A college professor and other oddballs are dropped onto a bleak world near a giant blue cube -- with no idea how to proceed.

    They band together with an English group, some of whom have been on the planet since before the turn of the century...

    Humanity’s greatest dreams have become reality. Along with dozens of other sentient races, the people of Earth have formed the United Federation of Planets—a galactic civilization that governs much of the known universe for the good of all. Over the past two centuries, mankind has tamed its basest instincts, and reached the stars…But suppose it hadn’t happened that way at all? Suppose instead humanity’s darkest impulses, its most savage, animalistic desires had triumphed? Suppose that the empire mankind made out in the stars was one ruled by terror, where only those willing to brutalize their own kind and their neighbors could survive?One hundred years ago, four crewmembers of the U.S.S. Enterprise crossed the dimensional barrier and found just such an empire. A mirror image of their own universe, populated by nightmare duplicates of their shipmates. Barely able to escape with their lives, they returned thankful that the accident that brought them there could not be duplicated. Or so they thought.But now the scientists of that empire have found a doorway into our universe. Thier plan: to destroy from within, to replace one of our starships with one of theirs. Their victims: the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC 1701-D.

    The world was being readied for...Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It meant the beginning of the most dramatic event in the history of the world. It will lead to the inescapable conclusion:WE ARE NOT ALONE

    The seamless and seemingly effortless blend of action and humour, the wonderful characters, the rich settings, the brilliant plot - all of it is perfect' James P. Blaylock

    For according to computer predictions, Mars is humankind's only alternative to extinction. But beneath his monstrous exterior, Torraway still carries a man's capacity for suffering.

    That led many people to underestimate the Nildoror and their obviously more fearsome commensals, the Sulidoror.But aliens should never be judged by human standards, as the Company learned to its cost when Holman's World, now once again known as Belzagor, was given back to the natives and the Company sent packing. Now Edmund Gunderson, once head of the Company's operation on this world, has come back across the galaxy to settle old scores with the Nildoror. If he can even get them to acknowledge his existence. Cover Artist: Gene Szafran

    Worlds that believe in magic consider it Darkness's mightiest talisman; and worlds of science consider it a lost artifact of some ancient and forgotten race. Some say the Heart enables its possessor to control people's minds and to amass wealth enough for a dozen lifetimes, while others think it capable of raising the dead, perhaps even changing the flow of time itself. But to all, the location of this fabled object has remained a mystery, until now. An isolated archaeological outpost has suddenly stopped responding to repeated requests for information. Sent to discover why, the "U.S.S. Enterprise" TM crew finds a devastated outpost and a dying scientist, whose last words fall on disbelieving ears: the Devil's Heart has been found. As the quest for the Heart unfolds, Captain Jean-Luc Picard discovers that beyond all the legends and age-old secrets lies an awful truth: whoever holds the Devil's Heart possesses power beyond imagining.

    It is said a race of shapeshifters once lived here, only to perish when men came. But one man believes they can still be found, somewhere in the back of the beyond.In The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Wolfe skillfully interweaves three bizarre tales to create a mesmerizing pattern: the harrowing account of the son of a mad genius who discovers his hideous heritage; a young man's mythic dreamquest for his darker half; the bizarre chronicle of a scientists' nightmarish imprisonment. Like an intricate, braided knot, the pattern at last unfolds to reveal astonishing truths about this strange and savage alien landscape.

    Even as many on Earth deny their existence, the giant wormlike carnivores prepare the world for the ultimate violation--the enslavement of humanity for food!

    It pushed Earth through the greatest technological evolution ever known, while warning that time travel is forbidden, and transgressors will be eliminated.Distant descendants of this ultra high-tech Earth live in parochial simplicity on the far-flung worlds of the New Republic. Their way of life is threatened by the arrival of an alien information plague known as the Festival. As forbidden technologies are literally dropped from the sky, suppressed political factions descend into revolutionary turmoil.A battle fleet is sent from Earth to destroy the Festival, but Spaceship engineer Martin Springfield and U.N. diplomat Rachel Mansour have been assigned rather different tasks. Their orders are to diffuse the crisis or to sabotage the New Republic's war-fleet, whatever the cost, before the Eschaton takes hostile action on a galactic scale.

    Tom Lasker did what any farmer would have done. He dug it up. And discovered a boat, made of a fiberglass-like material with an utterly impossible atomic number. What it was doing buried under a dozen feet of prairie soil two thousand miles from any ocean, no one knew. True, Tom Lasker's wheat field had once been on the shoreline of a great inland sea, but that was a long time ago -- ten thousand years ago.A return to science fiction on a grand scale, reminiscent of the best of Heinlein, Simak, and Clarke, Ancient Shores is the most ambitious and exciting SF triumph of the decade, a bold speculative adventure that does not shrink from the big questions -- and the big answers.

    Plus, you'll find a perplexingly frank introduction by the author himself, giving a behind-the-scenes look at each book and the zany radio series that inspired them. But that's not all! You also get a ferocious giggle of a short story, starring the two-headed, three-armed, ex-president of the Universe -- Zaphod Beeblebrox. The saga begins and ends...The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--Arthur Dent, mild-mannered, out-to-lunch kind of guy, is plucked from Earth just before it is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Towel in hand, he begins his journey through space and time with his rescuer Ford Prefect, a traveling research for the Guide.The Restaurant at the End of the Universe--where the floor show is Doomsday and Arthur and Ford dine with Zaphod Beeblebrox, well-appendaged, ex-head honcho of the universe, and Trillian, his human girlfriend. The four friends begin their quest for answers to some of the most confounding questions challenging mankind. When will they finish eating? What is the question to the ultimate answer? (which happens to be 42).Life, the Universe and Everything--Everything important and then some is examined in this third book, when Arthur Dent and his companions find they must avert Armageddon and save the Universe for life as we know it (or think we know it!).So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish--Galaxy-weary space traveler Arthur Dent returns to Earth With his new voidoid gang to discover that it has been mysteriously reinstated. But more pertinent questions remain: Why did all the dolphins disappear? What is God's Final Message to His Creation? What really happened the day the Earth was demolished?And finally, in Young Zaphod Plays it Safe--the two-headed hero travels to the depths of the ocean floor to investigate the mysterious destruction of the ship that "could one hundred percent positively never crash." with the annoying assistance of the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration, Zaphod learns some disturbing secrets...If you're just discovering Douglas Adams's galactic gangbuster of a series, don't panic--The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide is your chance to have it all! (Towel not included.)--jacket

    The soul is expendable.Nemo's mother and father left him behind to enter "the Bin"--joining twelve billion uploaded personalities who live in crime-free, disease-free and deathless virtual societies.Nemo has come of age on a dangerous, near-deserted planet populated by a handful of stragglers: religious fundamentalists and rebels, the creeps and the crazies. Now he is twenty-one. And on a rare, reluctant visit to the parents who abandoned their flesh and blood son for cyber-utopia, Nemo has met the perfect woman: a new Bin arrival named Justine, a beautiful pop singer who dreams other people's dreams in the virtual night.Now an inconvenient attraction is leading two lovers into a perilous mire of irreversible choice. For Justine has no body to return to. And Nemo the renegade has sworn never to sacrifice his own; to live, age, and die instead in a bleak earthly hell. Because, as an outsider, he may enter the Bin for short periods of time. But if he ever decides to stay...there will be no way out again.

    A stunning collection of the kind of fiction that has only one source--the unparalleled Ray Bradbury.