Maxima Library

If VR swallows the future, restaurants, bars, our friends, and even our souls may become imperfect copies of the past. As the bricks and mortar of civilization crumble like dying embers whose ghosts are wrought upon the floor, it will be left to the artist—seeking some form of originality—to cry out… NEVERMORE.

Ian MacLeod’s novel, The Golden Wheel, is just out from Harcourt Brace, and his short story collection, Voyages by Starlight, will be out soon from Arkham House. In a departure in style and setting from his previous Asimov’s tales, Mr. MacLeod takes us to an eerie time and place for a terrifying glimpse of… The Golden Keeper.

Every short story in this wonderfully varied collection has one thing in common: each features some alteration in history, some divergence from historical reality, which results in a world very different from the one we know today. As well as original stories specially commissioned from bestselling writers such as James Morrow, Stephen Baxter and Ken MacLeod, there are genre classics such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s story of how World War II atomic bomber the

Enola Gay

, having crashed on a training flight, is replaced by the

Lucky Strike

with profoundly different consequences.