With a foreword by Robert Shapard and an afterword by Christopher Merrill, this book brings you fresh approaches to an exacting form that demands precision, a species of brevity that is surprisingly expansive. Writers say the pieces are hard to compose, but readers say they are easy to appreciate, a pleasure to envision, a wonder to watch life spun out and painted in small places. Real and surreal, lyrical and prosaic, here are 135 stories by 89 authors, certain to make you think.

    In "Mercury Rain" a soldier fighting a new enemy learns the importance of holding on to his memories. "Blackwater," the title story of the collection, is an homage to Stephen King's short story, "Graveyard Shift," and it tells the tale of Paul Hawkins, a mine worker who disturbs something terrifying in the Blackwater Hills of Durham, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1976.

    In doing so, the book triumphed over a very strong shortlist, including collections by one Booker Prize winner in Anne Enright and two authors who have been Booker shortlisted in Shena Mackay and Ali Smith (the latter a winner of the Whitbread Prize).When announcing the winner, one of the judges – James Walton, journalist and chair of BBC Radio 4’s The Write Stuff – said, “I suspect Chris Beckett winning the Edge Hill Prize will be seen as a surprise in the world of books. In fact, though, it was also a bit of surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand.”In 2012 the Sunday Times named Chris’ latest novel Dark Eden the best science fiction novel of the year, and it is currently shortlisted for the BSFA Award in the same category. NewCon Press are delighted to be publishing The Peacock Cloak, the latest collection from one of Britain’s most distinguished and accomplished genre authors. Contains twelve stories (85,000 words) all previously uncollected.

    The Washington Post has called Gene Wolfe "the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced." This volume joins together two of his rarest and most sought after works--Gene Wolfe's Book of Days and The Castle of the Otter--and add thirty-nine short essays collected here for the first time, to fashion a rich and engrossing architecture of wonder.

    Here, science fiction's most beloved and highly honored writers revisit their best-known worlds in perhaps the greatest concentration of science fiction ever in one volume.

    The far ranging imagination of A. E. van Vogt will take you - Thousands of years into the future! Millions of years into the past! Trilions of miles into outer space! - and into other dimensions, galaxies and universes. Here is one of the modern masters of science fiction of whom it can well be said: "van Vogt's formula is grandoise - imaginative, I love it all." -Groff Conklin, Galaxy magazine. It contains the following stories:The Great Engine (1943) The Great Judge (1948) Secret Unattainable (1942) The Harmonizer (1944) The Second Solution (1942) Film Library (1946) Asylum (1942)

    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

    Now he's starring in a big-budget action thriller that offers him the chance to become a box-office titan.Except the action and the thrills aren't just in the movie. Dangerous and destabilizing new technology is floating around behind the scenes. Police and cartel lords lurk in the shadows. An assassin is on the loose, and has already claimed his first victim.Sean could be next in the killer's sights, unless he can find out what the bad guys want, who's hiding it, and how many people he's going to have to betray in order to save his life--- and more importantly, his celebrity!

    * New Edition. * Includes a new translation of 'Fotikchand'.

    Owens thought he would take one last trip to pay his respects to fallen comrades. However fate had other plans. His return trip to the planet of Hades in the Death Gates System was to be his final farewell. At ninety seven, his doctors had told him his chances of surviving the trip were small. This did not deter him in the slightest. It would be his last great adventure.This was supposed to be a trip to say goodbye to the men he had served with, under, and finally over as a Death Dealer. The men in those Imperial Black Uniforms. The Death Dealers have been the most feared military unit of the last four hundred and fifty years of the human Space Empire. Men trained in every form of combat known to man and alien. Units whose very names strike terror into the hearts of those they face. Names like Grim Rippers, Hells Lost Legion, and the Screaming Eagles. If it had not been for the Emperor Nicolai and an invasion by the Gelf Union four hundred and fifty years ago the Death Dealers may have been nothing more than a footnote in history. A company of Death Dealers were on Fair Cry Seven when they attacked. The Gelf’s killed every last human military unit that faced off against them. All but one was defeated within the first two days of the invasion. That one lone unit was the Death Dealer Company. From that war onwards, the Death Dealers have fought in every war on every planet from the time of their conception. Their battles have become legendary. Battlefields with names like Forty Acers where the Death Dealers lost one man for every enemy soldier they sent to meet their maker. Bloody Ridge on Colfax Eight where one company of Death Dealers in Armored Power Suits held off four regiments of Horbathian Tanks for three days before being relieved. On all of these planets and many more their battle cry of ‘Death is dealt by our hands’ has been heard. It was this battle cry that earned them their name. A name given to them by the very enemy they first faced off against. It was these stories that drew James as a young man to undergo the painful process of having the Death Dealers greatest asset installed in his body. The artificial intelligence computer known as a Death Dealer AI. As a young man from a poor planet James dreamed of wearing the Imperial Black Uniform of the Death Dealers. He never knew that he would become one of the most feared of Death Dealers, the man they themselves would call Death. It would be his drive to be the best of the best that would propel him far beyond his humble origins to being a First High Lord and personal Friend of the Emperor. However that is now all in his past. Now well past his prime, all James wants to do is travel to Hades and the Death Gates system to say goodbye and die a peaceful death. The old Death Dealer did not know that deep within him lying dormant was an old friend just waiting a signal to reawaken. An wakening that would begin not only a second chance in life, but what would become his greatest, and most rewarding adventure. He will face off against assassins, rogue military units, hostile planetary governments, and an all-out revolt against the Empire he swore to protect. All of these things are nothing compared to his greatest challenge.No that pleasure belongs to having to deal with not one but two very different Artificial Intelligence computers in his head. One is the original Death Dealer AI that all Death Dealers have, this was Dee De a Mark one Omega/ Assault class Death Dealer AI with a hidden secret. One that will lead to James’s greatest adventure and second chance in life.They say Death Dealers never retreat and never surrender. Their battle cry has been heard on thousands of worlds for over four hundred years.

