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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.

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.

For Karadel, being a shape-shifter has always been a reality she couldn’t escape. Even though she’s built a safe life as a rural veterinarian, with a close-knit network of shifter and human friends who would do anything for her, she can’t help but wish for a chance at being normal.

When she’s not dealing with her shifts or caring for her animal patients, she attempts to develop a drug that will help shifters control their changes – a drug that might even allow them to remain human forever.

But her comfortable life is threatened by two events: she meets an ordinary man who touches her heart, and her best friend is forced to shift publicly with deadly consequences.

Now Karadel must decide whom to trust: her old friends or her new love.

Strange bedfellows can be political poison, and the candidate had picked himself a dilly. She was ruthless and corrupt and had enough on him to smear his shining armour with front page mud.

Donald Lam and Bertha Cool told him not to worry. Women were Donald’s speciality, the more dangerous the better. But when the lovely lady turned up dead, the case took an ugly twist. Suddenly Lam and Cool were in the middle of a red-hot race where bullets, not ballots, counted.

District Attorney Frank Duryea had more than a simple murder case on his hands. Had someone killed both Addison Stearne and C. Arthur Right and then vanished? Or had it been a murder and a suicide? And, in either case, who died first? A vast fortune depended on the answer.

The obvious suspect was Nita Moline, who claimed she discovered the bodies, rushed up on deck and fainted. However, nobody had seen her come aboard. And through the tangled web of evidence, there seemed to be more than one mystery. Fortunately for Frank Duryea, his wife’s grandfather – the black sheep of a wild family – came for a visit and got in everybody’s way.

Given: Earth 400 years from now – a rotten society which mankind is doomed to die out.

A solution to the problem – an ultra-intelligent computer to govern humanity.

One man of seemingly average intelligence, but with incredible I.Q. potential.

And you have: A corrupt society turned into a world where there is no corruption, because Mother Machine knows what’s best for her human children and does it. Where that same all-powerful computer is rapidly turning men into zombies.

And where the world’s only hope turns out to be one outlawed not-average man.

Jay Benson had been one of the US Army’s top snipers. In Vietnam he’d killed 82 Vietcong. But making the School of Shooting he’d taken over outside Paradise City pay was a tougher proposition than the Vietnamese jungle.

So when the sinister Augusto Savanto turns up with an offer of $50,000 if Jay turns his gun-shy son into an expert shot – in just nine days – he accepts. Then he discovers the horrific reason why Savanto wants his son made into a marksman. But by now there is no backing out for Jay …

Annihilating everything before it, a horde of monstrous space travellers were advancing through the stars. And Earth lay in their route. To defend their home planets, the worlds that lay in the path of the monsters created a super defence force, asking each planet to contribute one especially talented warrior to help turn the invaders away. Miles Vander was Earth’s man, but when he arrived at the rendezvous point he found that he was included in the special task force of the less civilized defenders.

But in the contest of advanced nuclear weaponry and computer strategy, it turned out to be Vander’s group that had the special independent qualities and the raw courage to meet the challenge most effectively.

The City Imperishable’s secret master and heir to the long-vacant throne has vanished from a locked room, as politics have turned deadly in a bid to revive the city’s long-vanished empire. The city’s dwarfs, stunted from spending their childhoods in confining boxes, are restive. Bijaz the Dwarf, leader of the Sewn faction among the dwarfs, fights their persecution. Jason the Factor, friend and apprentice to the missing master, works to maintain stability in the absence of a guiding hand. Imago of Lockwood struggles to revive the office of Lord Mayor in a bid to turn the City Imperishable away from the path of destruction. These three must contend with one another as they race to resolve the threats to the city.

Olura Manoli is a lovely creature, though perhaps a little foolish in her friendship with an African prime minister whom she accompanies to Spain without police protection.

Olura and the politician are followed by an Italian paparazzo hoping to catch glimpses of their indiscretion. But when he turns up dead in the couple’s bathroom, it seems there is no one Olura can turn to for help but Philip Ardower, an English don and authority on the Basque language.

His help is certainly needed in the dangerous day to follow, when violent death and police suspicion dog the lovers along the rugged mountains and dark mine shafts of the fierce Biscay coast.

High tide in a sea of blood!
…And for Harry Keogh, Necroscope, the tide has finally turned. Always the champion of the living and the dead alike, now Harry is shunned by all men. Always a hunter of the evil that stalks the night, now he in turn is hunted. Always the hero, now he is the plague-bearer, the menace – the monster!

But yet his greatest battle will be with himself, with the Thing Inside. For the Necroscope is now a vampire.

Forsaken by the teeming dead pursued by the espers of E-Branch, Harry has a choice: to be banished, hounded right out of this world…or to release the plague which he carries within himself upon all humanity!

Barrister Martin Ainsworth is sent to West Berlin by British Intelligence to make contact with his former lover, a suspected Communist agent, and it’s up to him to find out the truth and to spot her contacts.

As he travels through a divided Berlin, his dual role becomes emotionally tortuous, his lack of training an unforeseen hazard, and he turns more reckless than his peers had ever bargained for …

‘A more or less conventional spy story is suddenly turned inside out by a most ingenious twist’ Guardian

The first battles began in the wilderness. The animals in the forests and glades struggled furiously for life and often fought with splendid courage. But they never won; they were always killed. And now it was man’s turn…

The men of Earth were on the verge of breaking into space. The first of their manned moon rockets was on its way to Luna. Now, after ten thousand years, the celestial Watchers were forced to a decision.
Were the Earth people ready to join in the civilizations of sapce – or should they be turned down and wiped out with solar fire?
THE TRIAL OF TERRA had begun!The men of Earth were on the verge of breaking into space. The first of their manned moon rockets was on its way to Luna. Now, after ten thousand years, the celestial Watchers were forced to a decision.
Were the Earth people ready to join in the civilizations of space – or should they be turned down and wiped out with solar fire?
THE TRIAL OF TERRA had begun!

In the course of his considerations, Samuel R. Delany poses a theory of discourse and explores how the reading of various rhetorical turns, some science fictional, some not, is shifted by science fictional understanding.