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Alastor, the son of an iron-master, has no inclination to follow his father's trade, preferring to work with wood. He and his musically-talented sister Catrianne leave the foundry to go and live in a town, where Alastor soon begins to specialize in making musical instruments. One day, while delivering an unusual musical instrument to a hamlet high in the mountains, he is thrown by his horse during a storm. Temporarily lame, he is forced to take refuge in a strange cabin in the forest, where the mysterious Melusine lived with her daughter Lucinia. When Alastor returns to the town, he takes Lucinia with him and marries her. They have two children, Handsel and Chanterelle. Everything goes well with the family until disaster strikes, leaving Catrianne in sole charge of the children, obliged to seek shelter first at the iron-master's foundry and then at the cabin in the mountains, where a great many surprises await them regarding their own identity and the peril overhanging the forest and the world of Faerie, which is under threat of extinction. Perhaps something can be saved, and if it can, the key to its salvation might lie, at least in part, in Catrianne's music, Handsel's uniqueness, and Chanterelle's dreams.

Mathieu Galmier, formerly of the Pasteur Institute, has to leave Paris under a cloud when one of his pioneering experiments in hematology goes awry. He is given refuge—of sorts—in London by Sir Juliam Templeforth. Unfortunately, the rewards both men hope to reap from continuing the experiments are slow to materialize. The research hits snags, and its human costs are beginning to weigh on Mathieu's conscience. Complicating matters further, some of Sir Julian's unruly Irish tenants have come to London to demand satisfaction, and Mathieu's presence has been detected by Philippe and Myrtille de Valcoeur, who have an intense interest in his research—seemingly more mystical than scientific. When complications lead to catastrophe, Mathieu has to flee. But his past proves exceedingly difficult to escape...

In the far future Earth is dying. Society has reverted to a more primitive life, much like the Middle Ages. Two men, Matthew and his brother John, who calls himself'Firefly,'set out to find the time traveller, the one person who can give purpose to their existence, the one individual who can still access past technology. The Firefly, he who lights his own way, seeks the age of Man's greatness, the time when the human race once owned the stars, when great cities stood in places that have now become rust-bowls.

Acclaimed author and scholar Brian Stableford turns his penetrating mind to matters of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in this collection of essays. He covers such diverse topics as: SLAVES OF THE DEATH SPIDERS: Colin Wilson and Existentialist Science Fiction IS THERE NO BALM IN GILEAD?: The Woeful Prophecies of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale A FEW MORE CROCODILE TEARS?: Gwyneth Jones THE ADVENTURES OF LORD HORROR: Across the Media Landscape FILLING IN THE MIDDLE: Robert Silverberg's The Queen of Springtime RICE'S RELAPSE: Memnoch the Devil FIELD OF BROKEN DREAMS: Michael Bishop's Brittle Innings THE MAGIC OF THE MOVIES H. G. WELLS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE THE MANY RETURNS OF DRACULA TARZAN'S DIVIDED SELF SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: Jacques Cazotte's The Devil in Love THE TWO THOUSAND YEAR QUEST: George Viereck's Erotic Odyssey THE PROFESSION OF SCIENCE FICTION

A plastic surgeon of the future is charged with re-creating the face of Adam, the first man. Is he just a pawn in a scheme to defraud a billionaire, or does he seriously intend to fulfill his task. And if he's successful, what does it mean to the world at large?

hey call them the'rat-catchers.'They're the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which a declining Earth has sent to re-establish contact with its long-lost colonies. Biologist Alex Alexander, together with his staff, must help solve the mysteries of human and alien ecosystems that they encounter far from home. On the world called Wildeblood, named for the ecologist/Emperor who founded it, the settlers'descendants harbor a terrible secret--a secret that Alex must uncover, if the colony is to survive. But he must also make contact with the world OTHER intelligent species, something that will take time--time that the colonists are determined not to give him. And even if can solve the biological problem, what about the diplomatic one? The Daedalus Mission, Book Three.

Kirk Markham returns to his home town of Leeds in 1999 after three years at university'down south.'In order to support himself while he tries to find a respectable career, he gets a job in a call center, which proves more challenging than he had anticipated, both professionally and socially. There he meets and falls in love with goth-girl Sheena, who is not like other girls, to put it mildly. Her uniqueness only makes her more attractive to him, and he makes every possible effort to live up to her hopes and expectations. At first, he treats his necessary involvement with the vampires of Atlantis as an intriguing game of make-believe, at which he considers himself to be a clever player, but as the game becomes increasingly serious, the possibility grows that he might be out of his depth.

Long-undisturbed Tenebrion Wood, identified in the Domesday Book and named by the Romans after a kind of'night-sprit,'stands in the way of a road development. Environmentalist Steve Pearlman recruits a number of investigators to examine the site in order to find some justification for its defense, including entomologist John Hazard. At first, the wood does not seem to be of any special scientific interest, despite the occasional profusion of its beetle population, but Hazard makes a surprising discovery in the clearing in the middle of the wood that changes the nature of his investigation drastically -- and suggests that the wood's'night-spirits'might be something far stranger than mere ghosts or goblins...

