The invasion of the future has begun.
Literary legends including Steven Millhauser, Junot Diáz, Amiri Baraka, and Katharine Dunn have attacked the borders of the every day. Like time traveling mad-scientists, they have concocted outrageous creations from the future. They have seized upon tales of technology gone wrong and mandated that pulp fiction must finally grow up.
In these wildly-speculative stories you will discover the company that controls the world from an alley in Greenwich Village. You’ll find nanotechnology that returns memories to the residents of a nursing home. You’ll rally an avian-like alien to become a mascot for a Major League Baseball team.
The Invaders are here. But did science fiction colonize them first?
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Review
Praise for *Invaders*
A 2016 Publishers Weekly Best Summer Read
[STAR] “In this very fine reprint anthology, Weisman has brought together 22 SF stories by authors who, although not generally associated with the genre, are clearly fellow travelers (not the ominous invaders suggested by the title). Among the major names are Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz, George Sanders, Katherine Dunn, Jonathan Lethem, Amiri Baraka, W.P. Kinsella, Steven Millhauser, Robert Olen Butler, and Molly Gloss. Among the best of the consistently strong stories are Díaz’s “Monstro,” the horrifying tale of a disease outbreak in Haiti; Gloss’s near-perfect first-contact story, “Lambing Season”; Kinsella’s totally bizarre “Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated”; Ben Loory’s fable-like “The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun”; and Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead,” a deeply sexy tale of wild experimental science. In general, the stories tend toward satire and emphasize fine writing more than hitting genre beats—technology is usually a means to an end rather than the center of the story—but most of them could easily have found homes in SF magazines. This volume is a treasure trove of stories that draw equally from SF and literary fiction, and they are superlative in either context.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Well, damn. From the first page to the last, Invaders surprised and intoxicated me, offering one stirring, visionary, warm-hearted, funny, probing story after another. Reading them in quick succession made me feel as if the world was flickering before my eyes, ricocheting from one possible reality to another, beneath a dozen different suns. It would be hard to devise a better survey of those contemporary short fiction writers, both celebrated and undersung, who have worked to smuggle the methods of science fiction into the mainstream.”
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip
"For almost forty years I've believed and practiced and preached that there's no necessary distance between 'high literature' and 'science fiction.' Invaders is convincing proof. Funny, absurd, frightening, streetwise, probing, heartbreaking — the fiction collected here touches all registers."
—Carter Scholz, author of The Amount to Carry: Stories and Radiance
“[O]ne of the best SFF collections I’ve read in years. It’s a smorgasbord of visionary and thought-provoking stories…”
—Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, & Creased
Praise for the anthologies of editor Jacob A. Weisman
The Treasury of the Fantastic (with David M. Sandner)
“From the evocative images of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’ and Lord Byron's ‘Darkness’ to Mark Twain's devil tale, ‘The Mysterious Stranger’ and Max Beerbohm's devil plus time travel fantasy, ‘Enoch Soames,’ the 44 stories and poems in this compilation of fantastic literature provides a solid grounding in the development of the genre. Because most of the writers are ‘mainstream’ rather than genre authors, this collection also makes a good case for fantasy as literature, while the presence of Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells and Lord Dunsany alongside Edith Wharton, Emily Dickinson, and E.M. Forster breaks down the barrier between literary and genre fiction. VERDICT: This is an important collection for all lovers of fantasy and literature.”
—Library Journal
“The Treasury of the Fantastic truly is a treasury of wonderful stories…Turns out there's not a dud to be found.”
—Fantasy and Science Fiction
"A marvelous mix of classics and rarely seen works, bibliophile's finds and old favorites....a treasury in every sense and a treasure!"
—Connie Willis, author of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog
"The fantasy tradition in English and American literature is rich and varied and strange. This is the book to read to find out what you never knew you needed to know."
—David G. Hartwell, editor of the Year's Best Fantasy series
“It was an absolute delight to see so [many] of these authors collected here and finding new treasures I hadn’t realized really fell into the realm of fantasy.”
—Tabitha Perkins, My Shelf Confessions
“The Treasury of the Fantastic is truly that, a comprehensive collection of fantastical literature from throughout the many years covering the romanticism era to the early twentieth century.... an exquisitely curated collection....”
—The Arched Doorway
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (with David G. Hartwell)
“Heroes and their mighty deeds populate the pages of this delightfully kitschy yet absorbing anthology of sword and sorcery short stories from the 1930s onward. Hartwell and Weisman have selected some of the best short-form work in the genre, starting with the originator, Robert E. Howard, and his tales of Conan the Barbarian. The heroes are tough, savvy, and willing to knock a few heads in to get the job done. The soldier of Glen Cook’s Dread Empire and Fritz Leiber’s Grey Mouser make strong appearances, as does Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné and his dread sword, Stormbringer. Female heroes are as ruthless as their male counterparts: C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry walks through Hell and back to get her revenge, while George R. R. Martin’s Daenerys Stormborn becomes a true queen by outmaneuvering an entire city of slavers. This is an unbeatable selection from classic to modern, and each story brings its A game.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The 19 stories in this volume span a time period from 1933 to 2012 and provide a strong introduction to this fantasy subgenre.”
—Library Journal
“Awesome collection, very highly recommended.”
—Nerds in Babeland
“Superbly presented...reignited this reader’s interest.”
—SF Site
“A big, meaty collection of genre highlights that runs the gamut from old-school classics to new interpretations, it serves as an excellent introduction and primer in one.”
—Green Man Review
About the Author
The author of seven novels, the most recent "The Book of Aron," and four collections of short fiction, Jim Shepard has won numerous awards and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. He also teaches creative writing and film at Williams College.
Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Martin Dressler," Steven Millhauser has written many novels, and is probably best known for his short stories ("The Barnum Museum"). He teaches at Skidmore College.
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Max Apple has been writing short stories (most recent collection "The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories," novels ("Zip," "The Propheteers"), and screenplays ("Roommates," "The Air Up There") for the last forty years. He still teaches for the University of Pennsylvania.
Amiri Baraka, who has also written as LeRoi Jones, is the Poet Laureate of New Jersey. Baraka has written poetry, plays, fiction, essays and musical criticism. Widely known as a revolutionist and political activist he is the winner of the PEN Open Book Award for "Tales of the Out & the Gone."
Jacob Weisman is the editor and publisher at Tachyon Publications, which he founded in 1995. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award three times for his work at Tachyon, and is the series editor of Tachyon s Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Shirley Jackson Award-winning novella line.
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