Robert Sheckley:
Masters of Science Fiction :
From his first published work of fiction in 1952 until his death in 2005, Robert Sheckley gave us more than two hundred short stories, along with dozens of novels. He is generally known as one of the great humorists in the science fiction field — his comedies are sometimes wry and often gonzo. They were very influential (Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy shows signs of Sheckley’s sway) and you’ll find them in fine form in such stories as “The Day the Aliens Came,” “What Is Life?,” and “The Two Sheckleys.”
But Robert Sheckley’s short fiction did more than just make us laugh. His stories, scared, thrilled, amused, excited, beguiled, inveigled, alarmed, charmed, and disarmed readers of science fiction anthologies and magazines for the better part of a century…and with this collection, they’ll continue to do so.
Robert Sheckley wrote frequently of everyman heroes caught in a world they don’t understand, and you’ll find honest, hard-working joes in stories here like “The Altar,” “A Ticket to Transai,” and “The Mountain without a Name.”
But he also liked to explore mythology and the nature of heroism, which you’ll find in full force in such stories as “Agamemnon’s Run,” “The Quijote Robot,” and “The Never-Ending Western Movie.” Two other topics that interested Sheckley were the ways in which humans interact with their machines, and the ways in which humans interact with each other. Both themes are on grand display in stories like “Watchbird,” “The Girls and Nugent Miller,” and “Seventh Victim.”
With thirty-one of his best stories — including the short novels Dramocles and Minotaur Maze — this collection is equally good for readers revisiting old friends and for those discovering Sheckley’s work for the first time. From the dangers of courtship to the perils of the surveillance state, from the troubles with utopia to the meaning of life, these stories offer rewards for every reader.
Robert Sheckley was born in Brooklyn in 1928 and began publishing fiction in 1951. His short stories appeared in magazines such as Galaxy, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Playboy. He published more than twenty novels and edited Omni magazine. His stories were adapted for television and film many times, most notably in the movies Freejack and The Tenth Victim. He received the Author Emeritus career honor from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2001. He died in 2005.
Signed limited hardcover. Signed by Jim & Ruth Keegan
The Book of Skulls
Published in 1972, Robert Silverberg’s The Book of Skulls confounded reviewers and science fiction fans with its then-present day road-trip setting, seemingly non-science fiction elements, and experimental narrative encompassing four different points of view.
This new edition of The Book of Skulls features a new introduction by Malcolm Edwards, an afterword by Robert Silverberg, a gallery of covers of previous editions of the book, and new cover and endpaper artwork by John Anthony di Giovanni. In addition, the book’s frontispiece is a reprint of Jim Burns’s cover for the 1980s Bantam paperback, here reproduced in gorgeous full color, with no obscuring title or author information.
The edition is limited to 300 copies.
Signed by all contributors.
Centipede Press
Centipede Press have finally published all of the Averoigne stories in one stunning volume. Clark Ashton Smith’s unparalleled imagination is complimented by the artwork of David Ho, who has created 12 double-page, full color artworks, one for each story, plus an assortment of small devices.
Combined with stunning illustrations, an oversize format, over 11 inches tall, with four color printing throughout on silky Italian paper. With printed endsheets, ribbon marker, signature page, and cloth binding in Italian Cialux cloth, all wrapped in a stunning dustjacket, this is probably the finest book ever created for Clark Ashton Smith’s works.
Only 200 signed copies were released plus an unknown number of unsigned copies. We have an unsigned copy and must say that it truly is as advertised.
Clark Ashton Smith:
The Averoigne Chronicles
Smith(1893-1961) wrote twelve Averoigne stories, ten of which appeared in Weird Tales at some point and are among the most vivid and breathtaking in all of fantasy literature.
Averoigne mythically lies in Southern France.It has one major town, the walled city of Vyones, the seat of the Archbishop and home to a magnificent cathedral. The other important towns and villages are Ximes, Perigon, Sainte Zenobie, Moulins, Les Hiboux, and Touraine. The best road in the province travels between Vyones in the north and Ximes in the south. The river Isoile wends through the center of the province and empties out in a marsh to the south. The most important feature of Averoigne is the thick forest that covers most of the center of the province and gives the region its sinister repute. Other places in Averoigne with sorcerous reputations are the ruined castles of Fausseflammes and Ylrougne.
Smith sprinkles details about the province throughout the stories, although the most straightforward portrait appears in “The Maker of Gargoyles”:
The term ‘haunted’ is applied frequently to the region. For reasons unknown, Averoigne suffers from intrusions of supernatural creatures. Sorcery, although illegal as in all of medieval Europe, lurks in many places, even within the church. The people tolerate a few astrologers and dabblers in the magical arts, but many sorcerers have evil agendas and utilize power described as ‘diabolical’ and hold converse with infernal creatures.
