The Man Who Had No Idea


Thomas M. Disch - 1982
    The Man Who Had No Idea (1978)The Black Cat (1976)The Santa Claus Compromise (1974)The Vengeance of Hera or, Monogamy Triumphant (1980)Concepts (1978)The Apartment Next to the War (1975)The Foetus (1980)The Fire Began to Burn the Stick, the Stick Began to Beat the Dog (1976)At the Pleasure Centre (1974)The Grown-Up (1981)How to Fly (1977)Planet of the Rapes (1977)The Revelation (1980)Pyramids for Minnesota (1974)Josie and the Elevator: A Cautionary Tale (1980)An Italian Lesson (1982)Understanding Human Behavior (1982)

Over the River and Through the Woods (collection of stories)


Clifford D. Simak - 1965
    Simak (1904-1988). When the Science Fiction Writers of America began bestowing their Grand Master awards, Simak was the third writer so honored. Only Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson preceded him, and he received his award before such luminaries as Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. Simak earned this distinction by producing, over a long period of time, a significant body of popular, respected, often award-winning work, including his classics City and Way Station, and many shorter works, eight of which are contained in this collection. Readers unfamiliar with Simak are in for a treat. More than half of the stories here were among the best stories of their respective years. "The Big Front Yard" (1958) won a Hugo. "A Death in the House" (1959) was selected by Judith Merril for Year's Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition. "Over the River and Through the Woods" (1965) made the cut for World's Best Science Fiction: 1966 edited by Donald Wollheim.Contents: A Death in the House The Big Front Yard Goodnight Mr. James Dusty Zebra Neighbor Over the River & Through the Woods Construction Shack Grotto of the Dancing Deer [He] wrote for so long and always so well that his excellence came to be taken for granted, as we take sunlight for granted until we go blind. - Poul Anderson I read Cliff's stories with particular attention, and I couldn't help but notice the simplicity and directness of the writing - the utter clarity of it. I made up my mind to imitate it, and I labored over the years to make my writing simpler, clearer, more uncluttered, to present my scenes on a bare stage. - Isaac Asimov Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land. - James Gunn Good fantasy - and that includes science fiction - takes off from the known for its flights into the new. Cliff Simak was a master of the art. His known was the rural Midwest that he loved. His new could reach to the ends of space and time, but never beyond reality. Even his cosmic aliens always had half human dimensions that made them believable. I loved him, as so many did, for his unfailing warmth and a wit that was keen but never cruel. I heard from him often during the painful time after his wife's death. His own death touched me deeply, and I'm happy to see him remembered with this collection of his best-loved stories. - Jack Williamson I always loved his stories, short or long. He made me love them -and the rural America of his childhood - as much as he did. - Lester del Rey Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that a volume of the best stories of Clifford Simak (author of the classic City) would not have been published by Putnam or Del Rey, but today we have to be grateful to the one-man firm of Tachyon Publications for preserving Over the River and Through the Woods, which includes some of Simak's best stories, including two Hugo Award winners. After all, Simak is dead, which means his career is flatlined, even if Robert Heinlein said, "to read science fiction is to read Simak. The reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all." Simak was a master of a special kind of nostalgic science fiction that reconciled the values of his youth (the rural Midwest of the 1920s) with the larger universe. Material that became ludicrous cliche in the hands of lesser writers - all those endless flying saucers landing in the hillbilly's back acre - was by Simak handled with elegance and dignity."A Death in the House" is typical: A farmer finds a dying alien. He does what he can, but that's very little. The farmer conceals the grave, wanting to give his "guest" that much dignity. But the alien is plantlike. It (or its young) sprouts out of the corpse. Human and alien struggle toward understanding. In "The Big Front Yard," a rural handyman finds his house transformed into a gateway to other worlds. The common people have the good sense; trouble starts when profiteers and the government get involved. The tone is light, friendly and clever. This is not to suggest that Simak was a writer with no hard edges. "Good Night Mr. James" is a horror story, about a duplicate human being created to destroy a particularly nasty alien illegally smuggled to Earth. But the gentler mode was more typical, and he could also write humor. "Dusty Zebra" is a long technological joke, maybe a bit slight to be included when a 50-year career must be distilled into 218 pages. Simak's last story, the last in the book, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," is about an immortal caveman, quite different from de Camp's "Gnarly Man." He is the original artist who painted that cave art the scientists keep finding; after