A Classic sci-fi trilogy. The Vacant World - Beatrice Kendrick, and her boss, engineer Allan Stern, wakes up on an upper floor of a ruined Manhattan skyscraper, thousands of years in the future when civilization has been destroyed. The pair has been in a state of suspended animation for fifteen hundred years. Changes in the earth's features as well as monstrously mutated "humans" make it clear they have little hope of survival. Beyond the Great Oblivion - Allan and Beatrice begin to discover the nature of the catastrophe that has split the Earth open. Rebuilding an airplane, they find a "bottomless" chasm near Pittsburgh where a huge portion of the Earth has been torn away to become a second moon. Alan and Beatrice earn the loyalty of the People of this Abyss and lead them from the chasm to New York. The Afterglow - Allan and Beatrice, with the People of the Abyss, prepare to recolonize the Earth's surface. But first, they must defeat the devolved, cannibalistic survivors who populate Earth's cities.

In an era when most colleges and universities have become vocational schools, their improvement measured in terms of cost reduction or instructional efficiency, the essential values of higher education are too often overlooked. Students are being filled with knowledge, but are not learning how to use it wisely, nor even understanding that it's important to do so.

According to philosopher and educator George Allan, what is most important about a college education is not what students are taught but whether they learn the moral practices that determine how they may best conduct their lives and how they can become responsible individuals-practices that cannot be taught but can only be learned in an environment that encourages imaginative play and open-ended dialogue. The most important thing colleges can offer young people, claims Allan, is a place to converse: to learn the skills of cultured intercourse and not just a trade.

Allan argues that the current goal-orientation of America's colleges and universities has undermined the very nature of higher education. He shows that while colleges historically may have been based on a religious sense of mission or on the Enlightenment's commitment to rational inquiry, today's universities have become resource centers organized to serve the needs of a diverse customer base of students. In its commitment to giving students what they want, this model of higher education not only neglects the broadening and deepening of minds, it encourages students to recognize the validity of numerous points of view without ever learning to interact creatively with them.

Writing with the same inventive openness he encourages for our colleges, Allan explores the essential nature of education and seeks to refocus the debate concerning its future. "Rethinking College Education" engages readers in fundamental issues rarely broached by the current educational literature, and it challenges American colleges and universities to reconsider their priorities before they lose completely the spirit and style that have been the sources of their importance to the nation.

In Whitehead's Radically Temporalist Metaphysics: Recovering the Seriousness of Time, George Allan argues that Whitehead's introduction of God into his process metaphysics renders his metaphysics incoherent. This notion of God, who is the reason for both stability and progressive change in the world and who is both the infinite source of novel possibilities and the everlasting repository for the finite values, inserts into a reality that is supposedly composed solely of finite entities an entity both infinite and everlasting. By eliminating this notion of God, Allan draws on the temporalist foundation of Whitehead's views to recover a metaphysics that takes time seriously. By turning to Whitehead's later writings, Allan shows how this interpretation is developed into an expanded version of the radically temporalist hypothesis, emphasizing the power of finite entities, individually and collectively, to create, sustain, and enhance the dynamic world of which we are a creative part.

Protestant institutions of higher learning have historically enrolled fewer students of color than nonsectarian colleges and universities. In this book, George Yancey explores the racial climate on Protestant campuses, examining the reasons why these institutions succeed or fail to attract a diverse student body and why students of color who do attend such institutions either succeed or fail to graduate. Of course, no major Protestant denomination endorses overt racism, and Protestant educators have indicated a wish to increase racial diversity on their campuses. Despite this expressed desire, however, Yancey finds numerous barriers to achieving such diversity. On the one hand, evangelical institutions, like the denominations that sponsor them, tend to espouse an individualistic, "colorblind" ideology that ignores racial injustices and discourages the attendance of students of color. Mainline Protestants have much more progressive racial attitudes than conservatives. Ironically, however, Protestants of color tend to be theologically conservative, and have deep disagreements with the mainline on such theological issues as biblical inerrancy and social issues like homosexuality. Yancey finds that many traditional approaches to enhancing diversity appear ineffective. Such diversity programs, he discovers, are not as effective as curriculum reforms or student led multicultural groups. Educational courses and student led groups that deal with racial issues prove to be more highly correlated with a diverse student body than multicultural, anti-racism, community, or non-European cultural programs.

Eleven of George Allan England's stories from the pulp magazines.