It was first published in the anthology Far Horizons in 1999.

    It doesn't appear as a standalone work, but is included with several collections. The story is a prequel to the events in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and has the young Zaphod Beeblebrox working as a salvage ship operator. He guides some bureaucrats to a crashed spaceship which may be leaking some hazardous materials. The bureaucrats are determined to "make it safe". The comic asides in the story include some of the time travel paradoxes which are a common running theme in Adams' SF work, and plenty of material about lobsters

    Works include:The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, Out of Time's Abyss

    His earliest stories, the ones that made his name a quarter of a century ago, were set in the jungles of South America and filled with creatures dark and fantastical. Stories like “Salvador,” “The Jaguar Hunter,” and the excoriatingly brilliant “R&R” deconstructed war and peace in South America, in both the past and the future, like no other writer of the fantastic.A writer of great talent and equally great scope, Shepard has also written of the seamier side of the United States at home in classic stories like “Life of Buddha” and “Dead Money,” and in “Only Partly Here” has written one of the finest post-9/11 stories yet. Perhaps strangest of all, Shepard created one of the greatest sequences of “dragon” stories we’ve seen in the tales featuring the enormous dragon Griaule.The Best of Lucius Shepard is the first ever career retrospective collection from one of the finest writers of the fantastic to emerge in the United States over the past quarter century. It contains nearly 300,000 words of his best short fiction and is destined to be recognized as a true classic of the field.

    Here for the first time are his short stories and other short form fiction collected into one volume. A Blink of the Screen charts the course of Pratchett's long writing career: from his schooldays through to his first writing job on the Bucks Free Press,; to the origins of his debut novel, The Carpet People; and on again to the dizzy mastery of the phenomenally successful Discworld series.Here are characters both familiar and yet to be discovered; abandoned worlds and others still expanding; adventure, chickens, death, disco and, actually, some quite disturbing ideas about Christmas,all of it shot through with his inimitable brand of humour.With an introduction by Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt, illustrations by the late Josh Kirby and drawings by the author himself, this is a book to treasure.

    the Black Company ... Majipoor. For years, these have been some of the names that have captured the hearts of generations of readers and embodied the sword and sorcery genre. And now some of the most beloved and bestselling fantasy writers working today deliver stunning all-new sword and sorcery stories in an anthology of small stakes but high action, grim humor mixed with gritty violence, fierce monsters and fabulous treasures, and, of course, swordplay. Don't miss the adventure of the decade!Contents:- Introduction: Check Your Dark Lord at the Door by Lou Anders & Jonathan Strahan- Goats of Glory by Steven Erikson- Tides Elba: A Tale of the Black Company by Glen Cook- Bloodsport by Gene Wolfe- The Singing Spear by James Enge- A Wizard in Wiscezan by C.J. Cherryh- A Rich Full Week by K.J. Parker- A Suitable Present for a Sorcerous Puppet by Garth Nix- Red Pearls: An Elric Story by Michael Moorcock- The Deification of Dal Bamore: A Tale from Echo City by Tim Lebbon- Dark Times at the Midnight Market by Robert Silverberg- The Undefiled by Greg Keyes- Hew the Tintmaster by Michael Shea- In the Stacks by Scott Lynch- Two Lions, a Witch, and the War-Robe by Tanith Lee- The Sea Troll's Daughter by Caitlín R. Kiernan- Thieves of Daring by Bill Willingham- The Fool Jobs by Joe Abercrombie

    Assembling an array of talent, this collection includes contributions from visionaries Michael Moorcock and China Miéville, modern icon Clive Barker, and audacious new talents Hal Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, and Sarah Monette. An essential snapshot of a vibrant movement in popular fiction, this anthology also features critical writings from authors, theorists, and international editors as well as witty selections from online debates.ContentsIntroduction: The New Weird: “It’s Alice?” by Jeff VanderMeer“The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines” by Alistair Rennie“Watson’s Boy” by Brian Evenson“Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered” by Cat Rambo“Jack” by China Miéville“In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker“Forfend the Heaven’s Rending” by Conrad Williams“Locust-Mind” by Daniel Abraham“Tracking Phantoms” by Darja Malcolm-Clarke“Constable Chalch and the Ten Thousand Heroes” by Felix Gilman“The Lizard of Ooze” by Jay Lake“Festival Lives: Preamble: An Essay” by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer“At Reparata” by Jeffrey Ford“Immolation” by Jeffrey Thomas“The Art of Dying” by Darja Malcolm-Clarke“Whose Words You Wear” by K. J. Bishop“The Neglected Garden” by Kathy Koja“Letters from Tainaron” by Leena Krohn“The Luck in the Head” by M. John Harrison“Crossing Cambodia” by Michael Moorcock“Death in a Dirty Dhorti” by Paul Di Filippo“All God’s Chillun Got Wings” by Sarah Monette“The Braining of Mother Lamprey” by Simon D. Ings“The Ride of the Gabbleratchet” by Steph Swainston“A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing” by Thomas Ligotti“European Editor Perspectives on the New Weird: An Essay” by Martin Šust, Michael Haulica, Hannes Riffel, Jukka Halme, Konrad Walewski“The New Weird: I Think We’re the Scene” by Michael Cisco“New Weird Discussions: The Creation of a Term” by various authors