all this time, he just has to tell someone. The story won both the Hugo and the Nebula for 1980, because both readers and fellow professionals wanted to say "thank you." - The Washington Post Book World Clifford D. Simak is another classic SF writer who staked out a distinctive territory based on his rural midwestern roots - only a couple hundred miles north of Bradbury's - but he never strayed very far from a few classic SF themes which he treated with considerably more rigor than Bradbury, if sometimes with as much sentimentality. Simak's City is at least as important to the history of SF as Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles - some would say more so, given its more challenging conceptual framework - and his other short stories are among the most enduring in the genre, as Over the River & Through the Woods, a new limited edition from Tachyon Publications, attests. Yet Simak, like Sturgeon, seems in danger of fading into the limbo of historical anthologies; while his work was once as widely available as that of any of the giants, today these stories seem almost like new discoveries - and are just as fresh. Part of the reason may be not that Simak's folksy language seems to belie the underlying sense of alienation and tragedy that characterizes much of his work; part may be due to the rediscovery of American regional idioms among younger SF writers from Terry Bisson to Nancy Kress . . . 'Over the River & Through the Woods' contains eight Simak stories from 1951 through 1980 - which means it includes none of the classic stories like "Desertion" or "Huddling Place", which later went to make up City, but does include his late Hugo and Nebula-winning masterpiece "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer" and the Hugo-winning "The Big Front Yard." One of the first things that comes to mind when rereading the latter story after several years - it concerns a characteristically laconic farmer with a dog named Towser (the only name Simak seems to have permitted for dogs) who finds on his property a gateway to distant worlds - is that few contemporary writers would have let such a simple and elegant premise be confined to a novella. Simak's focus is on the unimpressed rustic whose very lack of response to the wonder at his doorstep intensifies our own. When a rustic is impressed by an alien presence, such as in "A Death in the House," it is less likely to be from a sense of wonder than from a sense of companionship. Simak's roots may be firmly in SF, but he writes of alien encounters in a way Willa Cather might have written of them. Aliens are strange but unthreatening, and in some cases (as in "Neighbor") they can turn the entire neighborhood into a pastoral Shangri-la, isolated from the outside in a way that encapsulates what must be Simak's own drams of lost innocence. But Simak could write about more than wonderful things happening to remote farmers. "Good Night, Mr. James" is a very early treatment (1951) of what we would today call a cloning story, done with the kind of cynical humor that is needed for what is essentially a double- and triple-cross tale. It reveals Simak's healthy streak of humor, as does "Dusty Zebra," in which trivial objects are zapped into another dimension in return for high-tech wonders. "Construction Shack" ironically explores an almost Stapledonian notion of whole solar systems being engineered by ancient aliens (Pluto is the construction shack of the title), cast in terms of the matter-of-fact space jockeys so familiar from pulp SF. Simak may be at his best, however, when his theme is isolation and abandonment. The title story concerns children from the future sent back to the refuge of the 1890s. The best tale in the collection and one of the high points of Simak's late career, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," concerns an anthropologist who comes to realize that his assistant seems to know far too much about certain ancient cave paintings, and may in fact have been their creator. Simak's evocation, in a few pages, of the sheer loneliness of immortality and the daunting perspectives of time involved, again could be a lesson to a generation of younger writers, and reminds us brilliantly of what Simak was capable of. - Locus

Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester


Alfred Bester - 1997
    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.CONTENTS:Disappearing ActOddy and IdStar Light, Star Bright (1953)5,271,009 (1954)Fondly Fahrenheit (1954)Hobson's Choice (1952)Of Time and Third Avenue (1952)Time is the Traitor (1953)The Men Who Murdered Mohammed (1958)The Pi Man (1959)They Don't Make Life Like They Used To (1963)Will You Wait? (1959)The Flowered Thundermug (1964)Adam and No Eve (1941)And 3 1/2 to GoGalatea Galante (1979)The Devil Without Glasses

American Blood


Benjamin Marra - 2015
    American Blood is the definitive collection of writer-artist Benjamin Marra’s provocative, self-published comics stories from the past several years, including “Gangsta Rap Posse,” “The Naked Heroes,” “Lincoln Washington,” “Ripper,” and “The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd” (in which the controversial political columnist must fight off fanatic White House officials and Hezbollah commandos in time to file her most important column yet and make a date with George Clooney).

