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Fear and wonder, a powerful combination.

Terry Dowling is one of the best kept secrets in modern science fiction, fantasy and horror, a storyteller that Grand Master Jack Vance in his introduction calls, "A very talented writer, one I admire and respect."

Locus saw Dowling's first book, Rynosseros, as placing him "among the masters of the field", while editor David G. Hartwell calls him "A master craftsman...one of the best prose stylists in science fiction and fantasy." In the words of Harlan Ellison, "Here is Jack Vance, Cordwainer Smith and Tiptree/Sheldon come again, reborn in one wonderful talent...you'll purr and growl with delight."

Such praise is certainly deserved. Winner of the 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection, Dowling's stories have appeared in The Year's Best Science Fiction, The Year's Best SF, The Year's Best Fantasy, The Best New Horror and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, in major anthologies like Songs of the Dying Earth, Inferno, The Dark, and Wizards, and such leading publications as SciFiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Interzone.

Now, for the first time, Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder gives us the best of Terry's recent uncollected work in a single wonderful volume. From invasion by the truly alien in "The Lagan Fishers", "Truth Window" and "Flashmen" to the gut-wrenching horror of "Toother" and "The Suits at Auderlene", from the day-after-tomorrow, hardline SF of "He Tried to Catch the Light" to the epic sweep and swashbuckling adventure of "The Library", this is imaginative storytelling as it should be: provocative, unsettling, beautifully crafted, full of invention and genuine surprise and, yes, a definite touch of the dark side.

Table of Contents:

Introduction by Jack Vance
Preface
Amberjack
The Lagan Fishers
Glencoe
The Fooly
Now, Then, Everywhen
The Magikkers
The Lure of Legendary Ladies
He Tried to Catch the Light
Bermudas
Flashmen
The Blue Marlin Whore
Toother
China in His Day
The View in Nancy's Window
Mr. Fate & Mr. Danger
Jarkman at the Othergates
Ithaca
Some Roses for the Bonestell Man
Gantry Jack
The Suits at Auderlene
At the Sign of the Moon
Truth Window: A Tale of the Bedlam Rose
Down in the Limbo Gardens
The Library
Déjà-vu

An Intimate Knowledge of the Night

Terry Dowling

The Wonder and the Terror.... When an author sits downto write the linking pieces for the stories in his new book, planning to do it by the hours of the night observed by medieval scholars, he is interrupted by phonecalls from his eccentric yet harmless friend, Raymond, a former mental patient with whom he shares some curious notions about the perceived world.

At first casual and interested, even helpful, these calls soon become increasingly tense and strange, until the author realizes that what started out as an innocent, fun idea - a shared all-night vigil on the autumn Equinox - is actually serving some other vital purpose, becoming by stages part therapy, part incantatory progress, part vindication of those very theories which will change forever the way he sees the world.

Terry Dowling's marvellous new book is about rapture, fear, the secret, darkest mysteries of the world and the human spirit.

Table of Contents:

Introduction - (1995) - essay
The Bullet That Grows in the Gun - (1985) - shortstory
The Maze Man - (1984) - shortstory
The Daemon Street Ghost-Trap - (1993) - shortstory
The Terrarium - (1984) - shortstory
They Found The Angry Moon - (1992) - shortstory
The Gully - (1985) - shortstory
The Last Elephant - (1987) - shortstory
The Echoes - (1995) - shortstory
The Third Gift - (1993) - shortstory
The Quiet Redemption of Andy the House - (1989) - novelette
The Mars You Have in Me - (1992) - shortstory
The Rediscovery of Tutankhamen's Tomb - (1993) - shortstory
Scaring the Train - (1994) - novelette

Flashmen

Terry Dowling

This novelette originally appeared in in Oceans of the Mind, issue 10, Dec 2003. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection (2004), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy (Volume 1) (2005), edited by Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt. The story is included in the collection Amberjack: Tales of Fear and Wonder (2010).

Wormwood

Terry Dowling

Earth... After Wormwood.

Centuries from now, a world invaded by the all-powerful Nobodoi and their servant races, re-made as a strange and mighty patchwork of land-bridges and alien enclaves, where the remnants of a blasted Humanity are lucky just to survive.

The Human Heroes Aspen Dirk, Jamis Talby, Hollis Green, the mad poet Antellim... those who travel the patchwork, who meet the Hoproi warmasters, the gleaming Matta whose houses Kill, the Darzie mind-riders,the living spaceships, the Amazi, whose greatest longing is to couple with Human women...

All part of what the world has become... after Wormwood.

Table of Contents:

Introduction - essay by Harlan Ellison
Dag Extracts - short fiction
Nobody's Fool - novella
The Man Who Walks Away Behind the Eyes - (1982) - short story
A Deadly Edge Their Red Beaks Pass Along - novelette
Housecall - (1986) - novelette
In the Dark Rush - (1990) - short story
The Honour of Them - short story
For as Long as You Burn - (1987) - novelette
Exchange of Letters - short fiction

Blackwater Days

Dan Truswell

Terry Dowling

Table of Contents:

Blackwater Days - interior artwork by Shaun Tan
Downloading - (1998) - novelette
Beckoning Nightframe - (1996) - shortstory
First Interview: A Journey - shortstory
Basic Black - novelette
Second Interview: Psychosleuths - shortstory
The Saltimbanques - (2000) - novelette
Third Interview: A Forgetting - shortstory
Jenny Come to Play - (1997) - novelette
Light from the Deep Pavilion - shortstory
Blackwater Days - novelette
L'Envoi: A Homecoming - shortstory

The Saltimbanques

Dan Truswell

Terry Dowling

Ditmar Award winning and WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Eidolon: The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Autumn 2000. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Year's Best Fantasy (2001), edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell. It is included in the collections Blackwater Days (2000) and Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (2006).

Rynosseros

The Adventures of Tom Rynosseros: Book 1

Terry Dowling

Tom Tyson journeys to a futuristic Australia where terraforming, genetic engineering and mental sciences have become a way of life and tribal satellites monitor perpetually warring Ab'O states.

Contents:

3 - Colouring the Captains - novella
47 - The Only Bird in Her Name - (1985) - novelette
71 - The Robot Is Running Away from the Trees - novelette
101 - What We Did to the Tyger - (1986) - short story
119 - Spinners - novelette
143 - So Much for the Burning Queen - short story
163 - Mirage Diver - novelette
191 - Time of the Star - (1986) - novelette

Blue Tyson

The Adventures of Tom Rynosseros: Book 2

Terry Dowling

The Blue Captain... Of the seven Nationals who have won Colours and fine sand-ships from the tribes, earning for themselves the right to cross the eerie and exotic Australia of the future, Tom Rynosseros is the most mysterious. He is the one from the Madhouse, the Captain whose adventures among the powerful tribes of the interior reveal a hidden purpose, a destiny waiting out in the red deserts which affects not only Nation but the Dreamtime itself.

Table of Contents:

Introduction - (1992) - essay by Jack Vance
Breaking Through to the Heroes - (1992) - novelette
Going to the Angels - (1992) - novelette
Vanities - (1990) - short story
A Dragon Between His Fingers - (1986) - short story
Djinn of Anjoulis - (1992) - short story
A Song to Keep Them Dancing - (1992) - short story
Stoneman - (1992) - short story
Privateers' Moon - (1992) - novelette
Dreaming the Knife - (1992) - short story
Totem - (1992) - novelette

Twilight Beach

The Adventures of Tom Rynosseros: Book 3

Terry Dowling

A Ship, a Star, a Woman's Face... All that Tom Rynosseros remembers from his time in the Madhouse. But who was he? Why did the powerful Ab'O tribes send him there? What do the three signs mean? From the haunted streets of Twilight Beach to the burning heart of this future Australia, from the eerie wind-river called the Soul to the dream-ridden shores of the Inland Sea, Tom searches desperately for whatever pieces of his life he can find.

Contents: