Combining complex science with skillfully executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the shifting border between the known and the alien. The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in narratives that are by turns dark, satiric, and introspective. Among these bold storylines: a seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter's The Thing reveals the true villains in an Antarctic showdown; an artificial...

Philadelphia, 1918: Three friends-brave, confident Viola Trenmore, clever but shy Robert Drayton, and Viola's strong and hot-tempered brother, Terry-discover a mysterious powder that transports them two hundred years into the future. The Philadelphia of 2118 is no longer a bustling metropolis but instead a completely isolated city recovering from an unknown disaster. Citizens are issued identification tags instead of having names, and society is split...

This huge collection of short stories by one of science fiction's most beloved and popular writers is sure to please his millions of fans. Keeper of Dreams contains 22 stories written since 1990. From the opening science fiction tale, "The Elephants of Poznan," we see the hand of a master at work making a familiar idea new, strange, and wonderful. "Angles" takes a sideways look at alternate universes. "Geriatric Ward" is published here for the first...

Here are 33 weird, wonderful stories concerning men, women, teleportation, wind-up cats, and brown paper bags. By turns whimsical and unsettling-frequently managing to be both-these short fictions describe family relationships, bad breakups, and travel to outer space. Vukcevich's loopy, fun-house mirror take on everyday life belongs to the same absurdist school of work as that of George Saunders, David Sedaris, Ken Kalfus, and Victor Pelevin, although...

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present...

Mercurial, belligerent, passionately in love with language and wild ideas, Harlan Ellison has won more awards for imaginative literature than any other living writer. Though his contemporary fantasies have been compared favorably with the dark visions of Borges, Barthelme, Poe, and Kafka, Ellison resists categorization with a vehemence that alienates critics and reviewers seeking easy pigeonholes for an extraordinary writer. The San Francisco Chronicle...

"Podkayne Fries, born and raised on Mars, has just one ambition: to earn her wings as a starship pilot and rise through the ranks to command deep-space explorations. The opportunity to travel aboard the Tricorn - on an interstellar journey to Venus and Earth in the company of her diplomat uncle - is a dream come true. Poddy's idea of diplomacy is trying to handle her troublesome brother, Clark. But she's about to learn some things about war and peace....

"Michael and the Electroclan embark on their deadliest mission yet. The head of the resistance, known only as the voice, believes that the best way to wipe out the Elgen is to steal their money. That means capturing the Joule, the Elgen boat that serves as a floating treasury. Michael and his friends have learned about a highly placed member of the Elite Global Guard named Welch who wants to defect. They also know that three of the Elgen electric...

"Orson Scott Card's The Last Shadow is the long-awaited conclusion to both the original Ender series and the Ender's Shadow series, as the children of Ender and Bean solve the great problem of the Ender Universe-the deadly virus they call the descolada, which is incurable and will kill all of humanity if it were allowed to escape from Lusitania. One planet. Three sapient species living peacefully together. And one deadly virus that could wipe out...

"Led by its founding father, the great psycho-historian Hari Seldon, and taking advantage of its superior science and technology, the Foundation survived the greed and barbarism of its neighboring warrior-planets. Yet now it must face the Empire-- still the mightiest force in the Galaxy, even in its death throes. When an ambitious general determined to restore the Empire's glory turns the vast Imperial fleet toward the Foundation, the only hope for...