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...

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...

Process by A. E. van Vogt drops us into a living world where the forest is not just scenery. It thinks. It remembers. And when a starship lands, the planet’s ancient guardian begins defending its territory using forces that are far beyond imagination. The ship burns, battles, resists — but the forest has learned its lessons from ages past, and what begins as simple growth soon becomes something far more dangerous.As the story unfolds, the forest recalls wars with neighboring forest...

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...

Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn: Global war smashed civilization—or so the legends told-but not all of its machines. 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 ...

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...

What first reads like a tight noir mystery of a dead woman who won't stay dead, an American soldier paying the price for binge drinking and hooking up with the soon to be victim, quickly escalates into one of the biggest "big-idea" science fiction novels of all time.Not only are the science fiction ideas beyond the leading edge, but van Vogt's descriptions of future culture are eerily accurate.Written in 1953, this novel describes:the electronic cigarettea s...

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 ...