Sixteen all-new stories by science fiction's top talents, collected by best-selling author George R. R. Martin and multiple-award-winning editor Gardner Dozois.

From pulp adventures such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Carson of Venus to classic short stories such as Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain" to visionary novels such as C. S. Lewis' Perelandra, the planet Venus has loomed almost as large in the imaginations of science fiction writers as Earth's next-nearest neighbor, Mars. But while the Red Planet conjured up in golden-age science-fiction stories was a place of vast deserts and ruined cities, bright-blue Venus was its polar opposite: a steamy, swampy jungle world with strange creatures lurking amid the dripping vegetation. Alas, just as the last century's space probes exploded our dreams of Mars, so too did they shatter our romantic visions of Venus, revealing, instead of a lush paradise, a hellish world inimical to all life.

But don't despair! This new anthology of 16 original stories by some of science fiction's best writers - edited by number-one New York Times best-selling author George R. R. Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois - turns back the clock to that more innocent time, before the hard-won knowledge of science vanquished the infinite possibilities of the imagination.

Featuring all-new stories by:

• Eleanor Arnason
• Elizabeth Bear
• David Brin
• Tobias S. Buckell
• Michael Cassutt
• Joe Haldeman
• Matthew Hughes
• Gwyneth Jones
• Joe R. Lansdale
• Stephen Leigh
• Paul McAuley
• Ian McDonald
• Garth Nix
• Mike Resnick
• Allen M. Steele
• Lavie Tidhar
• And an Introduction by Gardner Dozois