He might look like Falstaff and talk in a steady stream of malapropisms, but anybody who might take him for a bumbling buffoon would quickly find themselves taken—to the cleaners! In Nick Van Rijn, Poul Anderson created one of the most memorable and popular characters in science fiction, and now, for the first time, all the stories of Van Rijn and the Polesotechnic League will be published in chronological order in three volumes. This first volume includes the classic novel, The Man Who Counts, in which Van Rijn and two associates are stranded on a planet inhabited by a winged race, two factions of which happen to be at war with each other. The planet has no food that is not poisonous to humans, and the three humans have only a small supply of food in their wrecked ship. Somehow the humans must get to another continent, where a human outpost is, before they starve, in spite of the planet’s inhabitants being too busy fighting a war to bother with the troubles of these three odd-looking wingless aliens. An impossible problem? Not for Nick Van Rijn! Also included are more stories of Van Rijn flamboyant exploits, plus stories set elsewhere in the Polesotechnic universe.

    The a body with two holes in its neck and no blood left turned up at his back door, and he found himself dealing with the kind of information that can get a man killed, or worse, much worse.Being chased by things out of myth and nightmare, Jason has only two weapons: his best friend, and his won quick wits.In a battle against darkness, the brightest weapon is the light of reason.

    Genellan -- the sole refuge for a ship's crew and a detachment of spacer marines, abandoned by a fleet fleeing from alien attackers. Now winter is coming, and the savage bear people are returning, bent on destroying every human -- but not before stealing the secret of hyperlight drive, the key to interstellar flight . . . .

    Leo Graf was just your typical efficient engineer: mind your own business and do the job. But all that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat, where children had been bio-engineered to have four arms (and no legs) to function in zero gravity. Now that they’re no longer needed, a heartless mega corporation is getting rid of them before they eat into the profit margin. Leo Graf adopted 1000 quaddies—now he had to teach them to be free. “Labyrinth”—When Miles Vorkosigan is captured while on a secret mission to a lawless world, his only hope of escape is an unlikely pair of allies: a quaddie and a teenage werewolf. Diplomatic Immunity— Miles Vorkosigan and his wife were heading home for the births of their first children, but a major diplomatic disaster is looming at Graf Station, colonized by the descendants of the original quaddies, and duty calls. Unfortunately, diplomatic immunity doesn’t carry over to immunity from a very nasty biological weapon. The downside of being a troubleshooter comes when trouble starts shooting back. . . .

    A caste of scientists arose who knew how to repair and operate the ancient machines, but not how they worked, and worshipped at the altars of the atomic gods who were said to make the machines run. Society was a strange mix of the modern and the medieval, with armies riding on horseback into huge spaceships, then flying to human colonies on other planets to wage war with swords and arrows. Then came the mutant Clane, who would have been put to death for his deformities had he not been born into the ruling family. Though his body was twisted, his mind was brilliant, and he not only recovered the lost science behind the ancient machines, but found the truth behind the legends of civilisation's downfall. Alien invaders, not human war, had reduced humanity to barbarism as a prelude for a later return in force to colonize the Solar System. And that return would happen soon, unless Clane could find a way to stop it. . . . For the first time, the entire Clane saga, told in the two novels Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn, is complete in one volume.Mission to the Stars, Van Vogt's sweeping novel of interstellar adventure, is also included, along with the two short novels in the Ezwal series, chronicling the struggle of one man to convince a feral but intelligent species to join with humanity in the battle against a mutual enemy, but first he must convince the lone Ezwal who is trapped with him in a deadly jungle to co-operate, or neither will survive.

    A proposed major software upgrade - an artificial intelligence - will give the system an unprecedented degree of independent decision-making, but serious questions are raised in regard to how much control can safely be given to a non-human intelligence. In order to more fully assess the system, a new space-station habitat - a world in miniature - is developed for deployment of the fully operational system, named Spartacus. This mini-world can then be "attacked" in a series of escalating tests to assess the system's responses and capabilities. If Spartacus gets out of hand, the system can be shut down and the station destroyed... unless Spartacus decides to take matters into its own hands and take the fight to Earth.

    Stardance: Shara Drummond was a gifted dancer and a brilliant choreographer, but could not pursue her dream of dancing on Earth, so she went to space, creating a new art form in three dimensions. And when the aliens arrived, there was only one way to prove that the human race deserved not just to survive, but to reach the stars. The only hope was Shara, with her stardance. Starseed: Years later, another dancer of genius faced the end of her career when her body failed her, and Rain McLeod followed Shara into space. If she joined with a symbiotic lifeform that would let her live without artificial protection in the vacuum of space, she would take a quantum leap in human evolution. Starmind: Rand Porter has been offered the job of a lifetime, as a shaper of visual effects and music for the world's most famous zero-gravity dance company in High Orbit. But his beloved novelist wife Rhea Paixao has her roots sunk deep in the Earth, in her beloved Cape Cod. And as they wrestle with their private dilemma, bizarre things-small miracles-are beginning to occur everywhere on Earth and throughout the entire Solar System. The human race-and its evolutionary successors, the space-dwelling Stardancers-find themselves approaching the terrifying cusp of their shared destiny, an appointment made for them a million years ago, a make-or-break point beyond which nothing, anywhere, can ever be the same again.

    So what if he is seven feet tall, furry, and equipped with retractable claws?Human is as human does … Right?

    A talented, elite cadre, they stepped out of the everyday human race...to enter their own!

    Therefore making friends with the Dilbians and establishing a human presence there is of the utmost importance, which may be a problem, since the bearlike Dilbians stand some nine feet tall, and have a high regard for physical prowess. They're not impressed by human technology, either. A real man, er, bear doesn't need machines to do his work for him.But Dilbians "are" impressed by sharp thinking, and some have expressed a grudging admiration for the logical (and usually sneaky) mental maneuvers that the human "shorties" have used to get themselves out of desperate jams. Just maybe that old human craftiness will win over the Dilbians to the human side. If not, we lose a nexus, and the Dilbians will learn just how unbearable Hemnoids can be....

    The world is a paradise - and then, in a moment, it ends. The council that controls the Net falls out and goes to war. Everywhere people who have never known a moment of want or pain are left wondering how to survive.

    Outnumbered and on the defensive, Earth made a desperate decision. It would attack the aliens not from space, but on the ground-with forces the Trofts did not even suspect. Thus were created the Cobras, a guerilla force whose weapons were surgically implanted, invisible to the unsuspecting eye, yet undeniably deadly. But power brings temptation . . . and not all the Cobras could be trusted to fight for Earth alone. Jonny Moreau would learn the uses-and abuses-of his special abilities, and what it truly meant to be a Cobra.

    With eight short stories and novellas--including three original to this collection--Galactic North imparts the centuries-spanning events that have produced the dark and turbulent world of Revelation Space.

    Peter Hamilton takes us on a journey from a murder mystery in an alternative Oxford in the 1800s to a story featuring Paula Myo, Deputy Director of the Intersolar Commonwealth's Serious Crimes Directorate.

    Pity the poor private eye (or official investigator, for that matter), who has to solve a case which may involve death by black magic, evidence that may have been altered or planted by an itinerant sorcerer, and supernatural entities.