Search Worlds Without End

A magical combination of modern sensibility, present-future technology, and dark humor tells the story of two friends--Rakesh and Royal Engineer Vasant--who travel across India and encounter many wonders, from the massive god of wood to the Pragmatic Monks, who perform miracles of meditation.

Starflight 3000 looks into the distant future, when a new race has evolved on the moon - a moon that has a thin atmosphere created by tiny, tenacious life forms and vast shallow seas. The whole is maintained by a complex deteriorating technology run by the shadowy Milcon and Polcon groups, whose origings stretch far into the past, and who continually struggle for power. For too long however, have they run close to the edge of disaster. Soon a new project is to be launched by revolutionary groups - starflight 3000.

Contents:

• 9 - Introduction (Love 3000) - essay by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh
• 13 - Child by Chronos - (1953) - short story by Charles L. Harness
• 33 - A Message from Charity - (1967) - short story by William M. Lee
• 57 - When You Hear the Tone - (1971) - short story by Thomas N. Scortia
• 75 - Share Alike - (1957) - short story by Daniel F. Galouye
• 93 - The Littlest People - (1954) - short story by Raymond E. Banks
• 111 - Ring Around the Redhead - (1948) - short story by John D. MacDonald
• 139 - Human Man's Burden - (1956) - short story by Robert Sheckley
• 157 - Home the Hard Way - (1967) - novelette by Richard McKenna
• 188 - Tin Soldier - (1974) - novella by Joan D. Vinge

Contents:

• 1 - Down Among the Dead Men - (1954) - novelette by William Tenn
• 28 - A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine - (1993) - novelette by Brian Hodge
• 54 - The Monster - (1986) - short story by Joe Haldeman
• 65 - The Eater of Filth - short story by Gary A. Braunbeck
• 79 - Correspondence - short story by Mark Garland and Lawrence Schimel
• 86 - War, the Last - short story by Billie Sue Mosiman
• 95 - In the Matter of the Ukdena - short story by Bruce Holland Rogers
• 113 - A Zombie Named Fred - short story by Jake Foster
• 131 - Surface Tension - short story by Peter Crowther
• 146 - The Monster Parade - short story by Ed Gorman
• 162 - Grabow and Collicker and I - (1992) - short story by Algis Budrys
• 168 - Behind Enemy Lines - (1991) - short story by Dan Perez
• 182 - Operation Chaos - [Operation Chaos] - novelette by Poul Anderson (variant of Operation Afreet 1956)

Growing Up in Tier 3000 (1975), is set in a world very similar to that of many of the tales, and deploys a similarly searching sense of the surface of events and of identities, though its plot moves with some difficulty: in an energy-quarantined, savagely competitive, complexly automated Dystopian future society, young children - in a reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis, first promulgated by Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941), that language structure shapes our conceptualization of the world - show their readiness to take over from their elders because they understand the languages that in effect embody hyperkinetic new realities.

First published in 1897, The Year 3000 is the most daring and original work of fiction by the prominent Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza. A futuristic utopian novel, the book follows two young lovers who, as they travel from Rome to the capital of the United Planetary States to celebrate their "mating union," encounter the marvels of cultural and scientific advances along the way. Intriguing in itself, The Year 3000 is also remarkable for both its vision of the future (predicting an astonishing array of phenomena from airplanes, artificial intelligence, CAT scans, and credit cards to controversies surrounding divorce, abortion, and euthanasia) and the window it opens on fin de siècle Europe.

Published here for the first time in English, this richly annotated edition features an invaluable introductory essay that interprets the intertextual and intercultural connections within and beyond Mantegazza's work. For its critical contribution to early science fiction and for its insights into the hopes, fears, and clash of values in the Western world of both Mantegazza's time and our own, this book belongs among the visionary giants of speculative literature.