Contemporary visions of cosmic transformation, mutation and madness - many inspired directly by the life and writings of H.P. Lovecraft, others reflecting his strangely presentient themes in their own bizarre sub-texts. Here the primal beings of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stalk a post-modern landscape of social collapse, ethnic cleansing, genetic engineering and nuclear devastation - nightmare prophecies from his pulp pages which have now come chillingly true. The undercurrents of sexual and...

"If you haven't read Gary Brandner, you're missing a treat."~ STEPHEN KINGThree great books... one low price!THE HOWLING:Karyn and her husband Roy had come to the peaceful California village of Drago to escape the savagery of the city. On the surface Drago appeared to be like most small rural towns.But it was not.The village had a most unsavory history. Unexplained disappearances, sudden deaths.People just vanished, never to be found....

The House of Incest, Anais Nin's famous prose poem, was first published in Paris in 1936 and immediately drew attention from the era's prominent writers, including Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. While written in English, it is considered a landmark work in the French surrealist tradition and one of the most unique books in 20th century literature.

**Quite possibly the GREATEST science-fiction collection of ALL TIME—past, present, and FUTURE! • "Nearly 1,200 pages of stories by the genre’s luminaries, like H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as lesser-known authors." —**The New York Times Book ReviewWhat if life was never-ending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the Pope was a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-h...

Gathered together for the first time from a major publisher - a collection of short stories by Adam Roberts.Unique twisted visions from the edges and the centre of the SF genres. Stories that carry Adam Roberts' trademark elegance of style and restless enquiry of the genre he loves so much.Acclaimed stories, some that have appeared in magazines, some in anthologies, some appearing for the first time.Stories to make you think, to make you laugh, to make you wonder, t...

Under the countless billions of stars in the universe, what forms will alien life take? How will they live? And what will happen when we meet them? Aliens: Recent Encounters collects answers to these questions from some of today's best science fiction writers. From first encounters to life alongside aliens—and stories of the aliens' own lives—here are many futures: violent and peaceful, star-spanning and personal. Only one thing is certain: alien life will defy our expectations.

Award-winning, bestselling novelist and travel writer Colin Thubron returns to fiction with his first novel in more than a decade, a searing, poetic masterwork of memory.A house is burning, threatening the existence of its six tenants-including a failed priest; a naturalist; a neurosurgeon; an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood; and their landlord, whose relationship to the tenants is both intimate and shadowy. At times, he shares their preoccupations and memories. He will als...

The Very Slow Time Machine arrives on earth in 1985. Its sole inhabitant is old and mad. Soon it becomes apparent that for him, time is going slowly backward. With every day, he is getting younger and saner. The world, and its whole concept of time, science and philosophy, must wait for him to speak. But while the world waits, it changes...

The Fifteens of Stone House have reached Attainment: the day a girlie may Beseech for the privilege of serving as a Perfected womanidol in the Orchid Nursery. When vivacious, irreverent Pearl goes missing, pious Mica hopes fervently that her friend has been chosen for Perfection and has not, as she fears, absconded from the State. Mica feels bound by love and duty to seek Pearl — to save her from punishment if she is caught by the Ecumen or, worse, if she has left Civilisation. Mica’s sear...

Ian Watson's latest collection shows the same range and apparently inexhaustible fund of ideas that have characterized all his previous books. No other contemporary figure in SF is so prolific or inventive a writer of short stories. In the title story we immediately encounter a phantasmagoric vision of a society increasingly dependent on recycling its usable material; other brilliant inventions include a planet inhabited by lemur-like aliens who bafflingly produce marvellously finished sto...

Garry Kilworth's first collection shows him to be one of the most original and enjoyable writers in the field. The thirteen stories in The Songbirds of Pain mix science fiction and fantasy, with a dash of unclassifiable strangeness. Kilworth is particularly adept at evoking colourful and exotic locales in distant parts of the world, as in 'The Dissemblers', a story set in the Arabian deserts, about a man resorting to bizarre self-torture in his attempts to see beyond the veil of d...

Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness. With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination-those supposedly incompatible room-mates...