Bram Stoker:
Dracula
In 1899-1900, a Swedish newspaper published a translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This version, titled Mörkrets makter (Powers of Darkness), is almost twice as long as the standard text of Dracula published in 1897. In addition, it contains numerous scenes not included in the 1897 text, along with a new ending and significant alterations of character names (Jonathan Harker becomes Thomas Harker; Dracula himself is referred to as Mavros Draculitz).
This edition of Powers of Darkness should not be confused with a book of the same title published in 2017, which was an English translation of a highly truncated Icelandic translation of Dracula that is about half the length of the 1897 text.
There is a strong possibility that the Swedish version of Dracula was founded on an early draft of the novel that found its way to Sweden in the 1890s. The translator may have added scenes and episodes to the text, especially passages where it is suggested that Dracula is conducting a fascist political conspiracy.
The Swedish text has been translated by Rickard Berghorn, a leading Swedish scholar and publisher of weird fiction, and edited by S. T. Joshi and Martin Andersson, who are both experts on the weird fiction of the turn of the 20th century, and this edition features an exclusive new foreword by Dacre Stoker. As John Edgar Browning has written: “Mörkrets makter (Powers of Darkness) is among the most important discoveries in Dracula’s long history.” Now, more than a century after its initial publication, it appears unabridged in English.
The Centipede Press edition of this book is a massive 824 pages with a comprehensive introduction and 11 full page and four double-page illustrations.
In 1897 Abraham "Bram" Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) published what must be one of the most popular books of all time - Dracula. The book has inspired more than 1000 novels and 200 films featuring Dracula. Stoker himself is a bit of a mystery - an academic who managed a theatre and was the personal assistant of Sir Henry Irving (said to be the inspiration of the character) and died in poverty.
As a added bit of trivia he married a celebrated beauty who chose Stoker over her former suitor, Oscar Wilde.
Whilst Stoker didn’t create the ‘vampire’, as there were already various poems and stories dealing with vampires, but he certainly defined the characteristics of the ‘vampire' in it’s modern form.What is notable about ‘ Dracula' is that it is one of the most successful books written in epistolary form to date, the novel being compiled entirely of letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, telegrams, doctor's notes, ship's logs, and the like. A must read if you are serious about the genre.
The Night Doctor And Other Tales by Steve Rasnic Tem
Author Dan Simmons has called him “One of the finest and most productive writers of imaginative literature in North America.”
This new collection of 25 stories (including two appearing here for the first time) collects the best of his dark fiction published since his landmark Centipede tome 'Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors'.
In 'The Night Doctor And Other Tales', you will encounter the most haunting figures ever to cross Tem’s imagination: a man obsessed with his own breath and the breathing he hears that is not his own; a husband waiting for his wife as new bodies appear at the bottom of his yard; a weekend fisherman and the unseen man sharing his fishing hut; a loyal husband dealing with the latest changes in his wife’s physical appearance; a strange widower in his house by the sea; a devoted mother trying to protect her son from the nightmares of the past; a son returning to a dreaded summer vacation spot; a grandfather protecting his grandchildren from a legacy of dark transformations; and, in the title story, an elderly man awaits the visit of a mysterious family physician.
With 336 pages of new material, ribbon marker, handsome signature page, and attractive dustjacket by artist Gary Laib, this is a phenomenal collection by one of horror’s most distinctive voices.
As part of Centipede Press's program of publishing classic genre novels from the past in the spectacular format that they merit, we turn to the works of British author Bernard Taylor who exploded onto the scene with the 1976 release of The Godsend'
Tales of xenogenesis have been a sub-genre of horror fiction for many, many years with notable examples including such landmark pieces of fiction as Ray Bradbury’s “The Small Assassin” among many others.
From the introduction of the foundling “Bonnie” to the Marlowe family to the novel’s conclusion, Bernard Taylor demonstrates a remarkable gift for pacing, and subtly builds layer upon layer of tension and discomfort. We can only watch helplessly as an inexorable doom stalks the four Marlowe children while the parents are incapable of protecting them. While the parallels between “Bonnie’s” actions and the real-life behavior of the cuckoo are more than a touch obvious, it is Taylor’s skillful building horror upon horror without ever resorting to overt violence and gore that renders this short novel such a classic of the field. When your debut novel is selected by the legendary Charles L. Grant as his pick for inclusion in Horror: 100 Best Books, you are definitely doing something right.
