Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, edited by Hugo and Wold Fantasy Award nominated editor Warren Lapine, brings you the very best in science fiction and fantasy. Join us as we explore strange new worlds. This is the ebook edition of the Fantastic Stories webzine containing all content from the October 2014 issue, including: Original Short Story: Rope Burns by Kelly McCullough He had a secret to keep, but then don’t we all? Short Story: Locomotive Joe and the Wreck of Space Train No. 4 b...

Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer is a collection of linked fantasy short stories by American writer Darrell Schweitzer featuring his dark fantasy protagonist, the child-sorcerer Sekenre. The twelve stories relate various episodes in the life of the immortal sorcerer, who stopped aging physically when he first became a sorcerer while still a child. He confronts various threats and challenges while attempting to maintain some semblance of humanity through the aeons.Critic D...

Weird fiction is an incredibly rich and varied genre, running the gamut from supernatural horror to imaginary-world fantasy to psychological terror. This anthology seeks to exhibit the wide range of themes, motifs, and imagery that weird fiction allows, as embodied in the work of some of the leading contemporary writers in the field.The ghost or revenant is a venerable motif, and stories by John Shirley, Lynda E. Rucker, and Reggie Oliver ring fascinating changes on it. Allied to t...

Darrell Schweitzer's career stretches back to the early 1970s. He has written novels, most notably The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995), which was expanded from a World Fantasy Award finalist novella, but he has probably most distinguished himself for a steady stream of short fiction which caused anthologist Mike Ashley (in The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers' Tales) to call him "today's supreme stylist" in the fantasy field. His work has appeared in a great variety of publications ranging from Amazi...

Fantasy novel by the World Fantasy Award-winning editor and author. "Few writers can genguinely touch the quality of nightmare...the fear that formless and almost banal stems from the sleeping mind. John Bellairs did it with THE FACE IN THE FROST... James Blaylock can do it. And now there is also THE SHATTERED GODDESS." --Mary Gentle

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.As a child, Matthew's father regaled him with elaborate tales of battling the nefarious Black Scorpion and his Zeppelin Gang to save the world. Though Matthew dismissed these stories as delusions, his father's insistence on involving him in clandestine training missions and nighttime escapades never ceased.Years later, Matthew receives a cryptic summons to meet his long-lost father atop the Empire State Building for one final en...

Super science. Madness. Transhumanism.This is the dawn of posthumanity. Some things can’t be unlearned.Gleaming labs whir with the hum of servers as scientists unravel the secrets of the universe. But as we peel away mysteries, the universe glances back at us. Even now, terrors rise from the Mariana Trench and drift down from the stars. Scientists are disappearing—or worse. Experiments take on minds of their own. Some fight back against the unknown, some gi...

All original stories about the return of Cthulhu and the Old Ones to Earth.Some of the darkest hints in all of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos relate to what will happen after the Old Ones return and take over the earth. What happens when Cthulhu is unleashed upon the world? What happens when the other Old Ones, long since banished from our universe, break through and descend from the stars? What would the reign of Cthulhu be like on a totally transformed planet wh...

Darrell Schweitzer's first novel is a powerful tale of Prince Evnos of Iankoros, who seeks to reclaim his bride from the God of Death. Rich with strange sorceries, grim mythologies, and hostile gods, this is a tale of heroism and horror, seeming triumph and subsequent tragedy, and strange turns of fate which none of the characters could possible foresee. It is a modern classic reminiscent of E.R. Eddison, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Lord Dunsany ... and yet uniquely the author's own.

"[This] novel has immense power in its climax," said The Encyclopedia of Fantasy about Darrell Schweitzer's 1982 novel, THE SHATTERED GODDESS. Now, at last, here's the companion volume to that work, a cycle of eleven stories set "in the time of the death of the Goddess." This is an Earth of the far future, when the planet has declined into chaos, and darkness looms at the end of human history. Here you'll meet...a dadar, a wizard's shadow attempting to become a man; two sorcerers grotesque...

The six volumes in the Black Wings series, from which these "Best of" tales are selected, stand as a monument to H. P. Lovecraft's incalculable and unassailable influence on contemporary weird fiction, and so the time seemed right for a retrospective volume that exhibits the choicest items from the series. The task of selection was not a simple or straightforward one, for every tale in the series had some claim to be chosen; let it then be said that this volume does not contain necessarily...

This classic 1984 interview with Larry Niven, author of such classics as Ringworld and and co-author of The Mote in God's Eye, plus many others, was conducted by Darrell Schweitzer. It originally appeared in Thrust #21, Fall 85/Winter 85 issue.