Classic stories of science fiction by this Nebula Grandmaster award-winner. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Contents: A Death in the House The Big Front Yard Goodnight Mr. James Dusty Zebra Neighbor Over the River &amp; Through the Woods Construction Shack Grotto of the Dancing Deer BACK COVER: . . . he wrote for so long and always so well that his excellence came to be taken for granted, as we take sunlight for granted until we go blind. - Poul Anderson 
I read Cliff's stories with particular attention, and I couldn't help but notice the simplicity and directness of the writing - the utter clarity of it. I made up my mind to imitate it, and I labored over the years to make my writing simpler, clearer, more uncluttered, to present my scenes on a bare stage. - Isaac Asimov 
Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land. - James Gunn 
Good fantasy - and that includes science fiction - takes off from the known for its flights into the new. Cliff Simak was a master of the art. His known was the rural Midwest that he loved. His new could reach to the ends of space and time, but never beyond reality. Even his cosmic aliens always had half human dimensions that made them believable. I loved him, as so many did, for his unfailing warmth and a wit that was keen but never cruel. I heard from him often during the painful time after his wife's death. His own death touched me deeply, and I'm happy to see him remembered with this collection of his best-loved stories. - Jack Williamson 
I always loved his stories, short or long. He made me love them -and the rural America of his childhood - as much as he did. - Lester del Rey 
Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that a volume of the best stories of Clifford Simak (author of the classic City) would not have been published by Putnam or Del Rey, but today we have to be grateful to the one-man firm of Tachyon Publications for preserving Over the River and Through the Woods, which includes some of Simak's best stories, including two Hugo Award winners. After all, Simak is dead, which means his career is flatlined, even if Robert Heinlein said, "to read science fiction is to read Simak. The reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all." 
Simak was a master of a special kind of nostalgic science fiction that reconciled the values of his youth (the rural Midwest of the 1920s) with the larger universe. Material that became ludicrous cliche in the hands of lesser writers - all those endless flying saucers landing in the hillbilly's back acre - was by Simak handled with elegance and dignity."A Death in the House" is typical: A farmer finds a dying alien. He does what he can, but that's very little. The farmer conceals the grave, wanting to give his "guest" that much dignity. But the alien is plantlike. It (or its young) sprouts out of the corpse. Human and alien struggle toward understanding. In "The Big Front Yard," a rural handyman finds his house transformed into a gateway to other worlds. The common people have the good sense; trouble starts when profiteers and the government get involved. The tone is light, friendly and clever. 
This is not to suggest that Simak was a writer with no hard edges. "Good Night Mr. James" is a horror story, about a duplicate human being created to destroy a particularly nasty alien illegally smuggled to Earth. But the gentler mode was more typical, and he could also write humor. "Dusty Zebra" is a long technological joke, maybe a bit slight to be included when a 50-year career must be distilled into 218 pages. Simak's last story, the last in the book, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," is about an immortal caveman, quite different from de Camp's "Gnarly Man." He is the original artist who painted that cave art the scientists keep finding; after all this time, he just has to tell someone. The story won both the Hugo and the Nebula for 1980, because both readers and fellow professionals wanted to say "thank you." - The Washington Post Book World 
Clifford D. Simak is another classic SF writer who staked out a distinctive territory based on his rural midwestern roots - only a couple hundred miles north of Bradbury's - but he never strayed very far from a few classic SF themes which he treated with considerably more rigor than Bradbury, if sometimes with as much sentimentality. Simak's City is at least as important to the history of SF as Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles - some would say more so, given its more challenging conceptual framework - and his other short stories are among the most enduring in the genre, as Over the River &amp; Through the Woods, a new limited edition from Tachyon Publications, attests. 
Yet Simak, like Sturgeon, seems in danger of fading into the limbo of historical anthologies; while his work was once as widely available as that of any of the giants, today these stories seem almost like new discoveries - and are just as fresh. Part of the reason may be not that Simak's folksy language seems to belie the underlying sense of alienation and tragedy that characterizes much of his work; part may be due to the rediscovery of American regional idioms among younger SF writers from Terry Bisson to Nancy Kress . . . Over the River &amp; Through the Woods contains eight Simak stories from 1951 through 1980 - which means it includes none of the classic stories like "Desertion" or "Huddling Place", which later went to make up City, but does include his late Hugo and Nebula-winning masterpiece "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer" and the Hugo-winning "The Big Front Yard." One of the first things that comes to mind when rereading the latter story after several years - it concerns a characteristically laconic farmer with a dog named Towser (the only name Simak seems to have permitted for dogs) who finds on his property a gateway to distant worlds - is that few contemporary writers would have let such a simple and elegant premise be confined to a novella. Simak's focus is on the unimpressed rustic whose very lack of response to the wonder at his doorstep intensifies our own. When a rustic is impressed by an alien presence, such as in "A Death in the House," it is less likely to be from a sense of wonder than from a sense of companionship. Simak's roots may be firmly in SF, but he writes of alien encounters in a way Willa Cather might have written of them. Aliens are strange but unthreatening, and in some cases (as in "Neighbor") they can turn the entire neighborhood into a pastoral Shangri-la, isolated from the outside in a way that encapsulates what must be Simak's own drams of lost innocence. But Simak could write about more than wonderful things happening to remote farmers. "Good Night, Mr. James" is a very early treatment (1951) of what we would today call a cloning story, done with the kind of cynical humor that is needed for what is essentially a double- and triple-cross tale. It reveals Simak's healthy streak of humor, as does "Dusty Zebra," in which trivial objects are zapped into another dimension in return for high-tech wonders. "Construction Shack" ironically explores an almost Stapledonian notion of whole solar systems being engineered by ancient aliens (Pluto is the construction shack of the title), cast in terms of the matter-of-fact space jockeys so familiar from pulp SF. Simak may be at his best, however, when his theme is isolation and abandonment. The title story concerns children from the future sent back to the refuge of the 1890s. The best tale in the collection and one of the high points of Simak's late career, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," concerns an anthropologist who comes to realize that his assistant seems to know far too much about certain ancient cave paintings, and may in fact have been their creator. Simak's evocation, in a few pages, of the sheer loneliness of immortality and the daunting perspectives of time involved, again could be a lesson to a generation of younger writers, and reminds us brilliantly of what Simak was capable of. - Locus 
When the Science Fiction Writer's of America began bestowing their Grand Master awards, the third writer so honored was Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) Only Robert A. Heinlein and Jack Williamson preceeded him, and he received his award before such luminaries as Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. He earned this distinction by producing, over a long period of time, a significant body of popular, respected, often award-winning work, including his classic books City and Way Station, and many shorter works, eight of which are contained in this welcome collection. 
Readers unfamiliar with Simak who are willing to give this book a chance are in for a treat. More than half of the stories here were among the best stories of their respective years. "The Big Front Yard" (1958) won a Hugo. "A Death in the House" (1959) was selected by Judith Merril for Year's Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition. "Over the River and Through the Woods" (1965) made the cut for World's Best Science Fiction: 1966 edited by Donald Woll