Limited to only 250 copies signed by the author, introducer, and cover artist, the book has a ribbon marker and full color endpapers.
Punktown by Jeffrey Thomas:
In 1980, Jeffrey Thomas began writing his first stories set in the noirish, far future city called Punktown — prefiguring the coining of the terms “cyberpunk” and “New Weird” — but it wasn’t until 2000 that his debut collection of these tales was published, by Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy Press.
Since that time, there have been further collections of short stories, plus a number of novels, two shared world anthologies, and a roleplaying game set in the Punktown universe.
Except in rare cases, the Punktown stories seldom share the same protagonist or continue a single plotline. They are glimpses into the lives of the city’s remarkable denizens, so that the reader is like a drone, stealthily trailing after one character to spy on a critical event in their life before moving on to the next.
These characters represent the colorful variety of Punktown’s citizenry: the descendants of the human colonists who founded this city on a far-flung planet, the indigenous race called the Choom, fantastically imagined beings from a countless array of other worlds and even other dimensions, not to mention sentient machines.
Beyond the setting, there is no simple template, no predictable theme or approach for a Punktown story.
Rife with grotesque imagery and nightmarish situations, most often they combine elements of horror with science fiction, but just as readily other genres such as crime fiction will enter into the mix, with the occasional nod to Lovecraft. Many of the stories function as a vehicle for social commentary, even satire of a darkly humorous nature.
First and foremost, these are stories of people — not always human in their physical makeup, but three-dimensional and relatable — living their desperate lives in a monstrous city that seems the personification of a universe intent on snuffing them out. As George Mann says in his introduction to Volume 2:
“…in these tales of a distant world, in a distant future, Thomas makes use of the alien to show us what it is to be human.”
This omnibus of three volumes collects several decades’ worth of Punktown short fiction.
A generous cross-section of the city’s inhabitants is represented here. Gangsters and detectives, baristas and booksellers, cloned laborers and obsessed artists, mutants and lovers, monsters and ghosts.
Whatever their guise, readers might well recognize themselves in one of them…or all of them.
Each book is bound in full black European cloth with ribbon marker, head and tail bands, stamping on spine and front, and a signature page in each. Each book has full wraparound dustjacket art by David Ho and several black & white interior illustrations.
Presented as a slipcased set.
Now available in an illustrated hardcover with a new introduction by noir historian Bill Crider. Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small town in Texas. The worst thing most people can say against him is that he’s a little slow and a little boring. But, then, most people don’t know about the sickness, the sickness that almost got Lou put away when he was younger. The sickness that is about to surface again.
Widely considered to be Jim Thompson’s masterpiece, this edition features color and black & white artwork, reproductions of old paperback covers and film posters, and is signed by Bill Crider, Patrick Loehr, and Paul Wedlake. Bound in full black cloth and a gorgeous dustjacket.
Now available for the first time in an illustrated hardcover edition with a new introduction by esteemed horror writer Laird Barron. As high sheriff of Potts County, Nick Corey spends most of his time eating, sleeping and avoiding trouble. If only people, especially some troublesome pimps, his foul-tempered wife, and his half-witted brother-in-law, would stop pushing him around. Because when Nick is pushed, he begins to kill, or to make others do his killing for him!
This edition features color and black & white artwork, reproductions of old paperback covers and film posters, and is signed by Laird Barron, Patrick Loehr, and Paul Wedlake. Bound in full black cloth and a gorgeous dustjacket.
Now available for the first time in an illustrated hardcover edition with a new introduction by Joe R. Lansdale. Young, beautiful, and fearfully abused, Mona was the kind of girl even a hard man like Dillon couldnÕt bring himself to use. But when Mona told him about the vicious aunt who had turned her into something little better than a prostitute, and about the money the old lady has stashed away, Dillon found it surprisingly easy to kill for her.
This edition features color and black & white artwork, reproductions of old paperback covers and film posters, and is signed by Joe R. Lansdale, Patrick Loehr, and Paul Wedlake. Bound in full black cloth and a gorgeous dustjacket.
Blindsight by Peter Watts
‘Blindsight' is the Hugo Award-nominated novel , “a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive” (The Globe and Mail).
Two months have passed since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent, until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet?
Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can’t feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world.
You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find — but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them…
Echopraxia
Prepare for a different kind of singularity in Peter Watts’ ‘Echopraxia', the follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel ‘Blindsight'.
It’s the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And it’s all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself.
Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat’s-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he’s turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out.
Now he’s trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasn’t yet found the man she’s sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call “The Angels of the Asteroids.” Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself.
