Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler is back with a new anthology that has gathered the intel on the world's greatest secret agents, declassified here for the first time.

1820s California, in a bygone era of sprawling haciendas and haughty caballeros, suffers beneath the whip of oppression. Missions are pillaged, native peasants are abused, and innocent men and women are persecuted by the corrupt governor and his army. But a champion of freedom rides the highways. His identity hidden behind a mask, the laughing outlaw Zorro defies the tyrant’s might. A deadly marksman and a demon swordsman, his flashing blade strikes down those who exploit the poor and oppressed.

A runaway planet hurtles toward Earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escape the doomed Earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans.

As daughter of the royal architect, Ikki set out to discover a new world the day she flew her homemade bi-plane up beyond Crete's artificial sun. Instead, she crashed her plane and found herself on trial for a crime she didn't commit. She is exiled to the Labyrinth - the city's ever-shifting mechanical core - and she has seven days to find her way back out. If Ikki can escape in time, she will be declared innocent by the gods of Crete. But no one has ever returned.

In his fiction, HG Wells explored various fantasy and science fiction sub-genres, from alien invasion narratives through time travel to dystopian tales. He was also an innovator and pioneer in matters of plot and style, as proven by the 33 short stories in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. The tale of the title is about a mountaineer who discovers a secluded valley of blind people. When he tries to tell them about the sense of sight, they scoff and attribute it to an over-active imagination.

For thousands of years, Carter Horton has been traveling across the galaxy toward a distant world capable of supporting human life. At journey's end, awakened from his millennia-long sleep by a curiously adaptive android, he is informed that his crewmates have all perished due to a system malfunction. But worse is yet to come: Horton's sentient ship is refusing to return him to Earth, and a strangely cordial predator is waiting for him on the planet's surface.

The Republic poses questions that endure: What is justice? What form of community fosters the best possible life for human beings? What is the nature and destiny of the soul? What form of education provides the best leaders for a good republic? What are the various forms of poetry and the other arts, and which ones should be fostered and which ones should be discouraged? How does knowing differ from believing?

The fate of the entire Marvel Universe hangs in the balance as Earth's mightiest heroes face their greatest challenge! Summoned across the stars by the mysterious and unbelievably powerful Beyonder, the Avengers, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men are set against their deadliest foes on the mysterious planet known as Battleworld - with the winner promised the ultimate prize. But as battle lines are drawn, new alliances are forged, and old enemies clash, one among them is not willing to settle for anything less than godhood.

Supergenius and quasi-villain Rex normally can’t go a week without accidentally endangering Decimen City with her science shenanigans. It’s been two weeks since her genetically engineered dinosaurs rampaged through town—a good streak for her—but the peace is broken when actual villain Last Dance sets his sights on Decimen. And he wants Rex’s help. Before Rex can say “I didn’t do it,” superheroes who’ve dragged her to jail on her worst days are crowding her lab to conscript her into quasi-herodom.

Two dozen tales of future shock and twisted history from an undisputed king of cyberpunk science fiction, including Nebula Award finalists “Sunken Garden” and “Dori Bangs.”

A collection of 20 classic short stories by Isaac Asimov, author of the Foundation series, featuring the definitive and only in-print version of “Nightfall”.

Out of the Silent Planet is the first novel of the Cosmic Trilogy, considered to be C.S. Lewis' chief contribution to the science fiction genre.

Since being forced into retirement by the CIA, Miles Kendig had tried everything in an effort to satisfy his hunger for excitement. But he could not recreate the ultimate conflict of life or death with no rules, the experience of pitting himself against the enemy with no holds barred. Despite his bitterness at being shelved by the CIA, Miles was still scrupulously American--so when he found himself tempted by an offer from the Russians, he realized the time had come for him to put up or give up.

From early work like "Rescue Party" and "The Lion of Comarre", through classic stories including "The Star", "Earthlight", "The Nine Billion Names of God", and "The Sentinel" (kernel of the later novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), all the way to later work like "A Meeting with Medusa" and "The Hammer of God", this comprehensive short story collection encapsulates one of the great science fiction careers of all time.

