Rick Schumann builds a tavern catering to visiting aliens, an interplanetary gathering place situated in Siberia that is known as Draco Tavern, in an anthology of short fiction that includes the previously unpublished "Losing Mars."

On an alternate Earth irrevocably transformed by a violent spray of comets in the 1870s, the planet is controlled by two superpowers--the British Empire and Russia--who appear to be heading for a deadly showdown.

After learning of his ancestral ties to Dormia, a hidden kingdom in the Ural Mountains whose inhabitants possess the ancient power of "wakeful sleeping," twelve-year-old Alfonso sets out on a mission to save the kingdom from destruction, discovering secrets that lurk in his own sleep.

"A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades...