John Crowley's all-new essay "Totalitopia" is a wry how-to guide for
building utopias out of the leftovers of modern science fiction. "This
Is Our Town," written especially for this volume, is a warm, witty, and
wonderfully moving story about angels, cousins, and natural disasters
based on a parochial school third-grade reader. One of Crowley's
hard-to-find masterpieces, "Gone" is a Kafkaesque science fiction
adventure about an alien invasion that includes door-to-door leafleting
and yard work. Perhaps the most entertaining of Crowley's "Easy Chair"
columns in Harper's, "Everything That Rises" explores the fractal
interface between Russian spiritualism and quantum singularities--with a
nod to both Columbus and Flannery O'Connor. "And Go Like This" creeps in
from Datlow's Year's Best, the Wild Turkey of horror anthologies.
Plus: There's a bibliography, an author bio, and of course our
Outspoken Interview, the usual cage fight between candor and common
sense.