Maxima Library

THE BEST OF

This new series features work by outstanding women science fiction writers, both well-known and unfairly neglected. Many of the stories in these individual volumes have never before been collected in book form, making each of these works valuable as an overview of the author’s best work. The first two volumes are: The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley and The Best of Margaret St. Clair.

MARGARET ST. CLAIR has been writing professionally since 1945. She is best known for her shorter science fiction and fantasy, much of the latter written under the pen name of Idris Seabright. She has a remarkably ironic sense of humor, and many of her stories have social or philosophical themes. As Rosemary Herbert points out in Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers, a story like “Short in the Chest” which features a “philosophical robot” psychologist called a “huxley,” “…is remarkable for its portrayal of women and its grappling with questions of sexuality.” St. Clair has written more than 130 short stories and eight novels. This new collection of her best short fiction consists mainly of stories never before available in book form. Readers will find her writing extremely polished and her perceptions unusually sharp.

BIRTH OF A HOLOCAUST

“Dr. Lawrence,” Madelaine said steadily, “will you help us? We can’t have anybody knowing about us who isn’t on our side.”

“That’s something I can’t answer until I know what you’re trying to do.”

“We want to free the sea people who are in the research stations. That’s the first thing. Then we want to make sure that human beings will never molest them again.”

“A large order,” Lawrence answered, unsmiling. “Yes, I’ll help you. But I’d like to point out that what you have said amounts to a declaration of war on the whole human race…”

Before the dawn of man…

…there was a covenant between the land and the sea people—a covenant long forgotten by those who stayed on shore, but indelibly etched in the minds of the others—the dolphins of Altair.

Now the covenant had been broken. Dolphins were being wantonly sacrificed in the name of scientific research, their waters increasingly polluted, their number dangerously diminished. They had to find allies and strike back. Allies willing to sever their own earthly bonds for the sake of their sea brothers—willing, if necessary, to execute the destruction of the whole human race…

Space-opera heroines, gender-bending aliens, post-apocalyptic pregnancies, changeling children, interplanetary battles of the sexes, and much more: a groundbreaking new collection of classic American science fiction by women from the 1920s to the 1960s

SF-expert Lisa Yaszek presents the biggest and best survey of the female tradition in American science fiction ever published, a thrilling collection of twenty-five classic tales. From Pulp Era pioneers to New Wave experimentalists, here are over two dozen brilliant writers ripe for discovery and rediscovery, including Leslie F. Stone, Judith Merril, Leigh Brackett, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin. Imagining strange worlds and unexpected futures, looking into and beyond new technologies and scientific discoveries, in utopian fantasies and tales of cosmic horror, these women created and shaped speculative fiction as surely as their male counterparts. Their provocative, mind-blowing stories combine to form a thrilling multidimensional voyage of literary-feminist exploration and recovery.