A Berkley medallion book

After a lethal birthday dinner of champagne and crayfish, famed Shakespearian actor Sir Henry is dead, and the cast of suspects is a mile long.

"By the spring of 1945, the Second World War was drawing to a close in Europe. Allied troops were sweeping through Nazi Germany and discovering the atrocities of SS concentration camps. The first to be reached intact was Buchenwald, in central Germany. American soldiers struggled to make sense of the shocking scenes they witnessed inside. They asked a small group of former inmates to draft a report on the camp. It was led by Eugen Kogon, a German political prisoner who had been an inmate since 1939.The Theory and Practice of Hell is his classic account of life inside"--Cover, p. 4.

The Betty Book chronicles the development of the author's wife as one of the best mediums of the 20th century. It describes how she first discovered her talent, how she developed it, and what her research came to mean. It also introduces the reader to the "Invisibles" -- a group of people living on the inner planes who guided Betty and helped her understand the nature of life without a physical body.

Twelve-year-old Kurt and his father encounter poisonous plants, an earthquake, and a gigantic flesh-eating dinosaur when they begin exploring the interior of the Outer Island near Dinotopia.

This collection of stories from Ballard's early years displays him in full command of his considerable literary gifts. Ballard excels in the short form and this book contains some of his very best; most notably, The Drowned Giant and The Garden of Time. His vivid, visual and original imagination are coupled with a jade cool narrative style, resulting in a uniquely strange body of work. Chronopolis and Other Stories contains none of the excesses for which Ballard has been damned and praised, just sixteen fine short stories; two or three of which are among the best you'll ever read.

One night in July, 2135, there were some eight billion people on Earth! The next morning there were perhaps 400. There was no clue to what had happened to the world's population—but, over the centuries that followed, still stranger things occurred. The human lifespan now stretched to millennia instead of decades, and much of the remaining population developed the ability to move at will among the stars—and abandoned their homeworld for a life in deep space. Then, after 3000 years, a star-rover discovered what had happened to Earth's original inhabitants—and that they were coming to reclaim their heritage. Those who had stayed behind knew, with a growing fear, that the mystery of what had been done to Earth and why was about to be solved... in a way that would change humanity forever.

"Fans are Slans," became the catchphrase of early science fiction fandom in the wake of this novel. Like the Slans - telepathic mutants hiding out in a hostile population - science fiction fans considered themselves a haunted special minority, imbued with transcendent and visionary insight, sure to prevail in the fullness of time. Communes were called "Slan shacks" and fans occupied them. In the wake of the atomic bomb and theories of atomic mutation, the premise of SLAN seemed ever more credible.There are two kinds of Slans - those whose tendrils publicize their power to read the minds of ordinary humans and so-called tendrilless Slans whose strange power is concealed (allowing these Slans to hide). The tendrilled Slans were exterminated in a pogrom a while ago; now human society is ruled by the dictator Kier Gray who promises to locate and eliminate the tendrilless Slans. Johnny Cross, a young adolescent, is a secret Slan who in the novel's opening scene is fleeing with his mother, pursued by a human mob. The mob assaults and kills his mother, who dies charging Johnny with the responsibility to confront Kier Gray in his palace and destroy him so that the Slans may live.The novel is the narrative of Johnny's odyssey through the Slan sub-societies and toward his final confrontation with Kier Gray. In Gray's palace lives the young, beautiful Slan, Kathleen Layton,who Gray spared from a mob so that a Slan and her powers could be investigated at close quarters. How Johnny finds his way past Gray's defenses toward that confrontation and what he shockingly learns from that meeting embody the point of the novel and the heart of Van Vogt's novelistic technique.

Forever and a day Brigadier General Benjamin Shore ignores a Presidential command and launches a revolutionary phase ship and its crew on an incredible journey deep into uncharted regions toward Galactic Center-point... Investigating one planet after another in search of a habitable world, they encounter: the vicious vine-tigers, weasel-like pre-men, who live on an innocent-looking planet lit by the sun of Polaris; the slim Gray-furs, a race possessing fantastic knowledge, yet strangely inept; and the giant conquerors, the Golden People, with their magnificent cities, and their deadly javelin guns... With half his crew lost, General Shore prepares to return to Earth, only to find his most formidable foe aboard the phase ship itself...

Prophetic science fiction.

Having just returned to Earth from an intergalactic research mission, Professor Peter Maxwell, specialist in Supernatural Phenomena, finds himself in most desperate straits. Earth, as the professor is well aware, has advanced beyond belief in many areas; time travel, for instance, has been perfected to such an extent that creatures from different ages (goblins, dinosaurs, and Shakespeare!) live together at the same time. But Maxwell has accidentally discovered a mysterious crystal planet which contains a storehouse of secret information, and he is sure that not even one-tenth of this knowledge is yet known on Earth. Realizing the value of the planet for the Earth's future development, he attempts to convince those in power that they must, at any cost, get control of the crystal planet. But his efforts are thwarted by a startling fact: Maxwell was ingeniously duplicated on his return trip. The "other" him came back before he did, and was soon after "accidentally" killed. Now no one will believe the new Maxwell really exists.