Selected from the pages of the popular magazine for outdoor enthusiasts, here is a wonderful tour of the natural world and an incisive overview of the people and animals who inhabit it. Published to coincide with Outdoor magazine's 15th anniversary.

"The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack" presents a terrific mix of science fiction stories, new and old, including a Hugo Award-winning story by Lawrence Watt-Evans, a Hugo Award nominee from Mike Resnick, and classics by Arthur C. Clarke, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and many more. Almost 700 pages of great reading! Included are: ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE, by Mike Resnick A BRIEF DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, by Michael Kurland GRANDPA?, by Edward M. Lerner TO ERR IS INHUMAN, by Marion Zimmer Bradley SARGASSO OF LOST STARSHIPS, by Poul Anderson THE SWORDSMEN OF VARNIS, by Geoffrey Cobbe MOON DOG, by Arthur C. Clarke WHY I LEFT HARRY’S ALL-NIGHT HAMBURGERS, by Lawrence Watt-Evans GALACTIC CHEST, by Clifford D. Simak PROTOTYPE, by John Gregory Betancourt THE DOORSTOP, by Reginald Bretnor THE TIME DISSOLVER, by Jerry Sohl DO UNTO OTHERS, by Damien Broderick KEEP OUT, by Fredric Brown THE CHAPTER ENDS, by Poul Anderson DO UNTO OTHERS, by Mark Clifton THE SERVANT PROBLEM, by Robert F. Young THE SLIZZERS, by Jerome Bixby AND THEN THE TOWN TOOK OFF, by Richard Wilson SPACE OPERA, by Michael R. Collings I AM TOMORROW, by Lester del Rey RIPENESS IS ALL, by Jesse Roarke DAWSON DID IT, by C.J. Henderson STARMAN'S QUEST, by Robert Silverberg THROUGH TIME & SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT (94), by Grendel Briarton And don't forget to search this ebook store for "Wildside Megapack" to see the 100+ entries in this series, covering everything from science fiction and fantasy to mysteries, westerns, ghost stories, author collections--and much, much more! (Sort by publication date to see the most recent entries.)

What it means to me to be a critic/reviewer? For a lot of readers, a "reviewer" or "critic" is an embittered failed novelist or worse, a barely restrained serial rapist. Book critics may take the form of a dilettante, theorist, essayist, or even historian, but almost never reviewers, who sometimes lack the distancing from the text required by the demands of academia synthesis.

Time travel is one of the staples of science fiction, right up there with aliens, space opera, and robots. Most science fiction authors have written at least one time travel story. This collection samples some of the best. TIME OUT, by Edward M. Lerner THESE STONES WILL REMEMBER, by Reginald Bretnor PROJECT MASTODON, by Clifford D. Simak 12:01 P.M., by Richard A. Lupoff TIME CONSIDERED AS A SERIES OF THERMITE BURNS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER, by Damien Broderick TIME AND TIME AGAIN, by H. Beam Piper TRY, TRY AGAIN, by John Gregory Betancourt THE ETERNAL WALL, by Raymond Z. Gallun THE MAN FROM TIME, by Frank Belknap Long OF TIME AND TEXAS, by William F. Nolan THE EDGE OF THE KNIFE, by H. Beam Piper THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT (10), by Grendel Briarton TIME BUM, by C.M. Kornbluth NEBOGIPFEL AT THE END OF TIME, by Richard A. Lupoff UNBORN TOMORROW, by Mack Reynolds LOST IN THE FUTURE, by John Victor Peterson THE WINDS OF TIME, by James H. Schmitz ARMAGEDDON -- 2419 A.D., by Philip Francis Nowlan THE MAN WHO SAW THE FUTURE, by Edmond Hamilton A TRAVELER IN TIME, by August Derleth THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT (71), by Grendel Briarton FLIGHT FROM TOMORROW, by H. Beam Piper IN THE CRACKS OF TIME, by David Grace SWEEP ME TO MY REVENGE!, by Darrell Schweitzer THE SOLID MEN, by C.J. Henderson THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT (Epsilon), by Grendel Briarton And don't forget to search this ebook store for "Wildside Megapack" to see many more entries in this series, covering westerns, mysteries, science fiction, pulp fiction, and much, much more!

In his Foreword, Rich Horton says: "First rate stories..." "Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order" is a clever and very funny time travel romp; "The Beancounter's Cat" is set in a far future with Clarkean science sufficiently advanced to appear magical; "Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone" (with Barbara Lamar) is another look at the mystery of human destiny; "Under the Moons of Venus" is a remarkable, evocative homage to one of SF's greats." Well-known editor Gardner Dozois has said of "The Beancounter's Cat" that it ..".starts out reading like fantasy, and gradually turns into very far-future SF." Also included is an original tale with Paul Di Filippo, "Luminous Fish," taking Mike Moorcock's famous character Jerry Cornelius for a spin in the 21st century! Nine scintillating science fiction stories by a major writer in the field.

In 1919, the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote a major essay, The Spiritual Power of Matter, which shaped his understanding of the role of struggle and conflict in evolution--whether in the material or on the spiritual plane. For Teilhard, who labored to integrate the insights of evolution with his Catholic faith, and who experienced ongoing conflicts with authorities in the church, these insights continued to play out in the rest of his life. Focusing on the meaning of his seminal essay for Teilhard's life, Kathleen Duffy explores the major struggles that he experienced in his roles as scientist, priest, mystic, friend, and member of the church.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The term mantle has inspired philosophers, geographers, and theologians and shaped artists’ and mapmakers’ visual vocabularies for thousands of years. According to Veronica della Dora, mantle is the “metaphor par excellence, for it unfolds between the seen and the unseen as a threshold and as a point of tension.” Featuring numerous illustrations, The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor is an intellectual history of the term mantle and its metaphorical representation in art and literature, geography and cartography. Through the history of this metaphor from antiquity to the modern day, we learn about shifting perceptions and representations of global space, about our planetary condition, and about the nature of geography itself.

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.

The Solar System is ours. Biotechnology has provided the Settled Worlds with a riot of habitable environments; sentient craft ply the routes between the planets; the souls of the dead live on in the Noosphere, a psychic Net where they can be contacted by the living. Paradise? Not quite - and when a strange womb is recovered from a living spaceship crashed on Mars it swiftly becomes the focus of intrigue and murder as the Settled Worlds begin to disintegrate under the strain of a vicious interplanetary war between two rival factions.