Groff Conklin was the most important science fiction anthologist through the years of the genre's true second generation, that point at which its previously magazine-bound masterpieces were being systemtically located, aligned and placed into permanent format. His contribution over the period of two decades was irreplaceable and all of our postwar history exists in the penumbra of his work. Bud Webster has in this index granted an act of scholarship and homage of equal irreplaceability. - Barry Malzberg, author and editor

The second Dodie Fanshaw mystery by Marina Oliver, author of 80+ novels. Dodie's rural peace is shattered, first by a mermaid walking up the lawn from the river Thames, and then by a body near the pool. The body belonged to an author who lived next door. His girlfriend, publisher and agent, ex-lovers and neighbours crowd the garden. But who might have killed this best-selling novelist? And why? Inevitably Dodie is drawn into trying to solve the mystery.

“Remember the Maine!” The war cry spread throughout the United States after the American battleship was blown up in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. Americans, already sympathetic with Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain, demanded action. Brief and decisive, not too costly, the Spanish-American War made the United States a world power. David F. Trask’s War with Spain in 1898 is a cogent political and military history of that “splendid little war.” It describes the failure of diplomacy; the state of preparedness of both sides; the battles, including those of Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders; the enlargement of conflict to rout the Spanish from Puerto Rico and the Philippines; and the misconceptions surrounding the war.