At last, the true story can finally be told of my participation in the investigation of a haunted bookshop in Barry, South Wales, organized by my good friend and fellow science fiction writer Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe. As a result of the haunting in question, or perhaps the abundant coal dust that accompanied it, I was enabled to meet the Devil and make a mutually rewarding pact with him. The story also relates my subsequent close encounter with the Devil's opposite number while participating as a volunteer in a psychology experiment at the University of Glamorgan, intended to open up a more effective conduit between the conscious and the unconscious mind. That one did not go as well, perhaps understandably given the inevitable conflict of interests, but was, and remains, no less intriguing.

This volume is the third of a set of three showcasing the work of Frédéric Boutet, the other two volumes being The Antisocial Man and Other Strange Stories and The Voyage of Julius Pingouin and Other Strange Stories. Viewed as an ensemble, the collections illustrate the range and development of Boutet's early work, and provide a few representative samples of its later evolution. Here are a baker's dozen of supernatural, horror, and fantasy tales from the early twentieth century, edited and translated by the well-known science fiction writer, Brian Stableford, including the novella,'When We Have Passed On,'and the highly original short novel,'Claude Mercoeur's Reflection,'both of them significant and highly readable works of French fantastic literature.

Although Gaston Danville was one of the earliest contributors to the French magazine, Mercure de France, considered a voice for the symbolist movement, he regarded himself as one of a new generation of Naturalists, interested in applying the relatively new insights of contemporary psychology to the analysis of human behavior. Danville's short fiction was unique, obsessed with the supposed psychologies of psychology and murder, and the analogies between them. He called his stories'Tales of Beyond,'but the beyond to which he referred was that of the Unconscious, to which he believe that all phenomena considered supernatural should now be attributed. The result was some of the most peculiar weird fiction ever produced, which still warrants the interest of connoisseurs of the bizarre. Here are his best eighteen stories (plus an essay), edited, translated, and with notes by Brian Stableford.

This volume is the second of a set of three showcasing the work of Frédéric Boutet, the other two volumes being The Antisocial Man and Other Strange Stories, and Claude Mercoeur's Reflection and Other Strange Stories. Viewed as an ensemble, these collections illustrate the range and development of Boutet's early work, and provide a few representative samples of its later evolution. Although several stories by Boutet were translated into English in the 1920s, especially in America, they were selected from his later works, when he was mostly writing sentimental stories and crime fiction for popular magazines; no examples of his early work, most of which consisted of offbeat supernatural fiction, have previously been rendered into English. These sixteen tales of horror and fantasy will hopefully serve to introduce the work of a highly distinctive writer of weird and baroque fiction to a new audience.

Six stories of fantasy and science fiction by a modern master, including three pieces published for the first time:'The Path of Progess,''Kalamada's Blessing,''The Shepherd's Daughter,''Shadows of the Past,''Reconstruction,'and the original short fantasy novel,'The Return of the Djinn.'

The fourth landing of the Daedalus Mission confronts Alex and his companions with a colonial culture seemingly modeled on a classic Utopian dream, but all of its inhabitants are infected with a mysterious alien parasite, and they no longer seem entirely human. Are they being controlled by the parasite, or has the parasite merely enabled them to transform themselves? Can the visitors from Earth avoid infection themselves, and what will the consequences be if they cannot? For once, the risks of the contact seem potentially far greater than any possible reward--but that still leaves the visitors with the necessity of passing judgment and deciding what to do, in an exceedingly awkward situation. Daedalus Mission, Book Four.

The final contact made by the Daedalus Mission begins badly, even before the ship makes a hard landing in the middle of nowhere. The situation of the colony doesn't seem to make any sense, and neither does the situation of the indigenous aliens--the Sets--that have helped the colony survive and thrive. Alex Alexander doesn't take long to work out a hypothesis that might explain the mystery--a hypothesis that the people on the ground have already worked out for themselves--and he's fortunate enough to fall in with a colonist who's obsessively determined to prove the hypothesis. Unfortunately, the quest seems likely to become so dangerous that both of them might die trying--and there's too much at stake not to take it to the very limit of possibility, no matter what the cost. The stunning conclusion (Book Six) of The Daedalus Mission series.

In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds like New Alexandria to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, starship pilots have become the great romantic heroes of the day. When Star-Pilot Grainger is rescued from a shipwreck, he finds himself pressed into reluctant service to fly the Hooded Swan, the prototype of a new kind of interstellar ship. He's also picked up an alien parasite that's determined to share his brain. Under these dire circumstances, can Grainger possibly stay out of trouble? Not a chance!

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. Dendra is a stable world, covered by a huge, unchanging forest—except that nothing living can really be free of change. The planet has no seasons, but its animal life still undergoes life-cycles involving birth, maturation, metamorphosis, and death. The Earth colony sent to tame the world has failed, at least in the terms expected of it, and seems beyond redemption; but the crew of the Daedalus still has to find out exactly why and how the program has gone wrong. Provided, of course, that they can survive the investigation itself!