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Poet, actor, playwright, chess expert, master of fantastic fiction. Fritz Leiber was a true Renaissance Man. His writing crossed all boundaries, from horror to sword and sorcery. This book goes deep into Leiber's underrated science fiction oeuvre. It's a comprehensive, page- turning cache that captures Leiber's thoroughly original style- - altogether mystical, beautiful, and sometimes disturbing.

"The Foxholes of Mars" is a literary assault: a frightening, nitro- fueled tale of war on Mars, with one soldier questioning the futility and purpose of the battle against bug- eyed aliens- - a distant mirror- image of our own times. "Space- Time for Springers" is told through the glaring eyes of Gummitch, a cat who happens to possess a genius IQ and a voracious appetite for scientific knowledge. "Night Passage" takes us on a dark journey into a Las Vegas where Earthlings and extra- terrestrials mingle and gamble- - and where one man takes a moonlit ride with a mystery woman from Mercury, tailed by some very scary pursuers. "The Mutant's Brother" is a malevolent mix of horror and SF, a tale of identical twins who each carry a frightful chromosome. One of them is also a monstrous serial killer. The literally chilling "A Pail of Air" takes place in an underground nest, where a family fights to survive in a sunless, moonless, post- apocalyptic world where even helium and carbon dioxide become crawling, shapeless threats.

Fritz Leiber was a storyteller and prophet for the ages. His work will never be dated or irrelevant. Treat this book like a crystal ball. These pages chronicle the world to come. You've been warned.

Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy. He excelled in all fields of speculative fiction, writing award- winning work in fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Yesterday House - 1952
• The Snowbank Orbit - 1962
• Wanted - An Enemy - 1945
• The Ship Sails at Midnight - 1950
• The Foxholes of Mars - 1952
• Far Reach to Cygnus - 1965
• Femmequin 973 - 1957
• Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum - 1974
• The Big Trek - 1957
• Space - 1958
• Moon Duel - 1965
• Poor Superman - 1951
• Night Passage - 1975
• The Mutant's Brother - 1943
• Coming Attraction - 1950
• The Black Ewe - 1950
• Bullet with His Name - 1958
• Mariana - 1960
• Sanity - 1944
• Time in the Round - 1957
• Ship of Shadows - 1969
• The Good New Days - 1965
• Catch That Zeppelin! - 1975
• Deadly Moon - 1960
• The Man Who Was Married to Space and Time - 1979
• Black Glass - 1978
• Friends and Enemies - 1957
• A Rite of Spring- 1977
• America the Beautiful - 1970
• A Pail of Air - 1951
• The Winter Flies - 1967
• Time Fighter - 1957
• The Far Reach of Fritz Leiber - essay by John Pelan

What you're holding in your hands is part of a science fiction revolution. James Patrick Kelly is much more than an award-winning author. He's an SF visionary. His writing has redefined the cyberpunk genre, with a uniquely edgy, outré style. This book is a literal treasure trove of Kelly's most memorable stories and novellas. Here you'll see classic science fiction blended with New Age technology--and an unparalleled understanding of human psychology.

"Think Like a Dinosaur" takes us on a troubling, sometimes terrifying interstellar journey, as we track a young woman's transformation into an alien life-form, with some unexpected results. "The Last Judgment" is a startlingly original meld of noir and cyberpunk, as a tough private eye gets embroiled in a world dominated by a race of robots. Kelly also adds some murderous extra-terrestrials to the mix. In "Ten To The Sixteenth To One," it's 1962, and a young science fiction fan is shoring up his mundane world with comic books and pulp magazines--until he's visited by a creature that will alter the fate of the human race. "Daemon" is a piece of first-person fiction, in which Kelly himself is the lead character, attending a book signing and confronted by a fan from Hell. In "Going Deep," Kelly explores teen-age rebellion in outer space, with a compelling, complex, and cloned heroine whose talent for mind-melds makes texting look antiquated. "Mr. Boy" is Peter Cage, who's been surgically altered to remain forever young. Ever wish you were twelve years old again? Eternal youth isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Unplug your mobile devices and plug into James Patrick Kelly's vision of our future. Your head will never be the same again.

James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards; his fiction has been translated into twenty-two languages. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Robert Reed
• Think Like a Dinosaur - (1995)
• Crow - (1984)
• St Theresa of the Aliens - (1984)
• Rat - (1986)
• Daemon - (1987)
• Lovestory - (1998)
• Itsy Bitsy Spider - (1997)
• 10¹⁶ to 1 - (1999)
• Feel the Zaz - (2000)
• Undone - (2001)
• The Pyramid of Amirah - (2002)
• Men Are Trouble - (2004)
• The Wreck of the Godspeed - (2004)
• The Last Judgment - (2012)
• Going Deep - (2009)
• Death Therapy - (1978)
• Homo Neuter - (1981)
• The Biggest - (2012)
• Solstice - (1985)
• Afterword by John Pelan

The late Richard Wilson's fifty-year career began with "Retribution" in Oswald Train's zine Science Adventure Stories and finished in 1988 with "The Name on the Book" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine.

Wilson's writing was particularly noteworthy for its consistently high level of quality. Whether working at novel length or with short stories, Wilson was incapable of writing anything less than professional, highly polished work.

This volume collects nearly two dozen of his best stories, ranging from "The Hoaxters," "The Inhabited," and "Those Idiots from Earth" to his brilliant posthumously-published novella "At the Sign of the Boar's Head Nebula," originally slated for The Last Dangerous Visions and kindly made available to us by Harlan Ellison.

"At the Sign of the Boar's Head Nebula" is considered by several knowledgeable critics of the genre to be the finest single work that Mr. Wilson produced. It is in remarkably good company, joined with two other powerful novellas, "The Far King" and "The Nineteenth-Century Spaceship," giving Richard Wilson a fair claim to being one of the founding fathers of steampunk.

Along with the stories, this collection includes several highly regarded novelettes, including the Nebula Award-winning "Mother to the World," "The Story Writer," "Gone Past," "If A Man Answers," "It's Cold Outside," "A Man Spekith," and "See Me Not." Rounding out the book are a selection of the author's finest short pieces, making this a cornerstone volume for any serious collection of modern science fiction.

Richard Wilson (1920-1987), a member of the near-legendary Futurians, is considered by many to have been one of the most consistently excellent writers of science fiction. A journalist by trade, Wilson brought to his fiction a crisp economy of style and a precise language in a field often criticized for overly-florid prose. With stories running the gamut from the humorous to bone-chilling horror and everything in between, Richard Wilson could quite accurately be said to have written something for everyone.

In the 1950s, Kate Wilhelm began publishing science fiction after she read a story in a magazine and said, "I can do better than that." She quickly proved that she could do better, selling "The Mile-Long Spaceship" to John W. Campbell at Astounding. "You have an easy, pleasing and readable style, one that would, moreover, be a marked change in science fiction," John W. Campbell wrote to her in 1957. Soon she was invited to attend a Milford writers conference in Pennsylvania and there she met Damon Knight, whom she eventually married.

Working with Knight as he edited his Orbit anthology series, Kate Wilhelm came into her own as a writer, publishing stories that grounded their extrapolations in strong naturalistic depictions of the here-and-now. In tales such as "Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis" and "Baby, You Were Great," she demonstrated her facility with speculation and science-fictional ideas, while tales like "The Village" and "The Funeral" spoke with great relevance to social and political matters. She received a Nebula Award in 1969 for "The Planners," one of her many well-crafted stories of scientific inquiry.

Kate Wilhelm once said she didn't set out to cross genre lines with her fiction, she just had a blind spot when it came to genre boundaries. Consequently, her stories often blend elements of mystery, crime, and the supernatural with the scientific rigor of science fiction, and readers never know what to expect when they start to read stories like "The Gorgon Field" or "The Day of the Sharks" or "The Look Alike." There's no telling where these characters will take you.

Many of Kate Wilhelm's classics tell the tale of a young woman drawn into a web of scientific intrigue, and here you'll find "The Winter Beach," "The Fullness of Time," and "The Bird Cage," prime examples of this storytelling mode.

The depth of characterization and the psychological insight in stories like "The Downstairs Room" and "The Infinity Box" firmly established her at the forefront of her generation. The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed her "One of the masters of psychological fiction in America."

Over the next five decades, Wilhelm went on to fulfill the promise -- many times over -- of her first wave of top-flight work. With forty-one stories across two volumes, these books amply show the breadth and range of her fiction... and the power of her storytelling, too.

With forty-one stories (reprinted from a wide variety of sources), a perceptive introduction by Jack Dann, and an informative afterword by editor John Pelan, these two volumes are troves of reading pleasure for everyone lucky enough to get their hands on them.

