Search Worlds Without End

This long-overdue collection of Walter Tevis' s best short stories proves him to be a master of the form. they range from the ingenuity of The Other End of the Line, in which a man receives a phone call from himself in the future and follows the instructions he is given with unexpected and disastrous results, to the sophistication of Rent Control, where a couple discover that when they are in bed together they can literally make time stop, to the deeply-felt emotion of A Visit from Mother, whose protagonist is revisited by his dead parents.

Entertaining and perceptive, the stories in Far From Home show the same talent which has made Tevis's novels The Man who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird modern SF classics.

Table of Contents:

• Rent Control - (1979) - short story
• A Visit from Mother - short story
• Daddy - short story
• The Apotheosis of Myra - (1980) - novelette
• Out of Luck - (1980) - short story
• Echo - (1980) - short story
• Sitting in Limbo - short story
• The Other End of the Line - (1961) - short story
• The Big Bounce - (1958) - short story
• The Goldbrick - (1957) - short story
• The IFTH of OOFTH - (1957) - short story
• The Scholar's Disciple - (1969) - short story
• Far from Home - (1958) - short story

Mockingbird is a powerful novel of a future world where humans are dying. Those that survive spend their days in a narcotic bliss or choose a quick suicide rather than slow extinction. Humanity's salvation rests with an android who has no desire to live, and a man and a woman who must discover love, hope, and dreams of a world reborn.

The future is a grim place in which the declining human population wanders, drugged and lulled by electronic bliss. It's a world without art, reading and children, a world where people would rather burn themselves alive than endure. Even Spofforth, the most perfect machine ever created, cannot bear it and seeks only that which he cannot have - to cease to be. But there is hope for the future in the passion and joy that a man and woman discover in love and in books, hope even for Spofforth. A haunting novel, reverberating with anguish but also celebrating love and the magic of a dream.

It is the sixties -- the 2060s -- and things on Earth are looking grim. Firewood is $7 a stick. Macy's is a giant coal storage bin. Energy laws have outlawed elevators, and skyscrapers stand empty. The U.S. is a second-rate power run by the Mafia and the Teamsters. Space travel is illegal. Worst of all, a new Ice Age is on the way.

What the world needs is a hero. A man rich enough to build his own spaceship. Brave enough to fly it. Crazy enough to want to save the world. Lucky enough to succeed.

And here he comes...

T.J. Newton is an extraterrestrial who goes to Earth on a desperate mission of mercy. But instead of aid, Newton discovers loneliness and despair that ultimately ends in tragedy.