Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov's Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.

Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award.

She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own.

To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com).

Dean Wesley Smith

Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA Today bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith published far more than a hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds of short stories across many genres.

At the moment he produces novels in several major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the Old West, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, a superhero series starring Poker Boy, a mystery series featuring the retired detectives of the Cold Poker Gang, and the Mary Jo Assassin series.

His monthly magazine, Smith's Monthly, which consists of only his own fiction, premiered in October 2013 and offers readers more than 70,000 words per issue, including a new and original novel every month.

During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, he wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies.

He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown.

Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing, where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as series editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series.

For more information about Dean's books and ongoing projects, please visit his website at www.deanwesleysmith.com.

Colliding Worlds Vol. 6 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith

The Final Volume in the Acclaimed Series!

For more than four decades, New York Times and USA Today bestselling writers Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith wrote professional science fiction short stories that won awards and sold millions of copies.

Now, for the first time, they collect together 120 of their science fiction short stories into a six-volume set called Colliding Worlds. Sixty stories total from each author, with ten stories from Rusch and ten from Smith in every volume.

Volume 6 closes the series with a space opera theme, a genre both Rusch and Smith excel in. Smith starts the volume with "The Tragic Tale of a Man in a Duster" about a cowboy floating alone in the vast reaches of space, who finds solace in cooking trout over an open fire. Rusch closes the volume with "The Spires of Denon," a novella from her award-winning Diving Universe.

CURATOR'S NOTE

•What happens when you put together two award-winning, bestselling storytellers who share a deep love for the space opera genre? You get Colliding Worlds Volume 6, a collection of outstanding stories that will dazzle you with their excitement and ambition. These two giants of the field hit one home run after another, each written with grace and power—everything from Dean's story of a true space cowboy to a breathtaking chapter in Kris's long-running Diving Universe series. It's the kind of book that will make you want to read further in the genre and seek out every last piece of fiction ever written by this prolific and inspired duo. – Robert Jeschonek

 
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Maybe Just a Little Bit Space Opera

Dean Wesley Smith

Of the six topics that Kristine Kathryn Rusch picked as themes for the six volumes, "Space Opera" fit both of us the best.

Kris has two major space opera series going with the Retrieval Artist series and the Diving series. Both have over a dozen books and Kris even anchored her selection here with a Diving series novella.

I also have two series that are space opera, but I also write a great number of just stand-alone space opera short stories.

So of all the subject topics for these six volumes, this one hit us both the best.

A bit of history. Kris and I wrote a lot of books together in our unique way of collaborating, with me writing the first rough plot draft and her doing the second coloring draft. About twenty of those books were Star Trek, the best and longest-running space opera series in history.

And I edited for Star Trek for a decade or so as well.

Often, readers when they see the words science fiction, they only think of space opera. But as I hope we have shown in this six-volume set, science fiction is so much more than ray guns and spaceships. Sure it can be that, but it is more.

So here, at the end of these six volumes, Kris and I would like to thank you for reading our crazy stories. We don't expect you to like all one-hundred-and-twenty of them, but we hope that you like enough of them to be entertained.

We both had a lot of fun doing this project, far more than we expected, and we hope that shows through as well.

And do remember, we are both still writing lots of new science fiction novels and short stories.

Thank you, one and all, for spending time with our stories. It means a great deal to both of us.