In the field for over six decades, Kate Wilhelm carved out a remarkable career highlighted not only by the quality of her own work, but by her tireless efforts to give back to the field and smooth the way for those who would follow. Equally well-known as an author of mysteries, she still found time to revisit the genre of speculative fiction. She also founded the Clarion Workshop with her husband Damon Knight and writer Robin Scott Wilson.

In the 1950s, Kate Wilhelm began publishing science fiction after she read a story in a magazine and said, "I can do better than that." She quickly proved that she could do better, selling "The Mile-Long Spaceship" to John W. Campbell at Astounding. "You have an easy, pleasing and readable style, one that would, moreover, be a marked change in science fiction," John W. Campbell wrote to her in 1957. Soon she was invited to attend a Milford writers conference in Pennsylvania and there she met Damon Knight, whom she eventually married.

Working with Knight as he edited his Orbit anthology series, Kate Wilhelm came into her own as a writer, publishing stories that grounded their extrapolations in strong naturalistic depictions of the here-and-now. In tales such as "Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis" and "Baby, You Were Great," she demonstrated her facility with speculation and science-fictional ideas, while tales like "The Village" and "The Funeral" spoke with great relevance to social and political matters. She received a Nebula Award in 1969 for "The Planners," one of her many well-crafted stories of scientific inquiry.

Kate Wilhelm once said she didn't set out to cross genre lines with her fiction, she just had a blind spot when it came to genre boundaries. Consequently, her stories often blend elements of mystery, crime, and the supernatural with the scientific rigor of science fiction, and readers never know what to expect when they start to read stories like "The Gorgon Field" or "The Day of the Sharks" or "The Look Alike." There's no telling where these characters will take you.

Many of Kate Wilhelm's classics tell the tale of a young woman drawn into a web of scientific intrigue, and here you'll find "The Winter Beach," "The Fullness of Time," and "The Bird Cage," prime examples of this storytelling mode.

The depth of characterization and the psychological insight in stories like "The Downstairs Room" and "The Infinity Box" firmly established her at the forefront of her generation. The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed her "One of the masters of psychological fiction in America."

Over the next five decades, Wilhelm went on to fulfill the promise -- many times over -- of her first wave of top-flight work. With forty-one stories across two volumes, these books amply show the breadth and range of her fiction... and the power of her storytelling, too.

With forty-one stories (reprinted from a wide variety of sources), a perceptive introduction by Jack Dann, and an informative afterword by editor John Pelan, these two volumes are troves of reading pleasure for everyone lucky enough to get their hands on them.

In the field for over six decades, Kate Wilhelm carved out a remarkable career highlighted not only by the quality of her own work, but by her tireless efforts to give back to the field and smooth the way for those who would follow. Equally well-known as an author of mysteries, she still found time to revisit the genre of speculative fiction. She also founded the Clarion Workshop with her husband Damon Knight and writer Robin Scott Wilson.

"Sheckley was a fantasist not entirely unknown to the public. For fifty years he had pursued his calling, inventing worlds both characteristic of the genre and unique to himself. From his brain had come planets of pleasure and worlds of pain. Nor had he neglected the multitudinous possibilities between."

So wrote Robert Sheckley in 2005, and so it was. And oh, those possibilities between!

From his first published work of fiction in 1952 until his death in 2005, Robert Sheckley gave us more than two hundred short stories, along with dozens of novels. He is generally known as one of the great humorists in the science fiction field -- his comedies are sometimes wry and often gonzo. They were very influential (Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy shows signs of Sheckley's sway) and you'll find them in fine form in such stories as "The Day the Aliens Came," "What Is Life?," and "The Two Sheckleys."

But Robert Sheckley's short fiction did more than just make us laugh. His stories, scared, thrilled, amused, excited, beguiled, inveigled, alarmed, charmed, and disarmed readers of science fiction anthologies and magazines for the better part of a century... and with this collection, they'll continue to do so.

Robert Sheckley wrote frequently of everyman heroes caught in a world they don't understand, and you'll find honest, hard-working joes in stories here like "The Altar," "A Ticket to Transai," and "The Mountain without a Name."

