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The Producer thinks he’s God’s gift to women – whether they’re human or alien.

The Director is delighted to work on a wild and woolly planet, where he can really behave like Attila the Hun. Some of the local natives are trying to steal the film crew blind – while others plan all-out war.

And if that weren’t enough, every time Tour Guide Fergus Reith turns around, he stumbles over another of his ex wives or girlfriends!

The Swords of Zinjaban is the fourth of L. Sprague de Camp’s Krishna book – interplanetary romance in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian Tales.

The gods of Poseidonis – or Atlantis – were powerful and real. Now they were determined to destroy the kingdom ruled by the father of Prince Vakar, the one man whose mind they could not read. The only way to save the kingdom was to discover that thing which the gods feared most.

To find it, Prince Vakar set out across the largely unknown world where dangers multiplied with every league. There he found savage countries and strange people – the wild Amazons; a voluptuous, ensorcelled queen; a too-charming girl who was half-horse, half-woman; dangerous magicians who ruled hordes of headless slaves; and the Gorgons, who could paralyze their victims at a glance.

Behind was his ambitious brother, determined that Vakar must fail. Even closer were unknown enemies set on his trail by the suspicious gods.

And to add to his troubles, Vakar had no idea of what he sought!

After an unintentionally successful demon-summoning, accountant Prosper Nash finds himself on the astral plane, inhabiting the body of Jean-Prospere, Chevalier de Néche-the swashbuckling cavalier he likes to imagine himself as-and in a New York filled with characters from similar wish-fulfillment daydreams of other mundane souls. The demon is possessing his body on a mundane plane, and he attempts to find his way back. This involves the Shamir, the Solomon’s Stone of the title, and plentiful swashbuckling adventure, and a plot in which Prosper Nash’s accounting abilities prove as useful as Chevalier de Néche’s athletic ones.

SUSPEND YOUR DISBELIEF

And plunge headlong into the always wild, constantly weird, and frequently whimsical realm of fantasy as invoked by that master magician L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP!

– A social protestor who just happens to be a ghost.
– A mail-order magic business that conjures up a universe of trouble.
– A fledgling wizard who doesn’t know the strength of his own power.

And these are only a sprinkling of the outrageous and amazing creatures and things you’ll encounter as you whir through a world where everything is probable.

BEYOND 2001!

By the twenty-first century, the great power struggle on Earth had been resolved in the only possible way. The United States, Russia, and China all have fallen by the wayside, and Brazil has assumed her rightful place as world leader. Thus it is naturally Brazil that conducts the first interstellar explorations, and creates the great space transport system, the Viagens Interplanetaries, to extend her galactic conquests and hold her vast and growing empire together.

Copy from the 1975 Owlswick Press print edition:

L. Sprague de Camp’s original Science-Fiction Handbook, published in 1953 and long out of print, has been favourably remembered by a whole generation of science fiction readers and aspiring writers. Over the years, at convention after convention, fans have urged its reissue. Teachers of courses on imaginative fiction have begged for the book; one planned to reproduce the manual for his creative writing course until he learned that the material was under copyright Because of this enduring interest, the present book came into being.

Completely rewritten by de Camp and his wife Catherine, Science Fiction Handbook, Revised serves two purposes. It introduces the general reader to the fascinating field of imaginative fiction. The first two chapters describe the growth of science fiction from Aristophanes to Asimov and give the history of its parent literature, fantasy, which is as old as cavemen and as young as tomorrow.

The rest of the book affords the apprentice writer an overview of the pleasures and problems of writing imaginative fiction an teachers him the many and varied skills such writing requires. There are chapters on setting the scene, plotting the story and writing dialogue. Other chapters are devoted to showing the creative writer how to sore his literary works, keep records for tax purposes, market a story, deal with editors and agents, read the fine print in contracts and bargain with publishers. Finally, there are helpful hints for the successful writer about relating to his community, handling publicity and melding the needs of the creative artists with those of a successful human being and family member.

