The houses if Iszm. The people of Iszm live in houses created from living tree-like plants and they alone know the secret of cultivating these plants. Aliens from other worlds have been trying for decades to break the monopoly by stealing a female house-seed.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, A Checklist, 1700-1974, Volume one of Two, contains an Author Index, Title Index, Series Index, Awards Index, and the Ace and Belmont Doubles Index.

Future and Fantastic Worlds embodies an unusual approach to the field of bibliographic research, including over 700 annotations of every DAW book published through mid-1987, with indexes by author, artist, and title, providing a massive guide to modern SF writers and their works, with much background data. Interspersed throughout the book are numerous wry, irreverent, and amusing observations offered by the late and highly respected researcher in this extremely valuable genre tool.

Science fiction loves strangeness. It relishes oddities, even when it piles on fear and dystopian loathing. The technical term for a fascination with the strange and alien is xenophilia, just as the term for a terror of the strange is xenophobia. At its core, then, science fiction is...Xeno Fiction. So science fiction seeks out the strange, roams far from home in space and time, looks with avid eagerness upon the ways of the Others, human or alien. It participates, in brilliantly lighted imagination, in their strange lives. In this second gathering from Van Ikin's critical journal, Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, writers of the alien are investigated with wit and insight. G. Travis Regier follows the Other into its own home, accompanying those experts in the alien, C. J. Cherry and Samuel R. Delany. In the book's long key essay, Terry Dowling pursues the Art of Xenography as exemplified by Jack Vance's "General Culture" novels. Three expert commentators look into Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey's postcolonial and postmodern frolics into alternative realities. And the Xeno fictions of Isaac Asimov, Greg Egan, Mary Gentle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison, Neal Stephenson, and Stanley Weinbaum are read as their road maps into the strange. Eleven revealing essays on speculative fiction by some of the best critics in the field.

A study of the work of John Holbrook Vance (the nom-de-plume on his mystery novels), who is most famous as science fiction writer Jack Vance. The Milford Series: Popular Writers of Today, Vol. 40.

Providing fast-action science fiction novels, Startling Stories was established beginning in January 1939 as a sister publication to Thrilling Wonder Stories. Publishing 99 issues in all, and combining Fantastic Story Magazine and Thrilling Wonder Stories with its ninety-seventh issue, it finally suspended publication in Fall 1955, one of the last of the pulps to fold. Leon L. Gammell, an avid reader and collector of that period, views that era's stories with both nostalgia and objectivity; his incisive critiques will provide interested readers with numerous guideposts to a wealth of exciting fantasy and SF reading.

A dictionary-style guide to the science fiction worlds of Jack Vance. A souvenir of the worlds you have visited in the past! A planning guide for your next excursion off world! A handy survival manual for unexpected occasions! A reference work on the science fiction of award-winning Grand Master Jack Vance! A handbook!

The authors of The Science of Superheroes now reveal the real genius of the most evil geniuses Ever wonder why comic book villains, such as Spiderman's bionic archenemy Dr. Octopus or the X-Men's eternal rival Magneto, are so scary and so much fun? It's not just their diabolical talent for confounding our heroes, it's their unrivalled techno-proficiency at creating global mayhem that keeps comic book fans captivated. But is any of the science actually true? In The Science of Supervillains, authors Lois Gresh and Bob Weinberg present a highly entertaining and informative look at the mind-boggling wizardry behind the comic book world's legendary baddies. Whether it's artificial intelligence, weapons systems, anti-matter, robotics, or magnetic flux theory, this fun, fact-filled book is a fascinating excursion into the real-world science animating the genius in the comic book world's pantheon of evil geniuses. Lois Gresh (Scottsville, NY) and Bob Weinberg (Oak Forest, IL) are the authors of the popular Science of Superheroes (cloth: 0-471-0246-0; paper: 0-471-46882-7)

This bio-bibliography of the golden age of the science fiction field includes 308 biographies compiled from questionnaires sent to the authors, and chronological lists of 483 writers' published works. This facsimile reprint of the 1975 edition includes a title index, introduction, and minor corrections. A now-classic guide to the major and minor SF writers active in the early 1970s.

Mark J.P. Wolf’s study of imaginary worlds theorizes world-building within and across media, including literature, comics, film, radio, television, board games, video games, the Internet, and more. Building Imaginary Worlds departs from prior approaches to imaginary worlds that focused mainly on narrative, medium, or genre, and instead considers imaginary worlds as dynamic entities in and of themselves. Wolf argues that imaginary worlds—which are often transnarrative, transmedial, and transauthorial in nature—are compelling objects of inquiry for Media Studies. Chapters touch on: a theoretical analysis of how world-building extends beyond storytelling, the engagement of the audience, and the way worlds are conceptualized and experienced a history of imaginary worlds that follows their development over three millennia from the fictional islands of Homer’s Odyssey to the present internarrative theory examining how narratives set in the same world can interact and relate to one another an examination of transmedial growth and adaptation, and what happens when worlds make the jump between media an analysis of the transauthorial nature of imaginary worlds, the resulting concentric circles of authorship, and related topics of canonicity, participatory worlds, and subcreation’s relationship with divine Creation Building Imaginary Worlds also provides the scholar of imaginary worlds with a glossary of terms and a detailed timeline that spans three millennia and more than 1,400 imaginary worlds, listing their names, creators, and the works in which they first appeared.