This volume assembles no less than 40 stories set in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Ranging from Lovecraft's own tales (including classics such as the novel At the Mountains of Madness, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and "The Colour Out of Space") to works by his friends and contemporaries (Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Robert Bloch), to later followers (Henry Kuttner, Lin Carter, Brian McNaughton), and contemporary afficianados (Brian Stableford, Mark McLau...

The masters of the Euchronian Millennium are panicking. The fabric of their ideal society on the platform built over the Earth has been ripped, and the order that they hold so precious seems to be teetering on the brink of collapse. In order to save it, the Hegemon has decided to obliterate all life in the perpetually covered Underworld of Earth from which the threat comes--but his followers are of two minds as to whether that's even possible, let alone justifiable. As the opposition grows...

Long after he was dead, French poet Charles Baudelaire inspired a Decadent Movement in France, which became definitive of fin de siecle sensibility. One of the historical and influential links between Baudelaire and the new Decadents was the Comte de Villiers de l'Isle Adam, who called the first of his own collections of Decadent prose Contes cruels, because they spurned conventional means of attaining literary closure by celebrating 'the irony of fate' -- the capacity that the course of e...

The Decadent Movement which flourished in the 1890s produced some of Europe's most striking and exotic works of literature. The Decadents, convinced that civilisation was in a state of terminal decline, refused to rebel as the Romantics had, but set forth instead to cultivate the pleasures of calculated perversity and to seek the artificial paradise of drug-induced hallucination. J.-K. Huysmans described Decadence as a 'black feast' and The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence offers a veritab...

They call them the "rat-catchers." They're the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which an economically destitute Earth has dispatched on a mission to re-establish contact with its far-flung, long-lost space colonies. Alex Alexander, ship's biologist, must help solve the mysteries of human and alien ecosystems that he encounters light-years from home. The planet Floria initially appears to be one of the few Earth colonies that's actually prospered since its initial settlement. But underneath ...

They call it Asgard, the Home of the Gods. Beneath its artificial shell are at least three vast cave-systems, each one the size of an Earth-like world; and beneath those, possibly many more. No one knows how many layers there might be, and no one knows what secrets might be buried down at the "center"--if there is a center. At some time in the distant past, Asgard had suffered a terrible catastrophe. Now its outer layers are cold, its builders presumed dead. Explorers and exploiters from a...

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds like New Alexandria to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, starship pilots have become the great romantic heroes of the day. When Star-Pilot Grainger is rescued from a shipwreck, he finds himself pressed into reluctant service to fly the Hooded Swan, the prototype of a new kind of interstellar ship. He's also picked up an alien parasite that's determined to share his brain. Under these dire circumstances, can Grainger possibly ...

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-utopian worlds like New Alexandria to the vermin-infested slums of Old Earth, the Star-Pilots are the great heroes of the day, and Grainger has become a legend in his own time. Pharos is paradise--or so it appears. But the champions of commerce want to package and sell the planet, and the conservationists want to stop them. Grainger's employer, Titus Charlot, is enlisted to negotiate a settlement, but the game is rigged. Charlot needs the Star-...

First published in 1976, "The Mind-Riders" features a remarkable anticipation of virtual reality gaming, in which the revised sport of boxing pits physically identical virtual fighters against one another, operated by electronically-connected "handlers" -- with viewers receiving transmissions of the combatants' emotions as their simulations slug it out. Ryan Hart, banished from the sport in its early days because of his lack of marketable emotion, is brought back by an obsessed media execu...

Paul Heisenberg is mysteriously endowed with the ability to jump through time. Together with thousands of eventual followers, he begins a journey that eventually takes him a billion years into the future. The Earth has been devastated by war with an alien race, and the changes that have resulted from the degradation of the world's biosphere force him--and others--to rethink their own humanity. His pilgrim's progress through the coming time is beset by doubts, distractions, and temptations ...

The people of the Euchronian Millennium had been reminded of the Underworld that existed beneath the platform on which they had constructed their better, cleaner, safer world--leaving the original surface of Earth a dark, dreary, and forgotten place. That awareness had become a political pawn, which many different people were trying to manipulate in their own interests. In the meantime, the search for more information about what actually existed in the Underworld went on, tentatively and i...

In the far future Earth is dying. Society has reverted to a more primitive life, much like the Middle Ages. Two men, Matthew and his brother John, who calls himself "Firefly," set out to find the time traveller, the one person who can give purpose to their existence, the one individual who can still access past technology. The Firefly, he who lights his own way, seeks the age of Man's greatness, the time when the human race once owned the stars, when great cities stood in places that have ...