In short, here is a wealth of information on the techniques of writing fiction. Here, too, is the wisdom distilled by the de Camps in the course of their long writing careers. And, for those who have no desire to write, here is a chance to see what the writer’s world is really like and to learn something about the remarkable literature that we call science fiction and fantasy.

Following on from OWLFLIGHT and OWLSIGHT, Our Hero Darian has just passed the tests to become Master Mage of the Vale. He’s been made a Knight of Valdemar and a Clanbrother. But a new Herald-Mage is arriving in k’Valdemar, and he’s bringing with him his new protégé: Shandi, the Healer’s sister, who has won her Whites in less than three years and is back looking for adventure . . .
The OWLFLIGHT saga is set in the same wonderfully imagined fantasy world as Lackey’s previous trilogies and is a story of ‘local boy and girl make good against all odds’. The books are packed full of magic, talking horses, hawks, gryphons, lizards and other mythical races, with strong characterisation and a plot that really moves along.
Like the previous books, this is lavishly illustrated with Larry Dixon’s evocative character portraits.

James Blish, in his incarnation as ‘William Atheling, Jr’ has written more than his share of the most incisive criticism of contemporary science fiction.

Following on form The Issue at Hand, this new volume of Atheling’s critical writings skewers literary malefactors of many kinds, including some well-known authors whose great popularity is all the more puzzling because there seems to be so little reason for it.

Atheling does not stint on praise where it is due, but in other cases, the sins and errors of the filed are dispatched with his trademark rapier-like incisiveness.

Most people think witches are old and ugly – but ANITA isn’t.

ANITA doesn’t cackle and hiss as she works dark curses, either. Oh, she casts witch’s spells and incantations, but not the usual kind.

ANITA’s main interest is boys, just like any other girl her age. And she doesn’t really need things like love potions – not with her face and figure.

But ANITA is a witch, and she’s young and a little reckless. Which means she sometimes makes mistakes (usually with boys), and when she does… all Hell might break loose….

Keith Robert’s The Lordly Ones offers a wide variety of sf and fantasy (and even a ghost story). The title story is a vision of near-future Britain collapsing in social disorder told from the viewpoint of a slow-witted lavatory attendant. Another take, “The Comfort Station”, approaches a similar situation from a quite different perspective. In other stories we see Roberts in a more light-hearted vein: “The Checkout”, another of his series of stories about a modern-day witch, Anita, or “Diva”, a tale of singer of unique abilities. In “Ariadne Potts” a man’s wish brings a classical statue to life, with, inevitably, unfortunate results. “The Castle and the Hoop” is an atmospheric ghost story set around the pubs of Southwark. And “Sphairistike” is perhaps the only sf story ever to centre on the game of tennis.

Welcome to a haunted world; the world of Keith Roberts’ powerful and unique imagination. These stories show Roberts’ fascination for the curious and unclassifiable; and as ever, his mastery of character and detail. ‘Susan’ introduces the reader to a schoolgirl with awesome psychic powers; but the sensitive treatment turns a shock situation into a brilliant fable, while ‘The Scarlet Lady’, predating Stephen King’s Christine, has the genuine stench of petrol, oil and demons. ‘The Eastern Windows’ chillingly continues the theme; by contrast, ‘Winderwood’ introduces us to a fearsome locale that Roberts insists is real. ‘Mrs. Cibber’ transports the reader, with complete conviction, to the smog-ridden London of the fifties and unfolds the strange tale of a young graphic designer haunted by a woman from the eighteenth century. ‘The Snake Princess’, equally atmospheric, tells the story of a boy’s doomed, bizarre love, while ‘Everything in the Garden’ presents the tour de force of a haunting within a haunting.

