Search Worlds Without End

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 1990. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Nebula Awards 26 (1992), edited by James Morrow.

Nebula nominated novelette. Originally pulished in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 2004. It can also be found in the anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2012) Jeff and Ann VanderMeer and the collection Leviathan Wept and Other Stories (2010).

Running from poverty and hopelessness, Ramón Espejo boarded one of the great starships of the mysterious, repulsive Enye. But the new life he found on the far-off planet of São Paulo was no better than the one he abandoned. Then one night his rage and too much alcohol get the better of him. Deadly violence ensues, forcing Ramón to flee into the wilderness.

Mercifully, almost happily alone—far from the loud, bustling hive of humanity that he detests with sociopathic fervor—the luckless prospector is finally free to search for the one rich strike that could make him wealthy. But what he stumbles upon instead is an advanced alien race in hiding: desperate fugitives, like him, on a world not their own. Suddenly in possession of a powerful, dangerous secret and caught up in an extraordinary manhunt on a hostile, unpredictable planet, Ramón must first escape . . . and then, somehow, survive.

And his deadliest enemy is himself.

This short story originally appeared on Sci Fiction, July 7, 2004. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30th Anniversary Anthology (2013), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story is included in the collection Leviathan Wept and Other Stories (2010).

What if you had a holocaust and nobody came?

Imagine a father who has sent his child's soul voyaging and seen it go astray. Or a backyard tale from the 1001 American Nights. Macbeth re-imagined as a screwball comedy. Three extraordinary economic tasks performed by a small expert in currency exchange that risk first career and then life and then soul.

From the disturbing beauty of 'Flat Diane' (Nebula-nominee, International Horror Guild award-winner) to the idiosyncratic vision of 'The Cambist and Lord Iron' (Hugo- and World Fantasy-nominee), Daniel Abraham has been writing some of the most enjoyable and widely admired short fiction in the genre for over a decade.

Ranging from high fantasy to hard science fiction, screwball comedy to gut-punching tragedy, Daniel Abraham's stories never fail to be intelligent, compassionate, thoughtful, and humane. Leviathan Wept and Other Stories is the first collection of his short works, including selections from both the well-known and the rare.

Table of Contents:

• A Hunter in Arin-Qin - (2010) - shortfiction by Daniel Abraham
• As Sweet - (2001) - shortfiction by Daniel Abraham
• Exclusion - (2001) - shortstory by Daniel Abraham
• Flat Diane - (2004) - novelette by Daniel Abraham
• Leviathan Wept - (2004) - shortstory by Daniel Abraham
• The Best Monkey - (2009) - novelette by Daniel Abraham
• The Cambist and Lord Iron - (2007) - shortfiction by Daniel Abraham
• The Curandero and the Swede - shortfiction by Daniel Abraham
• The Support Technician Tango - (2007) - novelette by Daniel Abraham

Shadow Twin is a 120 page novella by Gardner Dozois, George R.R. Martin, and Daniel Abraham. Gardner began the novella in the 1970s, handed it off to George in the 1980s, who, in turn, called upon Daniel Abraham to add the finishing touches.

This novella has been expanded into the novel Hunter's Run.

Hugo and WFA nominated novelette. It was first published in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, edited by John Klima (2007). It can also be found in the anthologies Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 2008: Twenty-First Annual Collection (2008), edited by Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow. I is also included in the collection Leviathan Wept and Other Stories (2010).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed Magazine.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The Book of Swords (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Novelette originally published in the Fall 2007 issue of Subterranean Magazine. It can also be found in the collection Leviathan Wept and Other Stories (2010).

Read the full story for free at Subterranean Magazine.

Armor up for a metal-pounding explosion of action, adventure and amazing speculation by topnotch writers--including Nebula-award winner Jack McDevitt, Sean Williams, Dan Abnett, Simon Green, and Jack Campbell--on a future warrior that might very well be just around the corner. Science fiction readers and gamers have long been fascinated by the idea of going to battle in suits of powered combat armor or at the interior controls of giant mechs.

It's an armor-plated clip of hard-hitting tales featuring exoskeleton adventure with fascinating takes on possible future armors ranging from the style of personal power suits seen in Starship Troopers and Halo to the servo-controlled bipedal beast-mech style encountered in Mechwarrior and Battletech.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword (Armored) - essay by Orson Scott Card
• Introduction (Armored) - essay by John Joseph Adams
• The Johnson Maneuver - short story by William H. Keith, Jr.
• Hel's Half-Acre - short story by John G. Hemry
• Jungle Walkers - novelette by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell
• The Last Run of the Coppelia - novelette by Genevieve Valentine
• Death Reported of Last Surviving Veteran of Great War - short story by Dan Abnett
• The Cat's Pajamas - novelette by Jack McDevitt
• Find Heaven and Hell in the Smallest Things - novelette by Simon R. Green
• Power Armor: A Love Story - short story by David Barr Kirtley
• The Last Days of the Kelly Gang - short story by David D. Levine
• Field Test - short story by Michael A. Stackpole
• Trauma Pod - short story by Alastair Reynolds
• Contained Vacuum - short story by David Sherman
• You Do What You Do - short story by Tanya Huff
• Nomad - novelette by Karin Lowachee
• Human Error - short story by John Jackson Miller
• Transfer of Ownership - short story by Christie Yant
• Heuristic Algorithm and Reasoning Response Engine - novelette by Ethan Skarstedt and Brandon Sanderson
• Don Quixote - short story by Carrie Vaughn
• The Poacher - short story by Wendy N. Wagner and Jak Wagner
• The Green - short story by Lauren Beukes
• Sticks and Stones - short story by Robert Buettner
• Helmet - short story by Daniel H. Wilson
• The N-Body Solution - novelette by Sean Williams

A 12-year-old math whiz accidentally learns the startling facts about her true identity and her role in an important secret experiment.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - essay
• Nuclear Tan - short story
• Over the Rainbow - short story
• The Last Dragon Master - short story
• Monkey Puzzle - short story
• Sherlock Holmes and Basho - short story
• Matter Mutter Mother - short story
• The Answerer of Dreams - novelette

Another mind-bending science fiction epic from a true visionary, Centuries explores a barely recognizable future where humans control their own evolution. Genetic manipulation and artificial intelligence shape an astounding destiny for our species.

With these wondrous changes come unexpected new truths of heart and mind that challenge the very definition of human--and that threaten not only our existence but the universe itself as our surprising powers--both miraculous and monstrous--evolve through the centuries.

50,000 years ago, three young friends band together for a perilous journey to find a new home after plague devastates their coastal tribe. Accompanied by a blind horse and armed with meager weapons and their own elusive courage, Hamr, Timov and Duru defy savage odds to survive in the strange and brutal realm of Ice Age Europe. This incredible quest takes them through primeval forests stalked by cave lions and across vast glacial moraines of thundering woolly rhinoceros - to the Thundertree clan. These forest people accept Duru, the girl, for her magical powers. But the two young men must prove themselves worthy by hunting down a giant Neanderthal - the last of his line - who has been terrorizing the tribe.

The speaker is a hickory-faced crone trying to explain to Chet, a shy kid with eyeglasses and pocket protector, why he can't take her granddaughter to the high school dance. For quiet, elfin Flannery is not like other kids. A living Blud-eye-eth, she has caught the attention of the faerie, beautiful evil creatures from a mysterious Otherworld, who seduce their victims with moonlight raves before feeding them to a dragon and hunting souls with a supernatural black dog of prodigious evil. And they have taken Flannery for one of their own. And she won't be going to the school dance-not unless Chet rescues her.

Ten years after the aged Baroness Ailena Valaise was turned out of her castle by her son, Guy, Ailena returns, restored to her youth by a drink from the Holy Grail, and announces her plans to end Guy's reign.

Mr. Charlie is a brain without a body, revived after being frozen for a thousand years.

Charlie Outis has no idea of what the world might be like in the far future after he decides to have his brain frozen with the slim hope of it being revived one day.

But even a thousand years from now, brains are a valuable commodity - even brains without heads. But who does the brain belong to? And who controls a mind without a body?

Life is lonely for 13-year-old Jane Riggs in the historical New England village that is her new home - until she discovers a four-hundred-year-old book of spells that really works. Guided by the ghost of the witch who wrote the conjure book, Jane embarks on a terrifying but glorious quest for magical power. Her ambition is to contact her mother, dead these ten years and remembered only in photographs. For such a great prize, Jane is willing to risk much among the weird creatures she conjures out of the spirit world. But she will need more than courage when her magic follows her to school. After an evil spirit fox steals her classmate's soul, life suddenly gets very complicated. Coming of age among dark, elemental powers while not missing a day of seventh grade is not easy. And the answers Jane needs for growing up don't seem to be in the conjure book.

A young bookkeeper in upstate New York, Sigrid Lindo is painfully aware that her life has narrowed down to working a dull job and caring for her widowed mother, when she steps out on Tappan Down to hear the moon's velvet voice asking her to be his wife. It is a seduction Siggy will resist with all the stoic reason and practicality she has learned from her beloved father. But the moon's gift of glamour is powerful and beyond her control.

Mesmerizing explorations into the limitless realm of creativity, and bold, exciting tales that captivate, thrill, and give form to a universe that is both wonderful & terrifying

Table of Contents:

• Foreword
• Ink from the New Moon
• Maps for the Spiders
• Demons Hide Their Faces
• Slain
• The Dark One: A Mythograph
• Zero's Twin
• Atlantis Rose
• Death's Head Moon
• Brave Tails
• Shagbark
• Riversplash Mountain
• The Strange, Wild Provenance of the Brave Tails
• Thirteen Raptures of the Black Goat
• Glimpses
• The Star Pools
• A Priestess of Nodens
• Time in the Hourless House
• Twice Dead Things: Investigations of the Fractal Blood Soul

Headhunters, sorcerers, pirates and Indian princes thrive in this exciting and poetic tale of a young outcast in Borneo. Born in 1609, son of a native woman and a Dutch sea captain he never knew, Jaki Gefjon grows up in the jungle as a sorcerer's apprentice. Later kidnapped by pirates, he befriends his captor, Trevor Pym, notorious for his dreaded man-of-war, Wyvern.

The scientific marvels on the European privateer become the young soul-catcher's passion -- until he falls for Lucinda, the headstrong daughter of Pym's sworn enemy. Propelled by intrigue, pirates' battles, curses and visions, this seafaring saga takes Lucinda and Jaki from the South Seas to India -- and to a bold, unforeseen destiny in the New World.

"Tortured Souls" is one of the most vividly imagined, tightly compressed novellas ever written by the incomparable Clive Barker. At once violent and erotic, brutal and strangely beautiful, it takes us into the heart of the legendary "first city" known as Primordium, the site of political upheaval, passionate encounters, and astonishing acts of transformation.

Lurking at the edges of this extravagant tale is the ancient entity known as "Agonistes," who accepts the pleas of selected "Supplicants," transforming them, through a combination of art, magic, and pain, into avatars of violence and revenge.

The story begins when a freelance assassin named Zarles Krieger commits a routine murder-for-hire. This act will lead him to two life-altering encounters, one with the daughter of his victim, the other with Agonistes himself. This conjunction of the human and the inhuman stands at the center of this instantly absorbing creation.

With great authority and equally great economy, "Tortured Souls" expands to become a portrait of Primordium itself, with its hierarchies, its hidden mysteries, its shifting power structure, and--most significantly--its indelible cast of characters. A perfectly controlled example of what Barker calls "the fantastique," "Tortured Souls" is something truly special, a story whose imaginative reach and sheer narrative power are evident on every page.

Note: This novelette was first published in 2001 as an accompaniment to a series of action figure toys know as Clive Barker's Tortured Souls. There were six toys in the series, and each toy was accompanied by the part of the novelette that featured that character.

The Web of the Golden Spider is a thrilling adventure moving from Boston to the mountains of South America. Wilson finds himself in the midst of a battle between a deposed queen and revolutionists who have banded together to make their country a republic, but he is more concerned with rescuing the girl he has fallen in love with who has been snatched away from him by a mysterious priest.

A quest, a war, a ring that would be grounds for calling any wedding off, a king without a kingdom, and a little, furry "hero" named Frito, ready - or maybe just forced by the wizard of Goodgulf - to undertake the one mission which can save Lower Middle Earth from enslavement by the evil Sorhed... Luscious Elfmaidens, a roller-skating dragon, ugly plants that can soul-kiss the unwary to death - these are just some of the ingredients in the wildest, wackiest, most irreverent excursion into fantasy realms that anyone has ever dared to undertake.

Imagine a world in which Teddy Roosevelt is elected to a third term and leads America directly into World War I.A world in which the consequent terms of the Versailles Treaty propose a much gentler reconciliation between Allied and Central powers. A world in which neither World War II-nor the Holocaust-ever occurs, though European skirmishes abound. It's into this world, present millennium, where Martin Gidron has placed both Janusz, who's fled Poland to avoid a Russian draft, and his lover Irena, daughter of a famous composer. When Irena travels to Greece for her father's funeral, things start unravelling for Janusz: people and business establishments having Jewish connections disappear, literally without a trace or even memory, from New York City where Janusz has illegally emigrated. Then the Jewish daily newspaper where Janusz works switches overnight from Yiddish to English. And what are these strange letters that Janusz receives at his apartment, offering a "credit card, " whatever that might be? The discovery that Janusz is cast into by the novel's end is as harrowing in its particularity as it is in its universality.

Contains:

• The Demolished Man - (1952) - novel
• Tiger! Tiger! - (1956) - novel (variant of The Stars My Destination)
• Time Is the Traitor - (1953) - novelette
• They Don't Make Life Like They Used To - (1963) - novelette
• The Pi Man - (1959) - shortstory
• The Men Who Murdered Mohammed - (1958) - shortstory
• Will You Wait? - (1959) - shortstory
• The Flowered Thundermug - (1964) - novelette
• Out of This World - (1964) - shortstory

Regina and her bee-ladies, bored members of the elite, while away the idle hours by playing at conjuring the Devil - a game which leads to horrifying consequences.

Half finished upon Bester's death, and completed by Zelazny, "Psychoshop" envisions a commercial establishment that attracts customers ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to a sorcerer intent on fabricating the Beast of Revelations.

This edition brings together a range of works by Alfred Bester. It includes the novel "The Demolished Man", "Hell is Forever" and "The Four Hour Fuge", there are also Bester's writings on noted celebrities such as Woody Allen, Rex Stout and Issac Asimov.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Redemolished) - (2000) - essay by Richard Raucci
• The Probable Man - (1941) - novelette
• Hell Is Forever - (1942) - novella
• The Push of a Finger - (1942) - novella
• The Roller Coaster - (1953) - shortstory
• The Lost Child - shortfiction
• I Will Never Celebrate New Year's Again - (1963) - shortstory
• Out of This World - (1964) - shortstory
• The Animal Fair - (1972) - novelette
• Something Up There Likes Me - (1973) - shortstory
• The Four-Hour Fugue - (1974) - shortstory
• Gourmet Dining in Outer Space - (1960) - essay
• Place of the Month: The Moon - essay
• The Sun - essay
• Science Fiction and the Renaissance Man - (1959) - essay
• A Diatribe Against Science Fiction - essay
• The Perfect Composite Science Fiction Author - essay
• My Affair With Science Fiction - (1974) - essay
• John Huston's Unsentimental Journey - (1959) - essay
• Rex Stout - (1967) - interview of Rex Stout - interview
• Conversation with Woody Allen - (1969) - interview of Woody Allen - interview
• Isaac Asimov - (1973) - interview of Isaac Asimov - interview
• Robert Heinlein - (1973) - interview of Robert A. Heinlein - interview
• The Demolished Man: the Deleted Prologue - shortfiction
• Writing and The Demolished Man - essay
• In Memoriam: Alfred Bester (1913-1987) - essay by Gregory Benford and Isaac Asimov

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology (1973), edited by Harry Harrison. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year #3 (1974), edited by Terry Carr, and Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Third Annual Collection (1974), edited by Lester del Rey. The story is included in the collections Star Light, Star Bright (1976) and Redemolished (2000).

TIME, SPACE, AND THE FUTURE

Here is your passport into the fascinating world of science fiction... eleven dazzling, jet-propelled, rocket-paced tales of tomorrow by one of today's most inventive writers, Alfred Bester, author of The Demolished Man and The Dark Side of the Earth.

Table of Contents:

• 7 • Disappearing Act • (1953) • short story
• 24 • Adam and No Eve • (1941) • short story
• 38 • Star Light, Star Bright • (1953) • short story
• 54 • The Roller Coaster • (1953) • short story
• 61 • Oddy and Id • (1950) • short story
• 76 • The Starcomber • novelette (variant of 5,271,009 1954)
• 110 • Travel Diary • (1958) • short story
• 113 • Fondly Fahrenheit • (1954) • novelette
• 133 • Hobson's Choice • (1952) • short story
• 148 • The Die-Hard • (1958) • short story
• 152 • Of Time and Third Avenue • (1951) • short story

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1972. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 20th Series (1973), edited by Edward L. Ferman. It is included in the collection Redemolished (2000).

Alfred Bester's first science fiction novel since The Stars My Destination was a major event. A fast-moving adventure story set in Earth's future. A band of immortals - as charming a bunch of eccentrics as you'll ever come across - recruit a new member, the brilliant Cherokee physicist Sequoya Guess. Dr. Guess, with group's help, gain control of Extro, the supercomputer that controls all mechanical activity on Earth. They plan to rid Earth of political repression and to further Guess's researches - which may lead to a great leap in human evolution to produce a race of supermen. But Extro takes over Guess instead and turns malevolent. The task of the merry band suddenly becomes a fight in deadly earnest for the future of Earth.

Sequoya Guess, whom they love, must be killed. And how do you kill an immortal?

The Dark Side of the Earth (1964) contains the short stories:

• "Time is the Traitor"
• "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" (Hugo Award Nominee)
• "Out of This World"
• "The Pi Man" (Hugo Award Nominee)
• "The Flowered Thundermug"
• "Will You Wait?"
• "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To"

When his lover is kidnapped by the evil Duke of Death, Rogue Winter, King of the Maori Commandos searches the solar system for her and uncovers evidence of an unlimited energy source in the underground torture chambers of Triton.

In the year 2301, guns are only museum pieces and benign telepaths sweep the minds of the populace to detect crimes before they happen. In 2301 murder is virtually impossible, but one man is about to change that...

Ben Reich, a psychopathic business magnate, has devised the ultimate scheme to eliminate the competition and destroy the order of his society. The Demolished Man is a masterpiece of imaginative suspense, set in a superbly imagined world in which everything has changed except the ancient instinct for murder.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1974. The story can also be found in The 1975 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha, Best SF: 1974 (1975), edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, The Best of Analog (1978), edited by Ben Bova, and The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume 2 (2000), edited by Frederik Pohl. It is included in the collections The Light Fantastic (1976), Starlight (1976) and Redemolished (2000).

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1958. The story can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series (1959), edited by Anthony Boucher
• Voyagers in Time: Twelve Stories of Science Fiction (1967), edited by Robert Silverberg
• The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces (1983), edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg
• The World Treasury of Science Fiction (1989), edited by David G. Hartwell
• One Lamp: Alternate History Stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (2003), edited by Gordon Van Gelder.

It is included in the collections The Dark Side of the Earth (1964), The Light Fantastic (1976) and Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (1997).

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1959. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Ninth Series (1960), edtied by Robert P. Mills, Alpha 1 (1970), edited by Robert Silverberg, The Great SF Stories 21 (1959) (1990), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, and The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (1994), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is included in the collections The Dark Side of the Earth (1964), Star Light, Star Bright (1976) and Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (1997).

"Dazzlement and enchantment are Bester's methods. His stories never stand still a moment."
--Damon Knight, author of Why Do Birds

Alfred Bester took science fiction into hyperdrive, endowing it with a wit, speed, and narrative inventiveness that have inspired two generations of writers. And nowhere is Bester funnier, speedier, or more audacious than in these seventeen short stories--two of them previously unpublished--that have now been brought together in a single volume for the first time.

Read about the sweet-natured young man whose phenomenal good luck turns out to be disastrous for the rest of humanity. Find out why tourists are flocking to a hellish little town in a post-nuclear Kansas. Meet a warlock who practices on Park Avenue and whose potions comply with the Pure Food and Drug Act. Make a deal with the Devil--but not without calling your agent. Dazzling, effervescent, sexy, and sardonic, Virtual Unrealities is a historic collection from one of science fiction's true pathbreakers.

"Alfred Bester was one of the handful of writers who invented modern science fiction."
--Harry Harrison

Contents:

• ix - Introduction (Virtual Unrealities) - (1996) - essay by Robert Silverberg
• 3 - Disappearing Act - (1953) - short story
• 22 - Oddy and Id - (1950) - short story
• 38 - Star Light, Star Bright - (1953) - short story
• 56 - 5,271,009 - (1954) - novelette
• 91 - Fondly Fahrenheit - (1954) - novelette
• 112 - Hobson's Choice - (1952) - short story
• 127 - Of Time and Third Avenue - (1951) - short story
• 136 - Time Is the Traitor - (1953) - novelette
• 159 - The Men Who Murdered Mohammed - (1958) - short story
• 173 - The Pi Man - (1959) - short story
• 191 - They Don't Make Life Like They Used To - (1963) - novelette
• 225 - Will You Wait? - (1959) - short story
• 233 - The Flowered Thundermug - (1964) - novelette
• 273 - Adam and No Eve - (1941) - short story
• 287 - And 3½ to Go - short story
• 292 - Galatea Galante - (1979) - novelette (variant of Galatea Galante, The Perfect Popsy)
• 334 - The Devil Without Glasses - novelette

May 23, 2440 A.D.

Around Jay Bruce's spaceship, the sky was an impenetrable blanket of opaque gas, typical of this region on Jupiter just north of the Red Spot. Bruce was puzzled. Why had the lovely young woman seated next to him chartered his ship to cruise an uninhabited area? Then it appeared... a massive Martian warship unlike any he'd ever seen before, forcing him to land -- and perhaps to die -- in the barren Jovian wilderness!

In the future, on the island of Ongladred, mankind has survived two enigmatic, civilization-destroying setbacks. Now a third holocaust is anticipated. The people fear destruction from invading barbarians, the reappearance of a semi-mythical sea creature, and the devious intervention of the neo-human Parfects.

This imminent disaster is very much the concern of Ingram Marley, a government spy sent to keep surveillance over Stonelore, a secluded haven and the center of free thought on Ongladred, and Gabriel Elk, Stonelore's resident genius.

While panic and fear rage outside, deep inside Stonelore the mysteries of life are pursued - reanimation of the dead, the invention of powerful laser weapons, and the secrets of "old earth" knowledge. Amidst harrowing dangers of sea battles and land invasions, Michael Bishop explores the transformation of Ingram Marley, a man caught in the middle.

Contents:

• 7 - The White Otters of Childhood - (1973) - novella
• 85 - Beneath the Shattered Moons - (1976) - novel (variant of And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees)

The depression has meant that a mission to Mars has been shelved for 20 years. But then Markham, head of Pellucida Films, cons two of the original Mars spacemen out of retirement and promises them their dream of setting foot on the Red Planet.

Written over the course of three decades, these remarkable stories showcase the breadth and power of Michael Blumlein's vision. By turns prescient, poignant, haunting, and humorous, they consistently amaze and delight. They are celebrations: of science, of love, of partnership, of difference. They are odes to the joy of discovery, inside and out.

A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party.

The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist.

Nebula Award nominated short story. The original Spanish title is Utopía de un hombre que está cansado. Some sources list the English title as A Weary Man's Utopia. Given the 1976 nomination there must be an earlier publication in English but the collection The Book of Sand (1977 in English) is the earliest publication mentioned.

This story originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine: Queers Destroy Science Fiction! Special Edition, June 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois and Wilde Stories 2016: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction (2016), edited by Steve Berman.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Ginny is a waiflike department store employee. Desperate for love but unwilling to keep her opinions to herself, she alienates the few good men who come her way. Michael is a graphic artist doing cut-and-paste work in New York's Chinatown. Talented but lacking in ambition, he figures women look right through him--and can't really blame them. Then one Christmas both Ginny and Michael give up on life, only to find something infinitely more wonderful. Because after risking everything, they soon discover, amid the glittering December snow, a romance awash with all the wonders of the hereafter, but with a great deal to teach us all about living here on Earth.

Time travel, changing history, forestalling atrocities: it's not a job for the weak. For one thing, the things people in the future wear...

