Ire an Ice is a brutal science-fiction adventure spanning over 70,000 years. From Ice Age Europe, to Celtic Ireland, the Early American Frontier, an East Baltimore Diner and a West Baltimore Liquor Store, characters as diverse as a homeless American man, a ruthless Roman centurian, a Shawnee warrior, an EMT and a ten-year-old gangbanger, are confronted with an ancient and terrible secret. Includes the Second Edition of the novella Winter and the addendum novelette A White Christmas.

A Punch Buggy Book According to the travelling doctor Abd al-Latif, in the year 1201, the old, the young and the fat were devoured by fellow Egyptians in a cannibalistic hunt that lasted a year and annihilated entire communities. The causes remain unknown. The forces of evil unleashed by this horrible feast remain unknown. The Jericho Bone tells the Good Doctor's tale and suggests answers to the unanswerable through the eyes of an ancient tribal general, a bloody-handed envoy of the Caliph, a fisherman, four doctors, a bookseller, a donkey boy, a slave girl sold for her flesh rather than her...

Four tales of alienation by James LaFond: My Crown Mixed with Blessings, vignette The Doom of Benjamin Long, short story, Wake from Your Dream Place, novelette, Snot, What Women Want, vignette

The Most Ancient Stain In the youth of our kind men of many tribes sought out, mined and painted themselves with ochre, the "bones of the gods." The most sought after earth pigment was red ochre, with the ancients sometimes thinking it the blood of ancient gods and giants slain in titanic battles. Or, at the chemical level, did our most ancient ancestors realize that this oxidized iron, the rust of the earth, was related to the hard-edged metal that would someday tear us to shreds in our groaning millions and leave the teeming survivors dependent on a great, metal-boned apathy machine? 40,000...

America in Chains tracks the evolution of servitude in America and presents such uncomfortable facts as: The English rarely referred to America as the "colonies" but as the "plantations." Plantations were envisioned as places were people, not crops, were planted. The people to be planted in these places were to be the poor of the British Isles, who had been outlawed in 1572. It was a crime to be poor in Great Britain and the penalty was a life of hard labor, starvation, mutilation and beatings. For the first 100 years the plantations were staffed almost exclusively by English children,...