Return to the unique and evocative world of The Dying Earth in this tribute anthology featuring the most distinguished fantasists of our day. A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. The sun is feeble and red. A million cities have fallen to dust. Here live a few thousand souls, dying, as the Earth dies beneath them. Just a few short decades remain to the long history of our world. At the last, science and magic are one, and there is evil on Earth, distilled by time ... Earth is dying. Half a century ago, Jack Vance created the world of the Dying Earth, and fantasy has never been the same. Now, for the first time, Jack has agreed to open this intriguing and darkly beautiful world to other fantasists, to play in as their very own. The list of twenty-two contributors eager to honour Jack Vance by writing for this anthology includes Neil Gaiman, Tad Williams, Elizabeth Hand, Tanith Lee, Dan Simmons, Robert Silverberg, and George R.R. Martin himself.

Fantasy: Collection of tales exploring Earth's past.

The Last Mimzy is the ideal introduction to an author who was ahead of his time—and whose time has finally come These seventeen classic stories create their own unique galaxy of vain, protective, and murderous robots; devilish angels; and warm and angry aliens. In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”—the inspiration for New Line Cinema’s major motion picture The Last Mimzy—a boy finds a discarded box containing a treasure trove of curious objects. When he and his sister begin to play with these trinkets—including a crystal cube that magnifies the unimaginable and a strange doll with removable organs that don’t quite correspond to those of the human body—their parents grow concerned. And they should be. For the items are changing the way the children think and perceive the world around them—for better or worse. Ray Bradbury called Henry Kuttner “a man who shaped science fiction and fantasy in its most important years.” Marion Zimmer Bradley and Roger Zelazny said he was a major inspiration. Kuttner was a writer’s writer whose visionary works anticipated our own computer-controlled, machine-made world. At the time of his death at forty-two in 1958, he had created as many as 170 stories under more than a dozen pseudonyms—sometimes writing entire issues of science fiction magazines—in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore. This definitive collection will be a revelation to those who wish to discover or rediscover Henry Kuttner, a true master of the universe.

From Sholom Aleichem to Avram Davidson, Isaac Bashevis Singer to Tony Kushner, the Jewish literary tradition has always been one rich in the supernatural and the fantastic. In these pages, gathered from the best short fiction of the last ten years, twenty authors prove that their heritage is alive and well -- in the spaces between stars that an alphabet can bridge, folklore come to life and histories become stories, and all the places where old worlds and new collide and change.

Book by Bloch, Robert

"No mortal can write this well." - Harlan Ellison "Kersh has a strange, perverted sense of genius. And how he can write." - Virginia Kirkus "Gerald Kersh had a wild imagination matched by a vivid, near-hallucinatory style. Many of his concepts are so original that they blur the distinction between fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror, but the cumulative impact of his short stories is horrific in the extreme." - Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural An expedition in South America uncovers a terrifying race of men without bones who literally suck the life out of their prey. A man in 20th century London makes a horrifying discovery about a monster found off the coast of Brighton in 1745. A sea captain goes ashore on a deserted island and finds what seem to be the bones of a previously unknown species of monster, only to learn that the bones tell a much more tragic tale than he could ever have imagined. A war correspondent, none other than Kersh himself, is sailing to America when he meets a strange man who claims to be 438 years old. These are the plots of just a few of the weird tales you will find in this book. Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) was a brilliant and inventive writer acclaimed in his time for his gritty novels of London life and his often bizarre short fiction, but he has unfortunately become neglected since his death. This volume includes an introduction by award-winning science fiction author Harlan Ellison, who also selected the eleven stories that appear in this collection and which represent the very best of Kersh's short fiction. Includes: "The Queen of Pig Island," "Frozen Beauty," "The Brighton Monster," "Men Without Bones," "Busto Is a Ghost, Too Mean to Give Us a Fright ," "The Ape and the Mystery," "The King Who Collected Clocks," "Bone for Debunkers," "A Lucky Day for the Boar," "Voices in the Dust of Annan," "Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?"