Young Zaphod Plays It Safe


Douglas Adams - 1986
    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

Death and What Comes Next


Terry Pratchett - 2002
    It tells the story of a discussion between Death and a philosopher, in which the philosopher attempts to use the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to argue death is not a certainty.

The Study of Anglophysics


Scott Alexander - 2014
    Michael Adwell. They discover this world does not run on the same physics as our own.

The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent


Larry Correia - 2016
    A policy with Stranger & Stranger can cover all of your interdimensional insurance needs. Rated "Number One in Customer Satisfaction" for three years running, no claim is too big or too weird for Tom Stranger to handle.But now Tom faces his greatest challenge yet. Despite being assigned the wrong—and woefully inadequate—intern, Tom must still provide quality customer service to multiple alternate Earths, all while battling tentacle monsters, legions of the damned, an evil call center in Nebraska, and his archnemesis, Jeff Conundrum. Armed with his Combat Wombat and a sense of fair play, can Tom survive? And will Jimmy the Intern ever discover his inner insurance agent?It's time to kick ass and adjust claims.Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Chuck) performs Larry Correia's madcap interdimensional tale of underwriting and space travel, where the only thing scarier than tentacle monsters is a high deductible.

Passport To Eternity


J.G. Ballard - 1963
    INCLUDES: The Man on the 99th Floor (1962); Thirteen to Centaurus (1962); Track 12 (1958); The Watch-Towers (1962); A Question of Re-Entry (1963); Escapement (1956); The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista (1962); The Cage of Sand (1962); Passport to Eternity (1962).

Turing & Burroughs


Rudy Rucker - 2012
    Computer pioneer Alan Turing and the Beat author William Burroughs connect in Tangier and begin a love affair. The novel fuses SF themes with beatnik styles and attitudes, switching between Turing's and Burroughs's points of view.Turing and Burroughs find a way to shapeshift into telepathic slugs, and society's reaction serves as a symbol of the 1950s horror of gays, artists, intellectuals and political outsiders.As our heroes flee the feds, the story becomes a road novel. In traditional 1950s SF style, they head for a nuclear test site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. En route, Turing and Burroughs visit Mexico City and have a heavy encounter with Burroughs's murdered wife.The story comes to a head with a thermonuclear blast and a final transcendence.

Short Story Collections by Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad, Tales of Pirx the Pilot, the Star Diaries


Books LLC - 2010
    Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 20. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The Cyberiad (Polish: ) is a series of short stories by Stanisaw Lem. The Polish version was first published in 1967, with an English translation appearing in 1974. The main protagonists of the series are Trurl and Klapaucius, the "constructors." The vast majority of characters are either robots, or intelligent machines. The stories focus on problems of the individual and society, as well as on the vain search for human happiness through technological means. Two of these stories were included in the book The Mind's I. Trurl and Klapaucius are brilliant (robotic) engineers, called "constructors" (because they can construct practically anything at will), capable of almost God-like exploits. For instance, on one occasion Trurl creates an entity capable of extracting accurate information from the random motion of gas particles, which he calls a "Demon of the Second Kind." He describes the "Demon of the First Kind" as a Maxwell's demon. On another, the two constructors re-arrange stars near their home planet in order to advertise. The duo are best friends and rivals. When they are not busy constructing revolutionary mechanisms at home, they travel the universe, aiding those in need. Although the characters are firmly established as good and righteous, they take no shame in accepting handsome rewards for their services. If rewards were promised and not delivered, the constructors may even severely punish those who deceived them. The universe of The Cyberiad is pseudo-Medieval. There are kingdoms, knights, princesses, and even dragons in abundance. Robots are usually anthropomorphic, to the point of being divided into sexes. Love and marriage are possibl...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=59380

