"One of the greatest collections of science fiction short stories ever" -Goodreads.comContentsCarcinoma AngelsThe Age of InventionOutward BoundA Child of MindThe EqualizerThe Last of the RomanyTechnicalityThe Rules of the RoadDead EndA Night in Elf HillDeathwatchThe Ersatz EgoNeutral GroundOnce More, With FeelingIt's a Bird! It's a Plane!SubjectivityThe Entropic Gang Bang CaperThe Last Hurrah of the Golden HordeNorman Spinrad is the award-winning author of dozens of books, and three-time past President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.

So small it had only one bank, so quiet no citizens carried guns. Hard-working, peaceful Northfield, Minnesota, was an orderly yet busy mill-town in the heart of prosperous farm country. On a serene autumn Tuesday in 1876, local shopkeepers, farmers, and citizenry went about their normal routines, little realizing that the infamous and deadly James-Younger gang had designs on tiny Northfield. The experienced robbers planned to target the single bank, which held the hard-earned money of the townsfolk. Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers had never experienced defeat. During a wild gun battle that raged between the outlaws and the bankmen up and down the town’s main street, two unarmed townsfolk were murdered. Northfield’s angered populace fought back. The townspeople killed two members of the James-Younger gang and wounded several more. The remaining bandits fled but were pursued across southwestern Minnesota by a posse that gradually grew to more than a thousand men. In Last Hurrah of the James-Younger Gang, Robert Barr Smith debunks the James-Younger "Robin Hood" image and shows that the real heroes of the Northfield raid were the ordinary people--the bankers who protected their depositors at their own risk, the townspeople who pitched in to chase the gang from town, and the posse members who pursued and triumphed over the retreating remnants of the gang.

American Dream or American Nightmare? Norman Spinrad describes The Star-Spangled Future: "America is something new under the sun. not so much a nation at all as a precog flash of the future of the species . . . I wrote believing that I was simply writing disconnected science fiction stories from whatever came into my head . . . And they all turned out to be about America, the leading edge of all possible futures unfolding around us . . . After all, that was what was coming into my head, that's the mother lode of science fiction realities - the American fusion plasma of which we are creatures - and all we have to do is keep ourselves open to it . . . that's my definition of science fiction. We have seen the future and it is us."

Following the Holocaust, American literature experienced a resurgence of Jewish themes, characters, and contributions. This book focuses on the genres of science fiction and fantasy of the post-Holocaust period and argues that while the era was colored by grief, it also offered a renaissance of Jewish creative expression. The author provides an overview of texts beginning with the rise of Jewish speculative fiction anthologies in science fiction and fantasy and delving into emerging subgenres such as alternate history, post-apocalyptic, cold war, second-wave feminism, counterculture parodies, new wave, postmodernism, and cyberpunk to illustrate how Jewish culture made its mark on popular culture. The book also covers the Silver Age and Bronze Age of comics which saw Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Julius Schwartz, and Marv Wolfman form new superhero teams to battle prejudice and draws parallels with some of the most impactful shows made by Jewish creators, including Star Trek, Twilight Zone, and Doctor Who. The analysis also looks beyond the American context to include texts from Germany, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and Israel.

Welcome aboard the sex-drive void ship . . . Captain Genro commands the giant spaceship Dragon Zephyr - on board are ten thousand passengers in electrocoma, a smaller number of conscious passengers eagerly utilising the ship's dream chambers - and a Pilot. In the context of space travel, the Pilot is merely a biological component in the machine. Always a woman, her function is to launch the ship into the Jump by means of a cosmic orgasm. She is a pariah, shunned by all. Void Captain Genro should never even have spoken to his Pilot, let alone tried to embark on a relationship with her. When he did so, the result was every space traveller's nightmare. A Blind Jump into the Void . . .

A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, while experiencing dreams of a battle between good and evil, move toward an actual confrontation as they migrate to Boulder, Colorado.