The World Turned Upside Down

Publisher Jim Baen joins two of his top authors to collect the stories which made them SF readers in their youth and fitted them to make major impacts on the SF field today. The quality of the stories in this huge volume compares favorably with that of any collection in the past fifty years--there's been nothing of equal size and quality since Groff Conklin's Omnibus of Science Fiction in 1952. Nevertheless the selection wasn't through some would-be objective standard but rather by a deliberately subjective process: these are the stories which, when the editors read them, turned their worlds around. Each story was picked because of the emotional charge it gave one or more of the editors on first reading. The story sources range from Analog to Weird Tales, the first appearances from the early '30s to the mid '60s. Many were written by the greatest names in the SF field. These are stories that made the editors think and feel. They will do the same for you.

<p>David Drake was attending Duke University Law School when he was drafted. He served the next two years in the Army, spending 1970 as an enlisted interrogator with the 11th armored Cavalry in Viet Nam and Cambodia. Upon return he completed his law degree at Duke and was for eight years Assistant Town Attorney for Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has been a full-time freelance writer since 1981. Besides the bestselling Hammer's Slammers series, his books for Baen include With the Lightnings and its sequel Lt. Leary, Commanding, Ranks of Bronze, Starliner, All the Way to the Gallows, Redliners, and many more. His most recent novels are Paying the Piper, a new Hammer's Slammers novel, and The Far Side of the Stars, the latest in the popular Lt. Leary series.
Jim Baen has been the editor of Galaxy magazine, of Ace Books, of Tor Books, and has for two decades helmed Baen Books, a powerhouse in science fiction publishing and the world's leading publisher of military science fiction.
Eric Flint's impressive first novel, Mother of Demons (Baen), was selected by SF Chronicle as one of the best novels of 1997. His next solo novel, 1632, sold out its first hardcover printing and went back to press almost immediately, and received enthusiastic critical praise. With David Drake he has written five popular novels in the Belisarius series. Flint has also begun a highly-praised fantasy adventure series, so far comprising The Philosophical Strangler and Forward the Mage. Flint received his masters degree in history from UCLA and was for many years a labor union activist. He lives in East Chicago, IN, with his wife.</p>