A space-traveling Jesuit priest confronts a moral but godless alien race in this Hugo Award–winning novel by the author of the Cities in Flight saga.Father Ruiz-Sanchez is a dedicated man, a Jesuit priest who is also a scientist, and a scientist who is also a human being. He doesn't feel any genuine conflicts in his belief system—until he is sent to Lithia.The reptilian inhabitants of this distant world appear to be admirable in every way. Untroubled by gree...

James Blish's Against the Stone Beasts launches Andreson from a shabby surrealist exhibition into a breathtakingly wrong universe, where paintings prove to be windows and a single touch hurls him into a winged civilization hanging beneath a stone sky. There he finds not only alien beauty and first-contact wonder, but a perilous love and a war fought across impossible dimensions. The Varese, humanlike and airborne, use advanced technology to speak with him and explain their desperate confli...

Colonel Hal Gascoigne is alone aboard a U.S. bomb satellite when voices, phantom crewmen, and shifting orders begin to surround him. As he decodes a mysterious teletype message, he learns the unthinkable: he has been ordered to bomb Washington, D.C., and perhaps even his own home, while the station's systems continue toward launch. Terrified that he may be losing his mind, yet determined to stop disaster, he sends an urgent plea for help to the Civilian Intelligence Group. At CIG, Peter Ha...

From the Hugo Award–winning author, the classic millennia-spanning epic in one volume: "A wholly new concept of the far future." — The New York TimesOriginally published in four volumes, Cities in Flight brings together the famed "Okie novels" of science fiction master James Blish. Named after the migrant workers of America's Dust Bowl, these novels convey Blish's "history of the future," a brilliant and bleak look at a world where cities roam the...

James Blish, in his incarnation as "William Atheling, Jr.," has written more than his share of the most incisive criticism of contemporary science fiction. In 1964 Advent brought out The Issue at Hand, a collection of Atheling's critical essays on stories in the science-fiction magazines.Now we present a new volume which concentrates on science-fiction books. As before, Atheling's rapier skewers literary malefactors of many kinds, including some well-known authors whose great popul...

The editors at www.fantasticstoriesoftheimagination.com present thirty-two wonderful tales of fantasy in this completely revised second edition text. More than seven hundred and fifty pages for your reading pleasure. Escape today! 'Immortal' by Shariann Lewitt; 'The Thing in the Attic' by James Blish; 'To Serve A Prince' by B.W. Clough; 'Red Nails' by Robert E. Howard; 'Your Name Is Eve' by Michael M. Jones; 'The Knights of Arthur' by Frederik Pohl; 'Go Through' by Alma Alexander; 'Piper i...

This is a posthumous collection of Blish essays, mostly on science fiction and fantasy. These include studies of Poul Anderson, James Branch Cabell, and the application of Spengler to science fiction. Other pieces range from "Music of the Absurd" (modern music—more fantastic than any fiction ) to the autobiographical "A Science Fiction Coming of Age" (focused on Blish's childhood), and a conversation with Brian Aldiss that reveals the emotion behind Blish the man and his fiction, as well a...

For many years, hiding under a cloak of anonymity, the most penetrating critic of the field of magazine science fiction was known as "William Atheling, Jr." It soon became a challenge to guess his real identity. And that was no easy game, for Atheling's dissection did not spare even his other ego, the noted science-fiction writer James Blish.Having shed his protective covering, Mr. Blish has assembled many of the Atheling papers and edited them into the present book. While it cover...

The story is set in a future where humanity has colonized other planets. The protagonist is an astronaut who lands on a distant planet and discovers an ancient civilization that has long been extinct. As the protagonist explores the ruins of this civilization, they come across a mysterious creature lurking in the attic of an ancient building.The "thing in the attic" turns out to be an intelligent alien being that has been hiding for centuries, observing humanity's activities. It is reveale...

The powerful black magician Theron Ware has opened the gates of Hell and unleashed an army of demons. Chaos and destruction prevail, and most of the world lies smouldering in ruins. But in a bunker beneath the ashes of Denver a small group of survivors are determined not to submit to the forces of evil. They summon the nuclear powers of the country's military arsenal to destroy Hell, but what can men do against the almighty evil that is Satan himself?A direct sequel to Hugo Award w...

A small group of intellectuals from a primitive culture of modified monkey-like humans are banished from the treetops for heresy. In their exile on the ground they have to adapt to vastly different circumstances, fight monsters resembling dinosaurs, and finally happen upon the godly giants, whose existence they had questioned.

Worlds of If was a three time winner of the Hugo Award for best science fiction magazine. Worlds of If discovered many talented writers who would go on to dominate genre fiction. This is the third in our Worlds of If series with even more memorable stories from its tremendous run. ‘The Yillian Way’ by Keith Laumer ‘Homo Inferior’ by Mari Wolf ‘The Talkative Tree’ by H.B. Fyfe ‘Show Business’ by Boyd Ellanby ‘The One and the Many’ by Milton Lesser ‘The Stowaway’ by Alvin Heiner ‘Sound of Te...