In recent years science fiction has burst from its ghetto in the pulp magazines and monster movies and has once again captured an ever-widening circle of serious readers. With best-selling novels emerging from the genre (Giles Goat-Boy, The Andromeda Strain, On the Beach, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Terminal Man—the list is endless) and with such big-budget movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes, science fiction has come into its own as the most relevant fiction of our time.

In ALTERNATE WORLDS, one of the best-known writers in the field traces "speculative writing" throughout man's written history, from Homer down to Heinlein. Filled with excerpts from the seminal works and full-color reproductions of the well-remembered art, this is a mental feast and a visual orgy for all science fiction fans, or for anyone who remembers those wonderful stories of Verne and Wells and Asimov and Clarke and Sturgeon and Bradbury and ...

Make your own list: they're all here, along with the incredible worlds they created, and the history they made.