Eric is the Discworld's only demonology hacker. Pity he's not very good at it. All he wants is his three wishes granted.Nothing fancy - to be immortal, rule the world, have the most beautiful woman in the world fall madly in love with him, the usual stuff. But instead of a tractable demon, he calls up Rincewind, probably the most incompetent wizard...

'A foot on the neck is nine points of the law' There are many who say that the art of diplomacy is an intricate and complex dance between two informed partners, determined by an elaborate set of elegant and unwritten rules. There are others who maintain that it's merely a matter of who carries the biggest stick. Like when a large, heavily fortified...

A brand new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Neil Gaiman's bestselling and much-loved novel. When his father dies, Fat Charlie Nancy discovers that not only was the late Mr Nancy actually the god Anansi, but that he also has a long-lost brother, Spider, who is everything Fat Charlie is not. When Spider begins to take over Fat Charlie's life,...

Kerry Shale reads an exciting original story featuring the 12th Doctor, as played on TV by Peter Capaldi, in an adventure with the Weeping Angels. All Alex Yow wants is to become a photo-journalist and break her first story. All Brandon Yow wants is for his sister to keep out of trouble and come home. But that's not going to happen, because Alex ha...

Dan Starkey reads an intriguing original story featuring the Twelfth Doctor, as played on TV by Peter Capaldi. People laughed at John Dee for years, dismissing the astrologer as a madman or a fraud. Then one day a face appeared in his mirror, a face that was not his own. He was given secrets from beyond time: how to mix potions; how to tame the el...

Nicola Bryant reads an exciting original story featuring the 12th Doctor, as played on TV by Peter Capaldi, and his companions Brandon and Alex.The TARDIS is under attack. Alien plants have taken root in its corridors, strange flowering tendrils that threaten to rip the Doctor's ship apart. New companions Brandon and Alex venture into the heart of...

Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world. Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vess...

How far would you go to find THE ONE? One simple mouth swab is all it takes. A quick DNA test to find your perfect partner - the one you're genetically made for. A decade after scientists discover everyone has a gene they share with just one other person, millions have taken the test, desperate to find true love. Now, five more people meet their M...

Once upon a time, damaged women came here to be cured. We took them in, fed them glasses of our clean, good water, let them scream at the waves till their lips split like ripe fruit. Now no one is left but my sisters and me. King died a year ago, quite suddenly. Mother has vanished, no one knows where. And the safe compound they built around us, fa...

In a surreal, but familiar, vision of modern day Egypt, a centralized authority known as 'the Gate' has risen to power in the aftermath of the 'Disgraceful Events,' a failed popular uprising. Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate in order to take care of even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the Gate never opens, and th...

The first science fiction written by a Black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of Black American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrench...

The first modern tale of alien invasion, H. G. Wells's story of tentacled Martians attacking the Earth remains one of the most influential of all science fiction works. First published by H. G. Wells in 1898, The War of the Worlds is the granddaddy of all alien invasion stories. The novel begins ominously, as the lone voice of a narrator intones, "...

'When you start believing in Spirits, you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are, you're believing in Gods. And then you're in trouble.' Reality is all very well in small doses. It's a perfectly conventional and convenient way of neutralising the imagination. But sometimes when there's more than one reality at play, imag...

'I thought: opera, how hard can it be? Songs. Pretty girls dancing. Nice scenery. Lots of people handing over cash. Got to be better than the cut-throat world of yoghurt, I thought. Now everwhere I go there's...' Death, to be precise. And plenty of it. In unpleasant variations. This isn't real life. This isn't even cheesemongering. It's opera. Whe...

All this books and stuff, that isn't what it should all be about. What we need is real wizardry. All is not well within the Unseen University. The endemic politics of the place have ensured that it has finally got what it wished for: the most powerful wizard on the disc. Which could mean that the death of all wizardry is at hand. And the world is...

William de Worde is the accidental editor of the Discworld's first newspaper. New printing technology means that words just won't obediently stay nailed down like usual. There's a very real threat of news getting out there. Now he must cope with the traditional perils of a journalist's life - people who want him dead, a recovering vampire with a s...

'Things have to come to an end, see. That's how it works when you turn the world into stories. You should never have done that. You shouldn't treat people like they was characters, like they was things. But if you do, then you've got to know where the story ends.' That's the problem when you let real life get in the way of a good story. You should...

Ragnarok is the story of the end of the world, destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves. As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. When she is given a copy of 'Asgard and the Gods'-a book of ancient Norse myths-her inner and outer worlds are transformed. Ling...

No one loves and quarrels, desires and deceives as boldly and brilliantly as Greek gods and goddesses. They are like us, only more so - their actions and adventures scrawled across the heavens above. From the birth of the universe to the creation of humankind, Stephen Fry - who fell in love with these stories as a child - retells these myths for ou...

New territory for McCarthy: a post apocalyptic landscape where readers meet a man who recalls a better world and a boy who doesn't. With all the trademarks of vintage McCarthy-a man and his young son, a blasted American landscape, sparse prose that is at once brutal and tender-The Road further cements McCarthy's stature as one of America's greatest...

The Daleks are advancing, their empire expanding into Earth's space. The Earth forces are resisting in every way they can. But the battles rage on across countless solar systems. And now the future of our galaxy hangs in the balance... The Doctor finds himself stranded on board a starship near the frontline with a group of ruthless bounty hunters....