"Startlingly original!" —Ramsey CampbellMargaret St. Clair (1911–1995) was an American fantasy and science fiction author who published about 130 stories in the pulps, mostly in the 1950s. She also wrote eight novels, four of which were published in the Ace Double series. St. Clair's pioneering role as a woman writing science fiction was noted by Eric Leif Davin in his book Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965.This collection assemb...

Earth was a weird and dire place after the plagues.The few humans who survived could not bear the touch of each other; they lived in the enormous, endless caverns hacked out of the bowels of the earth for the bombs that never came.And on one man rested the hopes of the world, though he did not know it. Sam Sewell only knew he had to journey, despite forbidding perils from the darkness of the past, into the ultimate fastnesses of the unknown to rescue the timeless wisdom of ...

Margaret St Clair is best known for her shorter science fiction and fantasy, much of the latter written under the pen name of Idris Seabright. She has a remarkably ironic sense of humor, and many of her stories have social or philosophical themes.Contents:Idris' Pig (1964)The Gardener (1949)Child of Void (1949)Hathor's Pets (1950)The Pillows (1950)The Listening Child (1950)Brightness Falls from the Air (1951)The Man Who Sold R...

Change the Sky is a collection in which you will find:- A man who has spent his life searching for the world of his dreams and got exactly what he wanted- A women who found the people around her so boring she changed them- A righteous minister who preached an old-fashioned Christmas and started an energy crisis - 2000 years in the future

Before the dawn of man . . .. . . there was a covenant between the land and the sea people - a covenant long forgotten by those who stayed on shore, but indelibly etched in the minds of others - the dolphins of Altair.Now the covenant had been broken. Dolphins were being wantonly sacrificed in the name of scientific research, their waters increasingly polluted, their number dangerously diminished. They had to find allies and strike back. Allies willing to sever their own ea...

They had existed from time immemorial, hidden in a space warp far beneath the the surface of the Earth. Until now, their only form of nourishment had been a strange hallucinogenic grain. Now, they hungered for human flesh. The Earth was to be their stockyard and mankind their meat...

His name was Tharg, but he was not of any life form we know today. He lived so long ago that the planet Earth had not yet shaped itself. Lava seas roiled and churned, volcanoes spouted and grew, and heavy clouds hung in the hydrogen atmosphere, leaving the planet's surface dark and dangerous.On that world Tharg met his death, or something very much like it. He became a disembodied, totally nonphysical intelligence, cut off from all contact with the life he had known. He 'slept' for...

Bonnar had created the Green Queen thoughtlessly - all part of a day's work. But when his brain-child became a full-grown Frankenstein's monster, embodied in the girl he loved, Bonnar was terrified. For now she threatened to shatter the whole carefully balanced social structure of Viridis - as well to undermine that radioactive world's atomic shield!Only Bonnar could end the holocaust and turn the all-too-grim reality back to the illusion he had originally intended. But to do that ...

Like so many others before him, reluctant Sam MacGregor was sent on a pilgrimage for the Grail Vision by the Dancers: androids grown from the cells of one man, with the powers of hypnotism and illusion - androids who held the tribes of the Republic of California in thrall.But soon Sam began to doubt his own identity, for he experienced, in close succession, extra-lives in different corridors of time and space.And he count not know whom his search would destroy: the Dancers ...

Did she hold the key to ecstasy - or to horror?The people of Gwethym were highly intelligent, rational beings. They worshiped the goddess Neith, not because they believed in such a golden-haired being, but because they recognised the need for religion as a counterbalance to human passions.So when trouble struck their planet, when they discovered an energy leak which was slowly destroying their world, the Gwethymians turned to science for their answer. If their world was to ...

Don Haig had been content to lie around and drink in the synthetic beauty of the pleasure planetoid Fyon, until a woman came into his life. A woman more beautiful and more perfect than any other female in the galaxy. A woman who brought about a curious change in Don.For she was a pocket-sized foll - a very strange and miraculous puppet who shed constant tears and held powers that Don never even dreamed of.But what Don did know was that dangerous alien forces were swiftly fo...

On Venus: An ancient and powerful Venusian race finds its ultimate evolution - but can they accept it?On Mars: The people of the Fourth Planet are eminently reasonable in all things - except for the cult of the Sacred Martian Pig, for which 'fanatic' would be entirely too reasonable a word.And on Earth: On the unknown world of one or ten centuries from now, the strangest stories of all become haunting, fascinating reality, as we find out that huma...