"Those who yearn for the Good Old Days are bound to like it.... Those who insist on the close reasoning and satirical wit of modern science fiction will find surprising amounts of both here; and if, like myself, you have a foot in both camps, you're sure to be delighted by this connoisseur's blend of the quaint and the ageless... not dated writing and is never likely to be; it's lucid, didactic, analytical, and above all, zestful." --Damon Knight, "In Search of Wonder"

First published in the fabulously rare pulp magazine "The Thrill Book" in 1919, this masterful blend of time-travel fantasy, alternate realities, and social satire propels early 20th century characters into the Philadelphia of the year 2118, in which the city is an isolated dystopia run by a corrupt oligarchy, the Liberty Bell has been transformed into a disintegration machine, and William Penn is worshiped as a god. For readers actually familiar with the Quaker City, there is the added pleasure of seeing an eerily recognizable rendition of the past (1918) projected into a strange future. For anyone, it is still an exciting melodrama filled with striking images and vivid characters.

One of the genuine classics of early pulp science fiction.

Francis Stevens was a pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948), the first woman to be a major contributor of fantastic fiction to the pulp magazines. She wrote primarily for "The Argosy" and "All-Story," but also appeared in "Weird Tales" and elsewhere. Her other novels include "The Citadel of Fear" and "Claimed." Her shorter works have been collected as "The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy."

Seventeen fantasies by one of the field's most prolific short story authors, including tales of...mad gods, specters returning from the beyond, inexplicable enigmas from outer space, a romantic and surreal interlude of the legendary madman, Tom O'Bedlam, time travel to allow an irate professor to settle the Shakespearean authorship controversy, and the King Arthur legend--plus genuinely frightening horror, including the celebrated story, "The Dead Kid." Mike Ashley calls the author "today's supreme stylist" of fantasy, and Tanith Lee says that "Schweitzer is a story-teller, by whose smoky fire one may sit spellbound." First-rate stories of the fantastic by a World Fantasy Award winner

" This] novel has immense power in its climax," said The Encyclopedia of Fantasy about Darrell Schweitzer's 1982 novel, THE SHATTERED GODDESS. Now, at last, here's the companion volume to that work, a cycle of eleven stories set "in the time of the death of the Goddess." This is an Earth of the far future, when the planet has declined into chaos, and darkness looms at the end of human history. Here you'll meet...a dadar, a wizard's shadow attempting to become a man; two sorcerers grotesquely transformed by their fratricidal hatred; a musician who becomes the lord of death; a boy-priest consumed by divine visions; and a witch who loves a god, among many others. Here's strangeness, wonder, and terror in the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith's Xothique or Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. Schweitzer is a master fantasist, whom anthologist Mike Ashley once called "today's supreme stylist." Great fantasy reading, now collected into book form for the first time

A collection of interviews with masters of fantasy and science fiction, including: Terry Bisson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Brunner, Jonathan Carroll, Robert Holdstock, Ellen Kushner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, Ray Faraday Nelson, Frederik Pohl, Dan Simmons, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and Jack Williamson. All interviews conducted by Darrell Schweitzer.

Under pressure from the reading public Arthur Conan Doyle brought his famous detective back from the dead in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. We learn that Holmes actually faked his own death in order to avoid being killed by one of his many enemies. Thirteen classic mysteries follow this admission.