What does a writer who produced two hundred books do with his spare time? If his name is Isaac Asimov, he writes - on any and every subject of interest to his fertile mind. Informative, amusing, timely, and provocative - OPUS 200 is Asimov at his sparkling best in selections carefully culled from his second hundred books. Drawing on novels (which have won both the Hugo and Nebula awards), on short stories, serious essays, and on children's books, Asimov addresses himself to everything from Black Holes to biblical Canaan. Here is a taste of the intelligence, the craftsmanship, and the ingenuity that have made Issac Asimov the most prolific writer of science fiction in the world.

A sci-fi classic from the master of space fiction. Iaac Asimov put together a book of his favorite short stories. If you are a sci-fi fan, you must own this book!

A Library Journal Horror Best Seller From Nebula Award winner Sam J. Miller comes a frightening and uncanny ghost story about a rapidly changing city in upstate New York and the mysterious forces that threaten it. Ronan Szepessy promised himself he'd never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City's distractions have become too much for him. He hopes that a quick visit will help him recharge. Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom's wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their town has become--overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and a mayoral election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives. But in doing so, they unleash something far more mysterious and uncontainable. Hudson has a rich, proud history and, it turns out, the real-state developers aren't the only forces threatening its well-being: the spirits undergirding this once-thriving industrial town are enraged. Ronan's hijinks have overlapped with a bubbling up of hate and violence among friends and neighbors, and everything is spiraling out of control. Ronan must summon the very best of himself to shed his own demons and save the city he once loathed.

Everything Belongs to the Future is a bloody-minded tale of time, betrayal, desperation, and hope that could only have been told by the inimitable Laurie Penny. Time is a weapon wielded by the rich, who have excess of it, against the rest, who must trade every breath of it against the promise of another day's food and shelter. What kind of world have we made, where human beings can live centuries if only they can afford the fix? What kind of creatures have we become? The same as we always were, but keener. In the ancient heart of Oxford University, the ultra-rich celebrate their vastly extended lifespans. But a few surprises are in store for them. From Nina and Alex, Margo and Fidget, scruffy anarchists sharing living space with an ever-shifting cast of crusty punks and lost kids. And also from the scientist who invented the longevity treatment in the first place. "The scariest, most enduring dystopias walk a fine line between parable and prediction. Penny erases that line. In this made-up story, the rich speciate from the poor; in our real world, working class lifespans are declining as the one percent live ever longer lives at ever-greater removes from the rest of us. This is no mere literary device. This is a pitiless allegory, calculated to enrage and terrify its readers." -- Cory Doctorow

A steampunk princess is torn between love and duty in this prequel to SyFy.com’s wildly popular webisodes. Riese has never been happy as a princess; she’d much rather be hunting or fighting than sitting through another lesson on court etiquette. When she meets Micah, a wandering artist with a mysterious past, she pretends to be a peasant—it’s a chance to be just a normal girl with a normal boy for a while. But with war decimating her once-proud nation and the sinister clockwork Sect infiltrating her mother’s court, Riese’s moments with Micah are the only islands of sanity left in a world gone mad. As her kingdom falls and the Sect grows ever stronger, will Riese remain true to her duty as a princess…or risk everything on a boy she barely knows? SyFy’s enormously popular Riese webisodes come to literary life in this prequel rife with steampunk technology and medieval mysticism.

Hand-picked authors and a literary legacy... You may want to read it in one quick bite... Or savor it slowly like fine Swiss chocolate... One delicious prose at a time! For 22 years, SF lovers from around the world have enjoyed the stories and poems of the Tesseracts series, ( Tesseracts One through Tesseracts Ten , and Tesseracts Q ). This unique collection of books has featured the work of some of Canada's finest speculative fiction writers, selected and edited by ever changing combinations of editors, hand-picked for each edition. For many science fiction writers, Tesseracts was a spring board to their fame. Tesseracts Eleven brings the series to a new height, with a tasty blend of past and present writers, with their own individual visions of the future. The literature of Tesseracts Eleven has been critically selected and shaped into the collection you see by this year's editors, two of Canada's finest writers - acclaimed authors Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips. Together they have chosen a powerful combination of works by well-known writers, as well as newer authors whose futures you will want to follow. Some favorite Tesseracts ingredients are a featured part of this edition's literary blend: some very popular award winning names in Canada's SF scene, like Canada's grand dame of speculative fiction, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Claude Lalumiere, David Nickle and Candas Jane Dorsey, to name just a few. As well, readers will find some bright new stars in the science fiction world like Yukon's Jerome Stueart, or Calgary's Susan Forest - just 2 of the delicious authors featured in this fine offering. All told, Doctorow and Phillips have presented 22 pieces of literary delights to tantalize your imagination, and although you may want to consume the book in one sitting - take your time, and savor each exquisite morsel - delight in every bite. Grab your favorite beverage, settle down, and enjoy the latest in Canada's literary legacy - Tesseracts Eleven

"This volume showcases the nuanced, playful, ever-expanding definitions of the genre and celebrates its current renaissance." --Washington Post Science fiction and fantasy can encompass so much, from far-future deep-space sagas to quiet contemporary tales to unreal kingdoms and beasts. But what the best of these stories do is the same across the genres--they illuminate the whole gamut of the human experience, interrogating our hopes and our fears. With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Charles Yu, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 continues to explore the ever-expanding and changing world of SFF today, with Yu bringing his unique view--literary, meta, and adventurous--to the series' third edition.

The sequel to the phenomenal national bestseller and enduring classic Love Story. Can the love of your life appear twice in a lifetime? Oliver Barrett IV found his soulmate in Jenny Cavilleri. Their love was magical and exhilarating...and though heartbreakingly brief, it was a love to last a lifetime. Two years have passed since Jenny was taken from him, and Oliver believes he will never love again. Then one day, Marcie--beautiful and mysterious--enters his world and suddenly the future holds new promise. From the running track in New York's Central Park to the hushed executive suites of a mightly department store empire, from a snowy Massachusetts Christmas to a shattering moment of turth in exotic Hong Kong--the story of Oliver Barrett IV is a story of passion and principle, of a young man's journey out of sadness, into love.

The sixteen stories collected here are spread over the farthest stretches of time and space, but even the bleakest of them is warmed by a passionate faith in the endurance of life and its ultimate possibilities. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Naomi and Nathan thrive on the yellow journalism of the social-media age. They are nomadic freelancers in pursuit of sensation and depravity. Naomi becomes engrossed about Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. Célestine has been found dead and mutilated in her Paris apartment; police suspect Aristide of killing her and consuming parts of her body. Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the controversial work of an unlicensed surgeon. After sleeping with one of Molnár's patients, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe's. Their parallel narratives become entwined with 3-D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival and, in an incredible number of varieties, sex.

Five years in the making, the Edgeworks Abbey Archive represents Harlan Ellison's last word on his written legacy. Researched and edited by the author's long-time associate, Jason Davis, under the supervision of Harlan and Susan Ellison, this collection assembles the preferred texts of each story and essay along with previously uncollected and unpublished material to create the definitive edition.A FEW (AMONG THE MANY) QUESTIONS THIS BOOK ANSWERS: What stopped Attila the Hun from sacking the Holy City of Rome in the year 452 when it lay defenseless before him? Where is the sunken continent of Atlantis and what will happen if it rises? Has anyone ever made an interesting case for the merits of waging war, and how does war benefit the human race? What happened When Santa Claus attacked Ronald Reagan in the men's toilet of the abandoned Camarillo State Mental Institution? Is it true that Jesus had a homosexual liaison with Prometheus? Does the Abominable Snowman exist, and what's his sex life like? What's the worst thing that can happen to those who do too much bad dope? How do you identify and survive the attentions of emotional vampires? Are you listening? Why are the bizarre stories of Harlan Ellison so damned popular, translated into thirteen languages, and made into movies; why do they influence a whole generation of younger writers, provoke lynch mobs, and win this Ellison person such an unconscionable array of literary awards? ASK NOT FOR WHOM THIS BOOK TOILS. IT TOILS FUR THEE, KIDDO.

New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor works on the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming. A brilliant mathematician, he spends his days calculating worst-case scenarios for FutureWorld, a consulting firm that indemnifies corporations against potential disasters. As Mitchell immerses himself in the calculus of catastrophe, he exchanges letters with Elsa Bruner—a college crush with her own apocalyptic secret—and becomes obsessed by a culture's fears. When Mitchell's darkest predictions come true and an actual worst-case scenario engulfs Manhattan, he realizes that he is uniquely prepared to profit. But what will it cost him? Odds Against Tomorrow , hailed by Rolling Stone as "the first great climate-change novel," is an all-too-plausible literary thriller, an unexpected love story, and a philosophically searching inquiry into the nature of fear. The future is not what it used to be.

