Winner of the 2002 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection: In Skin folk, with fifteen works ranging from science fiction to Caribbean folklore, passionate love to chilling horror, Nalo Hopkinson is at her award-winning best spinning tales like "Precious," in which the narrator spews valuable coins and gems from her mouth whenever she attempts to talk or sing. In "A Habit of Waste," a self-conscious woman undergoes elective surgery to alter her appearance;...

Astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway receives an encrypted message, apparently from a solar system many light-years away.

How far would you go to save your family? First the birds went quiet. Then the evening sky filled with strange clouds that trapped the heat below. Now Callum wakes, dripping in sweat. Something has come to his isolated Welsh farm. If he's going to keep his family alive during this single night when all hell breaks loose, he'll have to think fast. And when he sees what he's facing, he suspects even that may not be enough.

On the hot summer day Matty Jones's dad leaves for good, a strange girl suddenly appears in the empty field next to the farm-- the very field in rural Pennsylvania where a spaceship supposedly landed fifty years ago. She is uniquely beautiful, sweet, and smart, and she tells Matty she's waiting for her spaceship to pick her up and return her to her home planet. Matty has heard a million impossible UFO stories: conspiracy theories, wild rumors, crazy...

For years, people have feared that sexual material removed from victims of alien abductions might lead to the creation of something that modern science considers impossible: hybrids of the alien and the human. They would think like aliens, but appear human, and be able to do something that full-blooded aliens can't-walk the earth freely. In Hybrids, Whitley Strieber unleashes his unparalleled skills as a thriller writer and his unique knowledge...

Ed Loyce lives a happy and normal life is a happy and normal small town in mid America. But today something strange happens. In the late evening, on his way to work at his TV sales and repair shop he passes the tiny one block park in the middle of town and sees something hanging from the only lamp post, something big, almost like a body. Of course it must be something else, probably an ad of some sort or a joke. Not able to discern exactly what it...

How Far Would You Go to Find a Lost Loved One? Ten years ago, a man and his girlfriend went into the woods at the end of Claver Road on what was supposed to be a weekend's camping trip, and never returned. Police combed the area, but nothing was found except for his car, abandoned where they'd parked it. It seemed like Brad Ellicott and Cara Marshall had been swallowed by the silent, brooding forest, leaving not a trace of what had happened or where...

The SS Cygni probe sent back hours of video, captured by the Biolathe AI, but only a few minutes mattered-the four minutes that showed a creature made of fire, living, moving, and dancing in the plasma fire of the double star's accretion disk. A dragon made of star stuff, so alien that only a human expedition to observe and perhaps capture it, and could truly understand them. It's a perilous journey into the future, however, for SS Cygni is 245 light-...

TWO PLANETS CLASH FOR LUNAR TREASURE Gregg Haljan was aware that there was a certain danger in having the giant spaceship Planetara stop off at the moon to pick up Grantline's special cargo of moon ore. For that rare metal-invaluable in keeping Earth's technology running-was the target of many greedy eyes. But nevertheless he hadn't figured on the special twist the clever Martian brigands would use. So when he found both the ship and himself suddenly...

A reclusive survivor of alien abduction is joined by a girl with terrifying abilities on a desperate cross-country journey to find others who would help him prevent the world's destruction.