Book details

Book description

This collection contains one long novella, "The Firebird", which some critics regard this as Edmund Cooper's finest work. Two stories were written especially for the collection and the remaining stories were written and published over a number of years in various magazines but have not been collected together before in book form.

The theme of all the stories is fantasy. Edmund Cooper is fascinated by worlds of the imagination as much as the real world which he sometimes satirises in his books. In this collection, there are elements of tragic fantasy and also of humorous and satirical fantasy. Here are the best of his fantasy stories in one volume.

This book contains the following:
Introduction The Firebird Jahweh The Diminishing Dragon The Snow Crystals Second Chance I Am a Ghost Edmund Cooper (1926 - 1982)
Edmund Cooper was born in Cheshire in 1926. He served in the Merchant navy towards the end of the Second World War and trained as a teacher after its end. He began to publish SF stories in 1951 and produced a considerable amount of short fiction throughout the '50s, moving on, by the end of that decade, to the novels for which he is chiefly remembered. His works displayed perhaps a bleaker view of the future than many of his contemporaries', frequently utilising post-apocalyptic settings. In addition to writing novels, Edmund Cooper reviewed science fiction for the Sunday Times from 1967 until his death in 1982.