Product Description Majipoor, an immense planet populated by a wide variety of exotic races, first appeared in Robert Silverberg's 1980 novel, Lord Valentine's Castle, a book that has since acquired the status of a modern classic. In subsequent decades, Silverberg has revisited Majipoor on numerous occasions, and it has become one of this gifted and prolific author's signature creations.The latest offering in the cycle, Tales of Majipoor, is both a superb literary accomplishment and a gift to Silverberg's legion of devoted fans. This generous volume contains seven long stories, each of which explores a different aspect of life on Majipoor. Together, they encompass several thousand years of colorful, dramatic history. The opening tale, 'The End of the Line,' tells the story of Lord Stiamot and his rise to the role of Coranol, a position second only to Pontifex in Majipoor's complex hierarchy. The final entry, 'The Seventh Shrine,' circles back to the very beginning of the series, giving us a murder mystery set during the reign of Lord Valentine. In between are stories that involve magic ('The Sorcerer s Apprentice'), religion ('The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar'), and even poetry ('The Book of Changes'). Supplementing all this is a brief but crucial historical prologue and a series of detailed maps that add richness and depth to these singular--and endlessly absorbing--narratives. Beautifully written and thoroughly imagined on every level, Tales of Majipoor combines irresistible storytelling with the sort of meticulously detailed world building that only the finest imaginative literature can provide. It is a book that only Robert Silverberg, a true Grand Master, could have written. From the Inside Flap Majipoor, an immense planet populated by a wide variety of exotic races, first appeared in Robert Silverberg's 1980 novel, Lord Valentine's Castle, a book that has since acquired the status of a modern classic. In subsequent decades, Silverberg has revisited Majipoor on numerous occasions, and it has become one of this gifted and prolific author's signature creations.The latest offering in the cycle, Tales of Majipoor, is both a superb literary accomplishment and a gift to Silverberg's legion of devoted fans. This generous volume contains seven long stories, each of which explores a different aspect of life on Majipoor. Together, they encompass several thousand years of colorful, dramatic history. The opening tale, “The End of the Line,” tells the story of Lord Stiamot and his rise to the role of Coranol, a position second only to Pontifex in Majipoor's complex hierarchy. The final entry, “The Seventh Shrine,” circles back to the very beginning of the series, giving us a murder mystery set during the reign of Lord Valentine. In between are stories that involve magic (“The Sorcerer's Apprentice”), religion (“The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar”), and even poetry (“The Book of Changes”). Supplementing all this is a brief but crucial historical prologue and a series of detailed maps that add richness and depth to these singular—and endlessly absorbing—narratives. Beautifully written and thoroughly imagined on every level, Tales of Majipoor combines irresistible storytelling with the sort of meticulously detailed world building that only the finest imaginative literature can provide. It is a book that only Robert Silverberg, a true Grand Master, could have written.

The first in a series of superb science fiction. Alpha is, aside from the first letter of the Greek alphabet, a term that denotes excellence and primacy in a variety of disciplines: in nuclear physics, for example, it is the name of a particle of unusually large mass and charge. It seemed a useful label to attach to this volume, the first of an intended series of collections of science fiction stories. The Alpha series of anthologies will center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. The presence in any one volume of a cluster of stories bearing other thematic resemblance-as in this volume, where there are four or five time-travel stories-will be purely coincidental. I propose to cull the files of the science fiction magazines for stories that an educated and sophisticated reader will find stimulating, and to assemble them in books of roughly equal size that will appear once a year over the next few years. Some of the stories will be fifteen or twenty years old and richly in need of restoration to print. Others will be quite recent: the literary level of the science fiction short story has undergone an extraordinary transformation in the past few years, a fact that demands recognition here. Appropriately enough, this first volume of the ALPHA series covers a roster of writers from A to Z. Specifically, Aldiss to Zelazny-although this coincidence in alphabet is merely incidental to the fact that both these gentlemen, and the several others represented in this anthology, all write superb science fiction. Two criteria were used in the selecting of these stories-literary merit and importance to the genre. The result is that the variety of subjects is matched only by the richness and diversity of their handling-brilliant, frightening, clever, bizarre, powerful, witty, funny-and several steps in-between. So much for policy. The nine volumes of this series provide an exciting cumulative view of a field in which some of the most vigorous and inventive fiction of our times has been produced. Simply put, here is the best science fiction from the best science fiction writers.

