A survey of the last 100 years of science fiction, with representative stories and illuminating essays by the top writers, poets, and scholars, from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Samuel Butler to Robert A. Heinlein and and Jack Vance, from E.E. "Doc" Smith and Clifford D. Simak to Ted Chiang and Charles Stross-- and everyone in between. More than one million words of classic fiction and essays!

Five stories. Five very different excursions into the imaginative worlds of vintage science fiction, where interplanetary conflict, deadly mysteries, strange technology, and unexpected twists are waiting.Battle of the Solar System by Ray Cummings launches into a sweeping adventure on a cosmic scale, carrying readers into a future where danger stretches across the planets and the stakes could not be higher.The Grip of Death by Robert Bloch b...

Five stories. Five very different excursions into the imaginative worlds of vintage science fiction, where interplanetary conflict, deadly mysteries, strange technology, and unexpected twists are waiting.Battle of the Solar System by Ray Cummings launches into a sweeping adventure on a cosmic scale, carrying readers into a future where danger stretches across the planets and the stakes could not be higher.The Grip of Death by Robert Bloch b...

Five stories. Five very different excursions into the imaginative worlds of vintage science fiction, where interplanetary conflict, deadly mysteries, strange technology, and unexpected twists are waiting.Battle of the Solar System by Ray Cummings launches into a sweeping adventure on a cosmic scale, carrying readers into a future where danger stretches across the planets and the stakes could not be higher.The Grip of Death by Robert Bloch b...

From its first publication as a serial in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1940, Slan was acclaimed by readers as one of, if not THE, novel of Golden Age science fiction. Telling the story of Jommy Cross, a young slan, and his quest to discover his father's legacy as well as to find others like him, while fleeing from a repressive dictatorship, Slan was both a ground-breaking SF novel, and perhaps the first Young Adult paranormal adventure.   At the opening of th...

Following the success of the stories that formed The Weapon Shops of Isher, van Vogt wrote the novel, The Weapon Makers, in 1943, to enlarge the story of human immortality, the conflict between a controlling government, The House of Isher, the mysterious Weapon Shops and man's place in the universe.The promise of the Weapon Shops' slogan, The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to Be Free, is described thus:Many of these weapons still carried the old names. “Guns” they we...

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Well, Jim Pendrake is about to find out.Little does Jim Pendrake imagine, when he stumbles across an engine the like of which he's never seen before embedded in a hillside near his ranch, that he will soon be sucked into government conspiracies; have a complete memory reboot with a different life and a different wife (all part of the conspiracy); be kidnapped and sent to the moon, barely escaping the Neanderthal who rules the moon colo...

With the publication, in the July 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, of the story Seesaw, van Vogt began unfolding the complex tale of the oppressive Empire of Isher and the mysterious Weapon Shops. This volume, The Weapon Shops of Isher, includes the first three parts of the saga and introduces perhaps the most famous political slogan of science fiction: The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to Be Free. Born at the height of Nazi conquest, the Isher stories suggested that ...

Earth was helpless after the atomic holocaust—ready prey for the worst threat of all, the invaders from an alien galaxy…WAS MAN DOOMED FOREVER TO SENDING MESSAGES BY SMOKE SIGNALS?The Earth, after the atomic holocaust, had reverted to a strange kind of barbarism where men could build space ships but could not communicate except by the most primitive means.So it was a sickening shock to Lord Clane Linn when he captured one of the alien invader's space ships and discover...

One hundred and nine years after leaving Earth, the spaceship, Hope of
Man, went into orbit around Alta III. The following "morning" Captain Browne informed the shipload of fourth and fifth generation colonists that a manned lifeboat would be dropped to the planet's surface. "Every member of the crew must consider himself expendable," he said earnestly. "This is the day that our great grandparents, our forefathers, who boldly set out for the new space frontier so long ago, looked forward t...

Identity theft, multi-layer interlocking conspiracies, and mind control. Who can you trust?With the unhappy task of bringing the verdict of the Council – death in one week’s time for sedition – to his friend, scientist Wade Trask, David Marin agrees to meet Trask at his lab. Too late he realizes he knew too little about his friend, and too little about Trask’s experiments; Marin awakes to find his consciousness transferred into the body of Wade Trask. A body that is scheduled to be...