This collection by Lucius Shepard, one of the most exciting new writers to emerge in the 1980s, includes the eponymous story ¿Barnacle Bill the Spacer¿, about an attempted mutiny on a space station, which won the Hugo Award, as well as ¿Sports in America¿, about a man who finds out just how far he is willing to go when he is hired by a local crime boss to kill a man. In ¿All the Perfumes of Araby¿ a small-time smuggler is granted a vision of the future that compels him to change his life, while ¿Human History¿ is a post-apocalyptic adventure story with a hint of decadence. ¿The Sun Spider¿ is a romance of sorts, with a decidedly gothic twist, while in ¿Beast of the Heartland¿, a boxer at the end of his career is lured back into the ring with the promise of one last big payoff. And anyone who has ever completely lost themselves in a piece of music will recognise the inspiration for ¿A Little Night Music¿. Shepard’s stories are not just wonderfully three-dimensional characters dealing with life-changing events; they are filled with colours, textures, sounds and smells, as he describes his backgrounds with as much care as a master painter.

The crew of the XV-ftl was looking forward to shore leave, vacation, and a chance to see their families after a month in space. But once they brought back the news that they had discovered aliens, they were doomed to another, and longer, journey.

Accompanying them on the return were several technical experts, who seemed to be more interested in squabbling with each other than meeting the first alien race in the history of humankind. But face to face with the blue humanoid Norglans, everyone began to realise just how important these first meetings could be – for they could make the difference between peaceful coexistence in space and interstellar war!




(First published 1958)

Duncan Chalk is a monstrous media mogul with a vast appetite for other people’s pain. He feeds off it, and carefully nurtures it in order to feed it to the public. It is inevitable that Chalk should home in on Minner Burris, a space traveller whose body was taken apart by alien surgeons and then put back together again – differently. Burris’ pain is constant. And so is that of Lona Kelvin, used by scientists to supply eggs for 100 children and then ruthlessly discarded. Only an emotional vampire like Chalk can see the huge audience eager to watch a relationship develop between these two damaged people. And only Chalk can make it happen.

First published in 1967

Manhattan 2012: Nat Hamlin’s brilliant career as an artist came to an end the day he went insane and embarked on a murderous rampage … his sentence: Total Personality Replacement.

Lissa loved Nat for his passion, now she loves him again – but as Paul Macy – for his warmth and kindness. Now each personality wants her help in battling the other, for with her Power, the man she chooses can kill the other. Lissa is terrified. She has to send one of her loves to his destruction. If she chooses the wrong man, the horror will never end.

The 22nd century, 150 years after the Dust War destroyed America’s Mid-West, and much else besides. California is a last outpost for survival and reclamation during a long epidemic of all-purpose despair.

The extraordinary cult of ‘Tumbonde,’ a former taxi driver its prophet and leader, predicts the imminent arrival on earth of ‘Gods’ from the stars. The movement grows daily.

Tom O’Bedlam, an apparent madman, prey since childhood to visions which seem to confirm ‘Tumbonde,’ goes even further. He can, he will, help others to make the Crossing. If the world doesn’t go too man too soon. If well-meaning ‘rationalists’ don’t lock him away . . .

The Long Winter is over.

The People of the New Springtime must go out and reclaim their world.

For generations the survivors of the cataclysm have sheltered in cocoons buried in the earth and waited for the gods to grow tired of hurling down death-stars onto a frozen world. Now it is time for Koshmar and the boy-chronicler, Hresh, and the rest of Koshmar’s tribe to emerge into the sun. A strange and savage landscape awaits them, where rat-wolves, bloodbirds and soulless hjjk-men stalk – and terrifyingly altered other creatures.

In the ruins of Vengiboneeza, the ancient capital of the sapphire-eyes folk, Hresh dares to celebrate their triumph – and suffers a shattering defeat at the realisation of a great and terrible truth.




(First published 1988)

The death-stars had come, and they had kept on coming for hundreds of thousands of years, falling upon the Earth, swept upon it by a vagrant star that had passed through the outer reaches of the solar system. They brought with them a time of unending darkness and cold. It was an event that occured every twenty-six million years, and there was no turning it aside.

But all that was done with now. At last the death-stars had ceased to fall, the sky had cleared of dust and cinders, the sun’s warmth again was able to break through the clouds. The glaciers relinquished their hold on the land; the Long Winter ended; the New Springtime began. The world was born anew.

