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THE WIZARD KNIGHT springs from the myths, legends and literature of times past.
A teenager passes from Earth to a magical realm of seven worlds, where he is given a hero’s adult body and named Able. Though forced to act as a man, inside he is still a boy, even as he sets off to find his destined sword and become a knight.
In his quest he battles giants, meets gods, heroes and a sorceress (who repeatedly tries to seduce him), and serves the mercurial dragon king Arnthor in a was that could end everything.

It’s never easy being a knight, especially for a practical Eudoric Dambertson, whose mind and temperature are better suited to trade than to the highly impractical demands of chivalry. Take the simple matter of courting a wife. To please his potential father-in-law, the enchanter Baldonius, the young man must bring back two square yards of dragon hide. Only then can he earn his knightly spurs and the hand of the beauteous Lusina. But battles with dragons always seem to go better in the ballads.

Nine brilliant stories of infinite space and alien consciousness, suffused with a sense of wonder . . .

The Exploration of Space
The Bees of Knowledge
Exit from City
Me and my Antronoscope
All the King’s Men
An Overload
Mutation Planet
The Problem of Morley’s Emission
The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor

Thrown into the alternate universe of 14th century England, 20th century mathematician Jim Eckert and his wife Angie have become Sir James, Baron de Bois de Malencontri, and Lady Angela. A bit of a shock, but they’d coped with it. In fact they were dealing with their new life’s hazards and magical manifestations just fine. Until Jim is suddenly transformed into a dragon. None too pleased about this latest turn of events, Jim turns for help to his neighbour, the magician S. Carolinus, who takes him on as an apprentice. When Prince Edward is captured by the French at the Battle of Poitiers, Jim sets out with some companions, including Aaargh the wolf, to join the English forces. He ends up as chief pawn in a battle against the Dark Powers – with extraordinary consequences.

The Hand of Kwll and the Eye of Rhynn in exchange for the Heart of Airioch.

There were Gods abroad in the old days. It was their whim to wipe clean the slate of history, to destroy the old races: the Vadhagh, the Nhadragh, the remnants of still more ancient peoples. Mankind, the Mabden, was their instrument. But the Gods themselves fell out, and Chaos gained the advantage over Law.

Onto this stage stepped the Vadhagh Prince Corum. Driven mad for revenge by the callous slaughter of his family and race, and by his own grotesque mutilation at the hands of the Mabden, he agreed to accept, from the treacherous sorcerer Shool, the Eye of Rhynn and the Hand of Kwll in exchange for a lien on his soul. Thus armed he set out upon a personal crusade against the Sword Rulers: the Lords of Chaos and puppetmasters to Man.

The first of these was the loathsome Arioch, Knight of the Swords, master of five of the fifteen planes of reality. From Arioch, Prince Corum required his heart…

The Terran Empire was faced with disaster. A turmoil of unrest on the planet Diomedes was the first spark that threatened to ignite a chain reaction of insurrection. All the attention of the ruling powers was centred on Diomedes – but Sir Dominic Flandry, bon vivant and interstellar troubleshooter, was one jump ahead. Through a highly unorthodox gambit, Flandry had learned that the Diomedean troubles were a red herring masking the real location of a deadly plan for a galactic civil war that would crush the Empire out of existence.

Time was running out. Only Flandry had the knowledge that could prevent devastation. And when the real trouble began, Flandry was half a universe away.

Lord Tedric of the Marshes, ex-Corpsman, revered hero of the Empire and personal friend of the Emperor, is a traitor.

Fugitive from the Security Forces, Tedric and his blue-furred alien friend Ky-Shan intend to join up with the most ruthless and successful renegade in the Galaxy – the Bioman, Fra Villion.

Tedric’s quest brings him in contact with a strange and fascinating band of people.

There’s Milton Dass, a brilliant scientist who has invented the most staggering instrument of destruction the Universe has ever seen; Juvi, a prostitute seeking new excitement as a pirate; Yod, a black-planet boy hoping to revenge the death of his family; and, of course, Fra Villion himself, the Black Knight of the Iron Sphere.

