Against the Stone Beasts

James Blish's Against the Stone Beasts launches Andreson from a shabby surrealist exhibition into a breathtakingly wrong universe, where paintings prove to be windows and a single touch hurls him into a winged civilization hanging beneath a stone sky. There he finds not only alien beauty and first-contact wonder, but a perilous love and a war fought across impossible dimensions. The Varese, humanlike and airborne, use advanced technology to speak with him and explain their desperate conflict with the "space-beasts," invisible enemies that inhabit Earth's interior and move through solid matter as naturally as the Varese move through air. As Andreson learns of their faded grandeur, their failed campaign into the inverted enemy realm, and their crumbling defenses, he is drawn into a struggle of strange physics, decaying power, and mounting dread. Meanwhile, John Kimball follows through the time-machine trail, armed with little more than grit and a pistol, only to face his own ordeal in a dark, hostile negative world. When the sky becomes a stone dome, the city is trapped, the sun goes out, and survival itself depends on improvisation before the battle of matter, space, and love destroys them all. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.