Author of the Nebula Award winning Timescape, Benford's first collection of short stories demonstrates the extraordinary range of his imagination. The stories contained within are a perfect introduction to the work of one of our greatest SF novelists and thinkers.

There has probably never been anything like it in UFO history, but the UFO fever that gripped the small British town of Warminster for about a decade is now largely forgotten. It was one of the largest UFO flaps ever to occur. Thousands of witnesses reported seeing the "Warminster Thing." The hilltops around the town attracted a loyal band of followers, all waiting for the magic sighting, the landing, the contact. The authors were themselves among the skywatchers and spent nights on Cradle Hill, the center of the phenomenon, watching and waiting for UFOs, but also watching and listening to the witnesses and ufologists. IN ALIEN HEAT introduces the Warminster phenomenon to a new generation of readers. It contains a short history of the phenomenon, places it in its social and historical context, and examines the possible mechanisms that initiated and sustained this remarkable UFO flap.

The fifth book in The Complete Aliens Omnibus, an essential collection for fans of Twentieth Century Fox's iconic blockbuster action-packed science fiction film Aliens, comprised of Original Sin and DNA War. In Original Sin, centuries after the death of the original Ellen Ripley, her clone has joined the fight against the Alien threat. With the help of an android named Call, a brutal hired gun named Johner, and a paraplegic mechanic named Vriess, she will battle an Alien horror, and discover the answer to a question that pierces the Alien mystery to its seething acid-chamber of a heart. In a bleak galaxy, the hospitable planet Rosamond 6 is a rare find. But while it may look like an oasis among the stars, it harbors a fatal secret: it is infested with Aliens. In DNA War, eager to prove her theory that the Aliens can be reasoned with, anthropologist Jocasta Malvaux has set up an observation post there. And something unexpected happens: the Aliens donít attack. But, why? Could it be that the monsters are evolving? Or is it a matter of time until every person on the planet must fight for their lives?

A man is repeatedly abducted by the same aliens. A woman metamorphoses into a giant bird. A man and woman are surgically joined to each other. A man experiences the difficulties of remodeling a haunted house. A woman repeatedly drives her boyfriend to the brink of suicide. A man encounters a prehistoric beast in his backyard. A young couple kidnaps little children to supplement their income. A man searches for his evil twin. These are the types of situations the characters in Essential Stories routinely find themselves in. A man reminisces about the time his town was invaded by zombies. A woman is frustrated with her discount-store clone. A man and woman rent an apartment to a vampire. A man is seduced by a beautiful witch. A woman reveals the strange secret of her everlasting youth. A hitch-hiker accepts a ride from an alien. An artist's statues come to life. A man relates the conditions of his imprisonment. A man and woman visit an alternate universe. The last man and woman on Earth are ambivalent about having children. The stories are occasionally silly, often tongue-in-cheek, usually outlandish, and sometimes poignant. Told in a straightforward matter-of-fact style, they show how ordinary people react to extraordinary events.

The alien abduction phenomenon is one of the enduring enigmas of our time. While the reality of alien abductions is a hotly debated topic among UFO researchers, scientists, skeptics and true believers alike, the phenomenon indisputably exists as an artifact of popular culture. This book analyzes more than 75 films that draw their inspiration from allegedly fact-based accounts of alien contact, from 1951's The Man from Planet X to Contactee in 2021. These films are examined in terms of both their cinematic qualities and their exploration of thematic elements derived from abduction reports. Abduction motifs that appear in science fiction classics such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001 and Close Encounters are analyzed, as well as those in lesser-known films like The Stranger Within, Starship Invasions, Dark Skies and Proximity. Special attention is given to movies based on the famed experiences of abductees Betty and Barney Hill, Whitley Strieber and Travis Walton. The book also addresses skeptical theories about the origins of the phenomenon in science fiction and examines an uncanny prescience that appears to anticipate these inexplicable occurrences.

In this reexamination of what it means to have a tradition, Catholic and otherwise, Mark D. Jordan offers a powerful and provocative study of the sin of erotic love between men. The Invention of Sodomy reveals the theological fabrication of arguments for categorizing genital acts between members of the same sex.

This book examines the meat provision system of Rio de Janeiro from the 1850s to the 1930s. Until the 1920s, Rio was Brazil’s economic hub, main industrial city, and prime consumer market. Meat consumption was an indicator of living standards and a matter of public concern. The work unveils that in the second half of the nineteenth century, the city was well supplied with red meat. Initially, dwellers relied mostly on salted meat; then, in the latter decades of the 1800s, two sets of changes upgraded fresh meat deliveries. First, ranching expansion and transportation innovation in southeast and central-west Brazil guaranteed a continuous flow of cattle to Rio. Second, the municipal centralization of meat processing and distribution made its provision regular and predictable. By the early twentieth century, fresh meat replaced salted meat in the urban marketplace. This study examines these developments in light of national and global developments in the livestock and meat industries.

Meat Markets articulates the emergent 'nonhuman thought' developed across literatures of the long nineteenth century and inflecting recent critical theories of abject life and animality. It presents important connections between meat and popular serial press industries, the intersections of criminals and public readership, and the long history of bloody spectacle at London's Smithfield Market including public executions, criminal escapades, death and horror tales, and the fungible 'penny press' forms of mass consumption. Through analysis of subjection, address, and narration in canonical and penny literatures, this book reveals the mutual forces of concern and consumption that afflict objects of a weird cultural history of bloody London across the long nineteenth century. Players include butchers, Smithfield, Parliament, Dickens, Romantics, Sweeney Todd, cattle, and a strange, impossible London.