Author, editor, critic, fan: few people have had such a great and varied impact on modern SF as Damon Knight. From membership of seminal SF group the Futurians, through years of incisive reviews and criticism, to editorship of the influential Orbit series of anthologies, Knight bestrode 20th-century SF like a colossus. After his death in 2002, the SFWA GRAND MASTER AWARD was renamed in his honour.

The four volumes contained in this omnibus represent the best of his acclaimed short fiction – FAR OUR, IN DEEP, OFF CENTRE and TURNING ON – including his retro HUGO-winning TO SERVE MAN, surely the only SF story to inspire episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE and THE SIMPSONS!

In the decade from 1951 to 1960, Damon Knight was the outstanding critic of science fiction books. Knight’s reviews were not mere statements of his personal preferences – his skillful essays analysed the books and told why they were good or bad, to the edification of readers, the delight of good writers, and the embarrassment of bad ones. Believing that his work deserved more permanence than could be found in its original magazine publication, Advent brought out the famous first edition of In Search of Wonder in 1956. In this book, Knight wove his essays into chapters on many aspects of science fiction and fantasy, ranging from “Classics” to “Chuckleheads”. A second book was planned, but other activities prevented Knight from finishing it, however he was persuaded to integrate most of the new material into this second edition, which is more than fifty percent longer than the first.

Culled from the most imaginative and provocative minds of the pas thirty years, these pieces demonstrate the vitality and diversity, the excitement and commitment of the writers who helped make science fiction what it is today.

The Futurian Society was founded in 1938 by thirteen science fiction fans; it never numbered more than twenty, including wives, girl friends and hangers-on; yet out of this small group came seven of the most famous names in science fiction: Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Judith Merril, Frederik Pohl and Donald A. Wollheim.

Brilliant, eccentric and poor, the Futurians invented their own subculture, with its communal dwellings, its folklore, songs and games, even its own mock religion. In later years many of them became influential novelists, editors, anthologists, literary agents and publishers.

The author has interviewed ten of the surviving Futurians and has traced down the widow of one member whose tragic fate was unknown until now. Drawing on correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and amateur publications (including a collection of Futurian wall newspapers which had wound up in Australia), he has written a fascinating narrative of the early days of the Futurians, the feuds and lawsuits that divided them, and their later careers.

Five startling and provocative voyages into the future, by one of the most respected authors in science fiction – Rule Golden, Natural State, The Dying Man, Double Meaning and The Earth Quarter.

Brilliant invention, a rich sense of humour, an equal facility for describing ideas and technologies – these are the ingredients of Knight’s extraordinary talent as an SF writer. This collection of stories takes the reader from the death bed of the last man on earth to the unlikely demise of a vegetable vampire – and proves that Knight was at the top of his form.

The room was quiet; the man in front of the mirror was the only living things there, and he was too horrified to utter a sound.

In the mirror, five faces stared back at him: one young and ruddy, which was his own, and four that did not belong in that place at all, for they were wrinkled, malevolent, small as crabapples and blue as smoke.

So begins Damon Knight’s ‘Be My Guest’, a story of the human race possessed by things that were – well, not exactly demons . . . but not exactly not demons, either.

It’s just one of the unpredictably imaginative tales in this fascinating collection by a modern master of science fiction.

Take a step forward and fall suddenly into a creeping blob of protoplasm, then discover that your three companions have fallen with you and your bodies have been digested by the ‘thing’.

Watch a man searching on a beach, and feel your blood run cold when he tells you what he is searching for.

A doorway that will take you anywhere, except back to earth.

What would you do if little men in purple uniforms filled your living room with impossible machinery?

A machine made it possible to bury your crimes in the future?

You were abandoned on an asteroid alone with a murderous living snake of metal?