Space Raptor Butt Trilogy


Chuck Tingle - 2016
    Nobody could have expected what would happen when the story continued. Collected here is the entire trilogy of Chuck Tingle’s history making Space Raptor Butt series.SPACE RAPTOR BUTT INVASIONSpace can be a lonely place, especially when you’re stationed by yourself on the distant planet Zorbus. In fact, Lance isn’t quite sure that can last the whole year before his shuttle pod arrives, but when a mysterious visitor appears at Lance’s terraforming station, he quickly realizes that he might not be so alone after all. Soon enough, Lance becomes close with this mysterious new astronaut, a velociraptor. Together, they form an unlikely duo, which quickly begins to cross the boundaries of friendship into something much, much more sensual. It’s not gay if it’s a man and a dinosaur, is it? SPACE RAPTOR BUTT REDEMPTIONAfter a year stationed on planet Zorbus, astronaut Lance Tanner and his raptor lover Orion return home to find that they are not greeted as heroes, but as villains. Unbeknownst to Lance, his space travels have been funded by the villainous Scoundrels Inc, a corporation that has deep ties to the illegal trade of unicorn tears and a destructive mining project at the core of the earth. Now Lance is on trial for a number of false charges; from having connections to the wicked Scoundrels, to being too strange for space. The opposing lawyer argues that space is only for serious astronauts, and that love between a raptor and a man is giving space travel a bad name. Lance is arguing that there’s room to be weird in space. More importantly, Lance is arguing for the idea of love itself; that just because something comes out of darkness doesn’t mean it can’t become a beacon of light. Of course, this all culminates in a hardcore dinosaur on astronaut pounding that will have your jaw on the courtroom floor! SPACE RAPTOR BUTT ASCENSIONSoon after blasting off on their mission to find refuge for the people of Earth 1 on the dinosaur inhabited Earth 2, Orion and his space raptor lover Lance find a spaceship stow away, the notorious CEO of Scounrels Inc, Vam Dox. Vam claims that his intentions are pure, but it’s hard to trust such a sad, strange man. After landing in Hugona, the planet capital of Earth 2, our heroes restrain Vam Dox and head off to secure an important diplomatic relationship with the pterodactyl president, but that’s when all hell breaks loose. Soon, Vam Dox is storming the capital with a band of rabid dogs, and Lance and Orion are wrongly taking the blame! Fortunately, Lance and Orion know that the only cure for evil this strong is to prove their love in a hardcore gay encounter at the steps of the capital building. When the smoke clears, will Vam Dox be revealed as the super villain that he claims to be, or a meek, lonesome manbaby who is starved for attention?

Will the Last Person To Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun?


