• Age: 12 to 18
• Grade: 7 to 12

From Edward Willett, Aurora Award-winning author of Marseguro, The Cityborn, and Worldshaper (DAW Books), among many others, comes twenty-two tales of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, drawn from a long career of telling fantastic tales.

A young musician dreams of playing his songs among the stars...A Broadway performer on the lam is forced to direct aliens in The Sound of Music...Strange vegetables with dangerous properties crop up in small-town Saskatchewan...A man with a dark secret gets his comeuppance on a windy night on the prairie...An elderly caretaker on the Moon preserves the memory of the millions who died on Earth's darkest day...A woman and a bat-like alien must overcome their own prejudices to prevent an interstellar war...

From the far future and the farthest reaches of space to the Canadian prairie, from our world to worlds that have never existed to world's that might some day, rich realms of imagination and the fascinating characters and creatures that populate them await within these stories, some previously published, some seeing print for the first time. Time to go exploring...

EDWARD WILLETT is the author of more than sixty books of science fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction for readers of all ages. Marseguro (DAW Books) won the Aurora Award (honouring Canadian science fiction and fantasy) for Best Long-Form Work in English; his young adult fantasy Spirit Singer won a Saskatchewan Book Award. Several other of his books have been shortlisted for those and other awards.

Ed's most recent novel is the far-future humorous outer-space adventure The Tangled Stars (DAW Books). Other recent titles include Star Song, a finalist for both the Aurora Award and Saskatchewan Book Award for Young Adult Literature, published by Shadowpaw Press; Blue Fire (written as E.C. Blake), also from Shadowpaw Press; and the Worldshapers series (Worldshaper, Master of the World, and The Moonlit World) from DAW. His nonfiction runs the gamut from science books to biographies to history. He hosts Aurora Award-winning podcast The Worldshapers podcast (theworldshapers.com), in which he talks to other science fiction and fantasy authors about their creative process, and has Kickstarted several Shapers of Worlds anthologies featuring guests of the podcast.

In addition to being a writer, Ed is a professional actor and singer who has performed in numerous plays, musicals, and operas, and sung in several auditioned choirs, including the Canadian Chamber Choir. He lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, with his wife, Margaret Anne Hodges, P. Eng., a past president of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan. They have one daughter, Alice, and a black Siberian cat, Shadowpaw. You can find Ed online at www.edwardwillett.com.

Edward Willett's profile page

• Short-listed, Regina Book Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards
• Short-listed, Fiction Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards

"It was an absolute delight to read. Overall, Paths to the Stars is an elegant, beautiful collection of short stories. I recommend it for anyone ages 12+.” – Student Reviewer, LitPick

“Back when I was reading my first SF, I enjoyed the novels, like Heinlein, Asimov, and so on, but my first love was a good short story collection, each story being written by a different author…(these stories) remind me—not the least in variety—of those great collections of long ago.” – Steve Fahnestalk, Amazing Stories