SF/Fantasy/Horror Notes

Veteran Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, etc.) continues his banner year with A Stir of Echoes, a reprint in a limited signed edition of his classic genre-bending 1958 novel, along with the screenplay version that he wrote soon afterward and was never produced. David Koepp, director of Spiderman, who later did his own faithful screen adaptation of the novel, provides an afterword. PW profiled Matheson in its "Innovators" series June 17. (Gauntlet [Gauntlet66@aol.com], $50 294p ISBN 1-887368-58-2)

Phobos Books launches its first title, Empire of Dreams and Miracles: The Phobos Science Fiction Anthology, edited by Orson Scott Card and former Starlog managing editor Keith Olexa. Lawrence Kraus (The Physics of Star Trek, etc.) supplies a foreword. While the contributors are all unknowns, selected in the First Annual Phobos Fiction Contest, the big names associated with this project should ensure plenty of attention within the SF world. (Phobos [National Book Network dist.], $14.95 paper 200p ISBN 0-9720026-0-X)

The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time, edited by Leslie Pockell, boasts an all-star roster of names from the 19th century (Edgar Allan Poe, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker) to the first half of the 20th (M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson). For those new to horror literature wanting to sample some of the classic shorter works of the genre, this is an excellent starting point. (Warner, $13.95 paper 400p ISBN 0-446-67950-X)

In the year 2137, the Old World and the New have been separated for more than two centuries in the aftermath of a devastating war. Finally, an American naval officer, his ship caught in a storm, is forced to land in England, where he finds tigers running wild in Devon (among other sad wonders), in this reprint of Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Lost Continent: A Tale of the Lost Continent, first published in 1917. (Wildside, $26.95 144p ISBN 1-58715-307-6)