Mike Resnick - 1992
    Standouts include "Kirinyaga" and "For I Have Touched the Sky," two installments from Resnick's well-regarded Kirinyaga series, set on an orbital space habitat modeled on a pre-colonial African culture. Contentsxi • Foreword: The Man Who Hated Short Stories • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick1 • Introduction: Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut off the Sun? • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick3 • Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut off the Sun? • (1992) • shortstory by Mike Resnick7 • Introduction: Kirinyaga • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick8 • Kirinyaga • [Kirinyaga • 2] • (1988) • novelette by Mike Resnick31 • Introduction: Me and My Shadow • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick32 • Me and My Shadow • (1984) • shortstory by Mike Resnick51 • Introduction: Mrs. Hood Unloads • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick52 • Mrs. Hood Unloads • (1991) • shortfiction by Mike Resnick57 • Introduction: Over There • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick58 • Over There • [Teddy Roosevelt] • (1991) • novelette by Mike Resnick85 • Introduction: The Last Dog • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick86 • The Last Dog • (1977) • shortstory by Mike Resnick95 • Introduction: King of the Blue Planet • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick96 • King of the Blue Planet • (1988) • shortstory by Mike Resnick111 • Introduction: Watching Marcia • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick112 • Watching Marcia • (1981) • shortstory by Mike Resnick125 • Introduction: Death Is an Acquired Trait • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick126 • Death Is an Acquired Trait • (1988) • shortstory by Mike Resnick133 • Introduction: The Crack in the Cosmic Egg • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick134 • The Crack in the Cosmic Egg • (1988) • shortstory by Mike Resnick137 • Introduction: Revolt of the Sugar Plum Fairies • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick138 • Revolt of the Sugar Plum Fairies • (1992) • shortstory by Mike Resnick151 • Introduction: For I Have Touched the Sky • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick152 • For I Have Touched the Sky • [Kirinyaga • 3] • (1989) • novelette by Mike Resnick183 • Introduction: Frankie the Spook • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick184 • Frankie the Spook • (1990) • shortstory by Mike Resnick203 • Introduction: Beibermann's Soul • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick204 • Beibermann's Soul • (1988) • shortstory by Mike Resnick209 • Introduction: Balance • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick210 • Balance • [Susan Calvin (Robot)] • (1989) • shortstory by Mike Resnick217 • Introduction: Posttime in Pink • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick218 • Posttime in Pink • (1991) • novelette by Mike Resnick249 • Introduction: Beachcomber • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick250 • Beachcomber • (1980) • shortstory by Mike Resnick255 • Introduction: Blue • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick256 • Blue • (1979) • shortstory by Mike Resnick261 • Introduction: Stalking the Unicorn with Gun and Camera • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick262 • Stalking the Unicorn with Gun and Camera • (1986) • shortstory by Mike Resnick271 • Introduction: Monsters of the Midway • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick272 • Monsters of the Midway • (1991) • shortstory by Mike Resnick279 • Introduction: Malish • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick280 • Malish • (1991) • shortstory by Mike Resnick285 • Introduction: The Light that Blinds, the Claws that Catch • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick286 • The Light that Blinds, the Claws that Catch • [Teddy Roosevelt] • (1992) • shortstory by Mike Resnick295 • Introduction: His Award-Winning Science Fiction Story • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick296 • His Award-Winning Science Fiction Story • (1988) • shortstory by Mike Resnick309 • Introduction: Was It Good For You, Too? • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick310 • Was It Good For You, Too? • (1989) • shortstory by Mike Resnick317 • Introduction: God and Mr. Slatterman • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick318 • God and Mr. Slatterman • (1984) • shortstory by Mike Resnick327 • Introduction: The Fallen Angel • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick328 • The Fallen Angel • (1984) • shortfiction by Mike Resnick331 • Introduction: How I Wrote the New Testament, Ushered in the Renaissance, and Birdied the 17th Hole at Pebble Beach • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick332 • How I Wrote the New Testament, Ushered in the Renaissance, and Birdied the 17th Hole at Pebble Beach • (1990) • shortstory by Mike Resnick339 • Introduction: Winter Solstice • (1992) • essay by Mike Resnick340 • Winter Solstice • (1991) • shortstory by Mike Resnick

The Best of Isaac Asimov (Doubleday science fiction)


Isaac Asimov - 1973
    First published in Britain the previous year. STORIES: Marooned Off Vesta (1939); Nightfall (1941); The C-Chute (1951); The Martian Way (1952); The Deep (1952); The Fun They Had (1951); The Last Question (1956); The Dead Past (1956); The Dying Night (1956); Anniversary (1959); The Billiard Ball (1967); Mirror Image (1972).

The Engineer


Neal Asher - 1998
    A space vessel called Schrodinger's Box discovers the creature, brings it back to life, and analyzes its intellectual and physical capabilities. It's not long before the scientists realize the creature is able to manipulate the make-up of objects, including organic matter, at a molecular level. The eyes of the scientific world are on Schrodinger's Box, but not everyone is pleased with the discovery. A group of terrorists attempts to intercept the ship and destroy it.