Over the River & Through the Woods: The Best Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak

SIMAK, CLIFFORD. D.

Tachyon Pubns

Sixteen outstanding stories by Hugo and Nebula-award nominee, Jack McDevitt. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Contents: Standard Candles Tidal Effects Translations from the Colosian Black to Move The Fort Moxie Branch Promises to Keep Gus To Hell with the Stars Ellie The Jersey Rifle Cruising Through Deuteronomy Tyger Auld Lang Boom Dutchman Cryptic Time Travelers Never Die BACK COVER: McDevitt's tales have an emotional resonance that lingers well after the book has been set aside. Standard Candles is a strong, strong collection. -Cemetery Dance 
Always engaging and insightful, McDevitt can be counted on to ask the deep questions. - David Brin 
Jack McDevitt is one of those rare science fiction writers capable of taking the tropes of the field - from war and the military to alien contact to scripture vs. science - and breathing wonderful life into them. He's always a pleasure to read. - Gregory Frost 
It's not McDevitt's style, though his prose is wonderfully clear and deceptively simple. It's not his plots, though his stories always ask hard questions, and never settle for easy answers. For me it's his humanity. McDevitt understands the way people talk and think and behave, and still somehow has boundless compassion for the human animal. - Lewis Shiner 
In both his novels and his short fiction, Jack McDevitt has shown a terrific range of skills and imagination and speculation. Only one thing remains the same from piece to piece to piece - they're all damn fine stories. - Kevin J. Anderson 
Jack McDevitt is a master of the short story form. - Kathleen Ann Goonan 
The ideal writer can stretch your mind with a wonderful concept while also touching your heart with a personal story. Most of us fail at one or the other, but from the very beginning of his career Jack McDevitt has shown that he can do both. - Michael Cassutt 
You hold in your hand some of the best work of one of our best writers. Enjoy! - James Patrick Kelly 
McDevitt is the real thing: a writer with depth, integrating scientific issueswith human concerns on a vast stage, lit by vivid colors. - Gregory Benford 
Jack McDevitt is one of the few authors in contemporary science fiction whose work moves faultlessly from scientic speculation to speculations on the nature of reality and the human condition. McDevitt fashions fully realized worlds, rich in imagination, peopled by fully believable characters. More important, you can count on him for a damn fine read. - Bruce Boston 
It's high time indeed for a Jack McDevitt story collection! McDevitt writes with wisdom, compassion, and an abiding sense of wonder - everything that has drawn me again and again to the worlds of science fiction - real people with real concerns, in extraordinary settings.If you haven't read this man's work, start now! - Jeffrey A. Carver 
Long after you've closed this book,the stories will stay in your mind and in your heart. - Karen Joy Fowler 
It has long been a landmark in a science fiction writer's career when a publisher decides it is time to publish a collection of his or her best short fiction. Once upon a time, the publishers who did such things were mass market paperback houses. Today they are largely (not exclusively) small presses that market to the dedicated SF audience. NESFA Press is a good example; it collects work of Boskone guests of honor. So is Tachyon Publications, as it demonstrates with Standard Candles: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt. 
McDevitt has done a number of very interesting novels, of which the last two were The Engines of God and Ancient Shores. The short fiction has been accumulating for years - clever, insightful, often marked by oddly inconclusive endings, and quite neglected in the sense of fame, fortune, and awards. Two of the sixteen stories thus ring of personal revelance: the title story concerns an astronomer who, though he has never flared as brightly as a nova has had a long and glowing career; "The Fort Moxie Branch" offers the notion of a future library that preserves the work of neglected writers and materializes rather like an Isher weapons shop to offer afirmation when a writer needs it most. "Auld Lang Boom" is the butterfly whose wings cause hurricanes - everytime two old friends meet, something awful happens in the world; the surviving heir of one, reading the diary left behind, gets quite spooked. "Cryptic" is the tale of closing down a SETI operation and finding the files of an old computer disk with frightening implications. "Time Travelers Never Die" plays fast and loose with continuity when even after death a time traveler is able to maintain contact with his lover. "The Jersey Rifle" concerns the discovery of the world's greatest chess player, an unassuming druggist who can beat anyone. And more. - Analog

