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synopsis

The late Richard Wilson’s fifty-year career began with “Retribution” in Oswald Train’s zine Science Adventure Stories and finished in 1988 with “The Name on the Book” in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine.
       Wilson’s writing was particularly noteworthy for its consistently high level of quality. Whether working at novel length or with short stories, Wilson was incapable of writing anything less than professional, highly polished work.
       This volume collects nearly two dozen of his best stories, ranging from “The Hoaxters,” “The Inhabited,” and “Those Idiots from Earth” to his brilliant posthumously-published novella “At the Sign of the Boar’s Head Nebula,” originally slated for The Last Dangerous Visions and kindly made available to us by Harlan Ellison.
       “At the Sign of the Boar’s Head Nebula” is considered by several knowledgeable critics of the genre to be the finest single work that Mr. Wilson produced. It is in remarkably good company, joined with two other powerful novellas, “The Far King” and “The Nineteenth-Century Spaceship,” giving Richard Wilson a fair claim to being one of the founding fathers of steampunk.
       Along with the stories, this collection includes several highly regarded novelettes, including the Nebula Award-winning “Mother to the World,” “The Story Writer,” “Gone Past,” “If A Man Answers,” “It’s Cold Outside,” “A Man Spekith,” and “See Me Not.” Rounding out the book are a selection of the author’s finest short pieces, making this a cornerstone volume for any serious collection of modern science fiction.
       Richard Wilson (1920-1987), a member of the near-legendary Futurians, is considered by many to have been one of the most consistently excellent writers of science fiction. A journalist by trade, Wilson brought to his fiction a crisp economy of style and a precise language in a field often criticized for overly-florid prose. With stories running the gamut from the humorous to bone-chilling horror and everything in between, Richard Wilson could quite accurately be said to have written something for everyone.