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Anita's main interest is boys, just like any other girl her age. And she doesn't really need things like love potions--not with her face and figure. But Anita is a witch, and she's young and a little reckless. Which means she sometimes makes mistakes (usually with boys), and when she does... all Hell might break loose!

Contents:

• 5 - The Witch - [Anita] - short story
• 11 - Anita - [Anita] - (1964) - short story
• 22 - Outpatient - [Anita] - short story
• 36 - The Simple for Love - [Anita] - (1966) - short story
• 53 - The Charm - [Anita] - (1964) - short story
• 69 - The Familiar - [Anita] - (1966) - short story
• 78 - The Jennifer - [Anita] - (1965) - short story
• 90 - The Middle Earth - [Anita] - (1965) - short story
• 103 - The War at Foxhanger - [Anita] - (1965) - short story
• 114 - Idiot's Lantern - [Anita] - (1965) - short story
• 129 - Timothy - [Anita] - (1966) - short story
• 144 - Cousin Ella Mae - [Anita] - short story
• 165 - Sandpiper - [Anita] - short story
• 180 - Junior Partner - [Anita] - (1970) - short story
• 198 - The Mayday - [Anita] - (1970) - short story

Grainne, quite simply, is unique; a moving and magical tour de force that ranks with Keith Robert's best works.

Ostensibly, the novel charts the career of one Alistair Bevan, writer and adman, from his beginnings in a post-war Midland town. Here though any parallels with our world cease. Through Bevan's vivid memories we meet Grainne; blue-stocking seductress, darling of the media. Painfully human yet as mysterious as her great namesake, the girl-goddess doomed by her own proud nature who plunged all Ireland into war and shadow.

But there's very much more. Grainne proposes new and startling answers for the origins of the Celts themselves, answers that irrevocably link the fate of East and West; though the wide-ranging narrative wears its erudition lightly. We glimpse Oxford in the sixties, Ireland and Wessex, a London that has yet to be; through and between them, like the spirallings of Celtic thought itself, runs a strange graffito. How does it relate to the tenets of the Buddha, the heady eroticism of Hindu art? One by one the answers are made; by Grainne, human and divine, a proto-myth for the new millennium.

Within a future world where pilots are launched on giant kites to watch the skies for demonic monsters, two great religions are on the verge of battle for the souls of the realm.

Ladies from Hell contains five long stories.

"The Shack at Great Cross Halt" describes a Britain dominated by motorways, juggernauts and a tyranny, in which the unfortunates of society eke out a miserable existence scavenging items that fall off lorries.

"The Ministry of Children" shows comprehensive schools having become terrifying battlegrounds dominated by vicious gangs.

"The Big Fans" concerns an experiment in wind-powered electricity which accidentally unleashes an apocalyptic storm of effects.

"Our Lady of Destruction" ironically depicts a future in which a Stalinist British government taxes 'non-productive' people (i.e. artists) at over 100% and assigns them individual Overseers to regulate their work.

"Missa Privata" shows an opera singer in a communist-dominated Britain making a defiant individual gesture which will bring about her own ruin.

These are not stories of spaceships and alien worlds; rather they are studies of imminent social change, written out of passionate concern about the directions in which our society may be heading - stories, in fact, in the great Orwellian tradition. Most importantly, they are stories about people: believable, defiant individuals struggling against oppressive forces.

In an England two hundred years hence all children are brought up in single sex creches: the Blocks. Molly Zero, young and intelligent, resilient and loving, is a product of the Blocks and is destined for the Elite -- the governing body of a country now crippled by martial law.

Molly rebels and escapes, and we follow her through various adventures -- in the apparent mundanity of small town life, joining the eccentric gaiety of the travelling gypsies, and on finally to the "trendy" nihilism of middle-class terrorism. This is the story of her gradual awakening to the realities of responsibility and the price of caring.

A fantastical alternate history set in a twentieth-century England dominated by the Church of Rome and untouched by the Industrial Revolution chronicles the dramatic impact of a scientific and technological revolution that will transform the world and its peaceful agrarian society.

Table of Contents:

• Prologue - (1968)
• The Lady Margaret - (1966)
• The Signaller - (1966)
• The White Boat - (1966)
• Brother John - (1966)
• Lords and Ladies - (1966)
• Corfe Gate - (1966)
• Coda (Pavane) - (1968)

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE the hazardous evolution of mankind continues. And in primeval response to the disaster, humanity's solutions to catastrophe carve the harsh new world in violent patterns of magic and myth, rite and religion. Brave images scar the ancient hills, the clash of swords and the ageless power of sexuality sign-post another, bloodsoaked path to civilisation.

