SCIENCE FICTION. FANTASY. HUMOR. This is the third annual volume of Unidentified Funny Objects and it contains twenty-three humorous short stories from some of the genre's best-known authors, as well as talented up-and-comers. These are some of the unlikely characters you will encounter in the pages of this book: * Hobo Satan * Vampire novelist * Traveling robot salesman * Brain-in-a-jar superhero * Jinn trapped in a mattress

Chthon was Piers Anthony's first published novel in 1967, written over the course of seven years. He started it when he was in the US Army, so it has a long prison sequence that is reminiscent of that experience, being dark and grim. It features Aton Five, a space man who commits the crime of falling in love with the dangerous, alluring Minionette and is therefore condemned to death in the subterranean prison of Chthon. It uses flashbacks to show...

The Metal Maiden Series is a wildly different kind of story that tells how Elasa, a humanoid robot who achieves consciousness, eventually saves the world from surpassing horror Elasa contacts the very special Awares, folk who attune so perfectly to their environment that they can disappear, literally and figuratively. She needs to work with them to try to save Earth from being eaten by huge telepathic galactic maggots.

An alien starfish and a human man must learn to live in each other's bodies in Piers Anthony's ingenious sequel to the science fiction gem Aliena Along with fellow members of her sapient starfish race, Aliena traveled many light-years to Earth. There, in the host body of a human woman, the inquisitive extraterrestrial learned how to exist as a member of this perplexing earthborn race. Now Piers Anthony, the New York Times–bestselling maestro of...

The cast of cosmic characters: A prodigal worm, a telepathic, egotistical, totally unscrupulous little alien running away from his father becomes the biggest prize in the universe. Capture the slimy brat and win an entire planet! A cosmic hustler, an effete snob who ekes out a comfortable living as the president's son-in-law and perfects his reflexes with endless contests of cosmic pool, becomes the most important element in a delicate game of interspatial...

Penn and Chandelle, an older couple, rent a house in the city at a bargain price and discover that its back door opens onto an endless forest. Now they know why others were scared off. That's only the beginning of the oddities about this particular piece of realty. They decide to call in experts: their grandchildren, Lloyd and Llynn, who pitch in with a will, to try to discover what and why. But it may be more of a challenge than they can handle.

Slim's a Texas bluesman of a certain age, down on his luck and just about broke - but hey, that's what the blues are all about. He loves his music: "Not the popular blues, homogenized, synthesized, and zombilized; but the real down-home gut-bucket blues." Then one day the music loves him back. In a single hot burst of lightning that comes straight up out of the ground, Slim finds himself in Tejas. It's a little bit magic and a whole lot different,...

SCOURGE OF THE ECLIPTIC He was driven by violent injustice from his home moon of Callisto - and set forth to claim the epic destiny that would blaze across worlds and time. He saw his family destroyed, his sister carried off into sexual slavery, his beautiful lover killed - and he swore revenge against the murderous pirates who held the Jupiter planetoids in a stranglehold of terror. Fired by raw courage, steeled by young might, he rose in the navy...

THE TYRANT FALLS This is the fifth in the series Bio of a Space Tyrant, featuring the stages in the life of Hope Hubris, the tyrant of Jupiter, and his beloved sister, Spirit. Child of flame and terror, born and bred to violence, Hope Hubris had ruled the solar system's most powerful empire with a fierce, uncompromising passion. His was a white-hot flame of justice that scarred friend and foe alike. Yet now he left Jupiter as an exile, his autocratic...

Phthor is the sequel to Chthon, less intricately structured and less complicated in plot, but still quite dark and ugly in theme and detail. Rather than flashbacks and flash-forwards, it has a Y outline, with the stem the initial story and the ends alternate futures, neither of which is acceptable to Aton's son Arlo. Arlo has his own encounter with a Minionette, and naturally, destruction is upon him and all with whom he associates. Writer and editor...