Could an alien organism really survive a centuries-long trip on a meteor and remain virulent enough to attack a human being? How would a scientist know she was peering at a microbe from another planet? What's the possibility of a genetically mutated monster actually developing? In a gripping exploration of the facts behind the science fiction that has enthralled millions of X-philes, Anne Simon -- the respected virologist who comes up with the science for many intriguing episodes -- discusses telomeres, cloning, the Hayflick limit, nanotechnology, endosymbionts, lentiviruses, and other strange phenomena that have challenged the intellect and threatened the lives and sanity of America's favorite FBI agents. With Simon's extraordinary gift for explaining complicated, cutting-edge science in a light, accessible style, and her behind-the-scenes commentary on the development of various plot lines, The Real Science Behind the X-Files will appeal to science buffs and X-Files aficionados alike.

CONTENTS: ~ ~ SERIAL: Time Killer (Part 2 of 4) [Robert Sheckley]; NOVELETTES: Birds of a Feather [Robert Silverberg]; The Civilization Game [Clifford D. Simak]; SHORT STORIES: No Substitutions ]Jim Harmon]; People Soup [Alan Arkin]; ARTICLES: The First Spaceship [Willy Ley]; The Tin Age [H. L. Gold]

It's early twentieth century New York. Elderly puppeteer Papa Jonas lives in a small workshop with a cast of magical puppets he and assistant Christopher Lane have created out of cloth and wood. Papa watches as Christopher and pretty single mother and upstairs neighbor Mary Holly fall in love. At the same time, her young daughter Amy May 'marries' off her rag doll Annabelle Lee to 'clown-philosopher' puppet Mister Aristotle. As Christopher and Mary contemplate their future together, jealousy and duplicity doom the relationship of the puppet and rag doll. Full of insight and introspection both through the 'eyes' of the puppets and their creators, this novel explores the depths of human attachment, pain, and love in a wonderful story of love, romance, and philosophy.New York Times Review of "The Puppet Master""The rarity of the comic spirit in our fiction should make us prize its infrequent expression, and we should welcome the novel that neither flatters nor indicts us but invites us to observe ourselves with a little wholesome amusement. Such a book is 'The Puppet Master, ' in which imagination and insight, sympathy and humor have collaborated to produce a story with the accent of fantasy and the warm humanity of comedy."Lloyd MorrisNew York Times

Twenty never-before-published short stories span the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, inviting readers of both genres to lose themselves in tales sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying, and always engrossing. Sword & Laser hosts Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt hand-picked their favorite stories, plucked directly from the brains of the S&L audience. From living space ships to hapless thieves getting more than they bargained for, this collection has something for every genre reader.

This new offering from the Time Team duo of Robinson and Aston brings another entertaining and light-hearted book to our shelves. `This is the story of a fantasy dig readers undertake in their back gardens to find out what bits of rubbish are buried there'. What starts out as a small hole grows into a full-scale excavation involving mechanical diggers, and reveals the remains of a Roman villa under a proposed supermarket. In amongst this story, the authors answer many of the frequently asked questions about archaeology and archaeologists, about the history of the discipline and about how a dig works. Robinson and Aston are entertaining and amusing as always.

Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy which merges the life of Alice James, the brilliant sister of William and Henry James, with the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women; and about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination.

Sasha never saw his younger brother...until the secret police made him disappear. Sasha Vasnetsov left Thrice-Nine--the dirty folklore world that limps along in the wreckage of a Technomagic War--thirty years ago and never looked back. But word that the secret police have sent his brother Gena to a work camp for the socially degenerate drags him back, with a promise to free Gena and return him to their mother before her fiftieth birthday. The only problem? Sasha isn't a fraction of the tough guy he tries to be, so if he's going to break back into Thrice-Nine...he'll need help. Sasha's only hope is Maria Kamenaya, a former Technomagic Warrior with hundreds of enemy kills to her name, betrayed by the country that made her when her honor conflicted with their agenda. Thrice-Nine took Sasha's brother, and it took Maria's heart. This quest is how they get both of those things back, in the steaming, lawless land of decapitated states...the land of DEAD KINGS. Like True Grit set in the world of Final Fantasy, DEAD KINGS is unrelenting with its passion and thrills, massive in scale and unflinching as it peers into the underside of the obligations that drive us all: to family and country. It's a classic Wild West revenge cast against a haunting, awe-inspiring vision of a future where we've mortally wounded the world, and the prisoners are the only ones left to run the penitentiary. Written by Steve Orlando (Batman/Shadow, Crude, Midnighter, Virgil) and drawn by Matthew Dow Smith (October Girl, Suicide Squad, X-Files) DEAD KINGS continues Orlando's in-depth exploration of retribution in all its dark, complex forms. Having burst forth from the restrictions of the modern world's flesh and bone, Orlando and Smith create a whole new world of iron-and-oil fantasy, paths walked by a redemption-fueled older brother and the abandoned, rusted out, vindictive tool of a bygone war that protects him--this is us AFTER the World Wars of Mechs and Magic, broken hearts and busted fists included, a world you would ONLY find at AfterShock!

The author examines the psychological forces that contribute to sexual excitement in men and women. He looks at sexual aberrations to learn what they can tell us about "normal" sexual development and finds that in perversion hostility is directed, either in reality or fantasy, toward one's sex object. Through case studies and other provocative examples, Dr. Stoller shows how childhood frustrations and conflicts are hidden within fantasies to generate sexual excitement. Whether in the form of pornography, daydreams, or ritualized sex practices, childhood traumas are transformed into triumphs thereby making the victim the victor. [from the back cover]

God, Man, and Devil is an anthology of five Yiddish plays in translation, plus two additional independent scenes, all written by well-known playwrights in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The settings range widely—a luxurious parlor, a haunted graveyard, a farmyard, a sweatshop on strike, a subway, and the boardwalk of Atlantic City. The plays evoke tears and laughter through melodrama, expressionism, satire, fantasy, farce, suspense, and romance. But all consider the same question: what is life’s moral purpose? And all display the theatrical flair that made Yiddish audiences such passionate fans of their dramas and their stars. Translated and edited to make them more accessible for both reading and performance, the plays are accompanied by prefaces and notes to help students of theater and of Jewish culture by providing historical context, production histories, and elucidation of references.

