Jessica and her husband eagerly await the birth of their twins, but circumstances arise that compel her husband into action, even as a family emergency arises.

Meanwhile, Samantha has her first “session” with Jessica, as the doctor and her husband attempt to guide her.

A collection of some of the best original science fiction and fantasy short fiction published on Tor.com in 2019.

Includes stories by:
Elizabeth Bear
Siobhan Carroll
John Chu
Greg Egan
Kathleen Ann Goonan
S. L. Huang
Carole Johnstone
KJ Kabza
Erinn L. Kemper
Mary Robinette Kowal
Rich Larson
M. Evan MacGriogir
Seanan McGuire
Lis Mitchell
Mimi Mondal
Annalee Newitz
Silvia Park
Laurie Penny
Brenda Peynado
Christopher Rowe
Rivers Solomon
Karin Tidbeck
JY Yang
E. Lily Yu

Star Trek legend Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana takes the stage for her first-ever Star Trek comic book series. The writer from the original TV series, as well as The Animated Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, is joined by partner Derek Chester (Star Trek: Legacy) for The Enterprise Experiment, an all-new series set in the unexplored fourth year of the U.S.S. Enterprise’s legendary five-year mission. A sequel to the classic episode “The Enterprise Incident”-originally written by Fontana herself-where Kirk and Spock found themselves trapped on an Enterprise out of phase with space itself and facing a plot of revenge from Romulans!

Looking solemn, Michael Sutton arrives in Kinsey Millhone’s office with a story to tell. When he was six, he says, he wandered into the woods and saw two men digging a hole. They claimed they were pirates, looking for buried treasure. Now, all these years later, the long-forgotten events have come back to him—and he has pieced them together with news reports from the time, becoming convinced that he witnesses the burial of a kidnapped child.

As a DEA agent, Jeremiah “Hawk” Tate was one of the best at taking down drug traffickers. Then the cartels struck back—and destroyed everything he held dear.

Five years later, Hawk has retreated from society and is living a quiet life as a Montana wilderness guide. He’s done with the DEA, done with the criminals, and done with the pain left over from his past. But his past isn’t done with him.

When a mysterious woman offers him an enormous amount of money to find her lost brother, Hawk knows he should walk away, but, with a flash of gunfire, he gets pulled back in. Surrounded by old enemies and allies, he must face off with a new player planning to flood the market with a lethal drug. This may be the chance for revenge Hawk never thought he’d get.

Does working from home—or anywhere else but the office—make sense? In Remote, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of Basecamp, bring new insight to the hotly debated argument. While providing a complete overview of remote work’s challenges, Jason and David persuasively argue that, often, the advantages of working “off-site” far outweigh the drawbacks.

In the past decade, the “under one roof” model of conducting work has been steadily declining, owing to technology that is rapidly creating virtual workspaces. Today the new paradigm is “move work to the workers, rather than workers to the workplace.”

Hollywood, 1938: As soon as she learns that M-G-M is adapting her late husband’s masterpiece for the screen, seventy-seven-year-old Maud Gage Baum sets about trying to finagle her way onto the set. Nineteen years after Frank’s passing, Maud is the only person who can help the producers stay true to the spirit of the book—because she’s the only one left who knows its secrets.

But the moment she hears Judy Garland rehearsing the first notes of “Over the Rainbow,” Maud recognizes the yearning that defined her own life story, from her youth as a suffragette’s daughter to her coming of age as one of the first women in the Ivy League, from her blossoming romance with Frank to the hardscrabble prairie years that inspired The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Lisa Kallisto—overwhelmed working mother—is the not-so-perfect model of the modern woman. She holds down a busy job running an animal shelter, she cares for three demanding children, and she worries that her marriage isn’t getting enough attention. During an impossibly hectic week, Lisa takes her eye off the ball for a moment and her world descends into a living nightmare. Not only is her best friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter missing, but it’s Lisa’s fault. To make matters worse, Lucinda is the second teenage girl to disappear within the past two weeks. The first one turned up stripped bare and abandoned on the main street after a horrible ordeal. Wracked with guilt over her mistake, and after having been publicly blamed by Lucinda’s family, Lisa sets out to right the wrong.

Whether you are a student struggling to fulfill a math or science requirement, or you are embarking on a career change that requires a new skill set, A Mind for Numbers offers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating material. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical and technical savvy severely limited her options—both to rise in the military and to explore other careers—she returned to school with a newfound determination to re-tool her brain to master the very subjects that had given her so much trouble throughout her entire life.

What is populism? And why have populist parties and candidates suddenly sprung up and even gained power in the United States and Western Europe? The emergence of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, France’s Marine LePen, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the Alternative for Germany are signs that an older consensus about politics and government is breaking down.

John B. Judis, one of America’s most respected political analysts, tells us why we need to learn about the populist movement that began in the United States in the 1890s, the politics of which have recurred on both sides of the Atlantic ever since.

A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick’s exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has “shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy” she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator’s continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful.