One and Wonder

Piers Anthony presents a compendium of the Golden Age science fiction classics that inspired his astonishing career—timeless tales by Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson, Walter M. Miller Jr., and other early SF masters

When Piers Anthony was thirteen years old, he picked up a copy of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, and his life changed forever. These breathtaking stories of space exploration and remarkable technologies, of alien cultures and future dystopias blew his mind and set his imagination free. Now, after nearly two hundred novels and many New York Times bestsellers, one of the most creative minds in contemporary science fiction and fantasy returns to his roots, presenting the amazing tales that made him the writer he is today.


In One and Wonder, Anthony invites readers to experience the same amazing tales that moved him in his youth, beginning with the first science fiction story he ever read: Jack Williamson's "The Equalizer," in which the members of a space mission return to Earth after twenty years only to discover that the world they left is gone forever. Anthony continues on to Theodore Sturgeon's disturbing tale of an alien virus that literally turns people inside out, Isaac Asimov's fable of a dangerous automaton hiding among masses of seemingly identical but more-benign machines, and seven more prime examples of Golden Age speculative and fantasy fiction, as breathtakingly inventive and unforgettable today as when they first mesmerized a young Piers Anthony.