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Table of Contents:

• The Star Mouse - novelette
• Arena - novelette
• Hall of Mirrors - short story
• The Last Martian - short story
• Honeymoon in Hell - novelette
• Me and Flapjack and the Martians (with Mack Reynolds) - short story
• The Weapon - short story
• Abominable - short story
• Expedition - short story
• Keep Out - short story
• Mouse - short story
• Too Far - short story
• Nasty - short story
• Rebound - short story
• Nightmare in Gray - short story
• Nightmare in Green - short story
• Nightmare in White - short story
• Nightmare in Blue - short story
• Nightmare in Yellow - short story
• Nightmare in Red - short story
• Unfortunately - short story
• Granny's Birthday - short story
• Cat Burglar - short story
• The House - short story
• Second Chance - short story
• Great Lost Discoveries I - Invisibility - short story
• Great Lost Discoveries II - Invulnerability - short story
• Great Lost Discoveries III - Immortality - short story
• Dead Letter - short story
• Recessional - short story
• Hobbyist - short story
• The Ring of Hans Carvel - short story
• Vengeance Fleet - short story
• Rope Trick - short story
• Fatal Error - short story
• The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver I - short story
• The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver II - short story
• The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver III - short story
• Bright Beard - short story
• Jaycee - short story
• Contact - short story
• Horse Race - short story
• Death on the Mountain - short story
• Bear Possibility - short story
• Not Yet the End - short story
• Fish Story - short story
• Three Little Owls (A Fable) - short story
• Runaround - short story
• Murder in Ten Easy Lessons - short story
• Entity Trap - short story
• The Little Lamb - short story
• The Joke - short story
• The Geezenstacks - short story
• The End - short story
• Cartoonist (with Mack Reynolds) - short story
• Man of Distinction - short story
• Millennium - short story
• The Dome - short story
• Blood - short story
• Experiment - short story
• Sentry - short story
• Naturally - short story
• Voodoo - short story
• First Time Machine - short story
• And the Gods Laughed - short story
• A Word from Our Sponsor - short story
• Rustle of Wings - short story
• Imagine (poem) - short story
• Mitkey Rides Again - short story
• Six-Legged Svengali (with Mack Reynolds) - short story
• The Switcheroo (with Mack Reynolds) - short story
• Dark Interlude (with Mack Reynolds) - short story
• The Gamblers (with Mack Reynolds) - novelette
• Honeymoons and Geezenstacks and Fredric William Brown (essay) by Richard A. Lupoff - short story

A collection of all 118 short science fiction and fantasy stories of one of the masters of the vignette, all his short works except two which were rewritten into parts of a novel. Introduction by Barry N. Malzberg. Dustjacket art by Bob Eggleton.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (2001) - essay by Barry N. Malzberg
• Armageddon (1941) - short story
• Not Yet the End (1941) - short story
• Etaoin Shrdlu (1942) - short story
• Star Mouse (1951) - novelette
• Runaround (1942) - short story
• The New One (1942) - short story
• The Angelic Angleworm (1943) - novelette
• The Hat Trick (1943) - short story
• The Geezenstacks (1943) - short story
• Daymare (1943) - novelette
• Paradox Lost (1943) - short story
• And the Gods Laughed (1944) - short story
• Nothing Sirius (1944) - short story
• The Yehudi Principle (1944) - short story
• Arena (1944) - novelette
• The Waveries (1945) - short story
• Murder in Ten Easy Lessons (1945) - short story
• Pi in the Sky (1945) - novelette
• Placet Is a Crazy Place (1946) - short story
• Knock (1948) - short story
• All Good BEMs (1949) - short story
• Mouse (1949) - short story
• Come and Go Mad (1949) - novelette
• Crisis, 1999 (1949) - short story
• Letter to a Phoenix (1949) - short story
• Vengeance Fleet (1950) - short story
• The Last Train (1950) - short story
• Entity Trap (1950) - short story
• Obedience (1950) - short story
• The Frownzly Florgels (1950) - short story
• The Last Martian (1950) - short story
• Honeymoon in Hell (1950) - novelette
• Mitkey Rides Again (1950) - short story
• Six-Legged Svengali (1950) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• Dark Interlude (1951) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• Man of Distinction (1951) - short story
• The Switcheroo (1951) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• The Weapon (1951) - short story
• Cartoonist (1951) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• The Dome (1951) - short story
• A Word from Our Sponsor (1951) - short story
• The Gamblers (1951) - novelette by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• The Hatchetman (1951) - novelette by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• Something Green (1951) - short story
• Me and Flapjack and the Martians (1952) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• The Little Lamb (1953) - short story
• Rustle of Wings (1953) - short story
• Hall of Mirrors (1953) - short story
• Experiment (1954) - short story
• Sentry (1954) - short story
• Keep Out (1954) - short story
• Naturally (1954) - short story
• Voodoo (1954) - short story
• Answer (1954) - short story
• Daisies (1954) - short story
• Pattern (1954) - short story
• Politeness (1954) - short story
• Preposterous (1954) - short story
• Reconciliation (1954) - short story
• Search (1954) - short story
• Sentence (1954) - short story
• Solipsist (1954) - short story
• Blood (1955) - short story
• Imagine (1955) - short story
• First Time Machine (1955) - short story
• Too Far (1955) - short story
• Millennium (1955) - short story
• Expedition (1956) - short story
• Happy Ending (1957) - short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds
• Jaycee (1955) - short story
• Unfortunately (1958) - short story
• Nasty (1959) - short story
• Rope Trick (1959) - short story
• Abominable (1960) - short story
• Bear Possibility (1960) - short story
• Recessional (1961) - short story
• Contact (1960) - short story
• Rebound (1960) - short story
• Great Lost Discoveries I - Invisibility (1961) - short story
• Great Lost Discoveries II - Invulnerability (1961) - short story
• Great Lost Discoveries III - Immortality (1961) - short story
• Hobbyist (1961) - short story
• The End (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Blue (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Gray (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Red (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Yellow (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in Green (1961) - short story
• Nightmare in White (1961) - short story
• The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver I (1961) - short story
• The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver II (1961) - short story
• The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver III (1961) - short story
• Bright Beard (1961) - short story
• Cat Burglar (1961) - short story
• Dead Letter (1961) - short story
• Death on the Mountain (1961) - short story
• Fatal Error (1961) - short story
• Fish Story (1961) - short story
• Horse Race (1961) - short story
• The House (1960) - short story
• The Joke (1948) - short story
• The Ring of Hans Carvel (1961) - short story
• Second Chance (1961) - short story
• Three Little Owls (A Fable) (1961) - short story
• Granny's Birthday (1960) - short story
• Aelurophobe (1962) - short story
• Puppet Show (1962) - short story
• Double Standard (1963) - short story
• It Didn't Happen (1963) - short story
• Ten Percenter (1963) - short story
• Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1965) - short story by Fredric Brown and Carl Onspaugh
• Editor's Notes and Acknowledgements (2002) - essay by Ben Yalow

This short story was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1953. It was later anthologized in Assignment in Tomorrow, edited by Frederik Pohl (1954), The Great SF Stories #15, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg (1986), and The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time, edited by Barry N. Malzberg (2003), and collected in Honeymoon in Hell (1958), The Best of Fredric Brown (1977), And the Gods Laughed (1987), and From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown (2001).

Read this story for free at Project Gutenberg.

A collection of stories from a master of the form. Imagine... Ghosts, gods, and devils – heavens and hells – cities in the sky and cities beneath the sea. Time machines, spaceships – certainly you can imagine Martians, but what about interplanetary vampires? Or a mouse that isnt a mouse?

Honeymoon in Hell proves that Fredric Brown has a special vision, a sight beyond our wildest nightmares, a perception of things we couldn't even begin to imagine.

Table of Contents:

• Honeymoon in Hell - novelette
• Too Far - short story
• Man of Distinction - short story
• Millennium - short story
• The Dome - short story
• Blood - short story
• Hall of Mirrors - short story - short story
• Experiment - [Two Timer - 1] - short story
• The Last Martian - short story
• Sentry - [Two Timer - 2] - short story
• Mouse - short story
• Naturally - short story
• Voodoo - short story
• Arena - novelette
• Keep Out - short story
• First Time Machine - short story
• And the Gods Laughed - short story
• The Weapon - short story
• A Word from Our Sponsor - short story
• Rustle of Wings - short story
• Imagine - poem

Includes the novels:

Gateway to Darkness (1949)

Gateway to Glory (1950)

Martians Go Home (1955)

Rogue in Space (1957)

The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953)

The Mind Thing (1951)

What Mad Universe (1949)

THEY WERE GREEN, THEY WERE LITTLE, THEY WERE BALD AS BILLIARD BALLS AND THEY WERE EVERYWHERE!

Luke Devereaux was a science fiction writer, holed up in a desert shack waiting for inspiration. He was the first to see a Martian - but he certainly wasn't the last. It was estimated that one billion of them had arrived - one to every three human beings on Earth. Obnoxious green creatures who could be seen and heard (but not harmed) and who probed private sex lives as shamelessly as they exposed government secrets.

No one knew why they had come. No one knew how to make them go away - except perhaps, Luke Devereaux. Unfortunately he was going slightly bananas, so it wouldn't be easy. But for a science fiction writer nothing was impossible.

One of the great pulp writers, Fredric Brown (1906-1972) combined a flair for the horrific, a quirky sense of humor, and a wild imagination, and published many classic novels in the mystery and science fiction genres.

But he was also a master of the "short-short story," tales only a page or two in length, but hard-hitting and with a wicked twist at the end. Nightmares and Geezenstacks (1961) collects 47 short gems by Brown, ranging from science fiction to noir crime to horror, including the chilling and unforgettable "The Geezenstacks".

Long unobtainable, Brown's classic collection returns to print for the first time in almost 40 years and is sure to please both longtime fans and those who are discovering this brilliant writer for the first time.

Contents:

• 1 - Nasty - (1959) - short story
• 3 - Abominable - (1960) - short story
• 6 - Rebound - (1960) - short story
• 9 - Nightmare in Gray - (1961) - short story
• 11 - Nightmare in Green - (1961) - short story
• 12 - Nightmare in White - (1961) - short story
• 14 - Nightmare in Blue - (1961) - short story
• 16 - Nightmare in Yellow - (1961) - short story
• 19 - Nightmare in Red - (1961) - short story
• 20 - Unfortunately - (1958) - short story
• 22 - Granny's Birthday - (1960) - short story
• 25 - Cat Burglar - (1961) - short story
• 27 - The House - (1960) - short story
• 30 - Second Chance - (1961) - short story
• 33 - Great Lost Discoveries I - Invisibility - [Great Lost Discoveries - 1] - (1961) - short story
• 35 - Great Lost Discoveries II - Invulnerability - [Great Lost Discoveries - 2] - (1961) - short story
• 37 - Great Lost Discoveries III - Immortality - [Great Lost Discoveries - 3] - (1961) - short story
• 39 - Dead Letter - (1961) - short story
• 40 - Recessional - (1961) - short story
• 42 - Hobbyist - non-genre - (1961) - short story
• 45 - The Ring of Hans Carvel - (1961) - short story
• 46 - Vengeance Fleet - (1950) - short story (variant of Vengeance, Unlimited)
• 49 - Rope Trick - (1959) - short story
• 51 - Fatal Error - (1961) - short story
• 53 - The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver I - [The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver - 1] - (1961) - short story
• 55 - The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver II - [The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver - 2] - (1961) - short story
• 56 - The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver III - [The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver - 3] - (1961) - short story
• 59 - Expedition - (1956) - short story
• 61 - Bright Beard - (1961) - short story
• 63 - Jaycee - (1955) - short story
• 65 - Contact - (1960) - short story (variant of Earthmen Bearing Gifts)
• 68 - Horse Race - (1961) - short story
• 70 - Death on the Mountain - (1961) - short story
• 74 - Bear Possibility - (1960) - short story
• 76 - Not Yet the End - (1941) - short story
• 79 - Fish Story - (1961) - short story
• 82 - Three Little Owls (A Fable) - (1961) - short story
• 85 - Runaround - (1942) - short story
• 90 - Murder in Ten Easy Lessons - (1945) - short story
• 100 - Dark Interlude - (1951) - short story and Mack Reynolds
• 109 - Entity Trap - (1950) - short story (variant of From These Ashes ...)
• 128 - The Little Lamb - (1953) - short story
• 142 - Me and Flapjack and the Martians - (1952) - short story and Mack Reynolds
• 151 - The Joke - (1948) - short story
• 162 - Cartoonist - (1951) - short story and Mack Reynolds
• 171 - The Geezenstacks - (1943) - short story
• 182 - The End - (1961) - short story

The Roamers of the Cosmos Sought Intelligent Life - But They Found That Earth's Bipeds Didn't Make Sense!

This short story is included in the collections:

• Nightmares and Geezenstacks (1962), Fredric Brown
• The Best Short Stories of Fredric Brown (1982), Fredric Brown

It first appeared in the Winter, 1941 Issue of Captain Future magazine, available free on Internet Archives.

He had no name, no language, no friends. He had not been born and he could not multiply. He had just 'Happened' - an accidental combination of atoms that could think and learn and do a lot of incredible things. He had floated free in space for billions of years, for all he knew he was the only living thing in the Universe. So when he met three human beings wrangling and bickering in their funny-looking space ship, his whole life changed. Because he suddenly knew that he could make them do anything he wanted.

Contents:

• 9 - Introduction (Science-Fiction Carnival) - essay by Fredric Brown
• 12 - Preface (Science-Fiction Carnival) - essay by Mack Reynolds
• 15 - The Wheel of Time - (1950) - short story by Robert Arthur
• 37 - SRL Ad - (1952) - short story by Richard Matheson
• 49 - A Logic Named Joe - (1946) - short story by Murray Leinster
• 71 - Simworthy's Circus - (1950) - short story by Larry T. Shaw
• 89 - The Well-Oiled Machine - (1950) - short story by H. B. Fyfe
• 109 - Venus and the Seven Sexes - (1949) - novella by William Tenn
• 163 - The Swordsmen of Varnis - (1950) - short story by Clive Jackson
• 167 - Paradox Lost - (1943) - short story by Fredric Brown
• 189 - Muten - (1948) - short story by Eric Frank Russell
• 211 - The Martians and the Coys - (1951) - short story by Mack Reynolds
• 227 - The Ego Machine - (1952) - novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
• 283 - The Cosmic Jackpot - (1948) - short story by George O. Smith
• 301 - The Abduction of Abner Greer - (1941) - short story by Nelson S. Bond

Nine startling adventures of humans and other beings, by the first master of science fiction and fantasy, Fredric Brown.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Introduction (Space on My Hands)
• 3 - Something Green
• 15 - Crisis, 1999
• 36 - Pi in the Sky
• 69 - Knock
• 82 - All Good BEMs
• 95 - Daymare
• 144 - Nothing Sirius
• 165 - Star Mouse
• 191 - Come and Go Mad

Starduster Yes, I'm Max Andrews. I'm one of the guys who fought and bled and worked to get to Mars. I figure what I gave up in those early years gave me the right to pilot the next big jump. I've lied and stolen for that right. I'd have killed, too, but I didn't have top. Instead, I let a woman give her life so I could have my chance, my door to space. You think I'd stop at anything, now? I'll be on that rocket, blasting away on America's biggest adventure, the hop out into the stars themselves Only Fred Brown could have written this deeply moving science fiction novel about one man's epic, life-long struggle to open mankind's pathway to the star

The Mind Thing is an alien who was unfortunately transported from its own planet to Earth as punishment for a crime that it committed on its own planet. The mind thing is nothing more than a brain in a turtle like shell, but it has the power to take over another mind (human or animal) while that person is asleep. However, it can only leave that mind upon the person or animal's death. It thus can only leave a human's mind by forcing the person to commit suicide. It wants to go home and needs a human to build it a "projector" to get it back home. It takes over many animal and human minds in order to accomplish its goal.

BUG-EYED MONSTERS ON BROADWAY Pulp SF magazine editor Keith Winton was answering a letter from a teenage fan when the first moon rocket fell back to Earth and blew him away. But where to? Greenville, New York, looked the same, but Bems (Bug-Eyed Monsters) just like the ones on the cover of Startling Stories walked the streets without attracting undue comment. And when he brought out a half-dollar coin in a drugstore, the cops wanted to shoot him on sight as an Arcturian spy. Wait a minute. Seven-foot purple moon-monsters? Earth at war with Arcturus? General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Venus Sector? What mad universe was this? One thing was for sure: Keith Winton had to find out fast - or he'd be good and dead, in this universe or any other.

Deep in the Australian bush, Shannon Scott is holed up in a cabin with his brother, Rohan, waiting out the catastrophic effects of worldwide disease and a breakdown of global economies. After months of isolation, Shannon imagines there's nothing he doesn't know about his older brother, or himself - until a mysterious woman slips under their late-night watch and past their loaded guns.

Denny Cassidy is beautiful and a survivor. Her inclusion into cabin life brings about the need for a new set of rules. Soon the brothers begin to look to her as a source of comfort, hope and intimacy... Or is her warmth just a trap? Could she actually be a cold tactician, a woman with a deadly agenda?

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 3, 1981. There are no other known publications available at this time.

IN A VESSEL THAT SAILS ON A TIMELESS SEA, A GOD SINGS OF HUMAN MORTALITY...

Hear then of a time when the Lochlannach first came a viking into Eire, of a time when the gentle Christos was new-come to the land and an elder magic flickered still--and once in a great while, under just the right conditions and with a very special curse, might flare up into full life again.

Enslaved by fairies in sixth-century Ireland, Tadh MacNiall and his wife, Maire, are returned to the land of mortals in the twentieth century when the fairy empire disintegrates.

Swords and Shields. Faith and Magic.

Grab your weapons and prepare, for the enemy is on the move.

High fantasy and mighty conflicts go hand-in-hand. In great wars, armies rise to fight evil hordes and heroes struggle to push beyond their imperfections to save the day. These stories include more than just epic landscapes and characters... they also feature epic battles.

Imagine a doctor struggling to identify the spy who has infiltrated his company's ranks and poisoned his colleagues or a boy suspected of murder by a king yet protected by a princess as he helps her father against his own people. Imagine a butcher discovering that he's called to lead an uprising, or a First Born knowing that she must betray her own in order to save humanity.

The possibilities are endless, but at the heart they have this in common: soldiers--ordinary and otherwise-struggling against extraordinary odds to survive the day. They must withstand dark magic, dodge enemy blades, and defy the odds to survive SHATTERED SHIELDS.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Jennifer Brozek
• Ashes and Starlight - shortstory by David Farland
• The Fixed Stars - shortstory by Seanan McGuire
• The Keeper Of Names - shortstory by Larry Correia
• The Smaller We Are - shortstory by John Helfers
• Invictus - shortstory by Annie Bellet
• Rising Above - shortstory by Sarah A. Hoyt
• A Cup Of Wisdom - shortstory by Joe Zieja
• Words Of Power - shortstory by Wendy N. Wagner
• Lightweaver in Shadow - shortstory by Gray Rinehart
• Hoofsore and Weary - shortstory by Cat Rambo
• Vengeance - shortstory by Robin Wayne Bailey
• Deadfall - shortstory by Nancy Fulda
• Yael of the Strings - shortstory by John R. Fultz
• The Gleaners - shortstory by Dave Gross
• Bonded Men - shortstory by James L. Sutter
• Bone Candy - shortstory by Glen Cook
• First Blood - shortstory by Elizabeth Moon

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Here, gathered for the first time in a single volume, are seven stories that portray a world in which love has gone terribly awry--where unholy desires lead to chaos, madness and death. From the bestselling author of Obsession, The Hungry Moon and Incarnate.

Table of Contents:

• The Bare Bones: An Introduction - (1987) - essay by Clive Barker
• Dolls - (1976) - novelette
• The Other Woman - (1976) - novelette
• Lilith's - (1976) - short story
• The Seductress - (1977) - novelette
• Stages - (1987) - novelette
• Loveman's Comeback - (1977) - novelette
• Merry May - (1987) - novelette

Later editions also include:

• The Limits of Fantasy - (1992) - short story
• The Body in the Window - (1995) - short story
• Kill Me Hideously - (1997) - short story

Contents:

• 1 - Introduction (The Incredible Planet) - [Mightiest Machine] - short story
• 5 - The Incredible Planet - [Mightiest Machine] - novelette
• 47 - The Interstellar Search - [Mightiest Machine] - novella
• 177 - The Infinite Atom - [Mightiest Machine] - novella

This debut collection from Nebula-nominated author Beth Cato brings together works that span history and space, a showcase of vividly imagined speculative stories that range from introspective and intense to outright whimsical. Here you'll find the souls of horses bonded into war machines of earth and air, toilet gnomes on the rampage, magical pies, a mad scientist mother, a bitter old man who rages against giant extraterrestrial robots, and a sentient house that longs to be a home. The book features 28 stories and 6 poems, and includes Cato's acclaimed story "The Souls of Horses."

Millard Fillmore Pierce, Class 2 Arbiter, is lost. And when you're in the service of the Spiral Federation, getting found again is no easy task. The paperwork alone could take years.

But when Pierce's ship is captured by an alien dreadnought, the nightmare only gets worse: The aliens are intent on galactic conquest, and they intend to start with Pierce.

The plot gets thicker and thicker from that point on, as three of science fiction's most accomplished storytellers attempt to write each other into a corner.

A tale of nineteenth-century India - of Sanjay, a poet, and Sikander, a warrior; of hoofbeats thundering through the streets of Calcutta; of great wars and love affairs and a city gone mad with poetry. Woven into it are the adventures of a young Indian criss-crossing America in a car with his friends.

A good thief barters in goods. A great one deals in shadows.

A Shadow all of Light is a stylish, elegant, episodic fantasy novel by award-winning author and former poet laureate Fred Chappell.

Falco, a young man from the country, arrives in the port city of Tardocco with the ambition of becoming an apprentice shadow thief. Falco's tests and adventures teach him to break through ingenious security traps and drop him among con men, monsters, pirates, and the King of Cats.

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared as a chapbook. The story can also be foundin the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is included in the collection Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories (2009).

Tiptree nominated short story. First appeared in the collection Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You (1996)

World Fantasy Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in the collection More Shapes Than One (1991). The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

"The Goophered Grapevine" was Chesnutt's first Uncle Julius story. The story introduces John, the white Northern businessman who comes South after the War to buy a plantation and grow grapes. In this story, Uncle Julius tells John and his wife Annie about how the grape vines in the area were conjured long ago by a master who wanted to stop the slaves from stealing the grapes.

This short story can be found at Atlantic Magazine archives here or in the anthology Dark Matter.

Stoker Award-winning novelist Douglas Clegg (Afterlife, The Hour Before Dark, and over a dozen other best-selling novels of contemporary horror) sets his rich imagination to the task of reinventing Arthurian legend, and the results are spectacular. A young monk becomes enthralled by the story a mysterious prisoner begins to tell as he tends to his wounds. The prisoner is Mordred, bastard son of King Arthur Pendragon and his half sister Morgan Le Fay, who has been arrested for murder and treason. His story is one of ambition, power, and betrayal, and it will change the monk's life forever.

In Clegg's ambitious reimagining of Camelot, Mordred, the traditional villain of Arthurian legend, emerges as a heroic and romantic figure, torn between his powerful mother's desire for revenge against Arthur, his own conflicted feelings toward the father who betrayed him, and his passionate love affair with a knight in King Arthur's court: Lancelot. The first of a trilogy, Mordred, Bastard Son sets the stage for an epic adventure of love, friendship, magic, war, and betrayal, a fresh, dazzling chapter in the Arthurian canon.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - First Lesson - (1956) - short story
• 18 - Stickeney and the Critic - (1953) - short story
• 24 - Stair Trick - (1952) - short story
• 29 - Minister Without Portfolio - (1952) - short story
• 37 - Birds Can't Count - (1955) - short story
• 45 - The Word - (1953) - short story
• 50 - The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak - (1958) - short story
• 61 - Winning Recipe - (1952) - short story
• 65 - Letters from Laura - (1954) - short story
• 71 - The Last Prophet - (1955) - short story
• 79 - Mr. Sakrison's Halt - (1956) - short story
• 86 - The Wild Wood - (1957) - short story
• 95 - The Little Witch of Elm Street - (1956) - short story
• 104 - A Day for Waving - (1957) - short story
• 116 - The Gay Deceiver - short story
• 124 - A Red Heart and Blue Roses - short story

Stickeney is not precisely a human, but a supernormal being who is amiable enough if well fed and kept away from visiting literary firemen. As was to be expected, Miss Clingerman understands Stickeney and his prejudices; completely unexpected is the deadpan hilarity with which she tells Stickeney's heartrending story.

This short story appears in the collections:

• A Cupful of Space (1961), by Mildred Clingerman
• The Clingerman Files (2017), by Mildred Clingerman

This novelette originally appeared in the February 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is available free on Luminist.

Widely acclaimed as one of the first successful female science fiction authors, Mildred Clingerman returns with the exciting follow up to her 1961 science fiction collection, A Cupful of Space. Her stories tend to wed a literate tone to subject matters whose ominousness is perhaps more submerged than the horrors under the skin made explicit in the work of Shirley Jackson, but equally as deadly.

Clingerman's new anthology, The Clingerman Files, includes all of her originally published stories; The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak, Mr. Sakrison's Halt, Wild Wood, The Little Witch of Elm Street and many other favorites. Also included are previously unpublished works; Top Hand, Tribal Customs, The Birthday Party, Fathers of Daughters and many more soon to be favorites. The key to her stories is that they appear simple and straightforward, but each takes a twist or turn that, even when you're tempted to guess where they're heading, they take you there in a way you would never have bargained on. Other writers of the period tried to make big splashes. Clingerman, it seems, prided herself in concealing her effects within her masterfully constructed sentences. They barely make a ripple on the surface; all their power and drive lurk deep down below.

So many of her stories are alive with the underpinning notion that the cosmological vistas we spy at the end ends of telescopes and various other means of measurement belong to the very same universe under our feet. We're not apart from the universe, we're a part of it. Nearly every story here is alive with that sensibility, in the truest sense of that word. In every sentence there is a note (a gentle one, but insistent) of silent rebellion, a surreptitious snarl, entreating you to see that not the everyday, but an undiscovered marvel. May these eloquent rebellions be undiscovered no longer.

Welcome to the world of Mildred Clingerman!

Table of Contents::

• Memories of Mildred - essay by Kendall Clingerman Burling
• Mildred Clingerman: The Science of Magic and the Magic of the Commenplace - essay by Richard Chwedyk
• First Lesson - (1956) - short story
• Stickeney and the Critic - (1953) - short story
• Stair Trick - (1952) - short story
• Minister Without Portfolio - (1952) - short story
• Birds Can't Count - (1955) - short story
• The Word - (1953) - short story
• The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak - (1958) - short story
• Winning Recipe - (1952) - short story
• Letters from Laura - (1954) - short story
• The Last Prophet - (1955) - short story
• Mr. Sakrison's Halt - (1956) - short story
• The Wild Wood - (1957) - short story
• The Little Witch of Elm Street - (1956) - short story
• A Day for Waving - (1957) - short story
• The Gay Deceiver - (1961) - short story
• Red Hearts and Blue Roses - short story (variant of A Red Heart and Blue Roses 1961)
• Little Girl - short story
• Tutti Frutti Delight - short story
• The Stray - short story
• The Man Who Stole Tomorrow - short story
• Grandma's Refuge - short story
• Sorrow for the Need - short story
• You Remember Charles? - short story
• Size 5 1/2 B - short story
• Apologia - short story
• The Tea Party - short story
• The Vine - short story
• Tribal Customs - short story
• A Window for Mr. Stevens - short story
• The Man Eater - short story
• The List - short story
• The Telling Day - short story
• Threading a Closed Loop - short story
• Top Hand - short story
• A Time to Be Bold - short story
• The Birthday Party - short story
• A Stranger and a Pilgrim - short story
• On the Nicer Side - short story
• The Fathers of Daughters - short story
• Watermelon Weather - short story
• A Note from Eleanor - short story
• All Stories by Mildred Clingerman Bibliography - essay by uncredited

This is about a wealthy bore whose only distinction was that he knew the forgotten cause of - but Mrs. Clingerman lets her story develop and reveal itself so easily that a blurb has no business even stating the theme.

This short story appears in the collections:

• A Cupful of Space (1961), by Mildred Clingerman
• The Clingerman Files (2017), by Mildred Clingerman
• The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fifth Series (1956), edited by Anthony Boucher

This novelette originally appeared in the August 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is available free on Luminist.

A warm and gay story of magic in a quiet residential neighborhood, with a child-heroine who is all too literally bewitching,

This short story appears in the collections:

• A Cupful of Space (1961), by Mildred Clingerman
• The Clingerman Files (2017), by Mildred Clingerman

This story originally appeared in the April 1957 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

"That Seriously Obnoxious Time I Was Stuck at Witch Rimelda's One Hundredth Birthday Party" is a seriously funny story set in the world of Seriously Wicked, a young adult fantasy novel by Tina Connolly, the acclaimed author of Ironskin. Get ready to embrace your angsty inner witch at a pool party teeming with krakens, hexes, and cursed banana bread.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

In April 1945, the Allies are charging toward Berlin from the west, the Russians from the east. For Hitler, the situation is hopeless. But at this turning point in history, another war is about to explode.

To win World War II, the Allies dealt with the devil. Joseph Stalin helped FDR, Churchill, and Truman crush Hitler. But what if "Uncle Joe" had given in to his desire to possess Germany and all of Europe? In this stunning novel, Robert Conroy picks up the history of the war just as American troops cross the Elbe into Germany. Then Stalin slams them with the brute force of his enormous Soviet army.

From American soldiers and German civilians trapped in the ruins of Potsdam to U.S. military men fighting behind enemy lines, from a scholarly Russia expert who becomes a secret player in a new war to Stalin's cult of killers in Moscow, this saga captures the human face of international conflict. With the Soviets vastly outnumbering the Americans--but undercut by chronic fuel shortages and mistrust--Eisenhower employs a brilliant strategy of retreat to buy critical time for air superiority. Soon, Truman makes a series of controversial decisions, enlisting German help and planning to devastate the massive Red Army by using America's ultimate and most secret weapon.

A dazzling inferno by day, a frigid tundra by night...

Five freedom-loving companions have escaped the dungeons of the mighty Sultan of Fazir: a female rebel nomad, a heretic priest, a panther shapeshifter, a thief from the city gutters, a young noble. It is up to them to foil the Faziri conquest.

