A collection of short stories by Hugh Howey

A collapsed global economy. And a world gone to hell. People going postal. There seems but one thing to do: cave in to the Herculean pressures, or use them to transform from the human to the transhuman. So is born the Renaissance types of the early 21st Century. One in particular, Robin Baker, may be destined to lead them. If she can keep her remarkable powers growing ahead of theirs, and if she can keep her own mind from imploding, before one of them takes out the rest of the planet.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER -- In Cory Doctorow’s wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco—an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state. A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier. Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him—but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do. Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want. Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.

Johnny Valentine is a lonely boy who dreams of becoming a hero, just like the masked avengers in his comic books. His feisty grandmother Stella is a retired supermarket clerk and cancer survivor. Running out of time, money and options, the old lady is driven by a fierce sense of justice. Together the boy and his grandma devise a Robin-Hood style scheme to rob a ruthless retail conglomerate, stealing cash and medicine for the sick and needy. As their crime spree continues, the citizens of their town wonder how to judge the crazy young boy and his fugitive grandma. Are Johnny and Stella Valentine a menace to society? Or are they the only ones trying to save it? - Wattpad Top 10 Mystery/Thriller category - 2013 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Finalist (Action and Adventure Category)