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”.

The Eternals, the ruling class of the Future, had the power of life and death not only over every human being but over the very centuries into which they were born. Past, Present, and Future could be created or destroyed at will. You had to be special to become an Eternal. Andrew Harlan was special. Until he committed the one unforgivable sin - falling in love. Eternals weren’t supposed to have feelings. But Andrew could not deny the sensations that were struggling within him. He knew he could not keep this secret forever. And so he began to plan his escape.

Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a "full empty", something goes wrong.

For the better part of five decades, Jerry Pournelle's name has been synonymous with hard-hitting science fiction. For the first time, all of Pournelle's best short work has been collected in a single volume. Herein you will find over a dozen short stories, each with a new introduction by editor and longtime Pournelle assistant John F. Carr, as well as essays and remembrances by Pournelle collaborators and admirers.

For Meredith Gale, ending her life seems like her only choice, and that choice is the reason she’s dangling by her fingertips from a bridge high above the freezing water of the San Francisco Bay. But someone or some thing has other plans for Meredith, and as her fingers slip from the cold steel of the bridge, a disembodied voice asks her a simple question: “Candidate 13: Do you wish to be saved?” Realizing her mistake too late, Meredith screams “Yes!” and instantly finds herself transported to a mysterious island, alongside hundreds of other Candidates like her.

The Snail on the Slope takes place in two distinct worlds. One is the Administration, an institution run by a surreal, Kafkaesque bureaucracy whose aim is to govern the forest below. The other is the Forest, a place of fear, weird creatures, primitive people, and violence. Peretz, who works at the Administration, wants to visit the Forest. Candide crashed in the Forest years ago and wants to return to the Administration. Their journeys are surprising and strange, and listeners are left to puzzle out the mysteries of these foreign environments.

Before Area X, there was Ambergris. Jeff VanderMeer conceived what would become his first cult classic series of speculative works: the Ambergris trilogy. Now, for the first time ever, the story of the sprawling metropolis of Ambergris is collected into a single volume, including City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.

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.

The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Miyamoto Musashi becomes a reluctant hero to a host of people whose lives he has touched and by whom he has been touched. Inevitably, he has to pit his skill against the naked blade of his greatest rival.

Twelve stories by science-fiction master Stanislaw Lem, nine of them never before published in English.

In the distant future, corporations have become sustainable communities with their own militaries, and corporate goals have essentially replaced political ideology. On a youthful, rebellious impulse, Lawrence joined the military of a corporation that he now recognizes to be ruthless and exploitative. His only hope for escape is to earn enough money to buy his place in a better corporation.

There has always been a darkness to Ilmar, but never more so than now. The city chafes under the heavy hand of the Palleseen occupation, the choke-hold of its criminal underworld, the boot of its factory owners, the weight of its wretched poor and the burden of its ancient curse. What will be the spark that lights the conflagration? Despite the city's refugees, wanderers, murderers, madmen, fanatics and thieves, the catalyst, as always, will be the Anchorwood–that dark grove of trees, that primeval remnant, that portal, when the moon is full, to strange and distant shores.

Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden.

Five years ago Corin Cadence's brother entered the Serpent Spire - a colossal tower with ever-shifting rooms, traps, and monsters. Those who survive the spire's trials return home with an attunement: a mark granting the bearer magical powers. According to legend, those few who reach the top of the tower will be granted a boon by the spire's goddess. He never returned. Now it's Corin's turn. He's headed to the top floor, on a mission to meet the goddess.

Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving north to meet some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of hitchhikers who persuade him to take a job at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional institute involve all sorts of magical beings - a wish-granting fish, a tree mermaid, a cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a dream-interpreting sofa, and many more.

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a "full empty", something goes wrong.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely known as the greatest Russian writers of science fiction, and their 1964 novel Hard to Be a God is considered one of the greatest of their works. It tells the story of Don Rumata, who is sent from Earth to the medieval kingdom of Arkanar with instructions to observe and to influence, but never to directly interfere.

After a brief and deadly civil war, in which forbidden weapons were used, Russia is just a fraction of what it used to be. The border of what now proudly calls itself the "Moscow Empire" is set just a few hundred miles away from the capital, by the broad river Volga, now poisoned by the fallout. For years, nobody has come from the other side of the bridge. Until now...

When young programmer Alexander Ivanovich Privalov picks up two hitchhikers while driving in Karelia, he is drawn into the mysterious world of the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, where research into magic is serious business.

When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at a remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get involved in any police work. He's there to ski, drink brandy, and loaf around in blissful solitude. But he hadn't counted on the other vacationers, an eccentric bunch, including a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, a sulky teenager of indeterminate gender, and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses.

In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well. The Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end.

It should have never happened. But it did. It should have been left alone. But it wasn’t. No one should have gone in. But someone did.

Zone guide Yuri Bonyev escorts three scientists to an uncharted sector in the Zone chasing rumors of an old military bunker. Not everyone is who they appear to be, and Yuri learns perhaps some secrets are better left buried.

At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.

The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight-papyralysis-has obliterated much of the planet's written history. However, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community.

A witty and inventive satire of "men of science" and their thinking, as a team of scientists races to decode a mysterious message from space. "I had the feeling that I was standing at the cradle of a new mythology. A last will and testament...we as the posthumous heirs of Them...."

Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.

Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations that are like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates.

Twelve stories by science-fiction master Stanislaw Lem, nine of them never before published in English.