INTERPLANETARY ODYSSEYS ".....One of the novas of the SF cosmos." The New Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction Interplanetary Odysseys collects together all of Stanley G. Weinbaum's tales set on the planets and moons of our own solar system. With their colony cities and fast, easy space travel, these stories from the great romantic tradition of SF remain entertaining, readable and relevant. Weinbaum was noted as the first SF writer to create believable aliens that were a product of their own planetary environments and eco-systems. The lead story, the classic "A Martian Odyssey", demonstrates this talent perfectly and with the nine other tales included here it gives readers new and old a chance to relive the sense of wonder that sprang from the glory days of science fiction.

Howard Johnson and Walt Disney are determined to acquire land near Orlando, Florida from Margery Post Merriweather, heiress of the family cereal fortune

Even before his birth, Johnny Baker's life is in danger. His mother breaks the law when she has her fertilized egg endowed with genes that will give her son the potential to become a visual artist. Born in 2038, John Firth Baker is the first genetically engineered artist. At the age of nineteen, at the threshold of his career, he is murdered. Now, ten years after his death, Baker has become famous. An art curator has organized a show of his work, and his biography-culled from journals, e-mails, and interviews with those who knew him best-is published. The Song of the Earth is this "biography." It presents a powerful and haunting portrait of an artist as a young man in the twenty-first century. Baker is born into a world transformed by technology: genetic profiles, space travel, and controlled housing communities are commonplace. Global warming has altered the environment. A planetary gender war is raging, familial structures are shattered, and new religions contend with the old. Yet human needs remain the same: the search for love, the desire for approval, the longing for fame, and the quest for knowledge. The Song of the Earth is a hypnotic novel about our desire to control our destinies, our yearning for immortality, and the very human impulse to create art. With prose, poetry, and images, Nissenson tells an original tale that brilliantly captures the experience of another time and place.

There are big plans for a small town in Nevada. When a world famous architect is commissioned to design a completely enclosed city, he hires a young apprentice named Burke Isadore to translate his sketches into a three-dimensional computer model. The ambitious project is called New Moon City. Burke has promised himself to make a difference in the world. He sees the new city's design as a solution to environmental degradation, homelessness and isolation. But his youthful idealism leaves him with a blind spot to the intentions of others who are using the project to further their own goals, contradictory to the original vision. To complicate matters, there are some long-term employees of the master architect who are not well suited to the challenge of building the city. It falls to Burke to resolve an issue caused by their foolish antics. Burke meets a newspaper reporter named Aliyah Estrella who questions the entire premise of the enclosed city, known as an arcology. She thinks she would feel trapped inside a giant anthill if she were forced to live there. She also knows the local ranchers are not happy with the project, but some of her articles in the small-town newspaper raise the hackles of the powerful people behind the construction of New Moon City. The Arcs is the first book of The New Moon Trilogy. It examines the power and endurance of a promise over generations, as it follows the thread of one man's word through the tapestry of time.

La Negra y Blanca is the crowning achievement of Deena Metzger's lifetime as a novelist, poet, and playwright. On the surface, it is a meditation on memory as the narrator pieces together the bright flashes of images of her life recalled, piecing them together with the intention of creating a healing matrix that reflects a life lived in search of meaning. On a deeper level, it weaves in the history and tragedy of the Conquest's ongoing political and environmental effects on Latin America through the narrator s relationship with Victor Perera, a Guatemalan-American writer and journalist who documented the destruction of the native Lacandon tribe of Guatemala by imperialistic forces. We become acquainted with La Negra, a mysterious woman who is pregnant, but who will not give birth to her child until the world is safe enough for its continued existence, and who is the centerpiece character of a natural world struggling to survive and maintain its integrity in the midst of industrialization and the decimation of the sacred forests. Metzger has created a complex novel that weaves the personal, political, global and spiritual threads of her life into a tapestry of beauty, sorrow, transcendence, and ultimately, the assurance of a world renewed by the unwavering examination of all of its component parts to create a path into a future that promises reverence for all life.

