This latest volume is the best-of series of 16 all-original new writings in science fiction. Contents: Find the Lady, story by Nicholas Fisk A Solfy Drink, a Saffel Fragrance, story by Dorothy Gilbert A Scarab in the City of Time, story by Marta Randall Theodora & Theodora, story by Robert Thurston A Day in the South Quad, story by Felix C. Gotschalk Rogue Tomato, story by Michael Bishop The Mothers' March on Ecstasy, story by George Alec Effinger The Local Allosaurus, poem by Steven Utley Achievements, story by David Wise The Dybbuk Dolls, novelette by Jack Dann The Mirror at Sunset, story by Gil Lamont Report to Headquarters, story by Barry N. Malzberg Museum Piece, story by Drew Mendelson White Creatures, story by Gregory Benford The Contributors to Plenum Four, story by Michael Bishop Sail the Tide of Mourning, story by Richard A. Lupoff

Armchair fiction presents extra large editions of the best in classic science fiction novels and short stories. Here's a top-of-the-line novel by one of sci-fi's most heralded authors, Robert Silverberg. Against the night sky, the nearly completed World's Fair Satellite gleamed like a shiny new penny. You could see it even with low-powered field glasses as it moved in its stately orbit around the Earth: a giant copper-hued globe, the biggest space satellite ever constructed. The Fair's opening day?October 12, 1992?was only some six weeks away. And in very much less time than that, Bill Hastings was going to be up there to begin his year in space. From every loudspeaker in Denver Spaceport came the booming message: ?Attention, passengers for Flight 100 Special Transit to the World's Fair. Boarding has now begun? Don't miss this tremendous sequel to ?Regan's Planet.'

The stories here, all of them written between March of 1972 and November of 1973, mark a critical turning point in my career. Those who know the three earlier volumes have traced my evolution from a capable journeyman, very young and as much concerned with paying the rent as he was to advancing the state of the art, into a serious, dedicated craftsman now seeking to leave his mark on science fiction in some significant way. Throughout the decade of the 1960s I had attempted to grow and evolve within the field of writing I loved--building on the best that went before me, the work of Theodore Sturgeon and James Blish and Cyril Kornbluth and Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick and half a dozen others whose great stories had been beacons beckoning me onward--and then, as I reached my own maturity, now trying to bring science fiction along with me into a new realm of development, hauling it along even farther out of its pulp-magazine origins toward what I regarded as a more resonant and evocative kind of visionary storytelling. --Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

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The stories collected here, written between August of 1987 and May of 1990, demonstrate that I still believe in the classical unities. Of course, what seems to us a unity now might not have appeared that way when H.G. Wells was writing his wonderful stories in the nineteenth century. Wells might have argued that my 'To the Promised Land' is built around two speculative fantastic assumptions, one that the Biblical Exodus from Egypt never happened, the other that it is possible to send rocketships to other worlds. But in fact we've sent plenty of rocketships to other worlds by now, so only my story's alternative-world speculation remains fantasy today. Technically speaking the space-travel element of the plot has become part of the given; it's the other big assumption that forms the central matter of the story. --Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction