The follow-up to Silverberg's earlier Arbor House anthology focuses on short novels, or novellas, and discusses the difficulty of reprinting notable works of these lengths in anthologies with limited space. (Silverberg did an earlier, paperback anthology, Great Short Novels of Science Fiction, that just preceded in 1970 the first volume of his Alpha series. That book included 3 of the 15 stories here.)
Though a companion to the earlier Arbor House anthology, Silverberg slightly relaxes that one's scope; one story here was published in 1945, and Silverberg's introduction mentions that one story was written as early as 1941.
Table of Contents:
- Introduction (The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels) - (1980) - essay by Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg [as by Martin Harry Greenberg and Robert Silverberg]
- Beyond Bedlam - (1951) - novella by Wyman Guin
- Equinoctial - (1977) - novella by John Varley
- By His Bootstraps - (1941) - novella by Robert A. Heinlein
- The Golden Helix - (1954) - novella by Theodore Sturgeon
- Born with the Dead - (1974) - novella by Robert Silverberg
- Second Game - (1958) - novelette by Katherine MacLean and Charles V. De Vet
- The Dead Past - (1956) - novelette by Isaac Asimov
- The Road to the Sea - (1951) - novella by Arthur C. Clarke
- The Star Pit - (1967) - novella by Samuel R. Delany
- Giant Killer - (1945) - novella by A. Bertram Chandler
- A Case of Conscience - (1953) - novella by James Blish
- Dio - (1957) - novelette by Damon Knight
- Houston, Houston, Do You Read? - (1976) - novella by James Tiptree, Jr.
- On the Storm Planet - (1965) - novella by Cordwainer Smith
- The Miracle-Workers - (1958) - novella by Jack Vance
This anthology was re-released by Random House imprint Avenel Books in 1989 as Worlds Imagined; the only change in contents being that "The Miracle-Workers" was excluded, possibly for publishing rights reasons.