Table of Contents:

• The God House - (1971) - novelette
• The Beautiful One - (1973) - novelette
• Monkey and Pru and Sal - (1971) - shortstory
• Rand, Rat and the Dancing Man - (1974) - novella
• Usk the Jokeman - (1974) - novelette
• Fragments - (1974) - novelette
• The Sun Over a Low Hill - (1974) - novelette

America and Russia both explode huge H-bombs simultaneously. The tests go wrong, cracking the seabed, rupturing continents, and engulfing cities. The Thames flattens into a flood plain. London is drowned.

Now comes cosmic retribution - giant wasps, monstrous and deadly, directed by a supernatural intelligence, invade a reeling world.

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology New Worlds Quarterly #1 (1971) edited by Michael Moorcock. It is included in the collection The Chalk Giants (1974).

Contents:

• The Death of Libby Maynard - (1970) - novella
• The Everything Man - (1970) - novella
• The Inner Wheel - (1965) - novella

BSFA and Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1980. The story is included in the colleciton The Lordly Ones (1986).

Keith Robert's The Lordly Ones offers a wide variety of sf and fantasy (and even a ghost story). The title story is a vision of near-future Britain collapsing in social disorder told from the viewpoint of a slow-witted lavatory attendant. Another take, "The Comfort Station", approaches a similar situation from a quite different perspective. In other stories we see Roberts in a more light-hearted vein: "The Checkout", another of his series of stories about a modern-day witch, Anita, or "Diva", a tale of singer of unique abilities. In "Ariadne Potts" a man's wish brings a classical statue to life, with, inevitably, unfortunate results. "The Castle and the Hoop" is an atmospheric ghost story set around the pubs of Southwark. And "Sphairistike" is perhaps the only sf story ever to centre on the game of tennis.

Table of Contents:

• The Lordly Ones - (1980) - novelette
• Ariadne Potts - (1978) - novelette
• Sphairistike - (1984) - novelette
• The Checkout - (1981) - shortstory
• The Comfort Station - (1980) - shortstory
• The Castle on the Hoop - (1986) - shortstory
• Diva - (1986) - novelette

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1987. The story is included in the collection Kaeti on Tour (1992).

Kaeti and her companions inhabit a strange world; a 'theatre of the mind' where the unexpected is commonplace, where ghosts, vampires and even the odd goddess may be encountered at any turn. It is a tribute to the author's skill that Kaeti's world seems, at all times, as real as our own, sometimes uncomfortably so. Whether satirising the mores of the Thames Valley or exposing the curious antics of the publishing world, Roberts is equally at home. He explores the gamut of human emotions; high comedy alternates with terror, the most delicate of love scenes are set against the iron dreariness of Death Row. Always though, at the focus, is Kaeti; witty and resourceful, resilient and vulnerable by turns. Some characters may change their roles with lightning speed, like the players i n a repertory company - but Kaeti remains. As does London. Robert always displays a knowledge of a city haunted by its own past, and a love for its highways and byways, that will surprise old fans and win him many new admirers.

Table of Contents:

• Kaeti's Nights - (1981) - novelette
• The Silence of the Land - (1984) - shortstory
• Kaeti and the Potman - shortstory
• Kaeti and the Sky Person - shortstory
• Kaeti and the Building - novelette
• Kaeti and the Tree - shortstory
• Kaeti and the Hangman - novelette
• The Clocktower Girl - novelette
• Kaeti and the Zep - shortstory
• The Dream Machine - shortstory

Kaeti branches out, moves farther from her beloved London. In the process she makes a whole range of new, intriguing friends; and lands herself in some scrapes startling even by her standards. The shadows she sprays on the pavement of a Thames Valley town come alive to haunt her; later, the magic Tiger Sweater she acquires does more than haunt the subjects of her wrath. While for a time her latest experience of France also looks like being her last. In a Thames-side hotel she conjures Hell on request; on a deserted airfield, and in the Green Palace, Glasgow, Hell returns to haunt her. In the West Country, she meets an eighteenth century benefactress; or is she? Certainly the experience lands Kaeti in hospital; for a while it seems she's about to cross the Bridge of Dreams herself. Finally she circles back to London' but a London neither you nor she has never seen...

But it's all in a day's work for Kaeti, the Bow Bells actress who is in touch with things magical and eternal.

Table of Contents:

• Kaeti and the Shadows - novelette
• The Tiger Sweater - (1987) - novella
• Kaeti and the Village - (1988) - shortstory
• Turndown - novelette
• Kaeti and the Airfield - novelette
• The Green Place - novelette
• The Aquatint - novelette
• The Bridge of Dreams - novelette
• Londinium - novelette