A fantasy masterpiece from a five-time Hugo Award winner

A war-dragon of Babel crashes in the idyllic fields of a post-industrialized Faerie and, dragging himself into the nearest village, declares himself king and makes young Will his lieutenant. Nightly, he crawls inside the young fey's brain to get a measure of what his subjects think. Forced out of his village, Will travels with female centaur soldiers, witnesses the violent clash of giants, and acquires a surrogate daughter, Esme, who has no knowledge of the past and may be immortal.

Evacuated to the Tower of...

"Very simply, Tom Purdom IS science fiction. His ever-inventive stories are cut from the cloth of it and sewn with the skill of a master." --Gregory Frost

"Tom Purdom made his first professional sale all the way back in 1957. It's hard to think of any other member of his generation whose current work is frequently mentioned in the same breath with that of writers such as Charles Stross, Greg Egan, and Alastair Reynolds, many of whom were not even born when Tom started his professional career, but Tom's is. In fact, for sweep and audacity of imagination and a wealth of new ideas and...

Chasing the Phoenix a science fiction masterpiece from a five-time Hugo Award winner Michael Swanwick

In the distant future, Surplus arrives in China dressed as a Mongolian shaman, leading a yak which carries the corpse of his friend, Darger. The old high-tech world has long since collapsed, and the artificial intelligences that ran it are outlawed and destroyed. Or so it seems.

Darger and Surplus, a human and a genetically engineered dog with human intelligence who walks upright, are a pair of con men and the heroes of a series of prior Swanwick stories. They travel...

Susan Casper (1947-2017) had a comparatively limited, but very intense writing career. She collaborated with some of the biggest names in the field, attempted truly daring and innovative fiction, and then slipped away from writing as quietly as she'd originally started. As Michael Swanwick says in his introduction, the reason she stopped writing is a mystery. There came a point when she simply stopped, apparently satisfied with what she had accomplished.

This collection of literary gems contains the two dozen stories that comprise Susan Casper's fiction output, as well as several of...