This set of two books is limited to 300 signed and numbered copies. Each book has a ribbon marker and signature page signed by Peter Watts and artist Thomas Walker. The books are bound in full cloth with foil blocking in multiple colors, with handsome endsheets. The dustjackets are printed in four colors on top of a silver ink, creating an unusual look for the books. Each book has multiple illustrations by Thomas Walker.
Each book has a bonus short story. ‘Echopraxia' has the short story “The Colonel” while ‘Blindsight' has the short story “Insect Gods.”
First edition hardcover -signed/ ltd
First edition hardcover -signed/ ltd
Kate Wilhelm - Masters of Science Fiction
In the 1950s, Kate Wilhelm began publishing science fiction after she read a story in a magazine and said, “I can do better than that.” She quickly proved that she could do better, selling “The Mile-Long Spaceship” to John W. Campbell at Astounding. “You have an easy, pleasing and readable style, one that would, moreover, be a marked change in science fiction,” John W. Campbell wrote to her in 1957.
Soon she was invited to attend a Milford writers conference in Pennsylvania and there she met Damon Knight, whom she eventually married.
Working with Knight as he edited his Orbit anthology series, Kate Wilhelm came into her own as a writer, publishing stories that grounded their extrapolations in strong naturalistic depictions of the here-and-now. In tales such as “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” and “Baby, You Were Great,” she demonstrated her facility with speculation and science-fictional ideas, while tales like “The Village” and “The Funeral” spoke with great relevance to social and political matters.
She received a Nebula Award in 1969 for “The Planners,” one of her many well-crafted stories of scientific inquiry. Kate Wilhelm once said she didn’t set out to cross genre lines with her fiction, she just had a blind spot when it came to genre boundaries.
Consequently, her stories often blend elements of mystery, crime, and the supernatural with the scientific rigor of science fiction, and readers never know what to expect when they start to read stories like “The Gorgon Field” or “The Day of the Sharks” or “The Look Alike.” There’s no telling where these characters will take you.
Many of Kate Wilhelm’s classics tell the tale of a young woman drawn into a web of scientific intrigue, and here you’ll find “The Winter Beach,” “The Fullness of Time,”
and “The Bird Cage,” prime examples of this storytelling mode. The depth of characterization and the psychological insight in stories like “The Downstairs Room” and “The Infinity Box” firmly established her at the forefront of her generation.
Over the next five decades, Wilhelm went on to fulfill the promise — many times over — of her first wave of top-flight work
With forty-one stories (reprinted from a wide variety of sources), a perceptive introduction by Jack Dann, and an informative afterword by editor John Pelan, these two volumes are troves of reading pleasure for everyone lucky enough to get their hands on them.
• Two volume set, over 1,500 pages of Kate Wilhelm’s best science fiction.
• Introduction by Jack Dann.
• Cover artworks by Jim & Ruth Keegan.
• Afterword by John Pelan.
• Limited to 500 signed and numbered copies.
• Signed by Jack Dann, Jim & Ruth Keegan, and John Pelan, with a facsimile signature by Kate Wilhelm.
Richard Wilson - Masters of Science Fiction.
The late Richard Wilson’s fifty-year career began with “Retribution” in Oswald Train’s zine Science Adventure Stories and finished in 1988 with “The Name on the Book” in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine.
Wilson’s writing was particularly noteworthy for its consistently high level of quality. Whether working at novel length or with short stories, Wilson was incapable of writing anything less than professional, highly polished work.
This volume collects nearly two dozen of his best stories, ranging from “The Hoaxters,” “The Inhabited,” and “Those Idiots from Earth” to his brilliant posthumously-published novella “At the Sign of the Boar’s Head Nebula,” originally slated for The Last Dangerous Visions and kindly made available to us by Harlan Ellison.
“At the Sign of the Boar’s Head Nebula” is considered by several knowledgeable critics of the genre to be the finest single work that Mr. Wilson produced. It is in remarkably good company, joined with two other powerful novellas, “The Far King” and “The Nineteenth-Century Spaceship,” giving Richard Wilson a fair claim to being one of the founding fathers of steampunk.
Along with the stories, this collection includes several highly regarded novelettes, including the Nebula Award-winning “Mother to the World,” “The Story Writer,” “Gone Past,” “If A Man Answers,” “It’s Cold Outside,” “A Man Spekith,” and “See Me Not.”
Richard Wilson (1920-1987), a member of the near-legendary Futurians, is considered by many to have been one of the most consistently excellent writers of science fiction.
A journalist by trade, Wilson brought to his fiction a crisp economy of style and a precise language in a field often criticized for overly-florid prose. With stories running the gamut from the humorous to bone-chilling horror and everything in between, Richard Wilson could quite accurately be said to have written something for everyone.