Humpty Dumpty is a breakthrough work for this acknowledged master of the fantastic, an intriguing, entertaining, and immensely appealing novel of a man trying to make sense of a world gone mad. The tale begins when Wellington Stout wakes in an Italian hospital, uncertain how or why he came to be there. Gradually he learns that he was shot in the head in a Milan restaurant the night before his stepdaughter’s wedding, perhaps because of a mysterious packet his brother asked him to deliver. The doctors tell him he is fortunate to be alive, but Stout has his doubts. For the bullet that has entered his skull has also opened cracks in the fabric of reality, and, as in the old nursery rhyme, no force on Earth or in Heaven can put it back together again. Soon Stout is hearing voices foretelling his doom, encountering antediluvian cabals of dentists, extraterrestrial shoe salesmen, gargantuan rodents, seductive adolescent sibyls, and giant craters opening across the face of North America, and traveling on an uncertain odyssey through a distorted landscape made of the fragments of his own life and memory.

It’s the early 21st century. Ed Stone says he’s been in suspended animation since the 1930s. He says he was kidnapped by aliens. He says they sent him forth on a mission: to convince the nations of the world to build massive vault, a mile on each side, in which humanity’s billions will lie in suspension and survive the impending destruction of the Earth.

Ed Stone says all these things, and the strangest part is that people believe him – ordinary people and powerful people alike. So begins Why Do Birds, a classically science-fictional novel of ideas and quite possibly Damon Knight’s most haunting work, a terrifying tale of deceit and human folly.

Gene Anderson was born in Oregon, in the twilight post-war years, into the most ordinary circumstances imaginable.

Gene is endowed with powers. He can look into the other worlds that are all around him. He can make things happen. He can hurt and he can heal.

His life changes dramatically when another boy is killed in a tragic accident, and Gene runs away. He is only nine. As he grows to 8’6″ tall, his wanderings take him round the world in search of a remarkable destiny.

Thorinn went down. He had little choice, since his own father had hurled him into a well.

Yet the world was shifting in those days, and Thorinn was to go deeper than his father had ever dreamed; destined to discover strange worlds within worlds, to meet beasts undreamed of, and to discover that which few of us are permitted to know:

His Own True Name.

Alien Ghetto.

The men of Earth were spread thin across the galaxy – and little welcome where they did appear. They lived on sufferance, disliked by their hosts and intent on spreading hatred to the stars! Unable to live in peace in their own worlds, they would sow their seeds of discontent among the peoples of the galaxy, as all the hatreds of mankind simmered under alien rule. But revolution against Earth’s alien hosts would mean – for all mean – the end of the stars!

The fate of the Earth Empire hung in the balance – and Security Commissioner Spangler knew it was up to him to find the monster, the Rithian Terror, as some called it. Seven Rithians had landed on Earth. Six had been disposed of. One was loose.

Surely, Spangler reasoned, the stereoptic fluoroscope would flush it out. ‘That’s one test the Rithian can’t meet, no matter how good his human disguise may be.’ Spangler explained to Pembun, the strange, little Colonial who had been sent to help find the monster.

But Pembun didn’t agree. ‘The trouble,’ he said, ‘is that the Rithi have no bones. Which would be indication enough under a fluoroscope, if it weren’t for the fact that it can easily swallow a skeleton.’

Spangler shuddered.

Time Switch at the Zoo.

One day Martin Naumchik, reporter for Paris Soir, visited the Berlin Zoo. He was standing outside the spacious cage housing the newly-acquired Brecht Biped, Fritz, when the world seemed to lurch.

Then he was no longer outside the cage looking in, but inside looking out. He was no longer Martin Naumchik. He was Fritz, the Biped, that strange celestial animal from a world eighteen light-years away.

At the same time, Fritz, who had lived almost all his life in Hamburg Zoo, also felt the lurching motion. And found himself standing outside his cage in the body of Martin Naumchik, looking at the frantic Biped inside, who was beating with both hands on the glass.

He reached for Churan’s throat and his hands closed on air…

…yet the alien had not moved. With a chill of terror, Naismith realized that his arm had passed completely through the ugly, green-skinned body.

The aliens’ laughter swelled out, malicious and mocking. Behind him, Lall’s voice said, “A nice try. But not good enough.”