Standard Candles: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Literature & Fiction

McDevitt, JacK

Contemporary

As in her Hugo and Nebula-award winning Beggars in Spain, Dancing on Air finds Nancy Kress once more exploring the moral ambiguities of genetic engineering that have become her hallmark. This novella-length chapbook combines an intriguing murder mystery, involving a reporter's investigation into the competitive world of professional ballet, with the thought-provoking science fiction we have come to expect from Nancy Kress. This story is among her finest work. BACK COVER: Like Walter Miller's "The Darfsteller," [Dancing on Air] follows the future of an artform through ethical quagmires. - Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine Every so often there comes a story which works the old magic that first drew me to the genre as a reader. Dancing on Air is one of those stories. - James Patrick Kelly From her novel An Alien Light to this novella, Dancing on Air, Nancy Kress has again and again made bizarre viewpoints utterly compelling. No matter how peculiar the future is that Kress imagines, her characters face it with human and humane feeling. She is a writer's writer. - Tony Daniel Nancy Kress is one of the best damn storytellers ever. - Jack McDevitt

Dancing on Air

Kress, Nancy

Professor Vlad Smith is on a terrifying quest, one that will take him from the halls of our most hallowed institutions to the most run-down of old houses in blighted neighborhoods. A mysterious committee, shredded yellowed newspapers, a daguerrotype of a Confederate soldier, a headless corpse and a corpseless head.... These are the clues which Smith must piece together to save his sanity and his daughter, and uncover the terrible secret of the Boss in the Wall. BACK COVER: What a scary story, like a modern Dracula but completely original in its concept and chillingly realistic in its narration. Avram Davidson was one of the finest writers the fantasy field has had, endlessly inventive and uniquely vivid. Grania Davis has completed this work, which he left unfinished, in a way that does him proud. - Poul Anderson The Boss in the Wall is a last powerful and major work by a major and powerful author. - Gregory Benford It is hard to imagine the genre that could encompass him; it is even more difficult to imagine fantasy or science fiction without him. - The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Davidson may be always doomed to be underappreciated, but he remains a true original and, in his own subtle way, one of the greats. - The St. James Guide to Fantasy

Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Avram Davidson

Grania Davis

Science Fiction

Portrait of Jennie

[MP3-CD audiobook format in Vinyl case. NOTE: The MP3-CD format requires a compatible audio CD player.] [Read by Stephen R. Thorne] This supernatural love story is a masterpiece of modern fantasy. Eben Adams is a young painter in Depression-era New York just looking to make a living. His work has thus far left influential art dealers unimpressed. Then Eben happens upon a young schoolgirl named Jennie in Central Park. Intrigued by her mystical quality and her knowledge of things that happened well before her time, Eben begins to sketch a portrait of the young girl. The drawing turns out to be the most emotional piece Eben has ever done, and he finally gets the boost in his career he's been seeking. But before he can finish the portrait, Jennie vanishes. -- Saddened by the loss of his muse, he begins to scour the city for her, and when he does find her again, he is shocked to discover that she has aged several years since their last meeting. Who is this girl, and where did she come from?

NATHAN, ROBERT