Synopsis: From the front flap of the St. Martin's Press edition: "When his first collection of stories, Space, Time and Nathaniel, appeared in 1957, Brian Aldiss was hailed as one of the poets of science fiction. He has since become one of the genre's leading figures, but the poetry remains, honed and hardened over the years. Aldiss is a storyteller who recognizes that joy - or sorrow, for that matter - is ever on the wing. The twelve stories in this outstanding collection assemble a mindscape of places as close as Prague, Moscow, Malaysia, and the Oxford garden that hosts a bizarre orgy; and as distant as the Afterworld, a cabbage planet, and the heart of our galaxy. The voices too are various:: the man in Budapest without memory, the solitary who sailed round the globe, the dedicated North Korean with a strange wife, the cockroach who finds he's Kafka. The imaginative and often erotic strain of Aldiss's fiction is captured here more strongly than ever, frequently distilled in glittering black humor."