A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.

Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride.

Vannemar Morgan's dream is to link Earth to the stars with the greatest engineering feat of all time: a 24,000-mile-high space elevator. But first he must solve a million technical, political, and economic problems while allaying the wrath of God. For the only possible site on the planet for Morgans Orbital Tower is the monastery atop the Sacred Mountain of Sri Kanda.

Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last 15 years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.

Cities were crushed by the falling spacecraft, but one ship didn't crash. It remained intact and disgorged hordes of alien soldiers determined to fight to the death. The abandoned vessels also contained a wealth of advanced technology. Led by David Levinson, the greatest minds of our world developed deadly new hybrid weapons. Bases were built on the moon, Mars, and beyond. A new generation of defenders had to be trained, for the invaders would return.

On September 28th, a geologist working in Death Valley finds a mysterious new cinder cone in very well-mapped area. On October 1, the government of Australia announces the discovery of an enormous granite mountain. Like the cinder cone, it wasn't there six months ago.

Something is happening to planet Earth, and the truth is too terrifying to contemplate

When the technology for twisting to other probability patterns was developed, a grateful Earth solved its overcrowding by sending people to live on Earths where plants and animals never got started. Each family could have its own planet, because there was an infinite number of such alt-Earths available, and the computers never assigned the same one twice. Trouble was - someone else had the same idea!

They first appear as a series of dots on astronomical plates, heading from Saturn directly toward Earth. Since the ringed planet carries no life, scientists deduce the mysterious ship to be a visitor from another star. The world's frantic efforts to signal the aliens go unanswered. The first contact is hostile: the invaders blast a Soviet space station, seize the survivors, and then destroy every dam and installation on Earth with a hail of asteriods.

Two masters of science fiction collaborate on one wild post-apocalyptic story. After World War III, the Servants of Wrath cult deified the mysterious Carlton Lufteufel, creator of the doomsday weapon that wiped out much of humanity. But to worship the man, they need an image of him as a god, and no one has ever seen him. So the high priests send a limbless master painter named Tibor McMasters into the wilderness on a mission to find Lufteufel and capture his likeness.

To many thousands of listeners world-wide, Titus Crow is the psychic sleuth - the cosmic voyager and investigator - of Brian Lumley's Cthulhu Mythos novels, from The Burrowers Beneath to Elysia. But before The Burrowers and Crow's transition, his exploits were chronicled in a series of short stories and novellas uncollected in the USA, except in limited editions.

Captain Cleve Connell has already made a name for himself among pilots when he arrives in Korea during the war there to fly the newly operational F-86 fighters against the Soviet MIGs. His goal, like that of every fighter pilot, is to chalk up enough kills to become an ace. But things do not turn out as expected.

The story of The Tripods was the basis of a popular BBC television series in the 1980s, where humanity has been conquered and enslaved by "the tripods", unseen alien entities that travel about in gigantic three-legged walking machines.

Now a modern classic, this story of two boys' friendship at an exclusive New Hampshire prep school as it parallels the inescapable and escalating atmosphere of World War II, is intense and engaging to the last word.

The earth's surface is no longer habitable. All humanity is sequestered beneath the ground, couched in isolation and contentment. The Machine provides the needs of humanity. Mankind becomes subservient drones to the life-supporting Machine. But what happens when the Machine stops?

Everyone knew the legend of Christopher Sim. Fighter. Leader. An interstellar hero with a rare talent for war, Sim changed mankind's history forever when he forged a ragtag group of misfits into the weapon that broke the back of the alien Ashiyyur. But now, Alex Benedict has found a startling bit of information, long buried in an ancient computer file. If it is true, then Christopher Sim was a fraud.

Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II stands as the crowning achievement of one of America's most celebrated storytellers. Like no other books about the war, Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events - and all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of World War II - as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom.