Massive and arrogant, they patrol the final war zone - deep space. All great battleships before them - the celebrated fleet of the Spanish Armada, the mighty gunboats of the British Navy - are mere toys in comparision. In their armoured bellies swarm battalions of soldiers. Their flanks bristle with high-tech artillery. They are perfectly equipped to deliver their payload: Death. Now, the masters of science fiction present their most awesome visions of future warfare. A stunning collection of the ultimate war machines by such acclaimed writters as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, David Drake, Algis Budrys, Eric Frank Russell, C.M. Kornbluth, Poul Anderson, J.F. Bone, and Jack Williamson....

Bob Zane, the hero of most of these stories, is a seasoned prospector who not only knows the western deserts, but also knows the criminal mind and the laws that govern survival in this beautiful, dangerous land where the search for gold never ends. With keen intelligence and a strong sense of justice, he tracks robbers across the desert wastes and rescues hapless city slickers. Deep in the arid Sierra Madre, where gold is so plentiful it is used to make bullets. Bob Zane saves a young woman prospector from a band of fierce Yaqui Indians. He is almost outwitted by a psychotic killer who knows everything there is to know about desert warfare, and he solves a case of robbery and murder for the...

Gold is the pay dirt in all these rip-roaring western stories, more of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Whispering Sands series with their unique desert setting. Again the master storyteller features his rugged western hero, the philosophical prospector Bob Zane. In the title story Zane is true to form when he gets a spoiled rich kid to behave like a man and beat out claim jumpers in the desert. Men learn fast out there, or die, and Zane moves faster than any of them, rescuing a pretty hostage from Yaqui Indians, outwitting murderous gangsters in the Painted Desert, avoiding death from poisonous alkali springs, and hunting lost gold in Death Valley. Around camp at night, the sand whispers on the...

Everything your rulers never wanted you to know and you were afraid to ask… Ten classic stories from the birth of modern science fiction writing The Golden Age of Science Fiction, from the early 1940s through the 1950s, saw an explosion of talent in SF writing including authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. Their writing helped science fiction gained wide public attention, and left a lasting impression upon society. The same writers formed the mould for the next three decades of science fiction, and much of their writing remains as fresh today as it was then. Collected in one giant volume, here is the very best of the golden era. The stories...