Not only must they flee the relentless pursuit of the Invincibles, the Sultan's deadly lancers, but they must defeat subterranean behemoths and jealous desert jii, rabid gnoles and cruel necromancers... and worse.

Lucy Corin's daring debut story collection leads the reader through a world where characters behave normally in the most extreme situations and bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. Unpredictable and playful, Corin brilliantly dissects time, people, places, and things, truly rendering how it feels to be human.

It was a desperate choice. Stay and die, or accept cryosleep and wake in the near future cured. Leslie Burke chose to sleep.

She awakens to the unthinkable--four thousand years and more have passed. Leslie and others like her are revived as scarcely tolerated refugees from the past.

Beset with loneliness and confusion, Leslie grapples with the enormity of the changes around her. Faxims live alongside humans, but she quickly realizes that the greed and duplicity of the human heart haven't changed.

Concerned only with finding a place for herself in a new world, Leslie can't fathom why she is singled out for scrutiny by the ruling Council. Who can she call friend? How can she trust her own heart, especially regarding the alluring--but not quite human--Aimée?

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - essay by Michael Kurland
• Introduction - essay by Randall Garrett
• Sacheverell - (1964) - short story
• The Lord of Central Park - (1970) - novelette
• The Grantha Sighting - (1958) - short story
• The Singular Events.... - (1962) - short story
• Dagon - (1959) - short story
• I Weep, I Cry, I Glorify - novelette
• The 13th Brumaire - short story
• Lemuria Revisited - novelette
• In Which the Lodge Is Tiled - short story
• Partial Comfort - novelette
• Afterword for The Redward Edward Papers - essay
• Afterword to Entire Book - essay

Elizabeth Mann, haunted by self-destructive habits, thinks that leaving New York will solve her problems. During a trip to London she comes face to face with the skeleton of the famous criminal Jonathan Wild. Her obsession with the thief is interrupted by an encounter with Gideon Streetcar, an infertility specialist and future lover.

At an auction a few weeks into their relationship, Gideon bids on a box of memoirs by Jonathan Wild's second wife, Mary. Her journals are doled out sparingly throughout the novel, leaving the reader and Elizabeth breathless for what happens next.

Influenced by conversations with Gideon about cloning possibilities, she enlists Gideon's help to allow her to give birth to the clone of Wild. Elizabeth is implanted with an egg with Wild's DNA and soon shows signs of pregnancy.

Both deadpan detective novel and twisted historical romance, Heredity shows how the past, present and future are linked. As the book ends, both heroines find themselves in similar situations: pregnant and damaged by the past but determined to survive.

Nelson used to be a radical journalist, but now he works for Monad, one of the world's leading corporations. Monad make the Dr Easys, the androids which patrol London's streets: assisting police, easing tensions, calming the populace. But Monad also makes the Red Men - tireless, intelligent, creative and entirely virtual corporate workers - and it's looking to expand the programme. So Nelson is put in charge of Redtown: a virtual city, inhabited by copies of real people going about their daily business, in which new policies, diseases and disasters can be studied in perfect simulation. Nelson finds himself at the helm of a grand project whose goals appear increasingly authoritarian and potentially catastrophic. As the boundaries between Redtown and the real world become ever more brittle, and revolutionary factions begin to align themselves against the Red Men, Nelson finds himself forced to choose sides: Monad or his family, the corporation or the community, the real or the virtual.

'The Red Men' is at heart a novel about a character wrestling with his conscience, set against a pervasive and Orwellian vision of contemporary society: surveillance, automation, biotechnology, and their implications for our humanity.

Installing a network for the Church of Accelerated Redemption is just another crappy job in a series of crappy jobs for Lisa, an American engineer stuck doing menial work in Paris. That the Church uses artificial intelligences to power its never-ending prayer machines doesn't interest her at all: they're paying, and she needs enough money to survive in an increasingly crumbling world. Until a demonstration outside the Church's headquarters, and the appearance of Stéphane, an enigmatic man Lisa finds herself powerfully drawn to. What lies beneath his headscarf, why is he so interested in the Church--and how far will she be willing to go in order to earn his trust?

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science-Fiction (2010), edited by Jetse de Vries.

JF Dubeau's debut novel, The Life Engineered begins in the year 3594, where humanity is little more than a memory--a legend of the distant past destined to reappear. Capeks, a race of artificial creatures originally created by humans, have inherited the galaxy and formed a utopian civilization built on the shared goal of tirelessly working to prepare for their makers' return.

One moment a cop dying in the line of duty in Boston, the next "reborn" as a Capek, Dagir must find her place in this intricate society. That vaguely remembered "death" was but the last of hundreds of simulated lives, distilling her current personality. A robot built for rescue and repair, she finds her abilities tested immediately after her awakening when the large, sentient facility that created her is destroyed, marking the only instance of murder the peaceful Capeks have ever known. For the first time in their history, conflicting philosophies clash, setting off a violent civil war that could lay waste to the stars themselves.

Dagir sets off on a quest to find the killers, and finds much more than she sought. As the layers of the Capeks' past peel away to reveal their early origins, centuries-old truths come to light. And the resulting revelations may tear humanity's children apart--and destroy all remnants of humankind

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Hugo and Nebula Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in New Worlds, #185 December 1968. The story has been reprinted many times. It can be found in the anthologies:

• World's Best Science Fiction: 1969, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr
• Nebula Award Stories Five (1970), edited by James Blish
• The Shores Beneath (1971), edited by James Sallis
• The Hugo Winners, Volume 2: (1963-70) (1971), edited by Isaac Asimov
• The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume III (1981), edited by George W. Proctor and Arthur C. Clarke
• The Best of the Nebulas (1989), edited by Ben Bova
• Nebula Awards Showcase 2015, edited by Greg Bear

It is included in the collections Driftglass (1971), Distant Stars (1981), The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (1986), Driftglass/Starshards (1993) and Aye, and Gomorrah: And Other Stories (2003).

A hunted community. A haunted author. A horror that spans centuries.

Men are disappearing from Toronto's gay village. They're the marginalized, the vulnerable. One by one, stalked and vanished, they leave behind small circles of baffled, frightened friends. Against the shifting backdrop of homophobia throughout the decades, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and riots against raids to gentrification and police brutality, the survivors face inaction from the law and disinterest from society at large. But as the missing grow in number, those left behind begin to realize that whoever or whatever is taking these men has been doing so for longer than is humanly possible.

Woven into their stories is David Demchuk's own personal history, a life lived in fear and in thrall to horror, a passion that boils over into obsession. As he tries to make sense of the relationship between queerness and horror, what it means for gay men to disappear, and how the isolation of the LGBTQ+ community has left them profoundly exposed to monsters that move easily among them, fact and fiction collide and reality begins to unravel.

Cross frontiers of fear into chill realms of terror

Strange and terrible experiences await you in this book. A mis-spawned, murderous abomination lurking in its shuttered prison, waiting for its chance to escape... a man's mind wrenched through aeons of time and imprisoned in an alien body... a "window" that looks out across the dimensions onto scenes of grotesque monstrosities about to break through into our world...an occult experimenter trying to acheove reptilian longevity - and horribly succeeding: these and more stories from th eouter limits of horror are here. Each one will transport you into icy territories of unimaginable fear...

H. P. LOVECRAFT
the century's greatest master of supernatural terror, left several stories unfinished at his untimely death. August Derleth, his friend and fellow writer, skillfully completed them. The stories in this volume are the result of this unique collaberation.

Contains:

• The Survivor
• Wentworth's Day
• The Peabody Heritage
• The Gable Window
• The Ancestor
• The Shadow Out of Space
• The Lamp of Alhazred
• The Fisherman of Falcon Point
• The Dark Brotherhood
• The Shuttered Room

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Love in Vein (1994), edited by Poppy Z. Brite and Martin H. Greenberg. The story is included in the collection Caliban and Other Tales (2002).

Everyone--even the generals--hated the non-war. It cost a great deal, and there was no profit in it: it was insane. Yet allmost all of the adults were too deeply tangled in the system that produced the non-war to see their way out. That was almost the definaition of being an adult: That you couldn't see the way out...

But the children were tied by no such fetters of attitude and preconception. And one hundred and two strangely gifted orphans saw a way out very clearly.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1967) - essay
• 102 H-Bombs - (1965) - novelette
• The Sightseers - (1965) - shortstory
• Final Audit - (1963) - shortstory
• The Vamp - (1965) - shortstory
• Utopia? Never! - (1963) - shortstory
• The Return of the Medusae - (1963) - shortstory
• The Princess' Carillon - (1963) - shortstory
• Genetic Coda - (1964) - shortstory
• White Fang Goes Dingo - (1965) - novelette
• The Demi-Urge - (1963) - shortstory
• Dangerous Flags - (1964) - shortstory
• Invaded by Love - (1966) - novelette
• Bone of Contention - (1966) - shortstory
• Leader of the Revolution - (1965) - shortstory

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It was originally published on Salon, August 28th 2002. The story can also be found in the anthology Nebula Awards Showcase 2005, edited by Jack Dann and the collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2003).

Read the full story for free at Salon.

'The Masque of the Red Death' tracks an uber-wealthy survivalist and his followers as they hole up and attempt to ride out the collapse of society.

This novelette originally appeared in the collection Radicalized (2019).

A monk belonging to a sysadmin order tracks "An Anomaly" in the real world.

This novelette originally appeared on Tor.com, August 6, 2008. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 14 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection With a Little Help (2009).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

To save a galactic kingdom from revolution, Kindred mind-pairings were created to ensure each and every person would be seen and heard, no matter how rich or poor...

Joy Abara knows her place. A commoner from the lowly planet Hali, she lives a simple life--apart from the notoriety that being Kindred to the nobility's most infamous playboy brings.

Duke Felix Hamdi has a plan. He will exasperate his noble family to the point that they agree to let him choose his own future and finally meet his Kindred face-to-face.

Then the royal family is assassinated, putting Felix next in line for the throne... and accused of the murders. Someone will stop at nothing until he's dead, which means they'll target Joy, too. Meeting in person for the first time as they steal a spacecraft and flee amid chaos might not be ideal... and neither is crash-landing on the strange backward planet called Earth. But hiding might just be the perfect way to discover the true strength of the Kindred bond and expose a scandal--and a love--that may decide the future of a galaxy.

When Liz Drake's best friend vanishes, nothing can stop her nightmares. Driven by the certainty he needs her help, she crosses a continent to search for him. She finds Blake comatose in a Vancouver hospital, victim of a mysterious accident that claimed his lover's life - in her dreams he drowns.

Blake's new circle of artists and mystics draws her in, but all of them are lying or keeping dangerous secrets. Soon nightmare creatures stalk the waking city, and Liz can't fight a dream from the daylight world: to rescue Blake she must brave the darkest depths of the Dreamlands.

Even the attempt could kill her, or leave her mind trapped or broken. And if she succeeds, she must face the monstrous Yellow King, whose slave Blake is on the verge of becoming forever.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, July 2012.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Coming back into town after a hunting expedition, Alexandre Dumas witnesses an incredible scene: a man has come to hand himself in to the mayor after decapitating his wife, terrified by the fact that her severed head spoke to him even after her death. This prompts the guests at a dinner Dumas attends later that evening to exchange stories of death and the supernatural, ranging from accounts of the guillotine during the Terror to tales of vampires and fratricide in the Carpathians.

The Thousand and One Ghosts - here presented in its first and only translation into English - is a gloriously macabre work by the celebrated author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, which also touches on the serious political issue of capital punishment.

The city of Mera is a fortress hidden from the rest of humanity, a sanctuary for the diverse group of people rescued from death by the Oracle that rules the city. The Oracle has brought together the citizens of Mera from every land and every time period, protecting them from the ravages of time, death and the evil demon forces that howl outside the city at night. All that the Oracle asks in return is a willingness to aid the rest of humanity, calling the citizens to go forth on various missions of rescue to mortals in need of aid.

The Oracle sends Jerry out into the wilderness, accompanied by his ancient Greek friend, Killer, a world-famous lecher and juvenile delinquent with deadly combat skills. There they must rescue a woman named Ariadne, on the run with her children and seeking shelter. But children are not allowed in Mera, and Ariadne will not leave them, while Mera's evil demon enemies move closer and closer to Jerry's and Killer's temporary place of respite.

A mysterious young man has come to a small Highland town. His talent for wood carving soon wins the admiration of the weaver's daughter, Maddie. Fascinated by the silent carver, she sets out to gain his trust, only to find herself drawn into a terrifying secret that threatens everything she loves.

There is an evil presence in the carver's life that cannot be controlled, and Maddie watches her town fall under a shadow. One by one, people begin to die. Caught in the middle, Maddie must decide what matters most to her-and what price she is willing to pay to keep it.

Tabby Aykroyd thought she was coming to the dusty mansion of Seldom House to be a maid, but she's not being asked to clean or cook. Then one day a man, presumably the owner of the house, shows up with a small boy. The boy insists he's the master of the house, and curiously no one disputes him. Tabby is to be his playmate. The young master is a savage little creature, but the house itself contains far worse: Scores of dead maids and masters haunt Seldom House. Tabby is terrified for her life and the life of her young charge. But why isn't the young master afraid?

A gorgeous fantasy in the spirit of Pan's Labyrinth and John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things.

Set in a world similar to our own, during a war that parallels World War II, A Green and Ancient Light is the stunning story of a boy who is sent to stay with his grandmother for the summer in a serene fishing village. Their tranquility is shattered by the crash of a bullet-riddled enemy plane, the arrival of grandmother's friend Mr. Girandole--a man who knows the true story of Cinderella's slipper--and the discovery of a riddle in the sacred grove of ruins behind grandmother's house. In a sumptuous idyllic setting and overshadowed by the threat of war, four unlikely allies learn the values of courage and sacrifice.

As Hallowe'en draws near, 10-year-old Bridget Anne, nicknamed Dragonfly, hears unearthly noises drifting up from the basement of her Uncle Henry's funeral home. Impetuously jumping down a laundry chute to satisfy her curiosity, Dragonfly finds herself in the subterranean land of Harvest Moon, where morning never comes, where autumn leaves never desert the trees - for it is constantly Hallowe'en night. Threading her way through this perilous realm of monsters, vampires, werewolves, and worse, Dragonfly must find a way to rescue the human children imprisoned by Harvest Moon's dark masters - and to thwart an invasion of the surface world.

Primarily for adults, Dragonfly may also be enjoyed by precocious younger listeners. It is a story told in celebration of the wonder, nostalgia, and eerie delight of childhood Hallowe'ens, when jack-o'-lanterns flicker and things go bump in the night.

This novelette originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July-August 2013, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, May 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Set in the town of Redgunk, Mississippi – with a population of 400 people, a dog with black, smelly lips, and a mummy – these interwoven stories owe as much to Sophocles as they do to Flannery O'Connor, exploring the human condition against a background of swamp gas and lawnmower fumes. Redgunk is a place where Otis Zebrowsky, cable repairman, can suddenly be sucked into a mythic world older than ancient Greece; and where intelligent women like Mina Thorton can find absolute happiness in the guise of a made-to-order alien mate. In these stories of ghosts, alien abductions, and genetic experiments gone awry, immersed in a setting singing with cicadas, crawling with kudzu, and as redneck as any in the South, characters live and breathe with genuine hearts.

Contents:

• Preface - essay
• Lawnmower Moe - [Redgunk] - (1997) - short story
• The Secret of the Mummy's Brain - [Redgunk] - (1996) - short story
• Encounter in Redgunk - [Redgunk] - (1998) - short story
• Meadow Song - [Redgunk] - (1997) - short story
• Homesickness - [Redgunk] - (1999) - short story
• A God for Delphi - novelette
• How Boy Howdy Saved the World - (1999) - novelette
• Unicorn Stew - [Redgunk] - (1998) - short story
• Roadkill Fred - novelette
• Dragon of Conspiracy - [Redgunk] - (1999) - short story
• Plain Female Seeks Nice Guy - [Redgunk] - (1999) - short story
• The Miracle of Swamp Gas Jackson - novelette
• Redgunk, Texas - [Redgunk] - (1999) - short story

Mythmakers and world builders of the first order, the Eddingses spin tales that make imaginations soar. Readers have thrilled to The Belgariad and The Malloreon, magic-filled masterworks chronicling the timeless conflict between good and evil. But with those sagas brought to their triumphant conclusions, fans were left hungry for more. Now at last the wait is over. With The Redemption of Althalus, the Eddingses have created their first-ever stand-alone epic fantasy...

It would be sheer folly to try to conceal the true nature of Althalus, for his flaws are the stuff of legend. He is, as all men know, a thief, a liar, an occasional murderer, an outrageous braggart, and a man devoid of even the slightest hint of honor.

Yet of all the men in the world, it is Althalus, unrepentant rogue and scoundrel, who will become the champion of humanity in its desperate struggle against the forces of an ancient god determined to return the universe to nothingness. On his way to steal The Book from the House at the End of the World, Althalus is confronted by a cat--a cat with eyes like emeralds, the voice of a woman, and the powers of a goddess.

She is Dweia, sister to The Gods and a greater thief even than Althalus. She must be: for in no time at all, she has stolen his heart. And more. She has stolen time itself. For when Althalus leaves the House at the End of the World, much wiser but not a day older than when he'd first entered it, thousands of years have gone by.

But Dweia is not the only one able to manipulate time. Her evil brother shares the power, and while Dweia has been teaching Althalus the secrets of The Book, the ancient God has been using the dark magic of his own Book to rewrite history. Yet all is not lost. But only if Althalus, still a thief at heart, can bring together a ragtag group of men, women, and children with no reason to trust him or each other.

Boldly written and brilliantly imagined, The Redemption of Althalus is an epic fantasy to be savored in the reading and returned to again and again for the wisdom, excitement, and humor that only the Eddingses can provide.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #222 June 2009. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Sturgeon- and Locus-Award nominated novella

Camille is desperate to escape her home on colonized asteroid Vesta, journeying through space in a small cocoon pod covertly and precariously attached to a cargo ship. Anna is a newly appointed port director on asteroid Ceres, intrigued by the causes that have led so-called riders like Camille to show up at her post in search of asylum.

Conditions on Vesta are quickly deteriorating -- for one group of people in particular. The original founders agreed to split profits equally, but the Sivadier syndicate contributed intellectual property rather than more valued tangible goods. Now the rest of the populace wants payback. As Camille travels closer to Ceres, it seems ever more likely that Vesta will demand the other asteroid stop harboring its fugitives.

With "The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred," acclaimed author Greg Egan offers up a stellar, novella-length example of hard science fiction, as human and involving as it is insightful and philosophical.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Orbit 4 (1968), edited Damon Knight. The story can also be found in the anthology American Gothic Tales (1996), edited by Joyce Carol Oates, as well as the collections The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969), Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (1975) and The Essential Ellison: A 35-Year Retrospective (1987).

Ahmed is a doctor working in a far flung outpost of humanity. His way was paid for by the leaders of his faith and his atheism is a guarded secret. His encounters with the "kite people" will cause him to doubt his whole worldview however when the aliens start dying and escalating tensions between religious extremists threatens to destroy the colony's peace. WHEN THE STARS ARE SCATTERED is a moving story about alien contact, religious intolerance, and the redemptive power of the divine channeled through the spirit.

Whether that spirit is human or alien.

Following the debut of the highly-acclaimed collection, The Dark Country, comes RED DREAMS, Dennis Etchison's seminal collection that redefined the short story in modern horror. From desert highways to dark urban landscapes, Etchison weaves a world of unlimited imagination.

This special "definitive" edition features a special introduction from Dennis' good friend, the late Karl Edward Wagner, and extensive story notes by the author, and the author's own preferred texts for all the stories.

Fourteen tales from the Master of Dark Fantasy-

• Talking In The Dark
• Wet Season
• I Can Hear The Dark
• The Graveyard
• One The Pike
• Keeper Of The Light
• Black Sun
• White Moon Rising
• The Chill
• The Smell Of Death
• Drop City
• The Chair
• Not From Around Here

Moscoe Does Not Believe in Fears

When superstar TV journalist Lech Hammond heard rumors that the Martian Soviets had uncovered an alien artifact, he shipped out to Mars to investigate. But the KGB had the discovery under wraps, and with a serial killer on the loose and wild men rampaging near their secret base, they had closed ranks tighter than ever.

Hammond and his news crew were determined to break the story to the people of Earth. They never suspected that death stalked them and madness awaited them - or that, in a horrible way, the story had already been broken...

Nebula Award winning and Hugo and BSFA nominated short story.

In a far future society, people change their identities, their societal roles, even their personalities based upon the masks they must don each day. But not every citizen is content to play their mandated part, longing instead to discover who they are beneath their masks: sinner, gentleman, or beast.

The story originally appeared in Interzone, #220 February 2009, follewed a few months later by a publication in Apex Magazine, July 2009. It can also be found the Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, edited by Kevin J. Anderson.

Read the full story for free at Apex.

This short story originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 1988 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2013. It is included in the collections Peripheral Vision (1990) and Black Glass (1998).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.

This short story first appeared in Omni in July 1983. It was later reprinted in Gibson's collection Burning Chrome, and in Mirrorshades, edited by Bruce Sterling.

WFA and Nebula Award nominated short story. It first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 1992. The story can also be found in the anthologies Nebula Awards 29 (1995), edited by Pamela Sargent and Angels! (1995), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann. It is included in the collection Travellers in Magic (1994).

On the eve of World War II, a wandering magician comes to a small Hungarian village prophesying death and destruction. Eleven-year-old Kicsi believes Vörös, and attempts to aid him in protecting the village.

But the local rabbi, who possesses magical powers, insists that the village is safe, and frustrates Vörös's attempts to transport them all to safety. Then the Nazis come and the world changes.

Miraculously, Kicsi survives the horrors of the concentration camp and returns to her village to witness the final climactic battle between the rabbi and the Red Magician, the Old World and the New.

The Red Magician is a notable work of Holocaust literature and a distinguished work of fiction, as well as a marvelously entertaining fantasy that is, in the end, wise and transcendent.

Red as Blood and White as Bone by Theodora Goss is a dark fantasy about a kitchen girl obsessed with fairy tales, who upon discovering a ragged woman outside the castle during a storm, takes her in--certain she's a princess in disguise.

This Locus Award novelette is included in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 11 (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Sadie Grace is wanted for witchcraft, dead (or alive). And every hired gun in Kansas is out to collect the bounty on her head, including bona fide witch hunter Old Tom and his mysterious, mute ward, Rabbit.

On the road to Burden County, they're joined by two vagabond cowboys with a strong sense of adventure -- but no sense of purpose -- and a recently widowed schoolteacher with nothing left to lose. As their posse grows, so too does the danger.

Racing along the drought-stricken plains in a stolen red stagecoach, they encounter monsters more wicked than witches lurking along the dusty trail. But the crew is determined to get that bounty, or die trying.

In a Britain akin to this one, Vincent Rice falls off a ladder, literally at Petra Orff's feet. They introduce themselves, and he offers to take her to Metamuse, an alternative theatre experience like no other that he won tickets to in a competition he doesn't remember entering.

Vincent has a complex sense of home, and immigrant Petra senses a kindred spirit in him. As time goes on, inexplicable occurrences pile on top of one another, connected to Metamuse: certainly more than just a theatre experience. Unquiet dead seem to be reaching into the world to protest injustices both past and present.

When Lucie Sterling's niece is abducted, she knows it won't be easy to find answers. Stanton is no ordinary city: invasive digital technology has been banned, by public vote. No surveillance state, no shadowy companies holding databases of information on private citizens, no phones tracking their every move.

Only one place stays firmly anchored in the bad old ways, in a huge bunker across town: Green Valley, where the inhabitants have retreated into the comfort of full-time virtual reality--personae non gratae to the outside world. And it's inside Green Valley, beyond the ideal virtual world it presents, that Lucie will have to go to find her missing niece.

From award winning author Daryl Gregory, a thrilling and colorful Lovecraftian adventure of a teenage boy searching for his mother, and the macabre creatures he encounters.

Harrison Harrison--H2 to his mom--is a lonely teenager who's been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the "sensitives" who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school. On Harrison's first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea.

Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources--and an unusual host of allies--to defeat the danger and find his mother.

Redwood and Wildfire is a novel of what might have been. At the turn of the 20th century, minstrel shows transform into vaudeville, which slides into moving pictures. Hunkering together in dark theatres, diverse audiences marvel at flickering images. This "dreaming in public" becomes common culture and part of what transforms immigrants and "native" born into Americans. Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish man, journey from Georgia to Chicago, from haunted swampland to a "city of the future." Gifted performers and hoodoo conjurors, they struggle to call up the wondrous world they imagine, not just on stage and screen, but on city streets, in front parlours, in wounded hearts.

The power of hoodoo is the power of the community that believes in its capacities to heal and determine the course of today and tomorrow. Living in a system stacked against them, Redwood and Aidan s power and talent are torment and joy. Their search for a place to be who they want to be is an exhilarating, painful, magical adventure. Blues singers, filmmakers, haints, healers.

Otto McGavin is peaceful and idealistic by nature, an Anglo-Buddhist, who seeks employment with the Confederacion because he believes in it and its mission to protect the rights of humans and nonhumans. The only problem is that the Confederacion needs him as a Prime Operator for its secret service, the TBII, and the TBII wants Otto as a spy, a thief and an assassin.

It's not, of course, a problem for the Confederacion, which simply uses immersion therapy and hypnosis for Otto's training, and then sends him out in deep cover on a variety of dangerous missions on a number of bizarre worlds. But for Otto, it's a different matter: what he has to witness and what he is forced to do take a terrible toll on him...

This short story originally appeared in Nature, March 24, 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection A Separate War and Other Stories (2006).

Read the full story for free at Nature (*.pdf).

World-saver, or world-breaker?

The treaty that ended the civil war decreed that the men of science and the followers of the gods would split all of society between them. Yet Guild apprentice Pol was torn between the logic of science and the lure of faith, unaware that destiny had already chosen a very special role for him to play.

For Pol was about to encounter a woman of unique power, the mistress of a mysterious, forbidden castle, who would lead him down the pathways of prophecy to a strange and frightening new world...

The Ultimate List of Must-Read Horror! Curious readers and fans of monsters and the macabre, get ready to bulk up your TBR piles! Sadie "Mother Horror" Hartmann has curated the best selection of modern horror books, including plenty of deep cuts. Indulge your heart's darkest desires to be terrified, unsettled, disgusted, and heartbroken with stories that span everything from paranormal hauntings and creepy death cults to small-town terrors and apocalyptic disasters. Each recommendation includes a full synopsis as well as a quick overview of the book's themes, style, and tone so you can narrow down your next read at a glance.

Featuring a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Josh Malerman and five brand-new essays from rising voices in the genre, this illustrated reader's guide is perfect for anyone who dares to delve into the dark.

1768. Charlotte, daughter of the Habsburg Empress, arrives in Naples to marry a man she has never met. Her sister Antoine is sent to France, and in the mirrored corridors of Versailles they rename her Marie Antoinette.

The sisters are alone, but they are not powerless. When they were only children, they discovered a book of spells -- spells that work, with dark and unpredictable consequences.

In a time of vicious court politics, of discovery and dizzying change, they use the book to take control of their lives.

But every spell requires a sacrifice. And as love between the sisters turns to rivalry, they will send Europe spiralling into revolution.

Brimming with romance, betrayal, and enchantment, The Embroidered Book reimagines a dazzling period of history as you have never seen it before.

This short story originally appeared on Strange Horizons, 5 July 2010, and again on 16 January 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.

WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Love in Vein II: Eighteen More Tales of Vampiric Erotica (1997), edited by Poppy Z. Brite. The story is included in the collection Falling Idols (1998).

In exquisite prose, Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting more than three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters' lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions.

The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts, capturing the unexpected turns in its history and in our own lives. From the town's founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City with only his dog for company, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives.

At the center of everyone's life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look.

Beautifully crafted and shimmering with magic, The Red Garden is as unforgettable as it is moving.

Hogan is in the top rank of writers who write real science fiction about "real" science, and now he offers enthusiastic readers a special treat, giving them a guided tour through his many worlds. Learn new possibilities for smuggling through space travel; let Hogan explain how he personally brought about the fall of the Soviet Union; see what it would be like to rent-a-body of your choice; and much more.

Table of Contents:

• Madam Butterfly - (1997) - novelette
• How They Got Me at Baycon - essay
• Identity Crisis - (1981) - novelette
• Uprooting Again - essay
• Leapfrog - (1989) - novelette
• Boom and Slump in Space - essay
• What Really Brought Down Communism? - essay
• Last Ditch - (1992) - shortstory
• Sorry About That - essay
• AIDS Heresy and the New Bishops - essay
• Evolution Revisited - essay
• Zap Thy Neighbor - (1995) - novelette
• Ozone Politics - (1993) - essay
• Fact-Free Science - [Science Fact (Analog)] - (1995) - essay
• Out of Time - (1993) - novella

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue, June 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Originally published by Apex Magazine in August 2012, this short story was later anthologized in The Book of Apex: Volume Four of Apex Magazine (2013) and collected in A Cathedral of Myth and Bone (2019).

Read the story for free online at Apex Magazine.

Originally published by Subterranean Online in Spring 2013, this novelette has been anthologized in New York Fantastic edited by Paula Guran (2017) and collected in A Cathedral of Myth and Bone (2019).

Read the story for free online at Subterranean Magazine.

A planetary system, consisting of a star and five planets, is travelling through our galaxy and will pass close to Earth. The four largest planets are gaseous, but the fifth, named Achilles, appears capable of supporting life. Two rival expeditions - one Anglo-American and one Russian - set out to land on Achilles and explore its mysteries. But almost from the moment of their arrival things begin to go terribly wrong... and when they return to Earth, something not human will be coming back with them.

From a great distance the Yela's recorded message crackled through on the micro-earpiece: 'For the time being you have won. But I am not defeated so easily.'

That had been three years ago, after Dick Warboys had repulsed the invading Yela by firing a lithium bomb into the Sun. But now that threat seems near fulfilment as appalled scientists detect the rapid approach of a vast, engulfing cloud of hydrogen. Can humanity survive on Earth or must selected pioneers abandon it in search of a safer region of the Galaxy?

To find the answer Dick and his allies from Space suffer a perilous voyage into the realms that reach the ultimate in understanding the physical universe.

Renowned scientist John Sinclair and his old school friend Richard, a celebrated composer, are enjoying a climbing expedition in the Scottish Highlands when Sinclair disappears without a trace for thirteen hours. When he resurfaces with no explanation for his disappearance, he has undergone an uncanny alteration: a birthmark on his back has vanished. But stranger events are yet to come: things are normal enough in Britain, but in France it's 1917 and World War I is raging, Greece is in the Golden Age of Pericles, America seems to have reverted to the 18th century, and Russia and China are thousands of years in the future.

Against this macabre backdrop of coexisting time spheres, the two young men risk their lives to unravel the truth. But truth is in the mind of the beholder, and who is to say which of these timelines is the 'real' one? In October the First Is Too Late (1966), world-famous astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) explores fascinating concepts of time and consciousness in the form of a thrilling science fiction adventure that ranks among his very best.

In the 1970 of this story, Eire has become an authoritarian police state, made somewhat acceptable to the population by the vast wealth flowing from a secret and forbidden science zone occupying a large area of the South-West. Here is based the mysterious 'Industrial Corporation of Éire' which has produced a range of new technologies. Its enigmatic founders are not Irish: they settled there and resist all attempts to find out who they are. A young British scientist agrees to be sent as a spy to find out just what is going on.

It is the early twenty-first century. Humans are seeking signs of life elsewhere in the universe, but all exploratory ships have been lost without a trace--except for DSP 15. Thirty years after leaving Earth, and given up for lost, DSP 15 suddenly appears on radar screens at the space station at Mildenhall, England.

Her crew has been frozen to prevent aging, and as the ship settles to a landing, Dr. Richard Warboys eagerly waits with other scientists for word of what DSP 15 has found. But there is no crew, only a message scratched into a metal surface, signed by the captain: "If this ship returns to Earth, then mankind is in deadly peril--God help you."

Mike Jerome, a likable young TV writer, visits Professor Smitt, a physicist, who gives him an idea for a TV script: using some source of light, perhaps a laser beam, one could reduce the human structure to a form that could be transmitted into the future as electrical pulses - and thus create time travel.

On the way home Mike is hit by a taxi, and when he recovers he finds the date is 1979 - ten years in the future. This is but the beginning of a series of bewildering, fascinating ten year jumps. Mike is living the time change himself! Jumps to 1989, 1999 and so on, take Mike into such far-reaching places as London, the Northern Territory of Australia, California and the Italian Alps, for a rousing series of adventures in all sorts of bizarre circumstances.

Earth was dying...

One fourth of its population was dead. The rest had little time to live.

A mass of interstellar matter had invaded the solar system, fling planets out of orbit and blocking off the sun. In that titanic disaster, Man had one small chance to survive: Appeal to an alien intelligence that might exist and that might - or might not - care enough to help!

Young Peter, a student of Byzantine Art at Moscow University, receives, through a cryptic sentence in a lecture, a message to buy two books of his choice at a specific hour in the University bookshop. When he opens the package, a third book has been included. It is this third book which sends Peter on a series of adventures leading to the unravelling of a mysterious power source guiding the destinies of planet Earth. His quest is also intimately linked with his father's baffling disappearance.

Cameron, a tall, testy, whisky-drinking, nationalist-minded, Scottish physicist, may not have been an astronomer, but he knew the off things in the sky when he saw them. From an Australian mountaintop where he was advising on the location of a radiotelescope he saw what looked like Mars, in the wrong spot in the sky. But it wasn't Mars at all, it was a supernova... no, not a supernova but a quasar.

Knowing what would happen, Cameron dashed home to Scotland and found himself at a crossroads of his life. In the face of total catastrophe, and of intense heat, darkness and rain, he took over as natural leader with both the north and south of the United Kingdom turning to him for help.

When it comes to big dreams and schemes, young Chuck Lambert would give Walter Mitty a run for his money. In fact, Chuck's biggest dream of all is really out of this world. Because he's got his eyes on a prize in the sky. Chuck wants to buy a planet of his own....

Madman Murphy, the King of Planetary Realtors, is more than happy to oblige. He's got a whole galaxy of planets for sale. All Chuck needs is money ... and a lot of it. Eleven years later, saving every penny he can scrape up, Chuck's dream comes true. He takes possession and takes off for Planet 19453X....

One problem: Madman Murphy has sold Chuck a world of trouble. Because on Planet 19453X the water is undrinkable, the air is unbreathable, and the laws of physics don't apply. Has Chuck's dream turned into a nightmare? Not quite. As he's about to discover, sometimes, to fulfill your true desire, it's simply a matter of digging a little deeper....

By the time A Matter of Matter appeared in 1949, L. Ron Hubbard's stature as a writer was well established. As author and critic Robert Silverberg puts it: he had become a "master of the art of narrative." Hubbard's editors urged him to apply his gift for succinct characterization, original plot, deft pacing and imaginative action to the genre of science fiction and fantasy. The rest is Sci-Fi history.

Also includes the science fiction adventures, "The Conroy Diary," in which the man who opens up the universe to mankind also opens himself to charges of fraud and tax evasion; The "Obsolete Weapon", the story of an American GI involved in the 1943 invasion of Italy who slips back in time and finds himself fighting a different kind of battle--as a gladiator in ancient Rome; and "The Planet Makers", in which a great deal is at stake for the engineers who make planets habitable, but one of them has a surprising plan all his own.

Boldly go to times where no one has gone before.

While transporting a contraband Russian time machine and developmental weaponry, Private Everett Dumphee finds himself cast into new settings when the device suddenly activates.

What follows are fantastic high-tech experiences that might be called the ultimate off-road adventure. For the determined Dumphee--narrowly escaping with his life and three beautiful women--it is not necessarily a matter of will he make his destination, but when.

These four vivid characters trek through this fun and fast-moving journey like there's no tomorrow. Wherever that may be in A Very Strange Trip.

In the year A.D. 3000, Earth is a dystopian wasteland, plundered of its natural resources by alien invaders known as Psychlos. Fewer than thirty-five thousand humans survive in a handful of communities scattered across the face of a post-apocalyptic Earth.

From the ashes of humanity rises a young hero, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. Setting off on an initial quest to discover a hidden evil, Jonnie unlocks the mystery of humanity’s demise and unearths a crucial weakness in their oppressors. Spreading the seeds of revolt, Jonnie and a small band of survivors pit their quest for freedom in an all-out rebellion that erupts across the continents of Earth and the cosmic sprawl of the Psychlo empire, making it one of the best space opera books of our time.

For the fate of the Galaxy lies on the Battlefield of Earth.

Firsten Guide is a tough, wise-cracking rebel leader who's light years ahead of his time--and about to lead his crew into a battle that's Beyond All Weapons.

He and his fellow colonizers of Mars have faced a brutal crackdown engineered by Earth's tyrannical government. But the resourceful Firsten has developed an extraordinary new fuel that enables him and his hardy band to escape into space--and time.

Escape, however, is not enough. Firsten wants revenge. But the universe is full of unexpected twists and turns. Just as Prometheus flew too close to the sun, Firsten will soon discover that when you attempt to break the laws of physics, you can get burned.

Also includes the science fiction adventures "Strain," the story of a space war's brutality and one man's struggle to keep a secret under the pain of torture; and "The Invaders," in which the distant crystal mines are under attack until a technician crystallizes a unique strategy to undermine the attackers.

Contents:

• Beyond All Weapons - (1950) - short story
• Strain - (1942) - short story
• The Invaders - (1942) - novelette

Fortune hunter Billy Newman is not a man of great strength or physical courage. Like a young Johnny Depp, he gets by on his wit, wiles and good looks. And he's had quite a good run--striking gold in the Philippines and buying his very own island in the South Seas....

But there's trouble in paradise, and Billy's in the thick of it; The island's crops are failing; The island's people are dying; And the island's owner--Billy--is taking the heat; Why? Because he's angered the 75-foot-tall big-boss god of the island.

75-foot tall? To Billy, it's a laughable superstition--until he finds out just how serious the islanders are. They're out to sacrifice a beautiful young woman to the supposed god. The only way Billy can save her is to humor the locals and pretend to take the spirit on. But the joke may be on Billy, as he has to screw up some very real courage to face the very real Danger in the Dark.

Hubbard lived on Guam in 1927, while his father was assigned to the US naval station there. In his journals he describes a local superstition: the great cheese ghost named Tadamona. He wrote that the devil had the shape of a man, attained the height of coconut trees and was the cause behind all sickness and disease. To dispel the superstition, Ron descended into Tadamona's supposed abode, a great underground stream--an encounter reflected in Danger in the Dark.

Includes the fantasy adventures "The Room", in which Uncle Toby goes to his room, never to return, leaving it to his nephew to explore the magic and mystery of the place, and "He Didn't Like Cats", the story of one man's feline phobia and the hauntingly high price he pays for it.

THE GOD PROTECT THOSE WHO SERVE

Flight Lieutenant Clayton McLean had bailed out of his burning plane...but the chute failed to open! No one could have survived such an experience, yet McLean did.

It was but the first of many such impossible excapes from certain death for the Lieutenant... and each time he was spared, someone else died.

By the time McLean realized what was happening to him, and what ruthless powers protected him, it was too late. He was a man who wanted desperately to die - but knew he could not...

London 1975. The World War is grinding to a halt. A force more sinister than Hitler's Nazi regime has seized control of Europe and is systematically destroying every adversary. Ordered by his superiors to return to British Headquarters, located in a vast underground fortress, "the Lieutenant" is torn between abiding by military codes and doing what he knows is right for his country.

Is Greed good? The future of Earth and all of mankind may hang on that one question. And George Marquis Lorrilard--a space-age ace-pilot, adventurer, and fortune-hunter--is just the man to answer it.

The world is divided between Asia and the United Continents--two great superpowers locked in eternal warfare. But the balance of power is about to shift in Asia's favor. They have developed a top-secret weapon--the cohesion projector--that could lead to annihilation on an unprecedented scale.

But as far as Lorrilard is concerned, the number one problem with the projector is that it stands in the way of his profits. Can he find a way to subvert the powerful weapon and resume his enterprising exploits? For millions of people on Earth survival may ultimately depend on the power of one man's Greed.

Also includes the science fiction adventures, "The Final Enemy," in which Earth discovers it faces a distant, yet devastating new foe, the identity of which is the most shocking blow of all; and "The Automagic Horse," the story of a Hollywood special effects wizard who is about to apply his movie magic to a project that is out of this world.

Contents:

• vii - Foreword: Stories from Pulp Fiction's Golden Age - (2008) - essay by Kevin J. Anderson
• 1 - Greed - (1950) - short story
• 31 - Final Enemy - (1950) - short story
• 49 - The Automagic Horse - (1949) - novelette
• 60 - The Automagic Horse - (1949) - interior artwork by Edd Cartier
• 71 - The Automagic Horse [2] - (1949) - interior artwork by Edd Cartier
• 80 - The Automagic Horse [3] - (1949) - interior artwork by Edd Cartier
• 111 - Glossary (Greed) - essay by uncredited
• 121 - L. Ron Hubbard in the Golden Age of Pulp Fiction - (2009) - essay by uncredited
• 133 - The Stories from the Golden Age (bibliography) - (2008) - essay by uncredited

Does size matter? Is bigger better? That's no small question to Tom Little--the circus midget with giant dreams.

Tom may be king of the midgets, but he's got far grander ambitions--to become the muscleman at the top, the ringmaster. Now, drawing on some dark ancient secrets and mystic texts, he's about to get his wish.

Assuming another man's identity, Tom discovers he must also take on his sins, debts, and enemies. He may be living large--but now there are those who want to make him pay for the big man's sins.

Also includes "The Last Drop," an astounding tale of a New York bartender who mixes some very magical drinks--to amazing effect.

Contents:

• vii - Foreword: Stories from Pulp Fiction's Golden Age - (2008) - essay by Kevin J. Anderson
• 1 - If I Were You - (1940) - short fiction
• 9 - If I Were You - (1940) - interior artwork by uncredited
• 53 - If I Were You [2] - (1940) - interior artwork by uncredited
• 61 - The Last Drop - (1941) - short fiction by L. Sprague de Camp and L. Ron Hubbard
• 71 - The Last Drop - (1941) - interior artwork by uncredited
• 97 - Glossary (If I Were You) - essay by uncredited
• 106 - "In writing an adventure story..." - (unknown) - essay
• 107 - L. Ron Hubbard and American Pulp Fiction - (unknown) - essay by uncredited

Renowned throughout the universe...

A star among the stars...

A timeless hero whose time is now...

Ole Doc Methuselah is his name, and saving the universe is his game.

He may be a touch absent-minded, a tad disorganized, with a slight tendency to lose all perspective in the presence of an attractive woman... but when it comes to saviors of the universe, you take what you can get.

And what you get with Ole Doc Methuselah--the most famous member of the most elite organization in the universe, the Soldiers of Light--is action, spectacle, mystery, and plenty of laughs along the way.

With his razor-sharp scalpel, hypodermic needles, and doctor's bag of tricks, he journeys to the far corners of the cosmos, vowing to cut out the corruption, confront the cruelty, and contain the warped psychology that plagues mankind--and all other kinds out there.

Yes, there is intelligent life in the universe after all. You'll find it in Ole Doc Methuselah. So if you're looking for an adventure to remember, this is just what the doctor ordered.

Contents:

• [iii] - Foreword - essay by uncredited
• 1 - Ole Doc Methuselah - (1947) - novelette
• 36 - Her Majesty's Aberration - (1948) - short story
• 52 - The Expensive Slaves - (1947) - short story
• 66 - The Great Air Monopoly - (1948) - novelette
• 98 - Plague - (1949) - novelette
• 126 - A Sound Investment - (1949) - novelette
• 150 - Ole Mother Methuselah - (1950) - novelette

Things are disappearing. Parts of buildings, parts of people, parts of the whole world--they're here today, gone tomorrow. Old Shellback--a character as crazy-smart as Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future--thinks he needs glasses. But all he really has to do is open his eyes... and see the light.

Or so says George Smiley--otherwise known as the Messiah. George claims that the reason things are vanishing is because he wants them to go away. He has no more use for the world... and so it goes. Say goodbye. But Old Shellback has a different idea, and since he is the most stubborn man in the universe, you might want to hear him out.

What's Shellback's idea? That two can play at this game. While George is making this world disappear, Old Shellback will make another one appear. Join him on an amazing odyssey--as he heads back to a future of his own making.

By the spring of 1938, Hubbard's stature as a writer was well established. As author and critic Robert Silverberg puts it: he had become a "master of the art of narrative." Hubbard's editors urged him to apply his gift for succinct characterization, original plot, deft pacing and imaginative action to a genre that was new, and essentially foreign, to him--science fiction and fantasy. The rest is Sci-Fi history.

Also includes the Science Fiction adventures "A Can of Vacuum," in which a practical joke on a space station proves that a good sense of humor is timeless, and "240,000 Miles Straight Up," the thrilling story of a race to the moon... and the one man who may be able to save the earth from Armageddon.

Set in an uncertain, strife-torn future when the first starships of man are traveling across the galaxy--but not without extracting a terrible price from their crews.

The novel's thought-provoking opening line, "Space is deep, Man is small and Time is his relentless enemy," powerfully captures the challenges facing the brave men and women of these vessels--people who must give up their former lives to explore space as entire generations and whole societies come and go on Earth, while those aboard remain essentially untouched by the passage of time in a vessel traveling at nearly the speed of light.

This immersing, remarkably ruthless drama begins when Alan Corday, a naively unseasoned but brialliant young engineer, is shanghaied from the spaceport at New Chicago and taken aboard the "Hound of Heaven"--bound for the stars.

Commanded by a distantly mysterious but charismatic leader by the name of Captain Jocelyn, the "Hound" traverses teh galaxy in an effort to keep a lifeline between Earth and the first colonies in other star systems. But in the time span of a few crossings, conditions on Earth grow gradually worse and more dangerous, while those aboard are increasingly treated as outcasts and a threat to the powers that control the planet.

Against his will, Corday is mercilessly driven by Jocelyn to use his untested intellect and abilities to serve the ship and the beleaguered space colonies. But as events unfold among the turbulent reaches of the galaxy, and during the perilous returns to Earth, Corday discovers a startling truth about his destiny that will give a whole new meaning to man's place in the stars.

Jules didn't want to be a necromancer. In fact he shoudn't have been one - particularly after he mixed, half and half - wrong halves at that! - the formula for reviving and restoring corpses and the formula for winning friends and influencing people.

Farmer Eben Smith is fed up with big government telling him how to run his life and his business. They pay him to bury his crops while folks starve in the streets, and he's not going to take it anymore. He's declaring his independence, loading up his fruits and vegetables, and heading for the city to wheel and deal....

But before he can trade in his turnips, Eben'll have to deal with something bigger--a break in the space/time continuum. He's at The Crossroads, where reality is turned upside-down and inside out. And before it's over, he'll turn his turnips into liquor, and the liquor into guns and gold, as he plunges into strange new worlds... finding ways to wreak havoc in all of them.

Also includes the fantasy adventures, "Borrowed Glory," the haunting story of two immortals who wager on two mortals given a single day of love... a wager that leads to heartbreak and tragedy; and "The Devil's Rescue" based on the legend of The Flying Dutchman, in which the sole survivor of a disaster at sea is "rescued" by the devil himself and finds that fate rests on a roll of the dice.

Contents:

• The Crossroads - (1941) - novelette
• Borrowed Glory - (1941) - short story
• The Devil's Rescue - (1940) - short story

WWII intelligence officer Charles Martel, jailed in Leavenworth for bucking insane post war politicians with a new world order agenda, is "freed" by the chaos of WW III. Gathering haggard forces across 3 continents he unleashes an unlimited source of useful energy in a redoubt in the Atlas Mountains of Morrocco. Who will gather around him to fight to rebuild civilization from the post WW III fascism that has gripped the world? Could it be those the fascists depend on most? The captive brains who try to steal the secret of his energy source blow themselves and half their cities up. What happens when open and unstoppable communication of human rights and real values invades through the airwaves?

"Irish" is a bellhop at the Burton Hotel in New York whose curiosity continually lands him in the maximum amount of trouble. When the evil and exotic looking ghoul checks in at The Burton and Irish delivers a large chest seeming to contain nothing but air to this foul looking stranger's room, the inquisitive Irish begins searching for answers and lands himself in mishap after mishap in order to free himself from the power of supernatural forces.

Women. Liquor. Power...

Driven by greed and lust for power.

Does Fanner have a prayer?

That is Fanner Marston's mantra--his reason for being--and while he knows a little about the first and a lot about the second, he may well be on the verge of learning everything there is to know about the third. Power. He may, in fact, be about to uncover the key to gaining absolute control over the entire universe. The only problem is, Fanner is certifiably insane--a crazed Peter Lorre on a power trip....

His starship has crash-landed, and he's the sole survivor, which doesn't matter to him. Driven by greed and lust for power, wracked by thirst, hunger and pain, all he cares about is reaching the ancient city of Parva and making himself at home. Because there lies The Great Secret to universal domination--and what's a little suffering on the road to becoming God?

Does Fanner have a prayer? The writing's on the walls of Parva--and you won't believe what it says....

Also includes the Science Fiction adventures, The Space Can, in which a decrepit space battleship is a civilian fleet's only defense; The Beast, the tale of a hunter in the jungles of Venus, chasing an immoral beast; and The Slaver, in which an alien race has enslaved the human race, but can't repress the power of human love.

The year: 3975.

The man: Christopher Randolph Kellan.

The mission: Kill the king of the galaxy.

He is the Kingslayer.

Young Kit Kellan has led a rough-and-tumble life - knocking around the Vega System in his youth as a tiger hunter, a brawler, and a bouncer in a bar. But his real fight is just beginning. Summarily expelled from the prestigious Terra University, he is taken into custody by an agent of the System Bureau of Investigation (SBI). Kit's crime: thinking too much and thinking too well.

He's not in custody for long, however. Snatched from captivity by the People's Revolutionary Society, Kit sets out an epic adventure that will take him to the farthest reaches of the universe - as he is chosen to undertake a mission of extraordinary difficulty and danger: assassinate the Arbiter.

Just who is the Arbiter? He is the omnipotent ruler of the stars. Empires rise and fall, wars rage, planets vanish... all at the snap of his fingers. And as Kit discovers, it's not easy to kill the most powerful man in the universe.

He'll have to outsmart shadowy spies, battle deadly saboteurs, and match wits with women as beautiful as they are dangerous. In the end - if he lives to see the day - he might just make a discovery that will change him, and the galaxy, forever.

"An exciting novel of the future. One thrilling adventure to another, ending with a surprising climax. Highly recommended." (Los Angeles Daily News)

Contents:

• The Kingslayer - novella
• The Invaders - (1942) - novelette
• The Beast - (1942) - novelette
• Preface (The Kingslayer) - essay

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The Empire State Building has vanished into thin air! Gone, too, are Grant's Tomb and Grand Central Station, and all hell is breaking loose in New York City!

What's the story? One grizzled old newspaper reporter known simply as Pop--is on top of it... and better stay there because his livelihood is on the line. If Pop fails to get to the bottom of the vanishing landmarks, his job will disappear as well--and land in the hands of the newspaper publisher's son-in-law.

Any cub reporter could find someone breaking the laws of the city, but tracking down a suspect who's breaking the laws of physics is a different story altogether. But Pop's like a dog with a bone, and he won't let go until he gets at the truth... no matter how strange or astounding it is. In the end, he gets a lesson in larceny, proving that when you get down to business, size really does matter.

Also features the science fiction adventures "Battle of Wizards," in which an epic battle between science and magic unfolds with an entire planet hanging in the balance; and Hubbard's first published foray into science fiction and fantasy, "The Dangerous Dimension," the story of a mathematics professor who discovers an equation that enables him to teleport anywhere he can imagine... even if he doesn't want to go.

Contents:

• vii - Foreword: Stories from Pulp FIction's Golden Age (The Professor was a Thief) - essay by Kevin J. Anderson
• 1 - The Professor Was a Thief - (1940) - novelette
• 55 - Battle of Wizards - (1949) - short story
• 73 - The Dangerous Dimension - (1938) - short story
• 103 - Story Preview: A Matter of Matter - (1949) - short fiction
• 113 - Glossary (The Professor was a Thief) - essay by uncredited
• 121 - L. Ron Hubbard in the Golden Age of Pulp Fiction - essay by uncredited
• 133 - The Stories from the Golden Age (bibliography) - (2008) - essay by uncredited

Penniless, homeless and virtually lifeless, the vagrant "Doughface" Jack is about to discover that where medical marvels meet the mysteries of the human mind, amazing things happen. Like one of the comic book X-Men mutants, The Tramp acquires a capability beyond his imagination and without equal on Earth.

Riding the rails, Jack runs afoul of a local sheriff and ends up with a crushed skull. He's as good as dead until a savvy country doctor performs a bit of medical magic. Jack wakes up to find that his brain has been drastically altered. He has the power to save lives--and destroy them--with a single glance.

Will Jack use his astounding power for good... or for evil? His journey of discovery takes him to New York and into the arms of a woman, who has a plan of her own. Together they're bound for Washington, D.C., and a psychic adventure that could change the shape of history.

The Tramp was originally serialized in 1938 in three issues of Astounding Science Fiction. Its respected editor, John W. Campbell, wrote: "Hubbard is a very highly experienced writer, an author with a tremendous background of writing in every field. He's one of the few professional writers I know of who gets a genuine kick out of the story he's writing. In The Tramp, the suspense is intensified step by step, because every step points the same way. There are no backward slips, no scattered accidents that tend in any direction other than the one toward which Hubbard is driving."

It's not easy living in someone else's world, trapped in a reality over which you have no control. But that is the story of Mike de Wolf's life... literally.

The whole thing started at his friend Horace's Greenwich Village apartment. Horace is a writer and he's decided to model one of his villains after Mike. Sounds crazy... until Mike reaches to turn on a light and gets the shock of his life.

Knocked unconscious, Mike wakes up to find himself tossing in a violent ocean surf and getting slammed against the rocks. That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the bullets flying over his head, followed by the swordfight, certain to end in death... if not for the wild, beautiful woman on horseback who comes to his rescue.

This isn't the West Village anymore. Apparently it's the West Indies, some three hundred years ago, and Mike de Wolf is now Miguel Saint Raoul de Lobo, pursued across the Spanish Main by pirates, Englishman, and worse.

He doesn't know how he got here or why, but he does know he has to get out fast. Two problems: first off, the bad guys in Horace's stories never get out alive, and second, Mike's not all that sure he wants to leave after all. Seems he's fallen for that wild woman on horseback... What's a guy to do? The answer's written in the sky---in a wildly original, wickedly amusing novel in which, if you're not careful, you might just find yourself getting lost.

