John Crowley’s all-new essay Totalitopia is a wry how-to guide for building utopias out of the leftovers of modern science fiction. This Is Our Town, written especially for this volume, is a warm, witty, and wonderfully moving story about angels, cousins, and natural disasters based on a parochial school third-grade reader. One of Crowley’s hard-to-find masterpieces, Gone is a Kafkaesque science fiction adventure about an alien invasion that includes door-to-door leafleting and yard work. Perhaps the most entertaining of Crowley’s Easy Chair columns in Harper’s, Everything That Rises explores the fractal interface between Russian spiritualism and quantum singularities-with a nod to both Columbus and Flannery O'Connor. And Go Like This creeps in from Datlow’s Year’s Best, the Wild Turkey of horror anthologies.

Plus: There’s a bibliography, an author bio, and of course our Outspoken Interview, the usual cage fight between candor and common sense.