Now each year was warmer than the last. The fair seasons of spring and summer, long lost from the world, came again with increasing power. And the People, having survived the dark time in their sealed cocoons, were spreading rapidly across the fertile land. But others were already there. The hjjks, the somber cold-eyed insect-folk, had never retreated, even at the time of greatest chill. The world had fallen to them by default, and they had been its sole masters for seven hundred thousand years. They were not likely to share it gladly now . . .

What if there were an Afterworld? Not Heaven or Hell in the conventional sense, but a place where everyone who has ever lived reawakens when they die, to live again and die again and live again, seemingly forever. This is the premise of Robert Silverberg’s brilliantly inventive new fantasy novel. The central character is the legendary warrior-king Gilgamesh, who has been in the Afterworld longer than almost anyone else save the Hairy Men from before the Flood, and who in recent centuries (insofar as you can count time) has seen it change beyond recognition, as the newly dead from industrial times import their machinery, their weaponry and their attitudes. Gilgamesh’s adventures in the course of the novel take him to the Afterworld realms of other quasi-mythical figures like Prester John and Simon Magus, bring him into contact with such figures from more recent history as Walter Ralegh and Pablo Ruiz (known to some as Picasso), and eventually send him in search of a gateway which is rumoured to exist somewhere in the land of the dead – a gateway which leads back to the land of the living.

The new millennium has barely begun when a vast fleet of alien vessels descends without warning on the Earth. Some starships blaze mighty trails of fire; some pop into view, unfathomably silent. Three different but equally strange kinds of alien emerge. Wide-eyed UFOlogists who rush to welcome them are scooped up like bugs collected for study.

The aliens make no response when the governments attempt to communicate with them, but a single act of resistance to them provokes massive retaliation. This is the first major catastrophe of the alien years and it will be followed by others. In silence the aliens take control of the world, effortlessly enslaving what remains of its population.

On a remote California ranch, the Carmichaels are a family of blue-eyed, straight-backed patriots, flawed by narrow thinking and repressed emotions – but redeemed by their courage. With them rests the slender hope that natives of Earth may one day be free.



(First published 1997)

After years of beachcombing on the pleasure planet of Mulciber, ex-engineer Johnny Mantell thought he had hit rock bottom. But when he was unjustly accused of murder, he knew there was worse to come.

Johnny had to get out. And the only place for an outcast like himself was the impregnable outlaw world of Starhaven, a refuge that defied all galactic laws.

Once there, Johnny’s only wish was to forget the past and be left alone. But the super-science dictator of Starhaven had other plans for him. And soon Johnny found himself in the midst of one of the most explosive struggles the world had ever known. If he failed, not only his own life would be lost, but the future of galactic civilisation would be totally altered.

Identical twins Sean and Eric have been chosen for a daring experiment. One of them will travel into the distant past. The other into the distant future. But each swing of the time pendulum means they will be further and further apart.

Will the experiment work? And if it does, will the twins ever meet again?

Nearly twenty years ago Robert Silverberg began writing a monthly column of opinion and commentary, for Galileo Magazine, Amazing Stories, and then for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Now he has chosen the liveliest and most relevant of his hundreds of magazine columns for the present collection. They constitute a vivid chronicle of events both in science fiction and the world in general over the past two decades.

Robert Silverberg is one of the great veterans of fantasy and science fiction. During the course of a career that has now stretched across more than forty years, he has written dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them considered classics of the genre. He has won more major award nominations than any other writer in his field, and no less than nine Hugo and Nebula awards, the key s-f/fantasy trophies. His books have been translated into some eighteen languages and his short stories have appeared in every science-fiction and fantasy magazine in the world, as well as in Omni, Playboy, and Penthouse.

Capturing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science fiction, this unique autobiography by Robert Silverberg shows how famous stories in this genre were conceived and written. Chronicling his career as one of the most important American science fiction writers of the 20th century, this account reveals how he rose to prominence as the pulp era was ending-and the genre was beginning to take on a more sophisticated tone-to eventually be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.