In a future where Mother Earth has cast her children to the distant stars to begin anew and colonize the cosmos, the planet remains depleted of natural resources. Its air polluted by caustic iron and belching smoke, Earth faces her last desperate days in the grip of global environmental collapse.

In one final and feeble effort, Earth's Grand President Mankin musters the dregs of his fleet and sends three separate missions to the deepest reaches of space. Their mission: solicit help from far-flung colonial civilizations, or watch the planet die.

Also includes the science fiction adventures, "Battling Bolto," the story of a giant, con man who's running an interstellar scam, while the biggest trick of all lies right under his nose; and "Tough Old Man," in which an aging constable's lack of feelings is not a matter of insensitivity, but of a secret--and surprising--side of his character.

Contents:

• Tough Old Man - (1950) - novelette
• When Shadows Fall - (1948) - short story
• Battling Bolto - (1950) - short story

This short story originally appeared in Arden, volume XVI (2014), and was reprinted in Lightspeed, June 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Through speculative fiction, five interlocking novelettes explore the possible realities of our climate future.

What is the future of our climate? Given that our summers now regularly feature arctic heat waves and wildfire blood skies, polar vortex winters that reach all the way down to Texas, and "100-year" storms that hit every few months, it may seem that catastrophe is a done deal. As grim as things are, however, we still have options. Combining fiction and nonfiction and employing speculative tools for scholarly purposes, Our Shared Storm explores not just one potential climate future but five possible outcomes dependent upon our actions today.

Set in the year 2054, during the Conference of the Parties global climate negotiations (a.k.a., The COP) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Each story features a common cast of characters, but with events unfolding differently for them--and human society--in each alternate universe. These five scenarios highlight the political, economic, and culture possibilities of futures where investments in climate adaptation and mitigation promised today have been successfully completed, kicked down the road, or abandoned altogether. From harrowing to hopeful, these stories highlight the choices we must make to stabilize the planet.

Our Shared Storm is an experiment in deploying practice-based research methods to explore the opportunities and challenges of using climate fiction to engage scientific and academic frameworks. As such, the book includes an introduction and afterword, providing a framework for examining the SSPs as speculative narratives and the COP as a site for climate imaginaries, and offering a new theoretical contribution in the concept of "post-normal fiction"--a humanities iteration of sustainability's "post-normal science."

The Empire has declared war on the small, were-ruled kingdom of Aydori, capturing five women of the Mage-Pack, including the wife of the were Pack-leader. With the Pack off defending the border, it falls to Mirian Maylin and Tomas Hagen--she a low-level mage, he younger brother to the Pack-leader--to save them. Together the two set out on the kidnappers' trail, racing into the heart of enemy territory. With every step the odds against them surviving and succeeding soar...

This shot story originally appeared on the autor's Patreon site in July 2016, and was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 15, March-April 2017.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

An oblique, hard-edged novel tinged with offbeat fantasy, One Hundred Shadows is set in a slum electronics market in central Seoul - an area earmarked for demolition in a city better known for its shiny skyscrapers and slick pop videos. Here, the awkward, tentative relationship between Eungyo and Mujae, who both dropped out of formal education to work as repair-shop assistants, is made yet more uncertain by their economic circumstances, while their matter-of-fact discussion of a strange recent development - the shadows of the slum's inhabitants have started to 'rise' - leaves the reader to make up their own mind as to the nature of this shape-shifting tale.

Hwang's spare prose is illuminated by arresting images, quirky dialogue and moments of great lyricism, crafting a deeply affecting novel of perfectly calibrated emotional restraint. Known for her interest in social minorities, Hwang eschews the dreary realism usually employed for such issues, without her social criticism being any less keen. As well as an important contribution to contemporary working-class literature, One Hundred Shadows depicts the little-known underside of a society which can be viciously superficial, complicating the shiny, ultra-modern face which South Korea presents to the world.

In the spring of 1912, American writer Arthur Pearce is reeling from the wounds inflicted by a disastrous marriage and the public humiliation that ensued.

But his plans to travel abroad, write a new novel, and forget his ex-wife are interrupted by a lovely young woman he encounters on a London-bound train. Her name is Sarah Coyle, and the tale she tells him chills his blood.

According to Sarah, her younger sister Violet has been entranced by a local count, a man whose attractiveness and charisma are rivaled only by his shady reputation. Whispers of bizarre religious rites and experimental medicine surround Count Richard Dunning, though no wrongdoing has ever been proven. Sarah's family views the Count as a philanthropist and a perfect match for young Violet, but Sarah believes her sister is soon to become a subject in Count Dunning's hideous ceremonies.

Smitten by Sarah and moved to gallantry by her plight, Arthur agrees to travel to Altarbrook, Sarah's rural ancestral home, in order to prevent Violet from falling into ruin. He soon learns, however, that his meeting with Sarah on the train was no accident. And his arrival at Altarbrook represents a crucial but ghastly step in the Count's monstrous plot.

The White Lady is coming for the future of Emmaline's family, but the red soil of Alabama grows a different sort of magic in defense.

This short story originally appeared in Fantasy Magazine, December 2016, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy! special issue. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017, edited by Paula Guran.

Village couples seek approval for marriage from a stag with golden rings adorning its horns. That is until one suitor, determined to convince a woman to fall in love with him, makes a rash decision.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

A near-future thriller in which a shadowy coalition bent on controlling the world economy attempts to manipulate the president of the United States through the use of a computer bio-chip implanted in his brain.

Stephen Bury is a collective pseudonym for authors Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex (1996), edited by Ellen Datlow. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 2 (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, and Dangerous Games (2007), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Universe of Things (2011).

The shining pillar was nine or ten feet high and about a foot across. The top of it was flattened and rounded out. It was like a great golden pin thrust into the center of a shell. Within, Tom Blake saw a globe of reddish-gold that was neither solid nor gas. It began to move up and down the golden spike. At times, it flattened itself into a disc, or took the shape of a cylinder, or even a cone; then it became a globe again, and he wondered why it didn't tear itself loose from the spike that held it.

The Red King was a living core of light with a reddish halo. From this distance, it seemed little more than a cloud. When the cloud moved and changed its shape, a nucleus of reddish gold moved and changed with it.

They said that if your mind could contact the mind of this sleeping being they called the Red King, your dreams would come true, your wishes be granted. The Red King slept, but one day he would awake, and die--and those who could not contact him, and hated the minority who could, said that when he awoke, all the stuff of his dreams would vanish.

But what was this world? And what was Tom Blake doing here?

He and Flo DeLee had been out in the quadrangle at Squantley College that night, the night Tom was about to propose and give her the ring with the tiny diamonds that he had saved for for so long. Flo told him of a dream she had had, about a Red King who granted wishes...

Tom laughed, but he didn't laugh long. Three bell-like notes sounded, and a bubble seemed to come down from the tower of the college. It absorbed Flo and she was gone. And when Tom ran after her, another bubble captured him.

Tom found himself in a strange world where a bewildering variety of people, some of them Earthmen or the descendants of Earthmen, lived in a medieval-like civilization, and plotted against a minority who were able to contact the Red King and obtain their hearts' desire. They rode giant cats, instead of horses, and many things were strange-yet, so much was familiar. Tom was captured by Gathun of the Tiger Heart, Grand Marshal of the Marches and leader of the enemies of Eldon, the realm of those who could talk to the Red King. Every newcomer to his world was to be brought before the Red King, to see if contact could be made.

What chance did these semi-barbarians among whom Blake had fallen have against the super-science of Tulp and the folk of Eldon? And why did they hate the people of Eldon, when Tulp was not only willing but eager to share all the benefits he had obtained from the Red King with the entire world?

Aided only by a trained bear and a monkey, a magician and an acrobat challenge the power of the evil Red King who rules the Forest Lands by spreading the red fever to those who refuse to pay him tribute.

The tourist shops of Prague sell dozens of items commemorating Franz Kafka. You can drink a latte in the Café Kafka, add sugar to it from a packet with Kafka's face on it, and then light your cigarette from a box of Kafka matches.

Franz Kafka died in obscurity in 1924, publishing only a handful of bizarre stories in little-known literary magazines. Yet today he persists in our collective imaginations. Even those who have never read any of Kafka's fiction describe their tribulations with the Department of Motor Vehicles as being Kafkaesque.

Kafkaesque explores the fiction of generations of authors inspired by Kafka's work. These dystopic, comedic, and ironic tales include T. C. Boyle's roadside garage that is a never-ending trial, Philip Roth's alternate history in which Kafka immigrates to America to date his aunt, Jorge Luis Borges's labyrinthine public lottery that redefines reality, Carol Emshwiller's testimony by the first female to earn the right to call herself a "man," and Paul Di Filippo's unfamiliar Kafka -- journalist by day, costumed crime-fighter by night.

Also included is Kafka's classic story "The Hunger Artist," appearing both in a brand-new translation and in an illustrated version by legendary cartoonist R. Crumb (Fritz the Cat). Additionally, each author discusses Kafka's writing, its relevance, its personal influence, and Kafka's enduring legacy.

Table of Contents

• Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka - interior artwork by John Coulthart
• Stories After Kafka - essay by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
• Kafka Chronology - essay
• A Hunger Artist - short story by Franz Kafka (trans. of Ein Hungerkünstler 1924)
• On the Translation of 'A Hunger Artist' - essay by John Kessel
• Introduction to The Drowned Giant - essay by J. G. Ballard
• The Drowned Giant (1964) - short story by J. G. Ballard
• Introduction to The Cockroach Hat - essay by Terry Bisson
• The Cockroach Hat (2010) - short story by Terry Bisson
• Introduction to Hymenoptera - essay by Michael Blumlein
• Hymenoptera (1993) - short story by Michael Blumlein
• Introduction to The Lottery in Babylon - essay by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Lottery in Babylon (1998) - short story by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. of La lotería en Babilonia 1941)
• Introduction to The Big Garage - (2005) - essay by T. Coraghessan Boyle
• The Big Garage (1981) - short story by T. Coraghessan Boyle
• Introduction to The Jackdaw's Last Case - essay by Paul Di Filippo
• The Jackdaw's Last Case (1997) - short story by Paul Di Filippo
• Introduction to Report to the Men's Club - essay by Carol Emshwiller
• Report to the Men's Club (2002) - short story by Carol Emshwiller
• Introduction to Bright Morning - essay by Jeffrey Ford
• Bright Morning (2002) - novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• Introduction to The Rapid Advance of Sorrow - essay by Theodora Goss
• The Rapid Advance of Sorrow (2002) - short story by Theodora Goss
• Introduction to Stable Strategies for Middle Management - essay by Eileen Gunn
• Stable Strategies for Middle Management (1988) - short story by Eileen Gunn
• Introduction to The Handler - (1976) - essay by Damon Knight
• The Handler (1960) - short story by Damon Knight
• Introduction to Receding Horizon - essay by Jonathan Lethem
• Receding Horizon (1995) - short story by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz
• Introduction to A Hunger Artist - essay by David Mairowitz
• A Hunger Artist - short story by Robert Crumb and David Mairowitz
• Introduction to "I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting"; or, Looking at Kafka - essay by Philip Roth
• "I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting"; or, Looking at Kafka (1969) - short story by Philip Roth
• Introduction to The 57th Franz Kafka - essay by Rudy Rucker
• The 57th Franz Kafka (1982) - short story by Rudy Rucker
• Introduction to The Amount to Carry - essay by Carter Scholz
• The Amount to Carry (1998) - novelette by Carter Scholz
• Introduction to Kafka in Brontëland - essay by Tamar Yellin
• Kafka in Brontëland (2002) - short story by Tamar Yellin

Cyberpunk is dead. The revolution has been co-opted by half-assed heroes, overclocked CGI, and tricked-out shades. Once radical, cyberpunk is now nothing more than a brand.

Time to stop flipping the channel.

These sixteen extreme stories reveal a government ninja routed by a bicycle repairman, the inventor of digitized paper hijacked by his college crush, a dead boy trapped in a warped storybook paradise, and the queen of England attacked with the deadliest of forbidden technology: a working modem. You'll meet Manfred Macx, renegade meme-broker, Red Sonja, virtual reality sex-goddess, and Felix, humble sys-admin and post-apocalyptic hero.

Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel (Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology) have united cyberpunk visionaries William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan with the new post-cyberpunk vanguard, including Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, and Jonathan Lethem. Including a canon-establishing introduction and excerpts from a hotly contested online debate, Rewired is the first anthology to define and capture the crackling excitement of the post-cyberpunks.

From the grittiness of Mirrorshades to the Singularity and beyond, it's time to revive the revolution.

Table of Contents:

• Hacking Cyberpunk - essay by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly
• Kessel-Sterling Correspondence - essay by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling
• Bicycle Repairman - (1996) - novelette by Bruce Sterling
• Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland - (1996) - shortstory by Gwyneth Jones
• How We Got In Town and Out Again - (1996) - novelette by Jonathan Lethem
• Yeyuka - (1997) - shortstory by Greg Egan
• The Final Remake of The Return of Little Latin Larry - (1997) - novella by Pat Cadigan
• Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City - (1997) - shortstory by William Gibson
• The Wedding Album - (1999) - novella by David Marusek
• Daddy's World - (1999) - novelette by Walter Jon Williams
• The Dog Said Bow-Wow - (2001) - shortstory by Michael Swanwick
• Lobsters - (2001) - novelette by Charles Stross
• What's Up, Tiger Lily? - (2003) - novelette by Paul Di Filippo
• The Voluntary State - (2004) - novelette by Christopher Rowe
• Two Dreams on Trains - (2005) - shortstory by Elizabeth Bear
• The Calorie Man - (2005) - novelette by Paolo Bacigalupi
• Search Engine - (2005) - novelette by Mary Rosenblum
• When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth - (2006) - novelette by Cory Doctorow

Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Nearly a century later, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for eclectic misfits, seeking solely to disappear into the mansion's dark corridors. Except for Sana. Unlike the others, she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion: To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects--and to the door at its end, locked for decades.

Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room's shadows is a besotted, grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena's story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil. Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl's search for belonging.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear's Stead - novelette by Damien Broderick
• Omens - short story by Carol Emshwiller
• Touch the Earth - short story by Scott Russell Sanders
• The Other Magus - short story by Avram Davidson
• Peek-A-Boom - short story by Sonya Dorman
• Suzanne Delage - short story by Gene Wolfe
• The Finger - (1980) - short story by Naomi Mitchison
• Barranca, King of the Tree Streets - short story by Lowry Pei
• Thomas in Yahvestan - novelette by George P. Elliott
• The Vengeance of Hera, or Monogamy Triumphant - short story by Thomas M. Disch
• Falling - short story by Raylyn Moore
• Father Returns from the Mountain - short story by Luis Alberto Urrea
• The Oracle - novella by M. J. Engh

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd
• The Reason for the Visit - short story by John Crowley
• Set Piece - short story by Jill Paton Walsh
• Everything Blowing Up: An Adventure of Una Persson, Heroine of Time and Space - novelette by Hilary Bailey
• The New Zombies - short story by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis
• Earth and Stone - novelette by Robert Holdstock
• A Short History of the Bicycle: 401 B.C. to 2677 A.D. - short story by Michael Bishop
• Shadows, Moving - short story by Vonda N. McIntyre
• The Trumpeter Swan - poem by Laurence Josephs
• Lose, Place and Show - poem by Laurence Josephs
• The Pastseer - novelette by Philippa C. Maddern
• Hunger and the Computer - short story by Gary Weimberg
• Household Gods - short story by Daphne Castell
• Bender, Fenugreek, Slatterman and Mupp - short story by D. G. Compton
• Precession - short story by Edward Bryant
• A Criminal Proceeding - short story by Gene Wolfe
• For Whom are Those Serpents Whistling Overhead? - short story by Jean Femling
• The Summer Sweet, the Winter Wild - short story by Michael G. Coney
• The Gods in Winter - poem by Sonya Dorman
• Slow Music - novella by James Tiptree, Jr.

In these spellbinding stories, six of today's best-known science fiction authors write about women who must fight to develop their own identities. Luz Falco of Ursula K. Le Guin's new novel The Eye of the Heron follows the only truth she knows, even though it means exile in an endless wilderness. elana Driver of Diana L. Paxson's The Song of N'Sardi-El risks her vital scientific work and the safety of her spaceship's crew when a frightened young orphan is taken on board. Amanda of Joan Vinge's novelette becomes an outcase when she defies her father and offers shelter to a stranger who has fallen out of the sky.

These women live in alien worlds, but their situations are hauntingly familiar, and their stories have the impact of prophecy.

Table of Contents:

• Prayer for My Daughter - poem by Marilyn Hacker
• Introduction - essay by Virginia Kidd
• No One Said Forever - short story by Cynthia Felice
• The Song of N'Sardi-el - short story by Diana L. Paxson
• Jubilee's Story - short story by Elizabeth A. Lynn
• Mab Gallen Recalled - short story by Cherry Wilder
• Phoenix in the Ashes - novelette by Joan D. Vinge
• The Eye of the Heron - novel by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Biographical Notes - essay

Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart is the follow-up to Caitlín R. Kiernan's World-Fantasy Award nominated The Ammonite Violin & Others, a collection that drew comparisons to the writings of such luminaries of the macabre and surreal as Angela Carter, Thomas Ligotti, Shirley Jackson, and Harlan Ellison. Here, again, in her eighth collection, we visit the borderlands where the weird, horrific, mythic, and erotic intersect. Once again, Kiernan sets her masterful, intoxicating prose to the task of retelling fairy tales, spinning sensual post-Lovecraftian yarns, and blurring the lines between pain and pleasure. Here is a celebration of the bizarre and beautiful, and a marriage of unlikely worlds. From a reverence of the dead to the sacrifices the living make to unspeakable gods, from clockwork dreams to tales of merciless revenge, Kiernan blurs the artificial lines of genre, and shows us a world where there is no division between the light and dark.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Sexing the Weird - essay
• The Wolf Who Cried Girl - (2007) - short story
• The Bed of Appetite - (2007) - short story
• Subterraneus - (2012) - short story
• The Collector of Bones - (2008) - short story
• Beatification - (2008) - short story
• Untitled Grotesque - (2007) - short story
• Flotsam - (2009) - short story
• Regarding Attrition and Severance - (2008) - short story
• Rappaccini's Dragon (Murder Ballad No. 5) - (2008) - short story
• Unter den Augen des Mondes - (2008) - short story
• The Melusine (1898) - (2011) - short story
• Fecunditatum (Murder Ballad No. 6) - (2012) - short story
• I Am the Abyss, and I Am Light - (2008) - short story
• Dancing with the Eight of Swords - (2008) - short story by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Murder Ballad No. 7 - (2008) - short story
• Lullaby of Partition and Reunion - (2008) - short story
• Derma Sutra (1891) - (2008) - short story
• The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherazade - (2009) - short story
• The Belated Burial - (2009) - short story
• The Bone's Prayer - (2009) - short story
• A Canvas for Incoherent Arts - (2009) - short story
• The Peril of Liberated Objects, or the Voyeur's Seduction - (2009) - short story
• Pickman's Other Model (1929) - (2008) - novelette
• At the Gate of Deeper Slumber - (2009) - short story
• Fish Bride - (2009) - short story
• "But She Also Lies Broken and Transformed": An Afterword - essay by Sonya Taaffe
• About the Author - essay

Sarah Crowe left Atlanta, and the remnants of a tumultuous relationship, to live alone in an old house in rural Rhode Island. Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript written by the house's former tenant-a parapsychologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property. And as the gnarled tree takes root in her imagination, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago...

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is a novella by Stephen King. It originally appeared in the collection Different Seasons (1982).

The Company was a powerful, efficient, and monstrous insurance organization that controlled the entire world, scientifically regulating everything in life: war, epidemics, one-a-day food pills and test-tube sex...all through the use of its patented, terrifying human deep-freeze vault.

Claims Adjuster Wills, a great believer in the Company, begins to have second thoughts when he meets beautiful and sorrowful Rena, whose radical father lies in a frozen subterranean vault.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2016, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 139, April 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

The Other Side tells of a dream kingdom which becomes a nightmare, of a journey to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia, which is also a journey to the depths of the subconcious, or as Kubin himself called it, 'a sort of Baedeker for those lands which are half known to us'. Written in 1908, and more or less half way between Meyrink and Kafka, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the artists and writers of the Expressionist generation.

Expressionist illustrator Kubin wrote this fascinating curio, his only literary work in 1908. A town named Pearl, assembled and presided over by the aptly named Patera, is the setting for his hallucinatory vision of a society founded on instinct over reason. Culminating apocalyptically - plagues of insects, mountains of corpses and orgies in the street - it is worth reading for its dizzying surrealism alone. Though ostensibly a gothic macabre fantasy, it is tempting to read The Other Side as a satire on the reactionary, idealist utopianism evident in German thought in the early twentieth century, highly prescient in its gloom, given later developments. The language often suggests Nietsche. The inevitable collapse of Patera's creation is lent added horror by hindsight. Kubin's depiction of absurd bureaucracy is strongly reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial, and his flawed utopia, situated next to a settlement of supposed savages, brings to mind Huxley's Brave New World; it precedes both novels, and this superb new translation could demonstrate its influence on subsequent modern literature.

It will appeal to fans of Mervyn Peake and readers who like the darkly decadent, the fantastic and the grotesque in their reading.

Jennifer Talldeer is Osage and Cherokee, granddaughter of a powerful Medicine Man. She walks a difficult path: contrary to tribal custom, she is learning a warrior's magics. A freelance private investigator, Jennifer spends hours tracking down stolen Indian artifacts.

The construction of a new shopping mall uncovers fragments of human bone, revealing possible desecration of an ancient burial ground. the sabotage of construction equipment implicated Native American activists--particularly Jennifer's old flame, who is more attractive, and more dangerous, than ever. Worst of all, the grave of Jennifer's legendary medicine Man ancestor has been destroyed, his tools of power scattered, and a great evil freed to walk the land.

Jennifer must stand against the darkness. If she wavers even for an instant, she will be annihilated, and the world will fall into oblivion.

Here at last are the finest of Lafferty's shorter works, stories about - * A man who found one day that he knew absolutely everyone in the world *A race who kept their most ancient ancestors on shelves in the basements * A speeded-up world where a man could earn and lose a dozen fortunes a night. * Friendly bearlike creature named snuffles who said he was God ...in all, twenty-one immensely enjoyable stories that will continue to delight you long after you've finished reading them.

Table of Contents:

• Nine Hundred Grandmothers [Habitable Worlds] (1966) - short story
• Land of the Great Horses [Institute for Impure Science] (1967) - short story
• Ginny Wrapped in the Sun (1967) - short story
• The Six Fingers of Time (1960) - novelette
• Frog on the Mountain [Paravata] (1970) - novelette
• All the People (1961) - short story
• Primary Education of the Camiroi [Camiroi] (1966) - short story
• Slow Tuesday Night (1965) - short story
• Snuffles [Habitable Worlds] (1960) - novelette
• Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne [Institute for Impure Science] (1967) - short story
• Name of the Snake [Habitable Worlds] (1964) - short story
• Narrow Valley (1966) - short story
• Polity and Custom of the Camiroi [Camiroi] (1967) - short story
• In Our Block (1965) - short story
• Hog-Belly Honey (1965) - short story
• Seven-Day Terror (1962) - short story
• The Hole on the Corner (1967) - short story
• What's the Name of That Town? [Institute for Impure Science] (1964) - short story
• Through Other Eyes [Institute for Impure Science] (1960) - novelette
• One at a Time (1968) - short story
• Guesting Time [Habitable Worlds] (1965) - short story

Margo Lanagan's electrifying stories take place in worlds not quite our own, and yet each one illuminates what it is to be human. They are stories of yearning for more, and learning to live with what you have. Stories that show the imprint love leaves on us all.

If you think you don't like short fiction, that a story can't have the depth or impact of a novel, then you haven't read Margo Lanagan. A writer this startling and this original doesn't come along very often. So for anyone who likes to be surprised, touched, unsettled, intrigued, or scared senseless, prepare to be dazzled by what a master storyteller can do in a few short pages.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Cowpunk Anthology - (1989) - essay by Joe R. Lansdale and Pat LoBrutto
• Black Boots - (1989) - short story by Robert R. McCammon
• Thirteen Days of Glory - (1989) - short story by Scott A. Cupp
• Gold - (1989) - novelette by Lewis Shiner
• The Tenth Toe - (1989) - short story by F. Paul Wilson
• Sedalia - (1989) - novelette by David J. Schow
• Trapline - (1989) - short story by Ardath Mayhar
• Trail of the Chromium Bandits - (1989) - short story by Al Sarrantonio
• Dinker's Pond - (1989) - short story by Richard Laymon
• Stampede - (1989) - short story by Melissa Mia Hall
• Razored Saddles - (1989) - short story by Robert Petitt
• Empty Places - (1989) - short story by Gary L. Raisor
• Tony Red Dog - (1989) - novelette by Neal Barrett, Jr.
• The Passing of the Western - (1989) - short story by Howard Waldrop
• Eldon's Penitente - (1989) - short story by Lenore Carroll
• The Job - (1989) - short story by Joe R. Lansdale
• I'm Always Here - (1989) - short story by Richard Christian Matheson
• "Yore Skin's Jes's Soft 'N Purty..." He Said. (Page 243) - (1989) - short story by Chet Williamson

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (2009), edited by Mike Allen. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton.

Listen to or read the full story for free at Escape Pod.

Ester's family was torn apart when a manticore killed her mother and baby brother, leaving her with nothing but her father's painful silence and a single, overwhelming need to kill the monsters that took her family.

Ester's path leads her to the King's Royal Mews, where the giant rocs of legend are flown to hunt manticores by their brave and dedicated ruhkers. Paired with a fledgling roc named Zahra, Ester finds purpose and acclaim by devoting herself to a calling that demands absolute sacrifice and a creature that will never return her love. The terrifying partnership between woman and roc leads Ester not only on the empire's most dangerous manticore hunt, but on a journey of perseverance and acceptance.

BFA and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1979. It can be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 6 (1980), edited by Lin Carter and The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy By Women (1995), edited by A. Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones. It is included in the collections Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (1983), Forests of The Night (1990) and Tanith By Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee (2017).

How would it be if Snow White were the real villain & the wicked queen just a sadly maligned innocent? What if awakening the Sleeping Beauty should be the mistake of a lifetime--of several lifetimes? What if the famous folk tales were retold with an eye to more horrific possibilities? Only Tanith Lee could do justice to it.

In RED AS BLOOD, she displays her soaring imagination at its most fantastically mischievous. Not for nothing was the title story named as a Nebula nominee. Not for nothing was the author of THE BIRTHGRAVE & THE STORM LORD called by New York's Village Voice, "Goddess-Empress of the Hot Read." Here are the world-famous tales of such as the Brothers Grimm as they might have been retold by the Sisters Grimmer! Fairy tales for children? Not on your life!

Table of Contents:

• Paid Piper - (1981) - shortstory
• Red as Blood - (1979) - shortstory
• Thorns - (1972) - shortstory
• When the Clock Strikes - (1980) - shortstory
• The Golden Rope - novelette
• The Princess and Her Future - shortstory
• Wolfland - (1980) - novelette
• Black as Ink - novelette
• Beauty - novelette

A vampiric Snow White whose pious stepmother is her only salvation....

A supernatural Cinderella who strikes at midnight, leaving behind a prince mad with desire....

A sleeping beauty never meant to be woken...

In her World Fantasy Award-nominated short story collection, Red as Blood, Tanith Lee deconstructed familiar fairy tales, recapturing their original darkness and horror in haunting new interpretations. Behind gilded words and poised princesses, she exposed a sinister world of violence, madness, and dangerous enchantments.

