A snapshot of the Empire at the Diamond Jubilee of 1897. It looks at what made up the Empire, from adventurers and politicians to communications and infrastructure, as well as anomalies and eccentricities. This humane overview also examines the muddle of jumbled ideologies behind it, and how they affected its 370 million people.

Something is rotten in the state of Wisconsin. Werewolf packs are being united and absorbed into an army of super soldiers by a mysterious figure who speaks like an angel and fights like a demon. And every Knight Templar-keepers of the magical peace between mankind and magickind-who tries to get close to this big bad wolf winds up dead. No knight can infiltrate a group whose members can smell a human from a mile away . . . no knight except one.John...

When someone kidnaps the last surviving descendant of the Grandmaster of the Knights Templar, it's bad news. When the baby is the key to the tenuous alliance between a large werewolf pack and the knights, it's even worse news. They're at each other's throats before they've even begun to look for baby Constance. But whoever kidnapped Constance didn't count on one thing: She's also the goddaughter of John Charming, modern-day descendant of a long line...

For John Charming, living the dream just became a nightmare. Someone, somewhere, is reading a magic book that is reading them right back. Real life is becoming a fairytale: high school students are turning, quite literally, into zombies, subway workers into dwarves, drug addicts into vampires. John Charming and his motley band of monster hunters are racing to find the villain of this story, following the yellow brick road through a not so wonderful...

Unknown worlds-unknown dangers The Stars are Ours: Dard Nordis is a hunted man. His brother was murdered for covert activities as a scientist in a world in which scientists and engineers are blamed for the global war that smashed civilization. The global dictatorship of Pax has ordered their execution. Now he is on the run, trying to find the secret stronghold of his brother's friends and colleagues-a hidden place where the few remaining scientists...