It is 1847, and Paris is edging closer to its next revolution, but something is also astir inside Mont Dragon in the Ardeche. This is a place of annual pilgrimage for a band of enigmatic nomads, and also a place of interest to the ambitious Bishop of Viviers. In spite of his distaste for travel, Auguste Dupin makes the long southward journey, in the hope that he might be able to help an old friend, the evolutionist Claude Guerande. Guerande beli ...
Despite the development of a faster-than-light drive, Earth’s space program has been in the doldrums for centuries, as has Earth itself. Hyperspace being impossible to navigate without beacons at which to aim, there is no alternative but to wait for vessels sent out at sub-light speed decades previously to find somewhere worth going. <P> Unfortunately, when a worthwhile planet finally turns up, it doesn’t take long for political conflict ...
In the not-so-distant future, men have come to Mars to escape the oppressive Earth government. Ryan is an agent for a super-secret government agency, the Department of Control (DOC), and has always been willing to do whatever his masters want of him. But on Mars, everything is different, and all that Ryan does is read books: hardboiled, noir crime paperbacks dating from the last century. In fact, such works are read and collected by everyone on ...
"Help me!" With these simple words is triggered an awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping jaunt through the multiverses that comprise the cosmos of Morpheus, Scanner Prime to Her Puissant and Sublime Majesty, Queen Eveteria of Korynthia in Nova Europa. Faced with the inevitable consequences of his prescient visions of doom and collapse, not only for his own country, but for all of the civilized world, Morpheus must attempt the impossible: to somehow r ...
Poor Jack Wong is a clueless cadet at the Unified Space Academy when his pod is stranded on a planet of disgusting aliens. All he wants to do, other than escape, is to fulfill his proud duty to advance Earth Culture's Primary Heuristic: «Wherever possible, find the weak spot in an alien civilization and interfere as much as possible for the benefit of humanity.» It's the Human's Burden! But everything comes unstuck, made worse by ...
From the swarming, last-redoubt towers of the polar regions, where humanity huddles from the savage heat of Greenhouse Earth, to the dusty refugee camps of a shattered America; from the virtual reality landscape where teenagers seek to repair a wounded planet, to the post-human globe populated by wily transgenic heirs to mankind; and, lastly, across the ideology-splintered ruins of the U.S.A…a cast of dedicated survivors tries to make the best o ...
Weird Tales #325 (Fall 2001) features «From Out of the Crocodile's Mouth,» by Darrell Schweitzer; «The Gravedigger's Apprentice,» by Alvin Helms; «Our Temporary Supervisor,» by Thomas Ligotti; «Where All Things Perish,» by Tanith Lee; «The Wizard of Ashes and Rain,» by David Sandner, and more. ...
They call them the “rat-catchers.” They’re the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which an economically destitute Earth has dispatched on a mission to re-establish contact with its far-flung, long-lost colonies in space. Alex Alexander, the ship’s biologist, together with his staff, must help solve the mysteries of human and alien ecosystems that he encounters light-years from home. <P> Dendra is a stable world, covered by a huge, unchanging ...
Peter Bell the Third, accidentally named from the title of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, is called upon to renew his old friendship with Rowland Usher, who was deliberately named after the protagonist of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the new House of Usher that Rowland is growing in the Orinoco Delta, Usher explains the scientific work in genetics that he’s doing there to Peter, while they both mourn Rowland’s dead twin sister, Magdalen, who ...