The eighth in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality and importance to the science fiction genre. Here is another set of the best stories, stories which were ahead of their epoch when they were new, which display a freshness and vigor that make them almost indistinguishable from the best of today's s-f, and which set the standard by which modern writers have guided their careers. A DUSK OF IDOLS: Not only are the gods cruel, but they can make you like it. THE HUMAN OPERATORS: The great ships possess unlimited cruising range--and unbounded ferocity. WARM: It's just a simple guessing game: to be? or not to be? KLYSTERMAN'S SILENT VIOLIN: Powerful weapons are a fine thing--but you wouldn't want your lover to marry one. THE NEW REALITY: It's amazing how much destruction you can wreak with a few simple tools--if you put your mind to it. These and six other tales of the highest quality--the most amazing conviction

The seventh in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality and importance to the science fiction genre. Since its inception in 1970, the Alpha series has been dedicated to the proposition that science fiction can be a literature not only of stimulating and unfamiliar ideas but also of skilful and vigorous writing. Thus far Alpha has offered sixty-odd stories that exemplify the best of science fiction: challenging, provocative views of the universe, presented in crisp, sparkling prose. The volumes in the series offer some of the liveliest work produced in the short-story form anywhere in the world, and not just of the science-fiction category. Alpha serves a secondary purpose: to rescue from oblivion stories that might otherwise be undeservedly forgotten. Herewith, the seventh feast of outstanding fiction.

The fourth in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. Two criteria were used in the selecting of these stories-literary merit and importance to the genre. The result is that the variety of subjects is matched only by the richness and diversity of their handling-brilliant, frightening, clever, bizarre, powerful, witty, funny-and several steps in-between. Simply put, here is the best science fiction from the best science fiction writers. While a small number of science fiction writers are immensely well known, the Alpha series is intended, in part, to draw attention to some of the lesser known writers, whose work is equal in vision and artistry of those who have become household names.

The third in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. Two criteria were used in the selecting of these stories-literary merit and importance to the genre. The result is that the variety of subjects is matched only by the richness and diversity of their handling-brilliant, frightening, clever, bizarre, powerful, witty, funny-and several steps in-between. Simply put, here is the best science fiction from the best science fiction writers. The main intent of the Alpha series is to assemble groups of stories that give pleasure by demonstrating the richness and variety of the science-fiction form. Quality of storytelling is the touchstone; I make no effort to gather the stories in any one volume according to any thematic pattern. Yet thematic patterns seem to creep into the books like insidious invaders from far galaxies. The first Alpha contained a cluster of tales dealing with travel through time-relativity gone topsy-turvy all over the book. The second volume, through no prior intent of the editor, seemed to deal almost entirely with the tensions arising out of man's confrontation with technology. And in this third one, I find, a prevailing theme in nearly every story is the conflict between ourselves and strangers. Again and again, through some odd accident of balance, you will find tales of tense encounters, showing protagonists facing the unknown quantities of time and space. Freud tells us that nothing ever happens by accident. Perhaps so. These anthologies are not assembled in a random process, and no doubt the editor's mind serves as a thematic filter in ways that are not clear to the editor himself except in hindsight. And one can reasonably object that virtually every good science-fiction story deals in meetings with the unknown, so that the supposed theme detected here is no true theme at all, but only a universal characteristic of the genre. In any event, here are ten outstanding stories. I think they achieve what is for me the basic science-fiction accomplishment: they show the reader visions he has not previously had, and send him away transformed and enlarged. Go thou and read. Go and be changed.

The second in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. Two criteria were used in the selecting of these stories—literary merit and importance to the genre. The result is that the variety of subjects is matched only by the richness and diversity of their handling—brilliant, frightening, clever, bizarre, powerful, witty, funny—and several steps in-between. Whatever else these stories may be doing, they all explore the interplay between human beings and the technological society man has created for himself. Good science fiction simultaneously peers into remote realms of space and time and holds a mirror to the contemporary moment; and if the reflection in that mirror is somewhat distorted, so be it. Blame not the messenger for bearing bad tidings. Herewith ten stories which demonstrate the unsettling kinds of insights that science fiction alone can offer. More are on the way. The nine volumes of this series provide an exciting cumulative view of a field in which some of the most vigorous and inventive fiction of our times has been produced. Simply put, here is the best science fiction from the best science fiction writers.

The sixth in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. More of the same, the mixture as before--so Silverberg is tempted to describe this sixth Alpha collection. Not unfair phrases, either, for, like its five predecessors, Alpha Six is a volume of science-fiction stories that have no thematic links, that are held together only by their literary excellence and stimulating science-fictional content. As before, Alpha owes no allegiance to any single literary "school" within the faction-ridden science-fiction cosmos: it hews to a solidly middle-of-the-road line, seeking strong narrative drive and avoiding the excesses of the zap-zap ray-gun school on the one hand and the evanescently precious avant-garde on the other. As always, Silverberg's selection of stories represent the best across a four-dimensional slice of science-fiction publishing.