With Redder than Blood, Lee resumes the tradition of twisting tales. Among its nineteen tales, this volume explores unnerving variations of Beauty and the Beast, The Frog Prince, Snow White, and other classics, including three never-before-published stories.

A recognized master fantasist, Tanith Lee has won multiple awards for her craft, including the British Fantasy Award, the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Horror.

This short story originally appeared in Artemis #1, Spring 2000. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 5 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell.

Winner of the 1996 Stoker award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction, nominated for the 1997 BFA Best Short Fiction award.

This short story originally appeared in the collection The Nightmare Factory (1996). It has been subsequently republished several times.

The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smithis the second book in the "NESFA's Choice" series. It brings back into print all of the short science fiction of Cordwainer Smith, and includes two never before published stories.

The Rediscovery of Man includes all of Smith's short science fiction, including:

• "Scanners Live in Vain"
• "The Ballad of Lost C'mell"
• "The Dead Lady of Clown Town"
• "The Game of Rat and Dragon"
• "On the Storm Planet"

It also includes an in-depth introduction to the works of Cordwainer Smith by John J. Pierce, a noted authority on Smith's work.

Contents:

• Introduction by John J. Pierce
• Editor's Introduction by Jim Mann

Stories of the Instrumentality of Mankind:

• No, No, Not Rogov! (1959)
• War No. 81-Q (rewritten version)
• Mark Elf (1957)
• The Queen of the Afternoon (1978)
• Letter to Editor, Fantasy Book (March 9, 1948)
• Scanners Live in Vain (1950)
• The Lady Who Sailed The Soul (1960)
• When the People Fell (1959)
• Think Blue, Count Two (1963)
• The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All (1979)
• The Game of Rat and Dragon (1955)
• The Burning of the Brain (1958)
• From Gustible's Planet (1962)
• Himself in Anachron (1993)
• The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal (1964)
• Golden the Ship Was - Oh! Oh! Oh! (1959)
• The Dead Lady of Clown Town (1964)
• Under Old Earth (1966)
• Drunkboat (1963)
• Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons (1961)
• Alpha Ralpha Boulevard (1961)
• The Ballad of Lost C'Mell (1962)
• A Planet Named Shayol (1961)
• On the Gem Planet (1963)
• On the Storm Planet (1965)
• On the Sand Planet (1965)
• Three to a Given Star (1965)
• Down to a Sunless Sea (1975)

Other Stories:

• War No. 81-Q (1928)
• Western Science Is So Wonderful (1958)
• Nancy (1959)
• The Fife of Bodidharma (1959)
• Angerhelm (1959)
• The Good Friends (1963)

In a land ruled by war and love and strange enchantments, Cuchulain -- torn between gentleness and violence, haunted by the croakings of a sinister raven -- fights for his honor and his homeland and discovers too late the trap that the gods have set for him in the fatal beauty of Deirdre and the brutal jealousy of King Conor.

THE PRIMITIVES

Anthropologists tell us that primitive man believed he could be in several places at the same time. He had no sense of time as we understand it, and could think of himself as living in the past and present simultaneously.

And the future...?

He was convinced, too, that he could, at the same time, be a human being and an animal; space and time held no restrictions for him.

And the future...?

Suppose it weren't just primitive fantasy, suppose such powers were slumbering in some people and could be awakened.

The future is now...

"The impish love child of Tutuola and Marquez. Utterly delightful." --Nalo Hopkinson

Karen Lord's debut novel, which won the prestigious Frank Collymore Literary Prize in Barbados, is an intricately woven tale of adventure, magic, and the power of the human spirit.

Paama's husband is a fool and a glutton. Bad enough that he followed her to her parents' home in the village of Makendha, now he's disgraced himself by murdering livestock and stealing corn. When Paama leaves him for good, she attracts the attention of the undying ones--the djombi--who present her with a gift: the Chaos Stick, which allows her to manipulate the subtle forces of the world. Unfortunately, a wrathful djombi with indigo skin believes this power should be his and his alone.

Bursting with humor and rich in fantastic detail, Redemption in Indigo is a clever, contemporary fairy tale that introduces readers to a dynamic new voice in Caribbean literature. Lord's world of spider tricksters and indigo immortals, inspired in part by a Senegalese folk tale, will feel instantly familiar--but Paama's adventures are fresh, surprising, and utterly original.

One foul night while her husband is away, an old friend turns up on Claire's doorstep and begs for her help. She knows she should refuse, but she owes him. Despite her better judgement, Claire finds herself helping to bury something in the woods. The question is, will it stay buried, and can Claire live with the knowledge of what she has done?

Steven Erikson has carved a name for himself among the pantheon of great fantasy writers. But his masterful storytelling and prose style go beyond the awe-inspiring Malazan world. In The Devil Delivered and Other Tales, Erikson tells three different, but captivating stories:

"The Devil Delivered" tells a story set within the near future, where the land owned by the great Lakota Nation blisters beneath an ozone hole the size of the Great Plains. As the natural world falls victim to its wrath, and scientists scramble to understand it, a lone anthropologist wanders the deadlands, recording observations that threaten to bring the entire world to its knees.

"Revolvo" takes place in an alternate Earth where evolution took an interesting turn and the arts scene is ruled by technocrats who thrive in a secret, nepotistic society of granting agencies, bursaries, and peer-review boards, all designed to permit self-proclaimed artists to survive without an audience.

"Fishin' with Grandma Matchie" is told in the voice a nine-year-old boy, writing the story of his summer vacation. What starts as a typical recount of a trip to see Grandma quickly becomes a stunning fantastical journey into imagination and perception in the wild world that Grandma Matchie inhabits.

CAN FREDDIE FONG FINE SAVE THE WORLD? IF SO, SHOULD HE?

These are the questions that may or may not be the core of this extremely odd novel of the 1985. What the Israeli hyponuclear submarine Traif, Mavis Montreal the groupie, the giant cavern under the earth, Upchuck the Barbarian, and the Sacred Locomotive have to do with it all is hard to figure out. But entertaining - so who need to figure?

"If you have any interest at all in satire, science fiction's new wave, the '60s, pop music, comic books, or the picaresque tradition of literature, this book is for you... 32 years after its composition, this roaring tiger of a book still has the capacity to shock, amuse, enlighten, and provoke, more so than many a "bold, experimental novel" published just yesterday to waves of praise by the short-sighted and historically illiterate. This is a book that spits in the face of death and despair." -- Paul Di Filippo

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared as a chapbook. The story can also be found in the anthology Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (1988), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is included in the collection Tales from a Vanished Country (1990).

Death is one thing, it's what you do afterward that matters.

Aspiring comedian Raely is the sole survivor of a disastrous train wreck. While faced with the intense grief of losing her best friend, she realizes that someone is following her - and has been following her all her life. Trouble is, no one else can see him. For a ghostly tag-along, Casper's not so bad. He might even be the partner Raely needs to fight the evil spirit hell-bent on destroying her.

Raely and her friend must learn why this demonic spirit is haunting Raely and how she can stop him before he destroys her life - and her soul. Which, much to her chagrin, means she needs the help of a psychic (although she's sure they are all charlatans) and must rid herself of the pesky ghost hunter who's interested in exploiting her new abilities.

A post-apocalyptic world far gone, Humanity huddled within their glass-cage city were they lived, the last survivors of the Ice-Age cataclysm... One man dared the hostile world of freezing death outside the city in a bottle, in a wild despairing fight to turn back the clock and save the smouldering embers of mankind.

In the aftermath of the last great battle of the American Civil War, a disillusioned Union medic stumbles across a strange figure picking amid the corpses, and his life is changed forever...

In the cathedral city of Strasbourg in the years before the French Revolution, a church restorer is commissioned to paint a series of portraits that chart the changing appearance of a beautiful woman over the course of her life, although the woman herself seems ageless...

In Prohibition-era New York, an idealistic young Marxist is catapulted into the realms of elite society, and forced to assume the identity of someone who never existed...

Red Snow is a novel of love and violence, ideas and dreams, and revolves around the mystery of a monster drawn from humanity's darkest myths which still somehow survives, and thrives, and kills, in this modern age.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2013, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, #126, March 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, edited by Rich Horton, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Frost on Glass (2015).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Locus and Strugeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2016. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2 (2017), edited by Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

IN MEGA-CITY ONE, THE JUDGES ARE THE LAW--acting as judge, jury, and executioner. But how do the citizens really feel about a system where they are powerless? America Jara and Bennett Beeny grow up as best friends, living a fairly trouble-free life in a dangerous city... bar the odd encounter with a Judge. Time draws them apart, and when they are brought back together, Beeny is a successful singer and America has become involved with a terrorist organisation--with the Judges in its sights! Written by John Wagner (A History of Violence) with art by Colin MacNeil (Judge Dredd: The Chief Judge's Man) this dark and complex tale is a true 2000 AD classic!

A Pakistani storyteller captivates a group of wide-eyed tourists with a nesting doll of interlocked stories about a trickster and a hidden city ruled by the Queen of Red Midnight.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor

This short story originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, #232, August 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018, edited by Paula Guran.

Read the full story for free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Dartmoor, with its mists, bleak winter weather and overwhelming sense of isolation, is the perfect place to build a prison. It's not a place many would choose to live - yet the Governor of Dartmoor Prison did just that. When Herbert Russell retired, he bought All Hallow's Hall - a rambling Tudor mansion on the edge of the moor, and lived there all his life.

Now he's dead, and his estranged family are set to inherit his estate. But when the dead man's family come to stay, the atmosphere of the moors seems to drift into every room. Floorboards creak, secret passageways echo, and wind whistles in the house's famous priest hole. And then, on the morning the family decide to leave All Hallow's Hall once and for all, their young son Timmy goes missing.

The old man hears them before he sees them, three boys coming over the hill, disturbing the peace by the river where he's fishing. He smells the gun oil too, too much oil on a brand new shotgun. These aren't hunters, they're rich kids who don't care about the river and the fish and the old man. Or his dog. Red is the name of the old man's dog, his best friend in the world. And when the boys shoot the dog - for nothing, for simple spite - he sees red, like a mist before his eyes. And before the whole thing is done there'll be more red. Red for blood...

Mars, 600 years in the future, is dying. Five hundred years after the Chinese conquered the Red Planet, the great work of terraforming is failing. The human-machine Consensus of Earth had persuaded the AI Emperor to follow the Golden Path into a vast virtual reality universe, leaving behind an ungoverned planet swept by hunger riots and the beginnings of civil war. Enter Wei Lee, a lowly itinerant agricultural technician: rock 'n' roll fan, dupe, holy fool - and unlikely Messiah. After stumbling on an anarchist pilot hiding near the wreckage of her spacecraft, he's drawn into a revolutionary plot that has been spinning for decades.

With the help of a ghost, the broadcasts of the King of the Cats, a Yankee yak herder, and a little Girl God, Lee travels across the badlands, swampy waterways and vast dust seas to a showdown at the summit of the biggest volcano in the Solar System. Not even the God-like Consensus can predict the outcome of his struggle to define his own destiny...

Epic in scope, Red Dust's spectacular, fast-paced story brilliantly brings to life the planet that has captured our imagination like no other.

Set in the future when teenagers are monitored via camera and their recorded actions and confessions plugged into a computer program that determines their ability to succeed. All kids given a "score" that determines their future potential. This score has the ability to get kids into colleges, grant scholarships, or destroy all hope for the above. Scored's reluctant heroine is Imani, a girl whose high score is brought down when her best friend's score plummets. Where do you draw the line between doing what feels morally right and what can mean your future? Friendship, romance, loyalty, family, human connection and human value: all are questioned in this fresh and compelling dystopian novel set in the scarily forseeable future.

Summer, 1518. A strange sickness sweeps through Strasbourg: women dance in the streets, some until they fall down dead. As rumors of witchcraft spread, suspicion turns toward Lavinia and her family, and Lavinia may have to do the unimaginable to save herself and everyone she loves.

Five centuries later, a pair of red shoes seal to Rosella Oliva's feet, making her dance uncontrollably. They draw her toward a boy who knows the dancing fever's history better than anyone: Emil, whose family was blamed for the fever five hundred years ago. But there's more to what happened in 1518 than even Emil knows, and discovering the truth may decide whether Rosella survives the red shoes.

With McLemore's signature lush prose, Dark and Deepest Red pairs the forbidding magic of a fairy tale with a modern story of passion and betrayal.

This is the story of women becoming inexplicably pregnant. And it happens to every type of woman, regardless of race or creed, from nuns to lesbians.

It happened to Beauford Abel's wife. With her, a perfume tester called; one of his more exotic samples made her black out for a split second. At least, she thought it was a split second...

When Beauford eventually figures out what's going on, he plays amateur sleuth. But instead of finding sex maniacs, he finds brainy apes planning to invade the earth. And the brainy apes are clever enough to ask Beauford to handle their PR. They'd like to be liked when they land. And they'd like the baby apes that earth women will soon be giving birth to, to be liked as well.

You might think this is a pretty funny way for invaders to act. In this book, everything's funny.

America had been free, a democracy. But now Edward III was king, and America was a land with a small, wealthy elite and a vast body of peasants eking out their meager living in the countryside or preying upon one another in dangerous city slums. Edward's soldiers and especially his executioner, Brigadier General Tow, would see that this was exactly how life in America remained.

Only one man ever had the courage to speak out against the tyrant's rule - a man driven by the dream of restoring democracy to the land, only to become the martyr ignominiously hanged on Boot Hill. But from his death a new leader was born, a visionary young man not quite of this world, Chicago Red. His words would take action and be the spark to set the land ablaze with a new kind of revolution...

A BREATHTAKING TIME CHASE THROUGH HISTORY

Centuries before, New Jerusalem had been Chicago. Now it was ruled by the World Ecumenical Church... a repressive theocracy founded by one Allen Howard Dover and governed by fear.

Eugene Stillman didn't like this world. But he was a law-abiding government time traveler, not a radical--at least not until hi met Melanie. She introduced him to the delights of proscribed sex, brought him into the undeground, and presented him with a plan to prevent the birth of Allen Howard Dover. All in involved was murder... and a little trip.

BECAUSE OF MELANIE, STILLMAN AGREED.

BECAUSE OF MELANIE, THE CHURCH MADE STILLMAN A HUNTED CRIMINAL.

And because of Malanie, Stillman suddenly found himself on a horrifying flight through time, running back and forth through centuries to escape pursuers who were determined to follow him all the lives of his days... forever!

Past and present mingle, conscious and subconscious memory intertwine in this impressive work of the imagination. Described by the author as an "old-fashioned ghost story", The Awakening explores with chilling subtlety the theme of the uneasy dead seeking peace--a fear which must go back into our paleolithic subconsciousness.

It's hoped that a few month's rest at the rundown farmhouse, Aaron's Rock, will help heal Ray Albright of the effects of a horrendous car accident: a badly broken back, terrible guilt at the death of his passengers, and the swift comprehension of how little separates the living from the dead. But the farm is not the expected idyllic refuge, for Ray's daytime sketching is disturbed by ghastly moans from a thicket close by, his sleep by sounds downstairs of a wounded man's crawling silenced by an explosion, and his peace of mind by visions of his absent wife in the arms of another man. And he is visited by a recurrent dream, each night a little longer and more real: a band of exhausted men in tattered gray uniforms comes forward in the dawn light, but then turns again wearily to face enemy fire.

Only gradually, and with the help of a lovely and willing neighbor, does Ray come across the story of the Civil War tragedy which killed off the first owners of Aaron's Rock and whose ghosts are said to haunt the house. And only at the very end does he understand his own soul to be hostage to these ghostly players seeking release from torment.

In this spellbinding novel Richard Meredith makes use of a lifetime spent in the deep South, in towns which, like Aaron's Rock, cannot bury their unfinished past. He now lives in Milton, Florida, with his wife and children.

Starship Captain Robert L. Janas had only one loyalty--to the firm he worked for--the Stellar Trading Company. And with good reason, for STC was not just a merchant corporation.

For 1200 years the vast complex of companies that called itself STC had maintained contact between Earth and the multifarious worlds peopled with its colonies, giving help, support, financing and protection whenever and wherever these were needed, without regard to politics.

Inevitably, and precisely because it was neutral, STC had come to play a powerful rold in intergalactic affairs--more powerful, indeed, than Earth itself.

Now that neutrality was threatened--from withing the firm.

And Janas knew they would all be destroyed in the holocaust.

This novella originally appaeared in the anthology McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003), edited by Michael Chabon. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 9 (2004), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Right Livelihoods (2007).

The first book of the multiverse.

Dorian Hawkmoon... Corum Jhaelen Irsei... Elric of Melniboné. Over the years, Michael Moorcock has captivated readers with his unending versions of the Eternal Champion, the timeless warrior who serves the Cosmic Balance in the ongoing battle that rages between Law and Chaos through the many planes and levels of the multiverse. But what is the multiverse and what are its origins? In this essential novel, Michael Moorcock provides readers these critical answers.

World War Three has come and gone, and humankind has survived its brutal past to assume its place among the stars. Yet their existence is endangered nonetheless, as their entire universe is threatening to collapse. All their hopes rest on the shoulders of Count Renark von Bek, a nobleman of extraordinary psychic abilities and carefully guarded secrets.

Aided by his companions, von Bek will delve into the Sundered Worlds, a mysterious galaxy outside the space-time continuum that has materialized on the edges of known space. Inside this roving galaxy, they will uncover the secrets of the multiverse and embark upon a last desperate gamble to save humankind.

But as they will soon discover, even survival comes laden with danger, as the solutions to their dilemma may also hold the final keys to their destruction...

Alternate title: The Blood Red Game

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets) - (2014) - essay by David Thomas Moore
• A Scandal in Hobohemia - [alt.sherlock.holmes] - (2014) - short fiction by Jamie Wyman
• Black Alice - (2014) - short fiction by Kelly Hale
• The Adventure of the Speckled Bandana - (2014) - short fiction by J. E. Cohen
• The Rich Man's Hand - (2014) - short fiction by Joan De La Haye
• The Lantern Men - (2014) - short fiction by Kaaron Warren
• A Woman's Place - (2014) - short fiction by Emma Newman
• A Study in Scarborough - (2014) - short fiction by Guy Adams
• The Small World of 221b - (2014) - short fiction by Ian Edginton
• The Final Conjuration - (2014) - short fiction by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• The Innocent Icarus - (2014) - short fiction by James Lovegrove
• Half There/All There - [alt.sherlock.holmes (Glen Mehn)] - (2014) - short fiction by Glen Mehn
• All the Single Ladies - non-genre - [Sherlock Holmes (Gini Koch)] - (2014) - short fiction by Jeanne Cook [as by Gini Koch]
• The Patchwork Killer - (2014) - short fiction by Kasey Lansdale
• Parallels - (2014) - short fiction by Jenni Hill

A killer far worse than insane.

Chris Wilcox has been searching for years, so he knows a few things about his wife's killer. Cheryl Wilcox wasn't the first. All the victims were redheads. All eaten alive and left within a mile of the ocean. The trail of death crosses the globe and spans decades.

The cold trail catches fire when Chris and two other survivors find a trace of the killer's DNA. By hiring a cutting-edge lab to sequence it, they make a terrifying discovery. The killer is far more dangerous than they ever guessed. And now they're being hunted by their own prey.

We like to imagine the end. How we might survive. How we might live after the fateful moment that changes everything. That moment has arrived--welcome to Canada, after the apocalypse!

Fractured is a collection of stories by more than 20 writers who imagine life after the end of days. The waters have risen around Vancouver, nuclear disasters have devastated the Prairies, a strange sickness has relocated the capital of the nation to Yellowknife, aliens have invaded Manitoba, and even ghosts have returned to exterminate the living. Across this vast nation, a country fractured and rent asunder by disasters both natural and unnatural, come the stories of survivors, of the brave and the wicked, the kind and the hostile. These are tales that reveal the secrets at this critical point for humanity, exploring a diversity of scenarios and settings from small rural communities to large cities and protagonists from all walks of life.

Postapocalyptic literature finds its stories in each generation that has something new to reflect upon: Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man is considered the first work of modern apocalyptic fiction, and many have followed in her footsteps in both print, with The Hunger Games, I Am Legend, The Road, and OryxandCrake, and film, with Mad Max, Waterworld, The Book of Eli, and others. Contributors to this volume include T. S. Bazelli, David Huebert, Hilary Janzen, Arun Jiwa, Claude Lalumière, Michael Pack, Morgan M. Page, Miriam Oudin, Frank Westcott, A. C. Wise, and more.

Table of Contents:

• Kalopsia - short story by E. Catherine Tobler
• Jenny of the Long Gauge - short story by Michael Matheson
• Snow Angel - short story by A. M. Dellamonica
• Persistence of Vision - short story by Orrin Grey
• Keeper of the Oasis - short story by Steve Stanton
• Maxim Fujiyama and Other Persons - short story by Claude Lalumière?
• Saying Goodbye - short story by Michael Pack
• Of the Dying Light - short story by Arun Jiwa
• Edited Hansard 116 - short story by Miriam Oudin
• @shalestate - short story by David Huebert
• The Body Politic - short story by John Jantunen
• Brown Wave - short story by Christine Ottoni
• Dog for Dinner - short story by dvsduncan
• Manitou-Wapow - short story by GMB Chomichuk and Curtis Janzen and Thomas Turner
• D-Day - short story by T. S. Bazelli
• Ruptures - short story by Jamie Mason
• City Noise - short story by Morgan M. Page
• River Road - short story by Amanda M. Taylor
• Matthew, Waiting - short story by A. C. Wise
• The Dome of St. Macaire - short story by Jean-Louis Trudel
• No Man Is a Promontory - short story by Hilary Janzen
• White Noise - short story by Geoff Gander
• Last Man Standing - short story by Frank Westcott

WFA nominated novelette.

The Hundred-Year Christmas is the story of poignant friendship between Father Christmas, who lives a hundred years before being replaced, and Father Time, who lives only a single year before being replaced. Each year, Santa sees a version of his friend grow old and die. Now it's Santa's turn, but he's having trouble finding a replacement, and if he doesn't succeed, there'll be no one to take care of the infant Father Time. Time itself will stop.

Nebula and Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It was originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2004. No other publications are known at this time.

The rollicking true story of the legendary writer and editor who ruled over America's fantasy and supernatural pulp journals in the mid-twentieth century, and shaped today's UFO and sci-fi cultures: Ray Palmer.

Meet Ray Palmer. A hustler, a trickster, and a visionary. The hunchbacked Palmer, who stood at just over four feet tall, was nevertheless an indomitable force, the ruler of his own bizarre sector of the universe. Armed with only his typewriter, the Palmer changed the world as we know it - jumpstarting the flying saucer craze; frightening hundreds of thousands of Americans with "true" stories of evil denizens of inner earth; and reporting on cover-ups involving extraterrestrials, the paranormal, and secret government agencies.

As editor for the ground-breaking sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories and creator of publications such as Other Worlds, Imagination, Fate, Mystic, Search, Flying Saucers, Hidden World, and Space Age, Palmer pushed the limits and broke new ground in science fiction publishing in the 1940s and 1950s--and was reviled for it by purists who called him "the man who killed science fiction."

In the first-ever biography devoted to the figure who molded modern geek culture, pulp scholar Fred Nadis paints a vivid portrait of Palmer--a brilliant, charming, and wildly willful iconoclast who helped ignite the UFO craze, convinced Americans of hidden worlds and government cover ups, and championed the occult and paranormal.

Palmer overcame serious physical handicaps to become the most significant editor during the "golden age" of pulp magazines; he rebelled in his own inimitable way against the bland suburban vision of the American Dream; he concocted new literary genres; and he molded our current conspiracy culture decades before The X-Files claimed that the truth was out there.

One million years of evolution didn't change our nature. Nor did it bury the horrors predating civilisation. Ancient rites, old deities and savage ways can reappear in the places you least expect.

Lifestyle journalist Katrine escaped past traumas by moving to a coast renowned for seaside holidays and natural beauty. But when a vast hoard of human remains and prehistoric artefacts is discovered in nearby Brickburgh, a hideous shadow engulfs her life.

Helene, a disillusioned lone parent, lost her brother, Lincoln, six years ago. Disturbing subterranean noises he recorded prior to vanishing, draw her to Brickburgh's caves. A site where early humans butchered each other across sixty thousand years. Upon the walls, images of their nameless gods remain.

Amidst rumours of drug plantations and new sightings of the mythical red folk, it also appears that the inquisitive have been disappearing from this remote part of the world for years. A rural idyll where outsiders are unwelcome and where an infernal power is believed to linger beneath the earth. A timeless supernormal influence that only the desperate would dream of confronting. But to save themselves and those they love, and to thwart a crimson tide of pitiless barbarity, Kat and Helene are given no choice. They were involved and condemned before they knew it.

For 13-year-old Ronnie Day, life is full of problems: Mom and Dad have separated, his brother Tim is a constant pest, Melanie Ward either loves him or hates him, and Jesus Christ won't stay in his heart. Plus he has to walk past the red church every day, where the Bell Monster hides with its wings and claws and livers for eyes. But the biggest problem is that Archer McFall is the new preacher at the church, and Mom wants Ronnie to attend midnight services with her.

Sheriff Frank Littlefield hates the red church for a different reason. His little brother died in a freak accident at the church twenty years ago, and now Frank is starting to see his brother's ghost. And the ghost keeps demanding, "Free me." People are dying in Whispering Pines, and the murders coincide with McFall's return.

The Days, the Littlefields, and the McFalls are descendants of the original families that settled the rural Appalachian community. Those old families share a secret of betrayal and guilt, and McFall wants his congregation to prove its faith. Because he believes he is the Second Son of God, and that the cleansing of sin must be done in blood.

In the sealed city of Mickey-san the skies are still blue. There is no crime. No pollution. No one is unemployed and entertainment is the primary industry. In the tunnels below lies Dogton. Hard, dirty, industrial and restless with a subterranean rage, it's nightlife neon and garish. But surrounding all is Ded-Tek, grim, violent and predatory, with survival being the sole occupation of its inhabitants, and The Market its only hope.

Amidst this city of outcasts is Tommy Uchida, enigma, god, a mind too brilliant for his artificially enhanced body: and Kumo, trickster chimera, living by her wits and for her art, trying to assert her humanity. All are interconnected by the uncertainty of their future: fifteen minute viruses, a cold blistering sun, savage police 'wire-dogs', offbeat cult groups, roving gangs of rich boys, and the punishment of the 'Bell Factory', and the spectre of a brutal murderer, a foreshadow of a change that none of them can comprehend.

In the enclosed urban sprawl of the Construct, a sexually transmitted disease called "hives" poses a deadly threat. The government controls the epidemic with concentration camps for the victims and sterile, state-run whorehouses for the healthy.

When Anna Baxter's boyfriend commits suicide, she hires a male prostitute to help her recover from her grief. Ros Lawrence, her new lover, is trained as a caring companion as well as a sex partner- and what starts as a business transaction becomes a relationship neither Anna nor Rod could have imagined. But in a world where every touch is monitored and where the forces running the concentration camps are relentlessly opposed by terrorists with thei own agenda, an unlikely liason can be devastating.

This novella was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2023.

Ezekiel Cross is handsome, strong, intelligent and he is a cold blooded killer.

For most of his life, Ezekiel has been a killer, trained from a young age to enforce the whims of his boss. But Ezekiel is tired - tired of the lies to his wife, Mali; tired of not having the normal life he craves. He longs for the day that he can hang up his guns and live a normal life with his wife Mali. So he decides to end his career as a professional assassin; to hang up his guns and raise a family.

But the life of a killer is never his own. Ezekiel is called to do one last hit, but instead of closing the deal he finds himself a target. He's sent back in time in what is meant as an experiment as well as punishment.

Initially distraught, he decides to change his fate by saving himself and his family from the events that led him to a lifetime of crime. Along the way, he meets some of the coolest, sexiest, deadliest and craziest characters to ever grace the pages of a book and ultimately finds himself in a situation that could change his life forever... or end it.

This Special Edition includes the expanded alternate story, Redeemer: Glitch.

An ancient voice speaks from the depths of a long-forgotten cave...

As a violent storm rages overhead, the scratching sounds begin in the cellar below...

A man inherits the family talent, but what price does that legacy demand...?

A return to the family homestead brings overwhelming memories, but the darkest memory of all still waits in the ravine out back...

An unassuming tourist quietly strolls through town, leaving devastation in his wake...

A late-night call from an abandoned camp brings a frightened cop face-to-face with his darkest fears...

A wild joyride ends with a surprise reunion and an encounter with the impossible...

A man searches for answers at an abandoned lighthouse and uncovers an unspeakable past...

Listen closely. You can hear them. The whispered echoes of your darkest fears. In this stunning new collection, Paul F. Olson delves into the quiet heart of terror. Featuring eleven long out-of-print tales from the '80s and '90s, and the debut of "Bloodybones," a brand new novella of loss, longing, and chilling horror. With a foreword by Chet Williamson and an introduction by the author, Whispered Echoes abounds with subtle shivers that linger long after the last page is turned.

Table of Contents:

• The Country of the Strange: Paul F. Olson's Upper Peninsula - essay by Chet Williamson
• Introduction - essay
• The Visitor - (1983) - short story
• From a Dreamless Sleep Awakened - short fiction
• The Forever Bird - short fiction
• Homecoming - (1987) - short story
• They Came from the Suburbs - (1986) - short story
• Through the Storm - (1988) - short story
• The More Things Change - (1989) - short story
• Guides - (1989) - short story
• Getting Back - short fiction
• Faith and Henry Gustafson - (1991) - short story
• Down the Valley Wild - (1991) - short story
• Bloodybones - short fiction

What would guilt make you do?

Hadleigh Keene died on the road leading away from Hollyhock Asylum. The reasons are unknown. Her sister Morgan blames herself. A year later with the case still unsolved, Morgan creates a false identity, that of a troubled housewife named Charlotte Turner, and goes inside.

Morgan quickly discovers that Hollyhock is... not right. She is shaken by the hospital's peculiar routines and is soon beset by strange episodes. All the while, the persona of Charlotte takes on a life of its own, becoming stronger with each passing day. As her identity begins unraveling, Morgan finds herself tracing Hadleigh's footsteps and peering into the places they lead.

Set in ancient, magical Scotland, this is the story of Maira, a proud and beautiful Celt, trained in warfare as well as womanhood. Carric loves her but he belongs to an enemy tribe and she has vowed to kill him.

The world's first Zen Buddhist paranormal romance published to coincide with Halloween

One of the most progressive writers at work today, Victor Pelevin's comic inventiveness has won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, and Gogol, and Time has described him as a 'psychedelic Nabokov for the cyberage.' In The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, a smash success in Russia and Pelevin's first novel in six years, paranormal meets transcendental with a splash of satire as A Hu-Li, a two-thousand-year-old shape-shifting werefox from ancient China meets her match in Alexander, a Wagner-addicted werewolf who's the key figure in Russia's Big Oil. Both a supernatural love story and an outrageously funny send-up of modern Russia, this stunning and ingenious work of the imagination is the sharpest novel to date from Russia's most gifted literary malcontent.

The King was bored. For five hundred years he had been King of the country of Myth and Shadow, and he was a good king, if a slightly bewildered one.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

Every teenage girl thinks she's different. When government agents kick down Claire Forrester's front door and murder her parents, Claire realises just how different she is.

Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and, hours later, stepped off it, the only passenger left alive. A hero.

President Chase Williams has vowed to eradicate the menace. Unknown to the electorate, however, he is becoming the very thing he has sworn to destroy.

Each of them is caught up in a war that so far has been controlled with laws and violence and drugs. But an uprising is about to leave them damaged, lost, and tied to one another for ever.

The night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge, and the battle for humanity will begin.

Vanishings and aparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia--or anywhere else in the world--today.

The Masque of The Red Death is set in 12th century Italy, where Prince Prospero, a devout worshiper of Satan, rules tyrannically in a land stricken by a mysterious plague. Prospero's cruel whims include toying with the fear-stricken peasants under his domain, in order to satisfy his own diabolical pleasures. Deliverance... or Doom?

"The day of deliverance is at hand." That was the prophecy of the mysterious man cloaked in red. But the villagers had little time for rejoicing. For a few scant hours later, the people were dying of that grimmest of all plagues-the Red Death! And within the castle that ruled this desolated land, even eerier events were happening... as the purity of the lovely Francesca battled the evil of Prospero... and unearthly forces gathered for a mad, grim masquerade!

The pythons had entered into Mankind. No man knew at what moment he might be Possessed!

On Christmas the world's freedom died. Every man, woman and child lay in the grip of fear, for no one knew at what moment his nearest friend or a casual stranger might suddenly be possessed by some brutal mind... and begin to murder and destroy. For Chandler it was worse than for most. He was both victim and executioner. He had suffered himself, and he had committed a violent crime while under the strange domination. Accusing of hoaxing he was driven from his home. He wandered the world and found it smashed like a spoiled child's plaything?now Chandler was in the very presence of the destroyers! But what could one person do against such power -- the power of gods!

Two thousand years after Pompeii's destruction, a thriller of upheaval - volcanic and political - as only SF Grandmaster Frederik Pohl can write it!

With a keen eye for the humanity in any situation, science fiction icon Frederik Pohl has crafted a compelling new novel of a not-too-distant future we can only hope is merely science fiction.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. it gave so little warning that Pompeiians were caught unawares, and many bodies were preserved in volcanic ash. Two thousand years later, in 2079, Pompeii is a popular theme park eagerly anticipating Il Giubeleo, the Jubilee celebration of the great anniversary. But Vesuvius is still capable of erupting, and even more threatening are terrorists who want to use the occasion to draw attention to their cause by creating a huge disaster. As the fateful day draws near, people from all over the world - workers, tourists, terrorists - caught in the shadow of the volcano will grapple with upheaval both natural and political.

Table of Contents:

• Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus - (1956)
• The Ghost-Maker - (1954)
• Let the Ants Try - (1949)
• Pythias - (1955)
• The Mapmakers - (1955)
• Rafferty's Reasons - (1955)
• Target One - (1955)
• Grandy Devil - (1955)
• The Tunnel Under the World - (1955)
• What to Do Until the Analyst Comes

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Mars-Tube - (1941)
• Trouble in Time - (1940)
• Vacant World - (1940)
• Best Friend - (1941)
• Before the Universe - (1940)
• Nova Midplane - (1940)
• The Extrapolated Dimwit - (1942)
• Afterword

Two novel omnibus.

DRUNKARDS WALK: Cornut was a master teacher - respected, successful. his life well rewarded in past accomplishments and rich in the promise of achievements to come. Yet he was waging a bitter battle with a savage, bewildering drive to self-destruction.

But when he really began to probe the reasons for his "madness," the battle with himself became insignificant beside the power his new information could release.

If he could live that long...

THE AGE OF THE PUSSYFOOT: Forrester had no obligations.
He didn't have to think about whether his wife had enough money because he no longer had a wife. All his debts were paid - or forgiven - centuries ago.

He had nothing to worry about.

Or so he thought.

Then the joymaker - the marvelous contraption invented while he was in the deep freeze - informed him that he was in danger and that a hunting license was already out on him.

In a perfect world, suddenly everything had gone wrong!

When a mysterious alien spacecraft approaches the Earth and demands to speak with the President of the United States, then destroys a large Pacific island to demonstrate its strength and seriousness, you'd expect the President to talk. Problem is, there is no President - not even a United States. China rules the Americas, and to most people "US" and "USSR" are just quaint abbreviations in historical dictionaries. But the aliens prove unreasonable about accepting substitutes. . .

This short story originally appeared in Rogue, Feb/March 1966 and was reprinted in SF Impulse, October 1966. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• World's Best Science Fiction: 1967, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr
• Nebula Award Stories Two (1967), edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison
• Backdrop of Stars (1968), edited by Harry Harrison
• A Science Fiction Argosy (1972), edited by Damon Knight
• Alpha 3 (1972), edited by Robert Silverberg
• Bio-Futures (1976), edited by Pamela Sargent
• Decade the 1960s (1977), edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison
• The Road to Science Fiction 3: From Heinlein to Here (1979), edited by James Gunn
• The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (1980), edited by Robert Silverberg
• Robert Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder (1987), edited by Robert Silverberg
• The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery
• The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (1994), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer
• The Furthest Horizon: SF Adventures to the Far Future (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois
• The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume 3 (2001), edited by Frederik Pohl
• Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology (2012), edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly
• The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The story is included in the collections Day Million (1970), The Best of Frederik Pohl (1975) and Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Day Million - (1966)
• The Deadly Mission of P. Snodgrass - (1962)
• The Day the Martians Came - (1967)
• Schematic Man - (1969)
• Small Lords - (1957)
• Making Love - (1966)
• Way Up Yonder - (1959)
• Speed Trap - (1967)
• It's a Young World - (1941)
• Under Two Moons - (1965)

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Digits and Dastards) - (1966)
• The Children of Night - (1964)
• The Fiend - (1964)
• Earth Eighteen - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• Father of the Stars - (1964)
• The Five Hells of Orion - (1963)
• With Redfern on Capella XII - (1955)
• How to Count on Your Fingers - (1956)
• On Binary Digits and Human Habits - (1962)

He was a master teacher—respected, successful, his life well rewarded in past accomplishments and rich in the promise of achievements to come.

And yet he was fighting a bitter battle with a savage, bewildering drive to self-destruction.

But when he really began to probe the reasons for his "madness," the battle with himself became a puny thing beside the power his new information could release.

If he could live that long.

This novelette originally appeared in Omni, October 1982. It can also be found in the anthologies The 1983 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha, The Best Science Fiction of the Year #12 (1983), edited by Terry Carr, and The Third Omni Book of Science Fiction (1985), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story is included in the collection Midas World (1983).

Hugo Award wining novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, January 1985. The story can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986), edited by Gardner Dozois
• The 1986 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha
• The New Hugo Winners, Volume II: (1986-88) (1992), edited by Isaac Asimov
• The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of the 20th Century (1998) edited by Martin H. Greenberg
• Armageddons (1999) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
• The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF (2010), edited by Mike Ashley

It is included in the collection Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

Read the story for free at the Baen website.

Ben Bova, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, and Charles Sheffield share a collection of original stories and essays that speculate on what the world will be like fifty years from now and discuss the sociological and technological implications of their expectations.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Charles Sheffield
• 2042: A Cautiously Pessimistic View - (1991) - essay by Ben Bova
• Thy Kingdom Come - (1993) - novella by Ben Bova
• A Visit to Belinda - essay by Frederik Pohl
• What Dreams Remain - novella by Frederik Pohl
• Report on Planet Earth - essay by Charles Sheffield
• The Price of Civilization - (1992) - novelette by Charles Sheffield
• Democracy in America in the Year 2042 - essay by Jerry Pournelle
• Higher Education - novella by Jerry Pournelle and Charles Sheffield

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Horace L. Gold - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Gold on Galaxy - essay by H. L. Gold
• Coming Attraction - (1950) - shortstory by Fritz Leiber
• To Serve Man - (1950) - shortstory by Damon Knight
• Memoir (To Serve Man) - essay by Damon Knight
• Betelgeuse Bridge - (1951) - shortstory by William Tenn
• From a Cave Deep in Stuyvesant Town — A Memoir of Galaxy's Most Creative Years - essay by William Tenn
• Cost of Living - (1952) - shortstory by Robert Sheckley
• Memoir of Galaxy Magazine - essay by Robert Sheckley
• The Model of a Judge - (1953) - shortstory by William Morrison
• Memoir (The Model of a Judge) - essay by William Morrison
• The Holes Around Mars - (1954) - shortstory by Jerome Bixby
• Memoir (The Holes Around Mars) - essay by Jerome Bixby
• Horrer Howce - (1956) - shortstory by Margaret St. Clair
• Memoir (Horrer Howce) - essay by Margaret St. Clair
• People Soup - (1958) - shortstory by Alan Arkin
• Memoir (People Soup) - essay by Alan Arkin
• Something Bright - (1960) - shortstory by Zenna Henderson
• The Lady Who Sailed The Soul - (1960) - novelette by Cordwainer Smith and Genevieve Linebarger
• The Deep Down Dragon - (1961) - shortstory by Judith Merril
• Memoir (The Deep Down Dragon) - essay by Judith Merril
• Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night - (1961) - novelette by Algis Budrys
• Memoir: Spilled Milk - essay by Algis Budrys
• The Place Where Chicago Was - (1962) - novelette by Jim Harmon
• Memoir (The Place Where Chicago Was) - essay by Jim Harmon
• The Great Nebraska Sea - (1963) - shortstory by Allan Danzig
• Memoir (The Great Nebraska Sea) - essay by Allan Danzig
• Oh, to Be a Blobel! - (1964) - novelette by Philip K. Dick
• Memoir (Oh, To Be a Blobel!) - essay by Philip K. Dick
• Founding Father - (1965) - shortstory by Isaac Asimov
• Memoir (Founding Father) - essay by Isaac Asimov
• Going Down Smooth - (1968) - shortstory by Robert Silverberg
• Memoir (Going Down Smooth) - essay by Robert Silverberg
• All the Myriad Ways - (1968) - shortstory by Larry Niven
• Memoir (All the Myriad Ways) - essay by Larry Niven
• The Last Flight of Dr. Ain - (1969) - shortstory by James Tiptree, Jr.
• Memoir (Galaxy Book Shelf) - essay by Algis Budrys
• Galaxy Book Shelf (Galaxy, September 1969) - (1969) - essay by Algis Budrys
• Slow Sculpture - (1970) - novelette by Theodore Sturgeon
• Memoir (Slow Sculpture) - essay by Theodore Sturgeon
• About a Secret Crocodile - (1970) - shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
• Memoir (About a Secret Crocodile) - essay by R. A. Lafferty
• Cold Friend - (1973) - shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• Memoir (Cold Friend) - essay by Harlan Ellison
• The Day Before the Revolution - (1974) - shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Gift of Garigolli - (1974) - novelette by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl
• Overdrawn at the Memory Bank - (1976) - novelette by John Varley
• Note (Overdrawn at the Memory Bank) - essay by John Varley
• Horace, Galaxyca - essay by Alfred Bester
• Index to Galaxy Magazine

Caution! You are about to enter a world...

...where all engineering ingenuity has been employed for public spectacles of torture and death.

...where the stock market operated with pari-mutuel machines.

...where a court clerk transcribes testimony on punch cards, then feeds it to a jury machine.

...where the dream real-estate development of today has become a cracked-concrete savage jungle.

In this world, young lawyer Charles Mundin battles a great combine of corporate interest--battles them in board meetings and in dark alley--in a struggle that lays bare some brutal promises about the future... promises we are beginning to make right now.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Epoch (1975), edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg. It is also included in the collections Pohlstars (1984) and Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

By the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of "Gateway", this novel centres around Sandy Washington, a young man who has been raised on a spaceship by aliens. The Hakh'li have done everything to give Sandy an earth-type boyhood. Now they are returning him to Earth.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Science-Fiction Games - (1976)
• In the Problem Pit - (1973)
• Let the Ants Try - (1949)
• To See Another Mountain - (1959)
• The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass - (1962)
• Golden Ages Gone Away - (1972)
• Rafferty's Reasons - (1955)
• I Remember a Winter - (1972)
• The Schematic Man - (1969)
• What to Do Until the Analyst Comes - (1956)
• Some Joys Under the Star - (1973)
• The Man Who Ate the World - (1956)
• SF: The Game-Playing Literature - (1976)

The discovery of another habitable world might spell salvation to the three bitterly competing power blocs of the resource-starved 21st century; but when their representatives arrive on Jem, with its multiple intelligent species, they discover instead the perfect situation into which to export their rivalries. Subtitled, with savage irony, 'The Making of a Utopia', Jem is one of Frederik Pohl's most powerful novels.

Contents:

• vii - Introduction: Jupiter the Giant - essay by Isaac Asimov
• xv - Preface: Jupiter at Last - essay by Carol Pohl and Frederik Pohl
• 1 - Bridge - [Cities in Flight] - (1952) - novelette by James Blish
• 39 - Victory Unintentional - [Jovians - 2] - (1942) - short story by Isaac Asimov
• 65 - Desertion - [City] - (1944) - short story by Clifford D. Simak
• 81 - The Mad Moon - (1935) - novelette by Stanley G. Weinbaum
• 111 - Heavyplanet - (1939) - short story by Milton A. Rothman (variant of Heavy Planet)
• 125 - The Lotus-Engine - (1940) - short story by Raymond Z. Gallun
• 149 - Call Me Joe - (1957) - novelette by Poul Anderson
• 193 - Habit - (1939) - short story by Lester del Rey
• 211 - A Meeting with Medusa - [A Meeting with Medusa - 1] - (1971) - novelette by Arthur C. Clarke

When Comet Sicara brushed near enough to strip the ozone layer from the Earth's atmosphere, civilization effectively ended - in fact, life on Earth was nearly extinguished. But the underwater cities survived, and some heavily protected land enclaves held on as well. When the "ozone summer" years were ending, submarine captain Ron Tregarth rediscovered his lost love, Graciela Navarro. But their triumph against all odds was only the beginning, for the alien known as the Eternal stood between them and threatened to destroy all they held dearest. The Eternal's goal was to absorb the minds of every living thing, to create a death-in-life to enslave the planet.

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, March 1979. The story was later incorporated in the fixup novel The Cool War (1981).

Table of Contents:

• The Fire-Bringer
• The Midas Plague - (1954)
• The Servant of the People - (1982)
• The Man Who Ate the World - (1956)
• The Farmer on the Dole - (1982)
• The Lord of the Skies
• The New Neighbors - (1983)

Mars was harsh and unforgiving, but for the colonists who called it home, its future was as bright as the comets that hung in the night sky, for locked in those icy bodies were the water and gases that would make Mars live again, mined from the vast Oort Cloud beyond Pluto. Young Dekker DeWoe yearned to become an Oort miner. But when he finally arrived on Earth to begin training, the mining project was abruptly canceled. Then he began to hear rumors of a plan to force the restoration of the mining -- a plan that would result in the deaths of millions . . .

In a major science fiction event, Nebula Award winners Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Nancy Kress, and Frederik Pohl join forces--under the editorship of Robert Silverberg--to create a triumph of world-building: Murasaki, a science fiction novel in six parts. Murasaki is completely based in hard science and what we know of the Murasaki star system--which actually exists.

Authors Poul Anderson and Frederik Pohl painstakingly constructed the working mechanics of a real star system, projecting the atmosphere, geology, chemistry, flora, and fauna of the two planets on which the work is set. They and four more of America's best science fiction authors--known for their "hard" speculative fiction--used Pohl and Anderson's essays (included as appendixes to this book) as source material to create this amazing story of the earliest human explorations of the twenty-third century--an epic tale of discovery, conflict, and resolution told by the masters of imaginative writing.

Murasaki, star HD 36395... where the gristmill of Darwinism produced two vastly different alien ecologies on two closely revolving planets, circling each other since scouring lightning storms stirred them to life billions of years ago. The two planets are Genji, violent and reckless, filled with a variety of winged life; and Chujo, a cooling world of ancient, crumbling cities, slowly going through its glacial death throes. Both planets are host to intelligences that are strange in ways Man can only guess at...and the planets have an eerie connection that will soon come to fruition after the first human explorers arrive. Exceeding light-speed for twenty years and decelerating by plasma exhaust drive, the first ship bearing humans arrives at Murasaki. The wealth, pride, and future of nations depend upon the outcome as the first contact team sets foot on a Murasaki-system world--while the hope of mankind, a planet capable of supporting human life, awaits the first explorer to touch the strangely colored alien soil....

Contains:

• Introduction (Murasaki) - essay by Robert Silverberg
• The Treasures of Chujo - novelette by Frederik Pohl
• Genji - novelette by David Brin
• Language - novelette by Poul Anderson
• World Vast, World Various - novella by Gregory Benford
• A Plague of Conscience - novelette by Greg Bear
• Birthing Pool - novelette by Nancy Kress
• Appendix A: Design for Two Worlds (Murasaki) - essay by Poul Anderson
• Appendix B: Murasaki's Worlds (Murasaki) - essay by Frederik Pohl

This guard smelled trouble and it could be counted on to come-for a nose for trouble was one of the many talents bred here! A classic novella about the future of law enforcement by Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Frederik Pohl.

This story originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1957. It can also be found in the collections The Case Against Tomorrow (1957) and Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

The story of a philanthropic foundation used as a front by alien beings secretly monitoring Earth. Nolly Stennis - former opera singer turned accountant - hears of two performers who sign contracts with Narabedla and vanish. He investigates but is transported to one of Aldebaran's moons.

The overcrowded Earth isn't room enough for Evesham Giyt, a solitary and brilliant computer hacker who yearns for the long-gone frontiers of the past. Chasing stories of unspoiled beauty and endless possibility, he takes a leap across the stars to the rugged colony world of Tupelo and soon finds himself a respected member of the community and mayor of the colony's human population.

Humanity isn't the first race to colonize Tupelo: as mayor, Giyt is part of a council of races trying to peacefully coexist despite wildly disparate cultures and traditions. But as Giyt learns to like his alien neighbors, he begins to realize that his fellow humans may have other plans for Tupelo, plans that don't include peace but do include lots of dead aliens. It will be up to Giyt to crack the human conspiracy and carve out a future for all of Tupelo... before it gets him killed!

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Frederik Pohl
• The Stories of the Sixties - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Critical Mass - (1962) - novelette
• The World of Myrion Flowers - (1961) - shortstory
• The Engineer - (1956) - shortstory
• A Gentle Dying - (1961) - shortstory
• Nightmare with Zeppelins - (1958) - shortstory
• The Quaker Cannon - (1961) - novelette
• The 60/40 Stories - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Trouble in Time - (1940) - shortstory
• Mars-Tube - (1941) - novelette
• Epilogue to The Space Merchants - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Gravy Planet (excerpt) - shortfiction
• The Final Stories - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Mute Inglorious Tam - (1974) - shortstory
• The Gift of Garigolli - (1974) - novelette
• The Meeting - (1972) - shortstory

In a future where medical science has all but eliminated death, vid star Rafiel is faced with his own demise and learns many poignant lessons about life as he struggles with this reality.

An alien creature holds the inhabitants of Earth captive, an intergalactic explorer is hired to find the reason why a lunar mining operation is plagued by suspicious accidents, and a band of rebels plots to overthrow the rulers of Venus.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1982)
• Figurehead - (1982)
• Red Moon of Danger - (1951)
• Donovan Had a Dream - (1947)

Frederik Pohl, the bestselling author of The Boy Who Would Live Forever, is famous for his novels, but first and foremost, he is a master of the science fiction short story. For more than fifty years he has been writing incisive, entertaining SF stories, several hundred in all. Even while writing his bestselling triple-crown (Hugo, Nebula, Campbell Award) novel Gateway and the other Heechee Saga novels, he has always written short fiction.

Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the best of his many stories. Spanning the decades, these tales are in their way a living history of science fiction. Because Frederik Pohl has been on the frontlines of the field since the halcyon days of the late 1930s, and has written short stories in every decade since. And because he has always been a keen observer of the human condition and the world that is shaped by it, his stories reflect the currents of political movements, social trends, major events that have shaken the world...

Yet at their core, all his stories are most acutely concerned with people. All sorts of people. Some are people you'll love, some you'll hate. But you will need to find out what happens to the people who inhabit these stories. Because Frederik Pohl imbues his characters with a depth and individuality that makes them as real as people you see every day. Of course, he also employs a mind-boggling variety of scientific ideas and science fictional tropes with which his characters must interact. And he does it all with seemingly no effort at all. That's some trick. Not everyone can do that... but that's why he was named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by his peers in the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Here are his two Hugo Award winning stories, "Fermi and Frost" and "The Meeting" (with C. M. Kornbluth), along with such classic novellas as the powerful "The Gold at the Starbow's End" and "The Greening of Bed-Stuy," and stories such as "Servant of the People," "Shaffery Among the Immortals," and "Growing Up in Edge City," all finalists for major awards. And dozens of other wonderful tales, like "The Mayor of Mare Tranq" and the provocative "The Day the Martians Landed" and many others.

Altogether, a grand collection of thought-provoking, entertaining science fiction by one of the all-time greats!

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by James Frenkel
• "The Merchants of Venus", Worlds of If, July/August 1972
• "The Things That Happen", Asimov's, October 1985
• "The High Test", Asimov's, June 1983
• "My Lady Green Sleeves", Galaxy, February 1957
• "The Kindly Isle", Asimov's, November 1984
• "The Middle of Nowhere", Galaxy, May 1955
• "I Remember a Winter", Orbit 11, Damon Knight (ed.), 1972
• "The Greening of Bed-Stuy", F&SF, July 1984.
• "To See Another Mountain", F&SF, April 1959
• "The Mapmakers", Galaxy, July 1955
• "Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair", F&SF, October 1983
• "The Celebrated No-Hit Inning", Fantastic Universe, September 1956
• "Some Joys Under the Star", Galaxy, November 1973
• "Servant of the People", Analog, February 1983
• "Waiting for the Olympians", Asimov's, August 1988
• "Criticality", Analog, December 1984
• "Shaffery Among the Immortals", F&SF, July 1972
• "The Day the Icicle Works Closed", Galaxy, February 1960
• "Saucery", F&SF, October 1986
• "The Gold at the Starbow's End", Analog, March 1972
• "Growing Up in Edge City", Epoch, Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg (eds.), 1975
• "The Knights of Arthur", Galaxy, January 1958
• "Creation Myths of the Recently Extinct", Analog, January 1994
• "The Meeting" (in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth), F&SF, November 1972
• "Let the Ants Try", (as by James MacCreigh) Planet Stories, Winter 1949
• "Speed Trap", Playboy, November 1967
• "The Day the Martians Came", Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison (ed.), 1967
• "Day Million", Rogue, February/March 1966
• "The Mayor of Mare Tranq", The Williamson Effect, Tor, 1996
• "Fermi and Frost", Asimov's, January 1985
• Afterword : Fifty Years and Counting

A collection of short stories by the award-winning American science fiction writer, Frederik Pohl. They range from the lighthearted "The High Test" to the longest of the collection, "The Sweet, Sad Queen of the Grazing Star", a sinister story involving business and mobster rivalry.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1984)
• The Sweet, Sad Queen of the Grazing Isles - (1984) - novella by Frederik Pohl
• The High Test - (1983) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair - (1983) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• Second Coming - (1983) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• Enjoy, Enjoy - (1974) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• Growing Up in Edge City - (1975) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• We Purchased People - (1974) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• Rem The Rememberer - (1977) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• The Mother Trip - (1975) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• A Day in the Life of Able Charlie - (1976) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• The Way It Was - (1977) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• Introduction to the Translation (The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle) - essay by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
• The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle - novelette by Frederik Pohl
• Notes (The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle) - essay by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

Contents:

• vii - Introduction (A Dialogue) (Science Fiction Discoveries) - essay by Carol Pohl and Frederik Pohl
• 1 - Starlady - novelette by George R. R. Martin
• 31 - The Never-Ending Western Movie - shortstory by Robert Sheckley
• 51 - The Age of Libra - shortstory by Scott Edelstein
• 69 - To Mark the Year on Azlaroc - shortstory by Fred Saberhagen
• 85 - An Occurrence at the Owl Creek Rest Home - novelette by Arthur Jean Cox
• 123 - The Force That Through the Circuit Drives the Current - shortstory by Roger Zelazny
• 131 - Deathrights Deferred - shortstory by Doris Piserchia
• 147 - Error Hurled - novel by Babette Rosmond

Something Was Very Wrong, Out There Among The Stars... The interstellar transport had touched down on six other colony worlds - and all six had been devoid of human life. Where was everybody? It was almost as if humankind, when separated by cosmic distances from Mother Earth, could not survive.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It orginally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1983. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year #13 (1984). It is included in the collections Midas World (1983) and Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1972. The story can also be found in the anthologies Nebula Award Stories Eight (1973), edited by Isaac Asimov and The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 20th Series (1973). It is included in the collections The Gold at the Starbow's End (1972) and Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

First they Cracked The Codes

The big electronic calculators that handled math codes, production lines, found it simple to decipher the small but racy vocabularies of the animals.

then man had achieved the age-old dream: He could respond when his dog struggled to tell him something, and he cold tell that foolish sheep that if he didn't act right he'd be mutton; and, being man, he could create the wildest, craziest secret weapon for the war that is man's heritage but not that of the new, now-articulate minorities.