    Contents:A Martian Odyssey (1934)Valley of Dreams (1934)The Adaptive Ultimate (1935)Parasite Planet (1935)Pygmalion's Spectacles (1935)Shifting Seas (1937)The Worlds of If (1935)The Mad Moon (1935)Redemption Cairn (1936)The Ideal (1935)The Lotus Eaters (1935)Proteus Island (1936)

    In these tales, sci-fi fans follow the secret activities of the Company's field agents--once human, now centuries-old time-traveling cyborgs--as they attempt to retrieve history's lost treasures.

    P. Lovecraft. Despite this nearly unprecedented posthumous trajectory, at the time of his death at the age of forty-six, Lovecraft's work had appeared only in dime-store magazines, ignored by the public and maligned by critics. Now well over a century after his birth, Lovecraft is increasingly being recognized as the foundation for American horror and science fiction, the source of "incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates).In this volume, Leslie S. Klinger reanimates Lovecraft with clarity and historical insight, charting the rise of the erstwhile pulp writer, whose rediscovery and reclamation into the literary canon can be compared only to that of Poe or Melville. Weaving together a broad base of existing scholarship with his own original insights, Klinger appends Lovecraft's uncanny oeuvre and Kafkaesque life story in a way that provides context and unlocks many of the secrets of his often cryptic body of work.Over the course of his career, Lovecraft―"the Copernicus of the horror story" (Fritz Leiber)―made a marked departure from the gothic style of his predecessors that focused mostly on ghosts, ghouls, and witches, instead crafting a vast mythos in which humanity is but a blissfully unaware speck in a cosmos shared by vast and ancient alien beings. One of the progenitors of "weird fiction," Lovecraft wrote stories suggesting that we share not just our reality but our planet, and even a common ancestry, with unspeakable, godlike creatures just one accidental revelation away from emerging from their epoch of hibernation and extinguishing both our individual sanity and entire civilization.Following his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger collects here twenty-two of Lovecraft's best, most chilling "Arkham" tales, including "The Call of Cthulhu," At the Mountains of Madness, "The Whisperer in Darkness," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Colour Out of Space," and others. With nearly 300 illustrations, including full-color reproductions of the original artwork and covers from Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, and more than 1,000 annotations, this volume illuminates every dimension of H. P. Lovecraft and stirs the Great Old Ones in their millennia of sleep.

    They have been the subject of films, radio dramatizations and have even been presented on ice Read the originals now and one of the world's greatest ever story tellers will give you hours of pleasure and enjoyment.Stories included are: "Around the World in 80 Days, The Clipper of the Clouds, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon" and "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."

    In the award-winning title story, the narrator recounts the events of an expedition to the Belgian Congo in 1928 to collects gorillas for the Louisville Museum of Natural History. A mother invents a fairy-tale world for her son in 'Halfway People'. Twin sisters backpacking through Europe receive a mysterious invitation. A rebellious teenager is sent to a brutal reform school hidden away in paradise. A young woman inherits the family submarine. In 'The Dark', a researcher tracking plague outbreaks finds himself in the Viet Cong tunnels of Vietnam. A mystery writer visits an archaeological dig in Egypt and sets a curse in motion. In two stories, 'Booth's Ghost' and 'Standing Room Only', Fowler explores the circumstances of Lincoln's assassination from the perspectives of John Wilkes Booth's family and friends.Fowler, perhaps best known for her novels, is a master of the short story form: the secret history, the account of first contact, the murderous, ordinary tensions of family life. She draws on fairy tales, historical narratives, and war reportage, measuring the human capacities for hope and despair, brutality and kindness in the fantastic tradition of writers such as Shirley Jackson, T.H. White, Karen Russell, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

    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")

    Original tales by such science fiction luminaries as Orson Scott Card, Harry Turtledove, and Connie Willis, written in honor of Isaac Asimov's fiftieth anniversary in the genre, are set in one of his fictional universes.

    Death. War. Pestilence. These are the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse, of the End of the World. In science fiction, the end is triggered by less figurative means: nuclear holocaust, biological warfare/pandemic, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm.But before any catastrophe, there are people who see it coming. During, there are heroes who fight against it. And after, there are the survivors who persevere and try to rebuild. THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH will tell their stories.Edited by acclaimed anthologist John Joseph Adams and bestselling author Hugh Howey, THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH is a series of three anthologies of apocalyptic fiction. THE END IS NIGH focuses on life before the apocalypse. THE END IS NOW turns its attention to life during the apocalypse. And THE END HAS COME focuses on life after the apocalypse.THE END IS NIGH features all-new, never-before-published works by Hugh Howey, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jamie Ford, Seanan McGuire, Tananarive Due, Jonathan Maberry, Robin Wasserman, Nancy Kress, Charlie Jane Anders, Ken Liu, and many others.