The universe of the mind is a limitless expanse of wonders, filled with worlds and secrets that cannot be fully explored within the pages of a single novel. Avid readers of science fiction have long appreciated the myriad joys of returning to fictional galaxies already experienced. In Far Horizons, a variable "Who's Who" of science fiction's most beloved and highly honored writers once again revisit the remariable worlds they created and made famous. Perhaps the greatest concentration of science fiction talent ever in one volume, this unprecedented masterpiece reopens vast empires of imagination and adventure to new explorations and appreciations. It is a major SF event, sure to bring unparalleled joy to the hearts of serious fans everywhere.

"By the time this present group of stories was written I had passed through the cultural turbulence that engulfed nearly everyone's life in the wild, stormy period we know as "the Sixties," which for me had actually lasted from 1968 to 1974 or 1975. I had come through my own angry four-year-long retirement from writing in the middle 1970s, and was working again at a steady pace, though not with the frenetic prolificacy of the pre-retirement years. At the beginning of this period my personal life was still pretty chaotic, a carryover from all that Sixties madness, and plenty of new chaos was going to descend on me while some of these stories were written, but I was tiptoeing toward an escape from the various messes that were complicating my life, and by the time the last five stories of this volume were being written I was heading into the stability of my second marriage." -Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction

"I "I have to confess, right up front here, that you will not find a great deal in the way of poetic vision in these stories, or singing prose, or deep insight into character. Nor are these stories that will tell you much that is new to you about the human condition. These are stories in what is now pretty much a lost tradition in science fiction, the simple and unselfconsciously fast-paced adventure story of the pulp-magazine era. They are stories from the dawn of my career, which began in the closing years of that era, and are straightforward tales of action, in the main, that were written partly for fun and partly for money." -Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction

"The stories in this volume were written between July of 1990 and March of 1995-the second half of the fifth decade of my career as a science-fiction writer. I don't think I could have imagined, when I began that career in the early 1950s, that science-fiction publishing would evolve the way it did over the next forty years. Here, then, is the cream of the Silverberg output, 1990-95. I suppose I wrote more short stories in the first six months of 1957 than in that entire six-year period; but so be it. It's a different world today. I look back nostalgically on the small-town atmosphere of the era in which I began my career, and there are times when I'd be glad to 'call back yesterday, bid time return.' As Shakespeare pointed out, though, that can't be done. The one recourse is the one I have chosen, which is to soldier staunchly onward through the years, come what may, writing a story or two here and a book there, while the world changes out of all recognition around me. And so-to leap neatly from the Bard of Avon to F. Scott Fitzgerald-'so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'" -Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction

Robert Silverberg needs little introduction to anyone at all familiar with the history of the science fiction field. Fan. Author. Editor. Creative force. He has been an integral part of the field for longer than most of his readers have been alive. Earlier this year, he kindly agreed to put together a MEGAPACK(R) of his short stories, so here, then, is a selection of early works by one of the all-time greats. Included are: ALAREE BIRDS OF A FEATHER BLAZE OF GLORY DELIVERY GUARANTEED THE DESSICATOR THE HAPPY UNFORTUNATE THE HUNTED HEROES THE IRON STAR THE ISOLATIONISTS THE LONELY ONE THE MAN WHO CAME BACK NEUTRAL PLANET OZYMANDIAS THE PAIN PEDDLERS THE PLEASURE OF THEIR COMPANY POINT OF FOCUS POSTMARK GANYMEDE PRIME COMMANDMENT THE SONGS OF SUMMER SPACEROGUE THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN THE WOMAN YOU WANTED VALLEY BEYOND TIME WE KNOW WHO WE ARE

Somehow, for all my outward pretence of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I've discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there's more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to my-what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly, I have to admit, I wrote these stories because I couldn't not write them. Well, so be it. They involved me in a lot of hard work, but for me, at least, the results justify the toil. I'm glad I wrote them. Writing them, it turns out, was important for me, and even pleasurable, in a curiously complex after-the-fact kind of way. May they give you pleasure now too. -Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

The world that these stories sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh. Like William Faulkner, I do think we will somehow endure and prevail against increasingly stiff odds. A great many strange and dizzying things happen to the characters in these sixteen stories, and in the fourteen stories of the 1972-73 volume that will follow. The reader who makes the journey from beginning to end of all thirty stories will be taken on many a curious trip, that I promise-as was their author during the years when they were being written. -Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction

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

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