Two men struggle for possession of a small boat alone on the wasteland of the Sargasso Sea. High adventure!

Two men struggle for possession of a small boat alone on the wasteland of the Sargasso Sea. High adventure!

Will Barrent had no memory of his crime . . . but he found himself shipped across space to a brutal prison-planet. On Omega, his only chance to advance himself -- and stay alive -- is to commit an endless series of violent crimes. The average inmate's life expectancy from time of arrival is three years. Can Barrent survive, escape, and return to Earth to clear his name?

GENOCIDE by David Bischoff. The alien queen is dead, the hive mind left to flounder...and on a world bereft of its leader two strains of Alien divide their forces for world-shattering, acid-drenched war. On Earth, in the wake of alien infestation, athletes are flocking to humanity's Goodwill Games. But some come with a deadly new tool: a drug called Fire, distilled from the very essence of the Aliens' body chemistry.The military wants it. Pharmaceutical kingpin Daniel Grant wants it. But the only place the essential ingredient can be found is on that terrible world, convulsed by Alien holocaust. ALIEN HARVEST by Robert Sheckley. Royal jelly, the most illicit of Alien by-products, is keeping Dr Stan Myakovsky alive. A once-famous scientist fallen on hard times, Stan is fighting off the repo-men and trying hard to patent the cybernetic ant that will reinstate his reputation. Julie Lish is beautiful, mysterious, and totally amoral. She has a plan so outrageous that there might be one chance in a million to pull it off.Together they make an attempt to grab the ultimate treasure-royal jelly from an Alien hive.

The Winter 1989/1990 issue of Weird Tales showcases Featured Author Brian Lumley (who contributed 3 stories and an interview) and Featured Artist Vincent di Fate (who contributed all the artwork). Also includes Keith Taylor, Phyllis Ann Karr, and more.

'Hilarious SF satire. Douglas Adams said it was the only thing like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, although written ten years earlier. It's wonderful' Neil Gaiman This madcap cosmic farce relates the adventures of the hapless human Carmody, as he attempts to make his way home to Earth after winning the grand prize in the Intergalactic Sweepstake, encountering parallel worlds, incompetent bureaucrats and talking dinosaurs on the way. 'The greatest entertainer ever produced by science fiction ... a feast of wit and intelligence' J. G. Ballard

Robert Sheckley was science fiction's in-house reply to the
black humorists of the 1950s and 60s: Bruce Jay Friedman,
Terry Southern, and the young Thomas Pynchon were his nonetoo-
distant relatives; Mort Sahl's comedy, Charles Schultz's
cartoons, and Tom Lehrer's songs all mined similar veins.
Sheckley targeted the conformity and consumerism of our
mid-century technotopia while it was still under construction.
His new worlds, alternate universes, and future dystopias have
only become more present with the passing years, even as his
career, played out both in the pulp magazines and in front-line
venues like "Playboy "and "Omni," is a glimpse of a time when
"science fiction writer" could be a kind of hipster credential.
Mordant, absurdist, and deadpan, the best of Sheckley's dissident
farces represent science fiction's high-water mark as an
allegorical clearinghouse for twenty-century angst.

'The greatest entertainer ever produced by science fiction' J. G. Ballard These surreal, elegantly witty tales from one of the most esteemed writers of science fiction encompass indignant aliens, stranded space explorers, shapeshifters, a company that manufactures designer planets and a deadly hunting game in far-future New York. 'Robert Sheckley is one of the great funny writers' Douglas Adams 'A writer not quite like any other whose forte is his own brand of strange and wonderful humour' The New York Times 'Genuinely funny SF' Neil Gaiman

Something had gone wrong when they'd loaded the ship, and the rations hadn't "quite" lasted long enough to make the outbound end of the uranium prospecting trip. Then they found an abandoned world, and landed the ship on an old warehouse facility . . . and tried to found somehting to eat.

Not an easy thing to do, going through an alien warehouse when they could barely read the manuals, and had not much cluse as to the nature of the local biology.

They would have eaten a horse, if there'd been one. But there wasn't. And that was probably for the best -- it might have eaten them first!

THE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF A NEW ARRIVAL ON OMEGA AVERAGED THREE EARTH YEARS Barrent had been tried, convicted, and memory-washed on Earth - an Earth strangely altered and stratified by fear of the radical and non-conformist. Now he was serving his sentence on Omega - a prison planet walled by a ring of hovering guard-ships from which there was no escape. Omega was a world of horror, a savage, ruthless way of life. But it was only a momentary ordeal, a prelude to a return to Earth and the subtle terrors of its own status civilization. Robert Sheckley was a Hugo and Nebula-nominated American author. He was first published in science fiction magazines of the 1950's. His numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and comical. Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.