    A new outbreak is about to begin. The world's most deadly disease is loose, and anyone who catches it is doomed. Symptoms include coughing, sneezing, abdominal pain, and rotting of the flesh. There is no cure. Infection is 100% fatal. Stay calm. Please do not panic. The situation is under control. It is under control. The Peeling & Other Terrifying Tales is a collection of novellas and short stories from bestselling horror author Iain Rob Wright. It begins with the 80-page novella THE PEELING, and also includes several short stories, most of which have never been published before. Full table of contents below: 1. THE PEELING 2018 (novella) 2. THE PEELING OF SAMUEL LLOYD COLLINS 3. THE PEELING OMNIBUS (5 previously released novellas set in The Peeling universe) 4. EHLLF (short story) 5. VLOG LIFE (short story) 6. HEIRLOOMS (short story) 7. THE EAGLE & THE WOLF (short story) 8. CHICKEN BOY (short story) 9. THE WITNESS (short story) 10. THE BOB SAGA (1 previously released short story & 1 previously unpublished) "Iain Rob Wright scares the Hell out of me!" - J. A. Konrath "Iain Rob Wright is sick and twisted." - David Moody "A master of the genre." - Matt Shaw

    Epic battles. Artificial Intelligence's longing for meaning. Life as we know it, ending... Sci-Fi Bridge is thrilled to present its second collection from bestselling authors and newly emerging writers. These stories span the near and far future. They transport you to worlds unknown. They examine today's fears amid tomorrow's technologies. From the far corners of the galaxy to the inner reaches of the human heart, the exciting stories in At the Helm will thrill, inspire, and make you wonder--do humans have what it takes to build a better future? Or are we doomed by our own failings? Foreword by Jay Allan. "Scout" by Will McIntosh. "Gelassenheit" by Chris Pourteau. "Rubbish with Names" by Felix R. Savage. "Galaxy's Edge" by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole “A God Among Us” by Rhett C. Bruno "Just An Old Fashioned Lust Story" by Christopher J. Valin "The Quarium Wars" by E. E. Giorgi "Death-Life on Kepler 452b" by Hall & Beaulieu "The Tunnel" by Andreas Christensen "Caterpillar" by Isaac Hooke "The Null" by Vincent Trigili "The Machine" by Mark R. Healy "Bottled Lightning" by Philip Harris "The Gambit" by Rysa Walker "Control" by Will Swardstrom "The Greatest Serial Killer in the Universe" by Robert Jeschonek "Magnet" by David Adams "Stasis Dream" by Josi Russell

    Content advisory: violence

    Here's what you'll find in this issue:"Jenny's House" is a great place to play, but an unexpected playmate makes for a dark session of show-and-tell.Three kids seek to steal from a traveling carnival and get more than they bargained for in "A Lullaby for Caliban"In "The Last Nephew", Nephew yearns to be free of Uncle's depredations, but when Uncle leaves his pocket watch behind one night, it gives him the key to his escape.Crossing "The Cornfield" is harrowing on the best of winter nights, but this night, Jack turns to see eyes in the darkness, and knows that something is following him...In "The Ginger Men", mother is baking a special ingredient into a treat for father, an ingredient that gives her pie dough a life of its own. Featuring stories by Ada Hoffmann, Julie Jansen, Mark Onspaugh, Mike Trier, and Elizabeth Twist.Be sure to check out the other volumes in this ongoing anthology series, and watch for new volumes coming soon!

    Anderson illuminated the sources, inspirations, and influences that fired J.R.R. Tolkien’s genius. Now Anderson turns his attention to Tolkien’s colleague and friend C. S. Lewis, whose influence on modern fantasy, through his beloved Narnia books, is second only to Tolkien’s own.In many ways, Lewis’s influence has been even wider than Tolkien’s. For in addition to the Narnia series, Lewis wrote groundbreaking works of science fiction, urban fantasy, and religious allegory, and he came to be regarded as among the most important Christian writers of the twentieth century. It will come as no surprise, then, that such a wide-ranging talent drew inspiration from a variety of sources. Here are twenty of the tributaries that fed Lewis’s unique talent, among them:“The Wood That Time Forgot: The Enchanted Wood,” taken from a never-before-published fantasy by Lewis’s biographer and friend, Roger Lancelyn Green, that directly inspired The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; E. Nesbit’s charming “The Aunt and Amabel,” in which a young girl enters another world by means of a wardrobe; “The Snow Queen,” by Hans Christian Andersen, featuring the abduction of a young boy by a woman as cruel as she is beautiful; and many more, including works by Charles Dickens, Kenneth Grahame, G. K. Chesterton, and George MacDonald, of whom Lewis would write, “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master.” Full of fascinating insights into Lewis’s life and fiction, Tales Before Narnia is the kind of book that will be treasured by children and adults alike and passed down lovingly from generation to generation.