Hugo Award Winner HOMer Award Nominee The field of advanced mathematic imaging has taken a lethal turn in the form of the BLIT. Named after the now-deceased mathematician Vernon Berryman, the Berryman Logical Imaging Technique can create images that crash the human brain in the same way a computer crashes from a sufficiently complex query. Terrorists have killed millions using posters, graffiti—and television. Many parents have had secret biochips implanted in the optic nerves of their children to darken the world outside of their schools and homes. Now, with a mild-dose BLIT found in a copy machine, the secret student group known as the Shudder Club holds contests to see who can stare at it the longest and prove worthy of their tenet: That which does not kill us, makes us stronger

Different Seasons(1982) is a collection of four novellas, markedly different in tone and subject, each on the theme of a journey. The first is a rich, satisfying, nonhorrific tale about an innocent man who carefully nurtures hope and devises a wily scheme to escape from prison. The second concerns a boy who discards his innocence by enticing an old man to travel with him into a reawakening of long-buried evil. In the third story, a writer looks back on the trek he took with three friends on the brink of adolescence to find another boy's corpse. The trip becomes a character-rich rite of passage from youth to maturity. These first three novellas have been made into well-received movies: "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" into Frank Darabont's 1994 The Shawshank Redemption, "Apt Pupil" into Bryan Singer's 1998 film Apt Pupil, and "The Body" into Rob Reiner's Stand by Me(1986). The final novella, "Breathing Lessons," is a horror yarn told by a doctor, about a patient whose indomitable spirit keeps her baby alive under extraordinary circumstances. It's the tightest, most polished tale in the collection.--Fiona Webster

Read the Book! You May Never See the Movie! The name of the movie was DIFFERENT STROKES. Had it not been for the recent Supreme Court decision, it might now be playing at your friendly neighborhood skin-flick palace. How was such a movie made? What kind of people were the producer, director, writer, cameraman, actors, actresses and all the others in this very special world of fleshly fantasy and celluloid sensuality? What actually went on on camera, and what went on off? Here it all is, sometimes funny, always frank, completely fascinating — the first-person story of the making of a blue movie, including the final shooting script and an interview that really takes you inside a candid leading lady who could give pointers to Linda Lovelace