WHOSE WORLD IS THIS? He was a tall man, well-muscled and tough, with the strong intelligent face of a leader. But his mind was as blank as a newborn baby’s. The Foragers had rescued him and brought him to Archon; now the Controllers were teaching him, as they would a child, forming his mind. But one day they would send him Outside again, out of the safe runnels of Archon to face the terrors that existed in the land of the legendary Demons. Somewhere out there was the clue to his lost memory, his otherworldly past, and somewhere out there, too, was the hint of a future that could bring disaster and a hideous death

Take this route to… Oblivion. Expressway to an uncharted sphere. “They’re about!” the woman whispered, and Crane abruptly saw a strange light shining through the heavy black curtains that shrouded the house. He crossed to the window and before anyone could stop him he drew the curtain back. At first he did not understand what he saw: a round gleaming, color-running orb stared unwinkingly back into his face. It was… an eye. An immense sad eye staring at him through the chink of the curtains, an eye surrounded by a living whorl of flame that he had last seen engulfing poor Barney in the parking lot. At least three others had disappeared into the strange world from which those aliens had come, and a girl had been driven insane by them. And before Crane’s quest to unravel the secret of the Map Country was complete, the fate of two worlds would hang in the balance

El decenio 1956-1965 marca una época crítica para la ciencia ficción. La reciente respetabilidad del género motivó la atención, muchas veces peligrosa, del cine y la televisión. El inicio de la Era espacial en octubre de 1957 parecía confirmar aquello de que la realidad supera a la ficción. Pero la crisis condujo a la renovación del género: cuantitativa, por la aparición de una pléyade de nuevos autores; cualitativa, por la revolución de la tématica, que abandona de una vez por todas la fascinación por la cacharrería espacial, sentándose nuevas normas de calidad, como demuestra el presente volumen. – Recopilación, Prefacio e Introducción de Michael Ashley

VISA FOR AN ENIGMA When John Carter came to the Horalcah Cluster, it was in the guise of an interstellar salesman. If anyone there suspected he was more than that, it would mean his instant execution. But Carter’s unusual personality made it possible for him to put over the deception and even gain a visa to the forbidden central planet, an arsenal of space war factories. Of course, he had to make some special deals to do it, and those proved his undoing. For he found himself caught there between two menaces: the tyrannical militaristic moguls and a fantastically greater threat from beyond the ends of space