Beginning in Paris in the year 1290, Jews were accused of abusing Christ by desecrating the eucharist—the manifestation of Christ's body in the communion service. Over the next two centuries this tale of desecration spread throughout Europe and led to violent anti-Jewish activity in areas from Catalonia to Bohemia, particularly in some German-speaking regions, where at times it produced regionwide massacres and "cleansings." Drawing on sources ranging from religious tales and poems to Jews' confessions made under torture, Miri Rubin explores the frightening power of one of the most persistent anti-Jewish stories of the Middle Ages and the violence that it bred. She looks not just at the occasions on which massacres occurred but also at those times when the story failed to set off violence. She investigates as well the ways these tales were commemorated in rituals, altarpieces, and legends and were enshrined in local traditions. In exploring the character, nature, development, and eventual decay of this fantasy of host desecration, Rubin presents a vivid picture of the mental world of late medieval Europe and of the culture of anti-Judaism.

Anthologies of previously published science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories from authors outside the United States and United Kingdom.

Mermen? Yes. Long before mermaids emerged to people our inner seas, long before they established their restless, inviting niche in human fantasy, there was the merman. Born of the human need to dominate the great fruitful oceans, to control the vast destructive seas, to regulate the healing rains, to understand the tides, the merman emerged. The merman was water personified. The imposing water gods could be wheedled, cozened, implored, but―in the end―they were never fooled. How often were Poseidon or Neptune, Lir, Njord and the rest pictured riding the waves along inhospitable shores, shaking their magical tridents or spears or fists at the weak, imploring humans on land? The sea gods called up storms or quieted waves. They flooded the lands. They drowned the unwary. Yet despite the importance of early fish-tailed gods such as Ea-Enki and Dagon; despite the preponderance of mermen in the mythologies of Babylon, Greece, the British Isles, the Scandinavian peninsula, Germany; despite the mermen ranging along Slavic shores and inland seas; despite the mermen found in Chinese and Japanese lakes, along Polynesian island coasts, and in the lore and literature of the Middle East, the merman has become Legend’s Forgotten Man. With its 27 stories from around the world, this volume reconstructs the unnatural history of the Merman.

Drawing on classical paintings, historical portraiture, and 19th-century pornographic studio photographs, the erotic images of Jan Saudek reveal a world of fantasy where artistic play and expression are given free range. Using elaborate backdrops and magical costumes, Saudek is both voyeur and participant, photographer and model, shifting back and forth in a style that lends the term autoportraiture new meaning. These 146 color photographs, featuring new and previously unpublished images with Saudek's commentaries, are as much about the artist as about the characters he creates. As Saudek states, I dont have the capacity to portray other peoples lives. I am portraying my own. Spending time with Saudeks images is an unsettling experience, a roller-coaster ride of attraction and repulsion, confirmation and confrontation. The Spectator

California in the 1960s is a time of free love and peace on Earth. But the times, they are a'changing, and Gareth Brendan is trying his best to keep up. When his wealthy, powerful uncle gives him control of an underground newspaper, Gareth finds an outlet for all the radical thoughts and ideas he's kept inside. Suddenly, he's the head of an empire of casinos and clubs, movies and magazines, surrounded by models and pimps who cater to the ultra-rich. Dreams Die First is an explosive story of one man's vision of liberated sexuality and how he turns that vision into a life of fame and fantasy. But all that power comes at a price, as a ruthless underworld syndicate seeks to topple Gareth's throne. Harold Robbins, the world's bestselling novelist, does it again in Dreams Die First, a tale of power and passion that transports readers to another place and time.

Two thematically-related novellas by Georges Perec in one volume. In each, Perec probes our obsession with society's trappings--the seductive mass of things that masquerade as stability and meaning. In Things: A Story of the Sixties , Jerome and Sylvie, a young, upwardly mobile couple lust for the good life, caught between the fantasy of "the film they would have liked to live" and the reality of life's daily mundanities. The nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs "to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep." Yearning to exist on neutral ground as "a blessed parenthesis," he discovers something unexpected. With the American publication of Life: A User's Manual in 1987, Georges Perec was recognized in the United States as one of this century's most innovative writers. Things: A Story of the Sixties is accessible, sobering, and deeply involving. Each novel distills Perec's unerring grasp of the human condition and displays his rare comic talent, detachment, and compassion.

A gripping tale of guilty secrets, betrayal, and racial tension, of isolation and revenge in modern-day South Africa, from the Man Booker Prize—shortlisted author of The Good Doctor When Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning — a shadowy figure from his childhood — and Canning’s enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently — and perhaps forever. The Impostor evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. Skilfully interweaving the story of one man’s struggle to regain his moral centre with the disorienting, often tragic effects of massive social and political change, it is Galgut’s most powerful and unforgettable novel yet. From the Hardcover edition.

A gripping tale of guilty secrets, betrayal, and racial tension, of isolation and revenge in modern-day South Africa, from the Man Booker Prize—shortlisted author of The Good Doctor When Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning — a shadowy figure from his childhood — and Canning’s enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently — and perhaps forever. The Impostor evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. Skilfully interweaving the story of one man’s struggle to regain his moral centre with the disorienting, often tragic effects of massive social and political change, it is Galgut’s most powerful and unforgettable novel yet.