer something for any speculative fiction reader." —Publishers Weekly   "Some of these stories explore a world that is fully broken, others are focused on when it just begins to crack. But what's clear above all is that the world breaks for some groups of people much earlier than others. An inclusive and adept anthology in which each story is a facet for a different perspective on where we've gone—or will go—wrong." —Brian Evenson   "A thoughtful, diverse collection hewing closely to the themes of connection and devotion—tender reunions, heartbreaking partings, misplaced loyalty, friendship, romance, parenthood, these character-focused stories have it all." —Premee Mohamed   Patron saints and luchadores. Trickster gods. Freedom fighters. Infections of fire. Gated communities and glass castles. Hong Kong. Iran. NYC. The 1860s and the end of the world. The stories in this anthology reflect the authors' varied creative interests along with their multitudinous backgrounds and experiences. What does it mean to live in a fragmented and uncertain world? How do we find a better way forward? The anthology Dreams for a Broken World draws from both genre and literary traditions in attempt to answer these questions. Included here are original stories and reprints. The mix of genres, from literary to fantastical, from dark to playful, from speculative to activist, offers perspectives that are varied, imaginative, thoughtful, and provocative. The 24 contributors include such award-winning authors as Ava Homa, Aimee Liu, Usman T. Malik, Nisi Shawl, Sheree Renée Thomas, Vandana Singh, Andrew Altschul, Joy Baglio, Innocent Chizarama Ilo, Breena Clarke, Zig Zag Claybourne, Tina Egnoski, Cai Emmons, JoeAnn Hart, Céline Keating, Jan Maher, Benjamin Parzybok, Charles Payseur, Robert V.S. Redick, Veronica Schanoes, Lisa Taylor, Marie Vibbert, Cynthia Young, and Sabrina Vourvoulias. Dreams for a Broken World is the second charity anthology in the Dreams series published by Essential Dreams Press, an imprint of Reckoning Press; charity means that all the proceeds from sales are donated to a non-profit doing work to fix our broken world. Ellen Meeropol joins series editor Julie C. Day as guest editor of this second book in the Dreams series, a fundraiser for the Rosenberg Fund for Children. The RFC is a non-profit, public foundations that aids children in the U.S. whose parents are targeted, progressive activists. They also assist youth who themselves have been targeted as a result of their progressive activities. Can stories change the world? Not alone. But as poet Martín Espada wrote, "Any oppressive social condition, before it can be changed, must be named and condemned in words that persuade by stirring the emotions, awakening the senses." Naming. Condemning. Stirring. Awakening. That's what we hope these stories will do for all of us.          

After destroying a megalomaniac computer, Pinkerton leaves Lingstrom on the river cruiser Spinifex with Alexis. When Alexis disappears while in the company of a mystery girl, Codeen, Pinkerton goes in search with Lana, the captain's daughter to the Grange Mountains. Inside the mountains he finds another world and a mystery that takes him back to the creation of the universe.

In infiltrating an Android invastion fleet, Captain Kevin Rebel, a fifteen year old mercenry, searching for his lost past, saves a reject boy from extermination from a seciety that will accept only perfection, but is Sliver, the human like android boy, all that he appears to be and what part did he play in the extermination of a race? Kevin's journey of counter espoinage with take him into the darkest recesses of his mind to discover the link between the two races.

    "A mathematical sequence, and I never guessed."     "Yes, Kevin, it was you who has sent them away unconsciously.  You choose a destination for each by your walking pattern.  Each square represents a mathematical constant and the variables were your robot friends.  Relocate those positions; it's a simple matter of wishing them back." And Kevin once again has fallen into a robot mind game where winner takes all and the loser oblivion.

A patrol off cadets disappears on an outer world and becomes the Lost Patrol. Captain Kevin Rebel is given an assignment: find them! But even he draws the line in leading the dead, even as a member of Ferret Patrol he has sworn to lead them to the gates of Hades itself.

On gaining captain stars at thirteen, Kevin is send on a secret mission to find a stolen arms cache, weapons in the wrong hands may trigger a war. The trail leads into robot territory and a liaison with Robot Command. Kevin's belief his fast gun will conquer all before him proves to not be true, his enemies are ready and only Lady Luck and little else stand between him and death. He is yet to learn that pain can come from hidden emotional areas and the real treasure he seeks are those who must save him from Destiny's fate.

In the city of the blind only the blind boy can see. HIs imagination became fact, sending all with him into a new galaxy and a war between robots and humans, a war only he can end. Yet even the blind boy cannot contain all the forces that could destroy himself and his world. Once his crusade had been launched, fate threatened to eliminate the only human ever born who could alter it, and the blind boy's life would become a trading chip in the galaxy's grand gamble.

The last thing a star fighter pilot seeks is a commission to a planet not even one of the pirates he hunted down would land on. But a mysterious SOS sends Captian Kevin Rebel and his android boy companion to such a planet, a desert planet. What he finds is not a luckless castaway but giant ants and something bigger and darker, something waiting for such a victim, something even the space cowboy will find hard to escape from, with only his experience to keep him from death's door and little else.

Elo, thirteen year old boy genius, artist of prophetic dreams, processor of the sixths sense, is jettisoned in space, lands in the sea of the nearest planet.Rescued by Rick, a green human sea breathing Merboy, he learns a strange fact: Merboys cannot dream and Elo, in the water, is slowly evolving the same way as Rick. To reverse the process, Elo must learn its secret and determine if this was Rick's fate as well.