At 'The Hollyhocks' old people's home, the inhabitants are 'waiting for the scythe'. But while they are waiting...Lady Celia is running a blackmailing business on the side, Mr Cross keeps a tally of fellow residents' deaths on the back of his wardrobe, and then there is the rabid old Scots nationalist, and Mrs Green, a woman with a mysterious past. Hardly surprising in this environment that Mrs Bellamy decides she can't take any more and slits her throat. When Matron hushes it up because it would be bad for business, Lady Celia sees an opportunity to expand her blackmailing operation. Meanwhile two new incomers disturb the life of the home further; Mrs Feinberg, a sprightly Jewish woman of whom the other residents are immediately suspicious, and the elegant Mr Rufus. Hidden pasts, unusual sexual preferences and wickedly dark humour are mixed to delicious effect in Bernice Rubens' wonderful new novel.

Heather and Mack McKay seem to have it all: wealth, a dream house in the suburbs, and two adorable children along with the nannies to raise them. But their marriage has lost its savor: she is a frustrated writer and he longs for a cultural trophy to hang on his belt. During a chance encounter in LA, Mack invites exiled writer Zoltan Barbu—once lionized as a political hero, now becoming a has-been—to live with him and his wife in their luxurious home. The plan should provide Heather with literary companionship, Mack with cultural cachet, and Zoltan himself with a pastoral environment in which to overcome his writer’s block and produce a masterpiece. Of course, as happens with triangles, complications arise—some hilarious, some sad—as the three players pursue a game that leads to shifting alliances and sexual misadventures. Shulman pokes fun at our modern malaise (why is having it all never enough?), even as she traces the ever-changing dynamics within a marriage. Ménage is a bravura performance from one of America’s most renowned feminist writers.

Broken Theory is a jettisoned collection of fragmentary writing, collected and collaged by new media artist, writer, musician, and theorist Alan Sondheim. Folding theoretical musings, text experiments, and personal confessions into a single textual flow, it examines the somatic foundations of philosophical theory and theorizing, discussing their relationships to the writer and body, and to the phenomenology of failure and fragility of philosophy's production. Writing remains writing, undercuts and corrects itself, is always superseded, always produced within an untoward and bespoke silo - not as an inconceivable last word, but instead a broken contribution to philosophical thinking. The book is based on fragmentation and collapse, displacing annihilation and wandering towards a form of "roiling" within which the text teeters on the verge of disintegration. In other words, the writing develops momentary scaffoldings - writing shored up by the very mechanisms that threaten its disappearance. Broken Theory is prefaced by a text from Maria Damon and followed by an extensive interview with art historian Ryan Whyte. Alan Sondheim is a new media artist, theorist, and writer concerned with the phenomenology of the virtual. He has collaborated with motion capture and virtual environment labs. His work is concerned with the inhabitation of the body in the virtual; with the textuality of the body; with the problematic of mixed reality and codework. His writing is known for its "somatic grit" and skeletal codes that partially appear within and determine the surface. This style embeds interferences among syntax, semantics, and formal systems. The textual body, body of text and writer, are deeply entangled. His current work is based on the psychogeography of real and virtual worlds and their modeling. Most recently he has focused on "semantic ghosting" - the body behind the virtual/symbolic body - and modes of viral dispersion in a series of videos and texts. Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, attended Brown University, and has exhibited, taught, and lectured at a number of venues in the United States and abroad.

"[...]fact of war constitutes one of the gravest problems that we face to-day. Growing up in a peaceful environment we had imbibed the idea that war was a thing alien to us, monarchial, European. We had come to hold that a nation could avoid war by not desiring it, by not preparing for it, by minding its own business. We believed that what share in the world we had and wanted was what every reasonable nation would willingly concede us, and if certain powers proved refractory and unreasonable-a most improbable contingency-we could always send[...]".

On a dark and moonless planet, mutations have left women as little more than wombs, while men can teleport but have limited control over the ability. When aliens come to plunder this world's resources, the already harsh environment degrades exponentially. Will the Galactic Federation find this world in time to help the natives restore their women and save their civilization?