Once the Empire had ruled the galaxy, linking thousands of worlds with a network of commerce, culture and law... Now, with the Empire gone, only isolated planets remained and they were rapidly sinking into oblivion. Then came Mass, a man driven by a dream of rediscovering the Empire... but to achieve that dream he must find and control the space skimmer, one of the miraculous vessels that had first made the Empire possible...

    Contents:Tandy's Story (1961)Rule of Three (1951)The Education of Drusilla Strange (1954)Granny Won't Knit (1954)When You're Smiling (1955)The Claustrophile (1956)The Other Man (1956)The Stars Are the Styx (1950)Occam's Scalpel (1971)Dazed (1971)

    Pull up a chair, grab a glass of your favorite, and listen to the stories spun by time travelers, cybernetic aliens, telepaths...and a bunch of regular folks on a mission to save the world, one customer at a time.Callahan's Crosstime Saloon contains the following stories, virtually all of which were published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact: * "The Guy With the Eyes" * "The Time-Traveler" * "The Centipede's Dilemma" * "Two Heads Are Better Than One" * "The Law Of Conservation of Pain" * "Just Dessert" * "A Voice is Heard in Ramah..." * "Unnatural Causes" * "The Wonderful Conspiracy"

    Contains the stories:"The Narrow Land""The Masqerade on Dicantropus""Where Hesperus Falls""The World-Thinker""Green Magic""The Ten Books""Chateau D'If" (aka "New Bodies for Old")

    Each sought his own brand of happiness. But none could have guessed what awaited them. Not even in a million years....

    As the planet is transformed from an unexplored and forbidding terrain to a troubled image of a re-created Earth, we meet the First Hundred explorers—men and women who are bound together by Earth’s tenuous toehold on Mars. Presenting unforgettable stories of hope and disappointment, of fierce physical and psychological struggles, The Martians is an epic chronicle of a planet that represents one of humanity’s most glorious possibilities.The Martians is a unique collection of previously unpublished fiction, a fascinating addition to Robinson’s oeuvre, and a must for all lovers of the red planet.

    Paradise? The Energy Crisis: Solved!The Popualtion Bomb: Defused!World-Wide Disarmament: A Reality!But the price may be too high to pay - for the white-hot metal shafts that have plumbed Earth's core to bring back its plenty have awakened a terror that Mankind thought would sleep forever....

    Morgon, prince of the simple farmers of Hed, proved himself a master of such riddles when he staked his life to win a crown from the dead Lord of Aum. But now ancient, evil forces were threatening him. Shape changers began replacing friends until no man could be trusted. So Morgon was forced to flee to hostile kingdoms, seeking the High One who ruled from mysterious Erlenstar Mountain. Beside him went Deth, the High One's Harper. Ahead lay strange encounters and terrifying adventures. And with him always was the greatest of unsolved riddles; the nature of the three stars on his forehead that seemed to drive him toward his ultimate destiny.

    Rather, it suddenly wanted to stop thinking about them. The public was scared. Throughout all human history, the most horrifying of all ideas has been the idea of something which was as intelligent as a man, but wasn't human.The first sounds came at midnight, a plaintive keening from an unknown voice in the vastness of uncharted space. Within hours the whole world had heard the strange, unearthly music--and the panic had begun.Were the sounds a plea for help? From whom? From where? Or were they a command too terrible to think about? No one knew: And in billions of earth-bound minds the horror grew...For how could man, who had not yet claimed the moon, defy a challenge from the stars?And hours later, to the ears of a helpless world, the second message came. . .And Earth's days were numbered.

    Le Guin has created a profound and transformational literature. The award-winning stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea range from the everyday to the outer limits of experience, where the quantum uncertainties of space and time are resolved only in the depths of the human heart. Astonishing in their diversity and power, they exhibit both the artistry of a major writer at the height of her powers and the humanity of a mature artist confronting the world with her gift of wonder still intact.A Fisherman of the Inland Sea containsAnother Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea • [Hainish]Dancing to Ganam • [Hainish] Introduction: On Not Reading Science Fiction Newton's Sleep The Ascent of the North FaceThe First Contact with the GorgonidsThe KerastionThe Rock That Changed ThingsThe Shobies' Story • [Hainish]

    Odd is a tale of how an ordinary man profited from an extraordinary time paradox when he stops to help a man seemingly lost and confused, and then learns the reasons why.Stitch in Time concerns an elderly lady reflecting on a lost love and, thanks to her sons' experiments with time, finally discovering the reason why her lover abandoned her so many years ago.Oh Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty? is a social satire on Hollywood glamour in which a bright, individual young Irish woman becomes part of the celebrity circuit, and loses all that makes her special in the process of becoming a star.Random Quest combines romance and parallel universes.A Long Spoon is the story of how a demon is summoned by mistake and the lengths the couple that invoked him have to go to get rid of him without losing their souls in the bargain.

    The ISBN 0-440-04182-1 is derived from the SBN 440-04182-095 on the spine.JANDAR THE ALIEN ENSLAVEDon Callisto, moon of Jupiter, a world of black and crimson jungles where the hand of every man is lifted in eternal enmity against every other... a savage, hostile world on which he is first held prisoner by the fearsome insect-men, only to be freed for a more binding slavery in the deadly clutches of the insidious Sky Pirates... and in the incalculable aura of the beautiful princess Darloona who elicits love almost beyond the limits of his mortal soul...(Source: back cover)

    The reigning master of short fiction reinvents science fiction and fantasy in a dazzling new collection unlike anything you’ve ever read. Time-traveling dinosaurs wreak havoc on a placid Vermont town. An ogre is murdered in a locked room in Faerie. An uncanny bordello proves as dangerous as it is alluring. Language is stolen from the builders of babel. Those strangely loveable Post-Utopion scoundrels and con men, Darger and Surplus, swindle their way through London, Paris, and Arcadia.The Dog Said Bow-Wow includes three Hugo Award-winning stories and an original novelette of swashbuckling romance and adventure, “The Skysailor’s Tale.” Ranging from the hardest of science fiction to the highest of fantasy, this irresistible collection amuses and enlightens as only Michael Swanwick can.

    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 bought 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 to. 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 stars...'

    A Shaper. In a warm womb of metal, his patients dream their neuroses, while Render, intricately connected to their brains, dreams with them, makes delicate adjustments, and ultimately explains and heals. Her name is Eileen Shallot, a resident in psychiatry. She wants desperately to become a Shaper, though she has been blind from birth. Together, they will explore the depths of the human mind -- and the terrors that lurk therein