The electronic brain machines have broken codes, translated one human language into another, and have now turned their memory banks to the problems of deciphering animal languages. The first practical application of this is to tell the sheep to eat the weeds in the potato patch, but to leave the potatoes alone. This, however, is only the beginning.

The nature of animals is that they are expendable. When a prolundged "cold" war has created a manpower shortage so acute that Boy Scouts are being drafted, the navy, characteristically resourceful, turns to other available materials. To an Annapolis graduate, veteran of several "cold" strikes himself, a serious-minded; man willing to do anything the nave expects of him, this presents problems in ethics only surmounted by the baffling confusion of the T.O. of hos command. for instance, how valuable could a seal be as a guided missile? Who's responsible when monkeys take over the running of a submarine?

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST

The crew of the Constitution--scientists cum astronauts--had been carefully screened for extremely high intelligence and superb physical qualities. They were to be the first explorers sent to another stellar system. There they would explore the planet Alpha-Aleph and then return. They were the toast of the world press--true heroes, for they were to go where no man had gone before.

Or so they thought.

Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen knew otherwise--for there was no planet, no place to go...and no place from which to return. Knefhuasen had planned it that way. Of course, Knefhausen realized his plan wasn't exactly ethical. But then, he knew the ends often justify the means.

And Knefhausen's plan worked better then even he had ever hoped!

Eager for a home of their own, the crew of Nordvik, an antiquated trading ship, decide to set up camp on Slowyear, a rarely visited planet whose population must live underground during bitter winters lasting five Earth-years.

Scientists and psychics are predicting eruptions and earthquakes that could devastate half the earth, caused by a rare conjunction of the planets. It's called SYZYGY.

A ruthless land speculator decides to make a quick killing by starting a panic. Then others cash in on the Syzygy Effect for their own greed: a crackpot cult preaching doom, a politician out for votes, a quack scientist out to make the headlines.

When California is paralyzed by brush fires and flash floods, hysteria explodes. Only a dedicated scientist and a beautiful NASA astrophysicist can prevent massive destruction. But they're up against forces that will stop at nothing to keep the truth from getting out.

In this collaborative novel of international science fiction, Frederik Pohl and Elizabeth Anne Hull have compiled nineteen facets of a single dilemma, the fantastic situation oh human beings and aliens coexisting in one body. Each story's plot is organized around this single theme, but the voices that color each telling come from all corners of the world.

Table of Contents:

• Report From the Planet Earth - essay by Frederik Pohl
• The Last Word - essay by Elizabeth Anne Hull
• Sitting Around the Pool, Soaking Up the Rays - (1984) - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• The Thursday Events - shortstory by Ye Yonglie
• User Friendly - shortstory by Spider Robinson
• Life as an Ant - shortstory by André Carneiro
• Fiddling for Waterbuffaloes - (1986) - novelette by S. P. Somtow
• S Is for Snake - shortstory by Lino Aldani (trans. of S come serpente)
• The Divided Carla - novelette by Josef Nesvadba (trans. of Rozštepená Karla 1985)
• The View from the Top of the Tower - (1986) - shortstory by Harry Harrison
• Don't Knock the Rock - shortstory by A. Bertram Chandler
• The Owl of Bear Island - shortstory by Jon Bing (trans. of Ugle på Bjørnøya)
• Contacts of a Fourth Kind - shortstory by Ljuben Dilov (translation form Russian original 1985)
• Infestation - shortstory by Brian W. Aldiss
• In the Blink of an Eye - shortstory by Carlos Maria Federici
• Particularly Difficult Territory - shortstory by Janusz A. Zajdel (trans. of Wyjatkowo trudny teren)
• Time Everlasting - shortstory by Sam J. Lundwall
• The Middle Kingdom - shortstory by Tong Enzheng and Elizabeth Anne Hull
• On the Inside Track - novelette by Karl Michael Armer (trans. of Umkreisungen)
• The Legend of the Paper Spaceship - (1983) - novelette by Tetsu Yano (translation for Japanese original 1978)
• We Servants of the Stars - shortstory by Frederik Pohl
• Notes on Contributors - essay by uncredited

A colossal force is about to alter history, code name: Vulcan, a classified military project off the shores of Hawaii - where a volcano lies dormant at the bottom of the sea but about to be come a living hell.

Table of Contents:

• The Abominable Earthman - (1961)
• We Never Mention Aunt Nora - (1958)
• A Life and a Half - (1959)
• Punch - (1961)
• The Martian Star-Gazers - (1963)
• Whatever Counts - (1959)
• Three Portraits and a Prayer - (1962)

MAN ALIVE

Charles Forrester was out of the deepfreeze. It had taken several centuries to bring him back to life.

But what a life it was!

The 26th Century offered pleasure at the flip of a button -- everything from gourmet food to stupendous sex right there for the asking. And for a rich man like Forrester, the possibilities of delight were endless.

Of course, everything else was endless too. But by the time Forrester realized that he had had enough of a good thing -- even too much! -- he realized that he would somehow have to kill himself if he were ever to survive!

It was the Age of the Pussyfoot

Contents:

• "The Midas Plague" - Galaxy Science Fiction April '54
• "The Census Takers" - The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Feb. '56
• "The Candle Lighter" - Galaxy Science Fiction March '55
• "The Celebrated No-Hit Inning" - Fantastic Universe Sep. '56
• "Wapshot's Demon" - Science Fiction Stories July '56
• "My Lady Green Sleeves" - Galaxy Science Fiction Feb. '57

A breakthrough in quantum physics has shattered the boundaries between alternate worlds. History is in chaos as billions of possible futures collide.

As a conquering army mounts an invasion of neighoboring realities, a handful of men and women from a dozen different timelines risk their lives to safeguard an infinity of worlds.

Blending thrilling suspense with brilliant scientific speculation, Frederik Pohl's THE COMING OF THE QUANTUM CATS is a triumph of the imagination by a Hugo and Nebula winning master of science fiction.

Fred Pohl, multiple winner of science-fiction's top awards, presents a breathtaking romp through the energy-poor world of the 2020s - a gripping chase-intrigue novel with a highly unlikely stand-in for James Bond.

One day, the Reverend Hornswell Hake had nothing worse to contend with than the customary power shortages and his routine pastoral chores, such as counseling the vivacious Alys Brant - and her husbands and wife. At nearly forty, his life was placid, almost humdrum.

The very next day, Horny Hake was first enlisted as an unwilling agent of the Team - secret successor to the long-discredited CIA - and then courted by an anti-Team underground group. In practically no time at all, Horny and Alys were touring Europe on a mission about which he knew zip, except that it was a new move in the Cool War, the worldwide campaign of sabotage that had replaced actual combat.

For the team and its opponents, though, the Cool War could be as perilous as any hot one, as Horny Hake discovered when he came up against

*Leota, lovely leader of the underground cabal, dedicated to destroying the Team;

*Yosper, the Bible-thumping, foul-mouthed nonogenarian killer;

*The Reddi twins, professional terrorists who turned up in the oddest places at the worst times and always managed to make Horny's life miserable;

*And Pegleg, master of such lethal toys as the Bulgarian Brolly and the Peruvian Pen.

Picaresque and fast-moving, THE COOL WAR is also a deeply ironic, often hilarious, yet thought-provoking look at where we could be, some forty years from now.

Henry Steegman is hardly "Mr. Personality" aboard the Mars-bound Algonquin 9. Yet it is he who bungles upon the spectacular Macy's-like city beneath the Red Planet's crust. For better or worse, the name Steegman will be immortalized by a discovery that will transform millions of lives.

For a struggling screenwriter, the Martian beings could mean a big story, big bucks, headlines...and more women than any many his size has ever known...

For an exhiled Russian rocket man, the are a possible route to America's space program, and the land of opportunity...

For a flying-saucer faker of flickering fame, the possibilities are out of this world.

In a brilliant near-future look at the human condition, Frederick Pohl has honed his satire-sharp science fiction to a steely new edge.

Table of Conents:

• A Martian Christmas - (1987)
• Introduction (The Day the Martians Came) - essay by James E. Gunn
• From the New York Times "Martians Lack Language But Possess Organized Society" - (1988)
• Sad Screenwriter Sam - (1972)
• "NBC Nightly News": "Ferdie Dead" - (1988)
• The View from Mars Hill - (1987)
• Scientific American: "Martian Polar Wanderings" - (1988)
• Saucery - (1986)
• New Scientist: "Mars at the British Ass." - (1988)
• The Beltway Bandit - (1988)
• The President's News Conference - (1988)
• Too Much Loosestrife - (1987)
• "Oprah Winfrey" - (1988)
• Iriadeska's Martians - (1986)
• Notes from the British Interplanetary Society - (1988)
• The Missioner - (1988)
• Time Magazine: "We Wait with Eagerness and Joy" - (1988)
• Across the River - (1988)
• The Day After the Day the Martians Came - (1967)
• Huddling - (1988)

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna - (1937)
• The Dweller in the Ice - (1941)
• The King's Eye - (1941)
• It's a Young World - (1941)
• Daughters of Eternity - (1942)
• Earth, Farewell! - (1943)
• Conspiracy on Callisto - (1943)
• Highwayman of the Void - (1944)
• Double-Cross - (1944)

Locus Award winning and Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 1972. The story can also be found in the anthologies Best Science Fiction for 1972, edited by Frederik Pohl, The 1973 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha, Analog 9 (1973), edited by Ben Bova, The World Treasury of Science Fiction (1989), edited by David G. Hartwell and The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume Three (2001), edited by Frederik Pohl. It is included in the collections The Gold at the Starbow's End (1972) and Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

Table of Contents:

• The Gold at the Starbow's End - (1972)
• Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam - (1972)
• Call Me Million - (1970)
• Shaffery Among the Immortals - (1972)
• The Merchants of Venus - (1972)

This short story originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, November 1984. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (1985), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Genometry (2001), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

The final work from the brightest star in science fiction's galaxy. Arthur C Clarke, who predicted the advent of communication satellites and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey completes a lifetime career in science fiction with a masterwork.

30 light years away, a race known simply as the One Point Fives are plotting a dangerous invasion plan, one that will wipe humankind off the face of the Earth...

Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, a young astronomy student, Ranjit Subramanian, becomes obsessed with a three-hundred-year-old theorem that promises to unlock the secrets of the universe. While Ranjit studies the problem, tensions grow between the nations of the world and a UN taskforce headed up by China, America and Russia code-named Silent Thunder begins bombing volatile regimes into submission.

On the eve of the invasion of Earth a space elevator is completed, helped in part by Ranjit, which will herald a new type of Olympics to be held on the Moon. But when alien forces arrive Ranjit is forced to question his own actions, in a bid to save the lives of not just his own family but of all of humankind.

Co-written with fellow grand master Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem not only provides a fitting end to the career one of the most famous names in science fiction but also sets a new benchmark in contemporary prescient science fiction. It tackles with ease epic themes as diverse as third world poverty, the atrocities of modern warfare in a post-nuclear age, space elevators, pure mathematics and mankind's first contact with extra-terrestrials.

A collection of Frederik Pohl's short stories, including:

• The Man Who Ate The World
• The Wizards of Pung's Corners
• The Waging Of Peace
• The Snowmen
• The Day The Icicle Works Closed

Hugo Award winning short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1972. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year #2 (1973), edited by Terry Carr, Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Collection (1973), edited by Lester del Rey, and The Hugo Winners, Volume 3: (1970-75) (1977), edited by Isaac Asimov. It is included in the collections Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (1987) and Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories (2005).

This novella originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1954. It has been anthologized in Spectrum 1 (1961) edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two B (1973) edited by Ben Bova, The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction (1980) edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, and collected in The Case Against Tomorrow (1957) and The Best of Frederik Pohl (1975).

A race of turtle-like creatures conquers Earth, imposing a gentler set of values on humankind, outlawing destructive technology, and denying the validity of human scientific theories. When their home planet disappears into a black hole, however, the aliens' only hope for the future hinges on the possibility that humanity's flawed sciences might contain a glimmer of truth. Two veteran sf authors combine their strengths to produce a novel that both explains and explores the "mysteries" of modern science.

Barry di Hoa had the good life on the Moon: steady work and the love of a good woman. But a rival slipped him a mickey, and he next awoke aboard Gerald Tscharka's ship as it neared the colony planet, Pava, eighteen light-years away.

Pava was the frontier, complete with earthquakes, primitive conditions and hard physical work. The local "doctor" wouldn't treat Barry's little manic-depressive problem without medicine from the Moon. And the Millernarist colonists, who thought suicide was cool fun, didn't thrill him.

Then he made friends with the leps. The large, caterpillar-like, odd-speaking gentle beasts were helping the humans to fashion a life on their planet. In their strange way, they knew things about Pava that might make the difference in the colony's survival. He started to believe he could really enjoy life in this fragile paradise. Except Tscharka was up to soemthing bad, something that would change eveyrthing. Barry knew only he could stop the mad captian, and the captain knew it, too. What neither knew was whether Barry could be manic enough to do it.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (The Wonder Effect) - (1962) - essay by Frederik Pohl
• Critical Mass - (1962) - novelette
• A Gentle Dying - (1961) - shortstory
• Nightmare with Zeppelins - (1958) - shortstory
• Best Friend - (1941) - shortstory
• The World of Myrion Flowers - (1961) - shortstory
• Trouble in Time - (1940) - shortstory
• The Engineer - (1956) - shortstory
• Mars-Tube - (1941) - novelette
• The Quaker Cannon - (1961) - novelette

Wan-To was the oldest and must powerful intelligence in the universe, a being who played with star systems as a child plays with marbles. Matter occupied so tiny a part of his vast awareness that humans were utterly beneath his notice.

The colonists of Newmanhome first suffered the effects of Wan-To's games when their planet's stars began to shift, the climate began to cool down, and the colony was forced into a desperate struggle to survive.

Viktor Sorricaine was determined to discover what force had suddenly sent his world hurtling toward the ends of the universe. And the answer was something beyond the scope of his imagination -- even if he lived for 4000 years...

Table of Contents:

• The Haunted Corpse - Galaxy Science Fiction Jan. '57
• The Middle of Nowhere - Galaxy Science Fiction May '55
• The Gentle Venusian ("The Gentlest Unpeople") - Galaxy Science Fiction June '58
• The Day of the Boomer Dukes - Future #30 '56
• Survival Kit - Galaxy Science Fiction May '57
• The Knights of Arthur - Galaxy Science Fiction Jan. '58
• To See Another Mountain - The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction April '59

Table of Contents:

• Mars by Moonlight - (1958)
• The Richest Man in Levittown - (1959)
• The Seven Deadly Virtues - (1958)
• The Martian in the Attic - (1960)
• Third Offense - (1958)
• The Hated - (1958)
• I Plinglot, Who You? - (1959)

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in If, September 1965. The story can also be found in the anthology The Second If Reader of Science Fiction (1968). It is included in the collection Day Million (1970).

The Earth has forcibly been taken from its orbit. It began with an extra-terrestrial pyramid on top of Mt. Everest. And then a "runaway planet" took the Earth as its binary. And now harsh generations have passed since the inhabitants last saw the light of their sun, Sol. Society has grown rigid. The meek lambs have inherited the Earth, even it's a very poor Earth, indeed. It's a hard world for all. But Glenn Tropile is no lamb and if his citizens finds out he's a wolf, it will be the wolf that goes to slaughter.

First edition, hardcover. Retrospective anthology; most works have a forward by the story's author.

Contents:

• Introduction by Frederik Pohl
• As IF Was in the Beginning by Larry T. Shaw
• The Golden Man (1954) by Philip K. Dick
• The Battle (1954) by Robert Sheckley
• Last Rites (1955) by Charles Beaumont
• Game Preserve (1957) by Rog Phillips
• The Burning of the Brain (1958) by Cordwainer Smith
• The Man Who Tasted Ashes (1959) by Algis Budrys
• Kings Who Die (1962) by Poul Anderson
• Fortress Ship (1963) by Fred Saberhagen
• Father of the Stars (1964) by Frederik Pohl
• Trick or Treaty (1965) by Keith Laumer
• Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1966) by R. A. Lafferty
• Neutron Star (1966) by Larry Niven
• This Mortal Mountain (1967) by Roger Zelazny
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967) by Harlan Ellison
• Driftglass (1967) by Samuel R. Delany
• The Holmes-Ginsbook Device (1968) by Isaac Asimov
• Down in the Black Gang (1969) by Philip José Farmer
• The Reality Trip (1970) by Robert Silverberg
• The Nightblooming Saurian (1970) by James Tiptree, Jr.
• Occam's Scalpel (1971) by Theodore Sturgeon
• Construction Shack (1973) by Clifford D. Simak
• Time Deer (1974) by Craig Strete
• Afterword: Flash Point, Middle by Barry N. Malzberg

Favorite Stories from Forty Years As a Science Fiction Editor.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (1982) by Frederik Pohl
• The Nine Billion Names of God (1953) story by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Moon Moth (1961) novelette by Jack Vance
• The Man with English (1953) story by Horace L. Gold
• Into the Darkness (1940) novelette by Ross Rocklynne
• The Halfling (1943) novelette by Leigh Brackett
• Strange Playfellow (1940) story by Isaac Asimov
• Space-Time for Springers (1958) story by Fritz Leiber
• Emergency Refueling (1940) story by James Blish
• The Coldest Place (1964) story by Larry Niven
• The Life Hater/Berserker (1964) story by Fred Saberhagen
• The Embassy (1942) story by Donald A. Wollheim aka Martin Pearson
• The Last Flight of Dr. Ain (1969) story by James Tiptree Jr.
• Sweet Dreams, Melissa (1968) story by Stephen Goldin
• Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay (1967) story by Robert Sheckley
• Among the Bad Baboons (1968) novelette by Mack Reynolds
• Slow Tuesday Night (1965) story by R.A. Lafferty
• The Pain Peddlers (1963) story by Robert Silverberg
• At the Mouse Circus (1971) story by Harlan Ellison
• The Rull (1948) novelette by A.E. van Vogt
• The Ballad of Lost C'Mell (1962) novelette by Cordwainer Smith
• The Monster (1951) story by Lester del Rey
• Oh, to Be a Blobel! (1964) novelette by Philip K. Dick
• Let There Be Light (1940) story by Robert A. Heinlein
• Without Doubt (1941) story by Robert A. Heinlein & Elma Wentz
• A Gentle Dying (1961) story by Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth
• The Great Slow Kings (1963) story by Roger Zelazny
• Old Testament (1964) story by Jerome Bixby
• Eco-Catastrophe! (1969) story by Paul R. Ehrlich
• Guinevere for Everybody (1955) story by Jack Williamson
• A Bad Day for Vermin (1964) story by Keith Laumer
• Excerpt from Dragon Lensman (1980) fiction by David A. Kyle
• Excerpt from Dhalgren (1974) fiction by Samuel R. Delany
• Excerpt from The Short-Timers (1979) fiction by Gustav Hasford
• Interstellar Way-Station (1941) story by Wilson Tucker
• The Report on the Barnhouse Effect (1950) story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Afterword (1982) by Frederik Pohl
• The Paperbacks: 1971-1978 (1982) by Frederik Pohl
• The Galaxy & If Years: 1960-69 (1982) by Frederik Pohl
• The Anthologies (1982) by Frederik Pohl
• The Pulps: 1939-43 (1982) by Frederik Pohl
• The Fanzines: 1933-39 (1982) by Frederik Pohl

This short story originally appeared in Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction (2014), edited by Ian Whates, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 133, October 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Entropic Angel and Other Stories (2017).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, October 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Focusing on novels written in English since the end of World War II, Pringle's selection is controversial, as any selection must be, but it is also a valuable guide to good reading in a field that is wider than it first appears to be. Pringle's informative comments on each title will help the reader select those titles that will be of immediate interest.

The book is comprised of a series of 100 essays, covering the years 1946 to 1987 and in order of publication, without any ranking. Although somewhat focused on works from the British Isles, it is considered an important critical summary of the science fiction field.

Pringle says of the book:

While covering no foreign-language fantasies and few children's or 'light' fantasies, "I have tried to make a balanced list, and in so doing I have included some books which are not really to my taste--they may well be other people's favourites, though. In truth, there are not a hundred masterpieces of modern fantasy, any more than there a hundred masterpieces of science fiction." "At least some of the novels I have selected are masterpieces of modern literature, full of beauty and wonder. The others are craftsmanlike entertainments which I happily commend to you for your enjoyment."

The books and authors covered in this volume are the basis for our Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels list.

At long last, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had come to an agreement about weapon controle, a genuine rediction in arms.

How was it maintained? By dedicated arms inspectors, backed by all teh technology available to determined governments.

But there were hawks on both sides wo resented the agreement, and were resolved to overturn in. Particularly in a Presidential election year.

In Russia, a famous microbiologist was confined to a mental home, in a planned environment of great complexity. Was it for real? Or was it a well-equipped laboratory in which he could steal a march on the U.S. - and bury the treaty.

Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease, and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Isolated and forgotten, he realizes that he is stranded with no means of contacting the outside world. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and he is the prime suspect. Barely managing to escape arrest, he must struggle to survive in the streets of this foreign city gripped with fear of contamination and reestablish contact with his company and friends in order to clear his reputation.

But as the man's former life slips further and further from his grasp, and he looks back on his time with his wife, it becomes clear that he may not quite be who he seems.

It's not safe for anyone alone in the woods. But the woman in the red jacket has no choice. Not since the Crisis came, decimated the population, and sent those who survived fleeing into quarantine camps that serve as breeding grounds for death, destruction, and disease. She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that was perfectly sane and normal until three months ago.

There are worse threats in the woods than the things that stalk their prey at night. Men with dark desires, weak wills, and evil intents. Men in uniform with classified information, deadly secrets, and unforgiving orders. And sometimes, just sometimes, there's something worse than all of the horrible people and vicious beasts combined.

Red doesn't like to think of herself as a killer, but she isn't about to let herself get eaten up just because she is a woman alone in the woods...

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March-April 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

Lisen to or read the full story for free at EscapePod.

When Earth is rocked by evidence that extraterrestrials may have seeded human DNA throughout the universe, a one-way expedition into deep space is mounted to uncover the truth. What linguist Meg Dupris and her crewmates aboard the Earth ship Damocles discover on Didet--a planet bathed in the near-eternal daylight of seven suns--is a humanoid race with a different language, a different look, and a surprisingly similar society.

But here, it's the "Earthers" who are the extraterrestrial invaders, and it's up to Meg--a woman haunted by tragedy and obsessed with the power of communication--to find the key to establishing trust between the natives and the newcomers. In Loul Pell, a young Dideto male thrust into the forefront of the historic event, Meg finds an unexpected kindred spirit, and undertakes an extraordinary journey of discovery, friendship, and life-altering knowledge.

Told from both sides of a monumental encounter, Damocles is a compelling novel about man's first contact with an extraterrestrial race.

When Feno Chemical spilled an experimental pesticide in rural Iowa, scores of people died. Those who survived contamination were herded into a US Army medically maintained quarantine and cut off from the world. Dosed with powerful drugs to combat the poison, their bodies give off a sickly sweet smell and the containment zone becomes known simply as Flowertown.

Seven years later, the infrastructure is crumbling, supplies are dwindling, and nobody is getting clean. Ellie Cauley doesn't care anymore. Despite her paranoid best friend's insistence that conspiracies abound, she focuses on three things: staying high, hooking up with the Army sergeant she's not supposed to be fraternizing with and, most importantly, trying to ignore her ever-simmering rage. But when a series of deadly events rocks the compound, Ellie suspects her friend is right--something dangerous is going down in Flowertown and all signs point to a twisted plan of greed and abuse. She and the other residents of Flowertown have been betrayed by someone with a deadly agenda and their plan is just getting started. Time is running out. With nobody to trust and nowhere to go, Ellie decides to fight with the last weapon she has--her rage.

Flowertown is a high-intensity conspiracy thriller that brings the worst-case scenario vividly to life and will keep readers riveted until the final haunting page.

Kit Reed has been delighting and terrifying readers for over thirty years with her darkly comic speculative fiction. This collection of short stories, drawn from a lifetime's work, shows Reed at the top of her form. First published in venues ranging from The Missouri Review to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, these twenty stories deal with women's lives and feminist issues from the kitchen sink and pink dishmop era through the warlike years of the women's movement to the uneasy accommodation of the present.

Contents:

• Foreword by Connie Willis
• Introduction: Where I'm Coming From by Kit Reed
• The Bride of Bigfoot
• The Food Farm
• The Hall of New Faces
• Songs of War
• The Wait
• Whoever
• Like My Dress
• Frontiers
• The New You
• In Behalf of the Product
• Winter
• Chicken Soup
• Cynosure
• Pilots of the Purple Twilight
• Mommy Nearest
• Unlimited
• The Mothers of Shark Island
• Last Fridays
• The Weremother

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 1993. The story can also be found in the anthologis Alternate Warriors (1993), edited by Mike Resnick and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994). It is included in the collections An Alien Land (1998), New Dreams for Old (2005) and Win Some, Lose Some: The Hugo Award Winning (and Nominated) Short Science Fiction and Fantasy of Mike Resnick (2012).

Red Will Donahoe, born barbarian into a world stripped of civilization, was a misfit. All around him were the results of the final blowup that had doomed civilization, skulking in the ruins of the city. And Donahoe skulked, too, hiding from the struggling normal society on the other side of the great river. Hiding not from his own choice, but because he was bound by unseen ties to the man in shadows, Gareth Cole - Master of the Mutants.

Cole watched his barbarian grow from childhood, grow into the fierceness of a manhood that could know no peace until it had tasted the rich taste of blood. And Cole, enigmatic ruler of half a world, wondered if he had made a mistake in allowing Redbeard to live.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2000. The story can also be found in the collections Hunting the Snark and Other Short Novels (2002) and Win Some, Lose Some: The Hugo Award Winning (and Nominated) Short Science Fiction and Fantasy of Mike Resnick (2012).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.