The Crimson Keep was created in 2011 when Crazy 8 Press made its public debut. "Demon Circle," the first tale of the Crimson Keep, was a round-robin story written to raise funds for a worthy cause . . . but the authors couldn't get these characters and this fantastical world out of their minds.Now, in celebration of its third anniversary, the authors of Crazy 8 Press--Russ Colchamiro, Peter David, Micha el Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, Paul Kupperberg, and Aaron Rosenberg--have gathered to craft all-new Tales of the Crimson Keep. This first-ever Crazy 8 Press anthology reintroduces you to teen apprentices Athis, Belid, and Klaria, and to their teacher, the powerful and enigmatic sorcerer known only as the Master.Within these pages you'll also meet the Master's very first student . . . encounter some thieves who washed out of the apprentice program . . . learn the fate of the dread demon Koliander the Undying . . . follow two novices on their inaugural mission . . . watch as another learns a hard-won lesson . . . and see how the lives of the apprentices--and the power of the Crimson Keep--crop up in the most unexpected places. So step inside and join the team at Crazy 8 Press on a series of truly magical adventures--within the Crimson Keep.

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

Book by Oppenheim, E. Phillips