But he also liked to explore mythology and the nature of heroism, which you'll find in full force in such stories as "Agamemnon's Run," "The Quijote Robot," and "The Never-Ending Western Movie." Two other topics that interested Sheckley were the ways in which humans interact with their machines, and the ways in which humans interact with each other. Both themes are on grand display in stories like "Watchbird," "The Girls and Nugent Miller," and "Seventh Victim."

With thirty-one of his best stories -- including the short novels Dramocles and Minotaur Maze -- this collection is equally good for readers revisiting old friends and for those discovering Sheckley's work for the first time. From the dangers of courtship to the perils of the surveillance state, from the troubles with utopia to the meaning of life, these stories offer rewards for every reader.

Robert Sheckley was born in Brooklyn in 1928 and began publishing fiction in 1951. His short stories appeared in magazines such as Galaxy, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Playboy. He published more than twenty novels and edited Omni magazine. His stories were adapted for television and film many times, most notably in the movies Freejack and The Tenth Victim. He received the Author Emeritus career honor from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2001. He died in 2005.

In 1972, Jack Dann was a law school student and aspiring writer who had published stories in Fantastic when a story he had sent to Damon Knight for his famed Orbit anthology series was published. These early stories eventually led to a Nebula Award for his novella "Da Vinci Rising" in 1997 and to increasing acclaim as one of science fiction and fantasy's most original writers.

Jack Dann's imagined worlds are so rich in detail as to become hallucinatory; a reader doesn't so much peruse a Dann story as experience it. In "The Dybbuk Dolls," the owner of a sex shop in a future ghetto finds himself involved with weird customers, a political feud, alien dolls, and a number of complicated and often hilarious events. "Jumping the Road" and "Timetipping" also draw on Dann's Jewish heritage and his gift for humor, while "Amnesia," a darker tale in which a man searching for his dead wife plugs into a dying man's mind, demonstrates Dann's range, as does "Blind Shemmy," a story of gamblers playing for the highest of stakes.

In "Bad Medicine," a man searching for meaning in his life embarks on a spiritual quest with a Native American shaman, while the Ditmar Award-winning "The Diamond Pit," an homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald set in the 1920s, is an adventure story of an aviator shot down and confined by an eccentric millionaire in a luxurious prison from which he and other confined flyers must escape.

All of the stories in this volume reveal Dann's ability to draw the reader completely into his settings and the minds of his characters; even when we're not quite sure of where we are going, we are compelled to go along for the ride. John Kessel calls Dann's fiction "stories of transcendence, spiritual exploration, harrowing psychological transformations. Rebirth and conceptual breakthrough. And yet they are grounded in a developed sense of personal relationships, the rag and bone shop of the human heart." Set in places as diverse as Renaissance Italy, upstate New York, near-future Paris, Nazi Germany, modern-day Athens, and Hollywood in the 1950s, here are compulsively involving stories by a master storyteller.

Jack Dann's highly praised novels include Junction, The Man Who Melted, The Silent, Counting Coup, Shadows in the Stone, and the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral.

He has also been honored with the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award (twice), the Australian Aurealis Award (three times), the Chronos Award, the Darrell Award for Best Mid-South Novel, the Ditmar Award (five times), the Peter McNamara Achievement Award and also the Peter McNamara Convenors' Award for Excellence, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa Fantastica award. Having grown up in the United States, he now lives in Australia with his partner, author and anthologist Janeen Webb. The complete contents appear below. Note: Jack Dann wrote two stories called "Visitors." They are completely different stories. That is why you see the title listed twice in the table of contents below.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Meet Jack Dann (by George Zebrowski)
• Going Under (1981)
• The Dybbuk Dolls (1975)
• A Quiet Revolution for Death (1978)
• Camps (1979)
• Amnesia (1981)
• Fairy Tale (1981)
• Blind Shemmy (1983)
• Bad Medicine (1984)
• Tea (1988)
• Kaddish (1989)
• Jumping the Road (1992)
• Voices (1991)
• Timetipping (1975)
• Da Vinci Rising (1995)
• Marilyn (2000)
• The Diamond Pit (2001)
• Trainspotting in Winesburg (2016)
• Visitors (1987)
• Visitors (1977)
• The Carbon Dreamer (2019)
• Tattoos (1986)
• The Island of Time (2013)
• Jubilee (1995)
• Mohammed's Angel (2009)
• Café Culture (2007)
• Waiting for Medusa (2013)
• Ting-a-Ling (2001)
• The Confession of a Stalker (Afterword by John Pelan)