Melissa Scott – författare

The free flow of traffic to the Gamma Quadrant is vital to the recovery and survival of the planet Bajor and to Federation interests as well. When a mysterious cloaked ship begins raiding wormhole shipping, cleaning out holds and killing entire crews, Commander Benjamin Sisko of Deep Space Nine™ acts at once to stop the menace. Commander Sisko has unexpected aid: the cloaked vessel has been striking Cardassian ships as well, and the Cardassian commander Gul Dukat intends to destroy the ship at all costs. Their unlikely alliance works well -- until two of Sisko''s crewmen are captured by the raiders. Gul Dukat will stop at nothing to gain his victory; now Sisko must locate the predator ship, hold off the Cardassians long enough to rescue his people -- and prevent an interstellar war!

Desperately in need of vital nutritional supplies, the crew of the USS VoyagerTM must risk dealing with an enigmatic race known as the Kirse, legendary for the bountiful crops of their world - and for their secretive ways. Despite Neelix''s warnings, Captain Janeway leads an Away Team to the Kirse homeworld. But when the hostile Andirrim attack the Kirse, Janeway finds herself caught in a deadly situation. Forced to fight alongside the Kirse, Janeway and her crew can only hope that their strange, new allies are not more dangerous than their common foe.

A Battle of Wizardy From a History Not Quite Our Own...GOD SAVE THE KING OF SCOTLANDThe heavy summer air of 1593 is full of portents for Elizabeth, England's Queen, and James VI, King of Scotland. A coven of witches secretly controlled by the Wizard Earl of Bothwell has summoned a storm to sink the ship that bears James' bride to Scotland. Though the ship made port, the success of their summoning has emboldened them; the coven is now launching wizardly attacks on the King himself — and James is terrified.FROM SATAN'S WIZARD EARLThe King has protectors — not least the Queen of England herself — but not even Elizabeth's secret service and her champion, the redoubtable Sir Philip Sidney, can be on watch every instant. Eventually a trap is sprung, and King James is at the mercy of the satanic Bothwell's deadly spells...

Mad Science and MagicA series of mysterious plane crashes in the Rocky Mountains in the midst of a Depression winter call Air Corps reservists Mitch Sorley and Lewis Segura out to fly search and rescue, but it's more than just a simple navigational hazard. Fortunately Mitch and Lewis are more than just pilots. With Lewis' wife Alma and their old friend Dr. Jerry Ballard they're members of an esoteric Lodge dedicated to the protection of the world.The Silver Bullet Mine is haunted -- or is it? Can ghosts bring down aircraft? And are the small-time crooks who are interested in the Mine simply looking to make a buck -- or the vanguard of something more evil and deadly? Aided by their former con artist office manager Stasi Rostov, they've got to get to the bottom of what's happening at the Silver Bullet Mine before more lives are lost.It may be that Jerry holds the key not only to Silver Bullet, but to an even more dangerous secret, one that men have killed to gain for two thousand years. The Lodge is in deep, and there is only one man who can help them, the legendary scientist Nikola Tesla!Melissa Scott and Jo Graham tell yet another gripping story, and with their intense detail and snappy dialogue it is an adventure on the page. -- Historical Novel Society Review on Silver BulletPRAISE FOR THE ORDER OF THE AIR:Scott (Point of Knives) and Graham (Black Ships) avoid the pitfalls of conventional occult adventure thanks to their clean, well-crafted prose and their embrace of unconventional characters in unorthodox relationships. What could have been a mundane collect-the-plot-tokens supernatural thriller becomes a pleasantly intriguing story in their talented hands. -- Publishers WeeklyAlthough part of a series, it is also a good standalone novel. It contains elements for everyone: a bit of mystery, romance, history, and adventure, plus some paranormal happenings and humour. It has a wonderful, magical sense of time and place and is pure escapism; however, the authors still capture the feel of life in the 1930s. The novel has all the things a great adventure should be: it is a quick and easy read with nail-biting tension and great descriptions and dialogue. -- Historical Novel SocietyThe novel itself is a deft blend of supernatural intrigue and the noir adventure of serials from the 1930s, something that is rare to find and even rarer to find done well. Lost Things is a throwback in the best sense of the word. The action is extremely well-done, and the meticulously researched locations – a transatlantic airship, an archaeological dig, pre-Depression Chicago and New York – give you a true sense of being tossed back in time. (Lost Things) is a vibrant and utterly believable world peopled by characters you can't wait to see in action again. -- Geonn Cannon for Geek Speak MagazineMelissa Scott has returned. And she's done so in less a whirlwind of activity than a tornado….the entire novel unfolds in this effective, fluidly organic, and ceaselessly engaging way. It's a subtle skill, an impressive book-length balancing act. It's beautifully captured in Bob Eggleton's cover art, in which the novel's airship balances dreamily with symbols of the moon-goddess in the dreamlike sky of another age. And it makes Lost Things a decidedly difficult novel to put down. I hope you'll pick it up. I know I'll pick up the forthcoming sequel, Steel Blues. -- Cynthia Ward for Black Gate Magazine

Written with Jo GrahamIn 1929 archeologists began draining Lake Nemi in search of the mysterious ships that have been glimpsed beneath its waters since the reign of Claudius. What they awakened had been drowned for two thousand years. For a very good reason.Veteran aviator Lewis Segura has been drifting since the Great War ended, fetched up at last at the small company run by fellow veterans and pilots Alma Gilchrist and Mitchell Sorley, assisted by their old friend Dr. Jerry Ballard, an archeologist who lost his career when he lost part of his leg. It's a living, and if it's not quite what any of them had dreamed of, it's better than much that they've already survived. But Lewis has always dreamed true, and what he sees in his dreams will take them on a dangerous chase from Hollywood to New York to an airship over the Atlantic, and finally to the Groves of Diana Herself….The world is full of lost treasures. Some of them are better off not found.ADVANCE PRAISE FOR LOST THINGS:Scott and Graham avoid the pitfalls of conventional occult adventure thanks to their clean, well-crafted prose and their embrace of unconventional characters in unorthodox relationships. What could have been a mundane collect-the-plot-tokens supernatural thriller becomes a pleasantly intriguing story in their talented hands. -- Publishers WeeklyThe story is equally spent between action and quiet character moments, introducing us to these people and this world while simultaneously moving the story forward. The end result is a vibrant and utterly believable world peopled by characters you can't wait to see in action again. -- Geek Speak MagazineABOUT THE AUTHORS:Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in the Comparative History program. She is the author of more than twenty science fiction and fantasy novels, and has won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, and Point of Dreams, the last written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett. She has also won Spectrum Awards for Shadow Man and again in 2010 for the short story "e;The Rocky Side of the Sky"e; (Periphery, Lethe Press) as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She can be found on LiveJournal.Jo Graham worked in politics for fifteen years before leaving to write full time. She is the author of the Locus Award nominated Black Ships and the Spectrum Award nominated Stealing Fire, as well as several other novels, including the Stargate Atlantis Legacy series. Her next book, The General's Mistress, is highly anticipated from Gallery Books. She lives in North Carolina with her partner and their daughter. She can be found online at Live Journal.THE ORDER OF THE AIR is an original series, created by Melissa Scott & Jo Graham, loosely tied in to the past of the O.C.L.T. series books. Watch for the next volume in the series, STEEL BLUES, sometime in early 2013. Find many more Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, and other genre titles from CROSSROAD PRESS - featuring bestselling authors like John Farris, John Skipp & Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale, Neal Barrett Jr., Steven Savile, David Niall Wilson and many others. If you enjoyed LOST THINGS you might like our other original series, O.C.L.T. set in modern times. Simply search CROSSROAD PRESS to locate our more than 500 available titles.

In a space-faring civilization where a single woman is increasingly disenfranchised, the star pilot Silence Leigh is defrauded from her inheritance by a greedy competitor. Forced to ally with two men, Silence is dragged into a deadly political struggle, and is tantalized by the hints of the legendary Earth, as well as the dread and the glory of Magi's power. Her dreams of having her own ship and of escape from the Hegemony's oppressions take on new direction and focus when she joins the crew of "e;The Sun-Treader"e;"e;Polyamourous alchemical space-opera..."e; - Jo Walton

In Five-Twelfths of Heaven, Silence Leigh discovered that she was not only unusual, as a female pilot, but that impossible thing, a female magus. Her unique abilities make her the only person capable of reaching Earth, humanity's original home, now sealed behind a mysterious barrier — but first she must learn to use her new-found talents. As the Hegemon's men close in on her and her husbands and teacher, she must make a dangerous bargain: undertake an impossible rescue mission in exchange for a vital map. If she succeeds, she may be able to save Earth. If she fails…

Cassilde Sam is a barely solvent salvage operator, hunting for relics in the ruins left by the mysterious Ancestors—particularly the color-coded Elements that power most of humanity's current technology, including the ability to navigate through hyperspace. Cassilde is also steadily fading under the onslaught of Lightman's, an incurable, inevitably fatal disease. She needs one last find big enough to leave a legacy for her partner and fellow salvor Dai Winter.When their lover and former colleague Summerlad Ashe reappears, offering them a chance to salvage part of an orbiting palace that he claims contains potentially immense riches, Cassilde is desperate enough to take the gamble, even though Ashe had left them both to fight on the opposite side of the interplanetary war that only ended seven years ago. The find is everything Ashe promised. But when pirates attack the claim, Cassilde receives the rarest of the Ancestors' Gifts: a change to her biochemistry that confers near-instant healing and seems to promise immortality.But the change also drags her into an underworld where Gifts are traded in blood, and powerful Gifts bring equally powerful enemies. Hunted for her Gift and determined to find Gifts for her lovers, Cassilde discovers that an old enemy is searching for the greatest of the Ancestral artifacts: the power that the Ancestors created and were able to barely contain after it almost destroyed them, plunging humanity into the first Long Dark. Haunted by dream-visions of this power whispering its own version of what happened, Cassilde must find it first, before her enemy frees it to destroy her own civilization.