This volume is the second of a set of three showcasing the work of Frédéric Boutet, the other two volumes being The Antisocial Man and Other Strange Stories, and Claude Mercoeur's Reflection and Other Strange Stories. Viewed as an ensemble, these collections illustrate the range and development of Boutet's early work, and provide a few representative samples of its later evolution. Although several stories by Boutet were translated into English in the 1920s, especially in America, they were selected from his later works, when he was mostly writing sentimental stories and crime fiction for popular magazines; no examples of his early work, most of which consisted of offbeat supernatural fiction, have previously been rendered into English. These sixteen tales of horror and fantasy will hopefully serve to introduce the work of a highly distinctive writer of weird and baroque fiction to a new audience.

The planet Attica has two continents: Lambda and Delta. The indigenous alien population being restricted to Delta, Earth's colony was planted on Lambda. Before the arrival of the Daedalus, two sailing ships had set out from Lambda to cross the ocean separating the two continents, and neither had returned. Now a third is on its way, and Mariel Valory and Alex Alexander of the Daedalus have hitched a lift, in order that Mariel might use her talent to try to make contact with the aliens. Unfortunately, it turns out that contact has already been made, and that the aliens are building an empire with the aid of borrowed Terran technology--an empire that's beginning to crack under its internal strains and eternal challenges. And when Alex and Mariel are marooned by their reluctant hosts, things start to go from very bad to much worse.... Daedalus Mission, Book Five.

A plastic surgeon of the future is charged with re-creating the face of Adam, the first man. Is he just a pawn in a scheme to defraud a billionaire, or does he seriously intend to fulfill his task. And if he's successful, what does it mean to the world at large?

At an 1847 revival of Meyerbeer's opera Robert le Diable, the ghost of Blaise Thibodeaux, the author of La Résonance du temps, appears in one of the boxes, just as Thibodeaux had predicted to Auguste Dupin that it would, thirteen years before. Unfortunately, Dupin is unable to attend the performance, leaving his uninformed friend and narrator Reynolds to try to make sense of the apparition and all the confusing circumstances surrounding it. Once Dupin has returned to the intellectual fray, however, and pulled the multitudinous threads of possibility together, seven individuals must set forth for the forest of Fontainebleau in the dead of night in order to bring the "temporal resonance" that Thibodeaux had earlier attempted to produce to its full fruition, hoping at least to understand why he wanted to do so—although the Comte de Saint-Germain, apparently in control for once, has much greater ambitions than that... Another riveting entry in this ongoing historical fantasy...

In Paris, on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, an old man suddenly vanishes without a trace: a new plague has reached France, and will soon grow to terrible proportions. The event is witnessed by a cytologist working at the Aristotle Institute, who is also a Polyplast—the result of an experiment in selective breeding intended to produce pacifists, but which has also had perverse results. As a result of his presence at the crucial event, the Polyplast becomes a privileged observer of the entire tragedy, of which he naturally sets out to write a personalized history, explaining how the new plague became the casus belli of yet another war in an endless series, fought with the aid of "Archimedes": powerful, long-range weapons that would destroy the world in no time were it not for their habit of misfiring, and only killing tens of thousands of people instead of millions. The Napus, first published in 1927, remains one of the classics of absurdist science fiction.

Despite the development of a faster-than-light drive, Earth's space program has been in the doldrums for centuries, as has Earth itself. Hyperspace being impossible to navigate without beacons at which to aim, there is no alternative but to wait for vessels sent out at sub-light speed decades previously to find somewhere worth going.Unfortunately, when a worthwhile planet finally turns up, it doesn't take long for political conflicts to materialize over its exploitation. Then, when an entire survey team perishes, the problems intensify.Lee Caretta is the man most likely to solve the problem—if his conflict-ridden employers will let him, if he can keep his tendencey to suffer unexplained blackouts under control, and if the world really is sufficiently Earth-like not to be deadly to the explorers.And then the humans begin to die once more! Despite the development of a faster-than-light drive, Earth's space program has been in the doldrums for centuries, as has...

The Stones of Camelot tells the story of Amory, a boy who was once taken into Faerie as a changeling, but then returned. While being cared for and educated by the Sisters of Saint Syncletica, Amory becomes preoccupied with the mystery of his origin, wanting to know why Faerie rejected him.

Journey to the Isles of Atlantis is the sixteenth volume in a series of anthologies translating antique items of French roman scientifique. Included in this collection are Fututistic Paris in 5839 (1822), a story for which the editor was fined a thousand francs and sentenced to three months in prison; The Clockmaker of Nuremberg (1882) and The Inventor (1902), which anticipate the age of aviation; King Beta (1905), in which an aeronaut ends up in a kingdom where modern science is unknown and people still believe in the power of enchanters. Optimistic accounts of the human future future are presented in Humans in the Year 3000 (1907), dedicated to H G Wells, and The Discovery of the Earth in 2009 (1909). Finally, the eponymous Atlantis-based fantasy written in 1914 features Plato’s fictitious island, and uses that vanished civilization as a satirical reflection of contemporary France.

This collection brings together the ten earliest stories in Brian Stableford's series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, all written in the 1980s, except for one anomalous example from the 1960s. The dates in some of the stories, located a comfortable distance in the future when the stories were written, have now long past, revealing certain anomalies of early expectation; but they have been left unaltered, as nostalgic samples of yesterday's long-dead and perhaps much-lamented tomorrows. The collection begins and ends, as is surely only appropriate, with flamboyant utopian fantasies boldly asserting the perfectibility of humankind and the world of which the species has custody. Great science-fiction reading by a master of the form!

Well-known critic and novelist Brian Stableford here discusses the writers, editors, and publishers who helped create the modern genre of science fiction: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Camille Flammarion, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell Jr., Edward E. "Doc" Smith, Robert A. Heinlein, James Blish, Gregory Benford, and Ian Watson. Complete with bibliography and index.