Centipede Press - Hardcover, signed limited.
Kane is an immortal somewhat like the Wandering Jew, Kane's character also includes elements of Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane. He is an immortal, cursed to wander the earth until he is destroyed by the violence that he himself has created.
He sells his loyalty as a fighter to the highest bidder. He is a well-read and intelligent man who has traveled his world for centuries and is able to discuss music, poetry, politics, and many other subjects. He is also amoral and a born killer.
The Kane stories are often classified as tales of sword and sorcery (although Wagner disliked the term), which some critics have compared favourably to those of Howard and Michael Moorcock. The character Kane is considered one of the most memorable and original anti-heroes of heroic fantasy
We have to say the Nightshade editions of the collected Kane were very nice, and we have received the Centipede Press signed limited editions (with slipcase) and they are out of this world.
Karl Edward Wagner:
Wagner created his own mystical and immortal pre-historical anti-hero, Kane, whose name and background are based on traditional conceptions of the biblical Cain. A powerful, left-handed warrior-sorcerer with red hair and blue eyes, the character was described by Wagner as one "who could master any situation intellectually, or rip heads off if push came to shove”.
Gene Wolfe, is highly regarded by peers and fans. Another ‘SF grand master’ he is a multiple award winner and is renowned for his dense, allusive prose.
The Book of the New Sun is a tetralogy, a collection of essays, and a sequel. It inaugurated the so-called "Solar Cycle" that Wolfe continued after 1987 by setting other multi-volume works in the same universe, The Long Sun and Short Sun series.
The tetralogy chronicles the journey of Severian, a disgraced journeyman torturer who is exiled and forced to travel to Thrax and beyond. It is a first-person narrative, apparently translated by Wolfe into contemporary English, set in the distant future when the Sun has dimmed and Earth is cooler (a "Dying Earth" story).
This is just amazing stuff but heavy going - not for the light reader.
We are fortunate to have the huge Centipede Press signed/limited editions which are the ultimate testament to the series. In addition we also have the extremely rare 'Empires of Foliage and Flowers’ from Cheap Street.
Gene Wolfe:
Neil Gaiman gave some pointers on Gene Wolfe which are amazing true:
"I cannot tell you how to meet Gene Wolfe. I can, however, suggest a few ways to read his work. These are useful tips, like suggesting you take a blanket, a flashlight, and some candy when planning to drive a long way in the cold, and should not be taken lightly. I hope they are of some use to you. There are nine of them. Nine is a good number.
How to read Gene Wolfe:
1) Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there.
2) Do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far. It's tricksy and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at any time.
3) Reread. It's better the second time. It will be even better the third time. And anyway, the books will subtly reshape themselves while you are away from them. ‘ Peace' really was a gentle Midwestern memoir the first time I read it. It only became a horror novel on the second or the third reading.
4) There are wolves in there, prowling behind the words. Sometimes they come out in the pages. Sometimes they wait until you close the book. The musky wolf-smell can sometimes be masked by the aromatic scent of rosemary. Understand, these are not today-wolves, slinking greyly in packs through deserted places. These are the dire-wolves of old, huge and solitary wolves that could stand their ground against grizzlies.
5) Reading Gene Wolfe is dangerous work. It's a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn't mind. Gene is throwing the knives.
6) Make yourself comfortable. Pour a pot of tea. Hang up a DO NOT DISTURB Sign. Start at Page One.
7) There are two kinds of clever writer. The ones that point out how clever they are, and the ones who see no need to point out how clever they are. Gene Wolfe is of the second kind, and the intelligence is less important than the tale. He is not smart to make you feel stupid. He is smart to make you smart as well.
8) He was there. He saw it happen. He knows whose reflection they saw in the mirror that night.
9) Be willing to learn. "
The Book of the New Sun
Possibly the finest science fiction series ever written, Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun has been hailed as one of the field’s most important and enduring works. The tale of Severian and his exile from the Guild of Torturers won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1980. A triumph of imagination and inventiveness.
We are in awe of the Centipede Press editions, each contains gorgeous full color, full page illustrations by German artist Alex Preuss. The editions are oversized with a three piece cloth construction, ribbon marker and slipcase. Signed and limited to 100 copies, these are #55 except for book one. Bit of a story here, but we only found out about this edition when book two was published, by that time book one was long gone and in the subsequent years we’ve never seen a copy for sale. Jerad at Centipede Press was kind enough to make his unsigned publishers copy available to us, make a slipcase and have Gene Wolfe sign the book, which he did in bold!
So here they are in all their glory with a couple of images of the interiors.