Dean Wesley Smith

Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, New York Times and USA Today bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith published over two hundred novels and over seven hundred books, and hundreds and hundreds of short stories. He has over thirty million copies of his books in print.

At the moment he produces novels in four major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the Old West, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the cold case mystery series, Cold Poker Gang series, and the superhero series starring Poker Boy.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kristine Kathryn Rusch sold more than 35 million books worldwide. She publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance.

Her novels made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction appeared in more than twenty best-of-the-year collections. She 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.

Colliding Worlds Vol. 3 edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith

The Third 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 3 takes the series across time, space, and even into alternate history. Rusch's stories transport the reader from a future White House where staffers time-travel to the past, to Wall Street in the 1920s, to the Underground Railroad. Meanwhile, Smith introduces a time-travel jukebox, a space pirate whose best friend is a talking tree named Fred, and an alternate timeline for the Alamo. The twenty stories in this volume pack a wallop.

 
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Introduction

Maybe Just a Little Bit Time

Dean Wesley Smith

The unifying theme Kristine Kathryn Rusch picked for this third volume of Colliding Worlds is "Time." The one-word theme helped us both in our organizing of our stories.

Now, unlike the themes Kris picked for the other five volumes, the theme of "Time" worried me the most because almost every story and series I write that is science fiction has time travel elements involved.

So, my problem was limiting myself to only ten.

I knew I had two stories that would anchor the first and last spots in my list of ten, but the rest got switched in and out numbers of times as I filled other books.

The goal of Colliding Worlds six-volume set was to give readers one-hundred-and-twenty science fiction stories from two of the nation's top bestselling and award-winning science fiction writers. The fun for me and Kris was spending the hours and hours and hours to search back through the decades of our fiction to find the right stories.

To be honest, the search was a great deal of fun. It is not in my nature to look back at my own work like this. In fact, for many of these stories, I hadn't looked at them in decades since I wrote and sold them.

For Kris, it was easier because not only does she have a lot better memory than I do for stories and titles (by factors of hundreds), but for many, many years she has been publishing a story a week on her website for free for readers to read. So, she has kept in touch with much of her inventory.

On top of all that, she keeps a complete bibliography which she has kept up from her early days of writing, which every writer should do. As in so many of the differences between the two of us, I do not, and if I had to tell you where a story was first published, most of the time I wouldn't be able to. (As a writer, do what Kris does. Don't imitate me.)

These six volumes not only illustrate how different we are as writers, but we both hope you find a lot of stories that will entertain you in every volume. That was our ultimate goal, after all.

Enjoy.