Monsters
Introduction: Monsters - essay by Isaac Asimov
Passengers - short story by Robert Silverberg
The Botticelli Horror - novelette by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
The Shapes - novelette by J. H. Rosny aîné (trans. of Les Xipéhuz)
The Clone - short story by Theodore L. Thomas
The Men in the Walls - novella by William Tenn
The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth - novelette by Roger Zelazny
Student Body - novelette by F. L. Wallace [as by Floyd L. Wallace]
Black Destroyer - novelette by A. E. van Vogt
Mother - novelette by Philip José Farmer
Exploration Team - novelette by Murray Leinster
All the Way Back - short story by Michael Shaara
Science fiction
Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, Charles Waugh, Robert Silverberg, Lloyd Biggle Jr, J.-H. Rosny, aîné, Theodore L. Thomas, William Tenn, Roger Zelazny, F. L. Wallace, A. E. van Vogt, Philip José Farmer, Murray Leinster, Michael Shaara
Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers.  Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2.  His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old.  He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen, he was selling them to the science fiction magazines. He graduated from Columbia University in 1939. He married Gertrude Blugerman in 1942.  During World War II he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station.  After the war, he returned to Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948.  He then joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine until 1958, when he became a full-time writer. His first novel, [Pebble in the Sky](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46402W), was published in 1950. He and his wife divorced in 1973, and he married Janet O. Jeppson the same year. He was a highly prolific writer, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards. || Martin Harry Greenberg (March 1, 1941 – June 25, 2011) was an American academic and anthologist in many genres, including mysteries and horror, but especially in speculative fiction. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. He was also a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel. Greenberg was also an expert in terrorism and the Middle East. He was a longtime friend, colleague and business partner of Isaac Asimov. || Robert Silverberg is an American author, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for his novella Sailing to Byzantium, which takes its name from Yeats' poem; a Hugo in 1990 for Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another; and in 2004 he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

([Source][1])


  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Silverberg || Lloyd Biggle was born in Waterloo, Iowa. During World War II he served in a rifle company of the 102nd Infantry Division and was wounded twice, leaving him disabled for life.  After the war, he received an A.B. Degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and M.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan.  He taught at the University of Michigan and at Eastern Michigan University in the 1950s.  He began writing professionally in 1955, and became a full-time writer with the publication of his novel, All the Colors of Darkness in 1963.  He published two-dozen books, magazine stories, and numerous articles.  He continued writing until his death in 2002. || pseudonyme de Joseph Henri Honoré Boex || Amerikan science fiction writer || Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba. Early in his career he wrote for true confession pulp magazines like True Story, but in the late 1930s he began writing science fiction, which he was more interested in. His first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" was published in 1939, and is considered to be one of the first works of the Golden Age of science fiction. In 1941 he left his job at the Department of National Defence to become a full-time writer, and he went on to write a large number of short stories. In 1944 he moved to Hollywood, California. In the 1950s he briefly became involved in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics projects. Although he left Dianetics, he claimed that Hubbard's followers continued to harass him, and he stopped writing for a few years. In the 1960s Frederik Pohl convinced him to start writing again, and he wrote novels (as opposed to short stories that were later developed into novels) until his death in 2000. || Philip José Farmer was an American author, principally known for his award-winning science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.

Farmer is best known for his sequences of novel — especially the World of Tiers (1965–93) and Riverworld (1971–83) series. He is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for — and reworking of — the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters.

Philip José Farmer is also well known for remixing classic fictional characters, worlds, and both real and fake authors. This is epitomized with his Wold Newton family group of books that tie all classic fictional characters together as real people and blood relatives resulting from an alien conspiracy; his works such as The Other Log of Phileas Fogg and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life make Farmer the ultimate grandfather of the modern literary mashup. - Wikipedia || Michael Shaara (June 23, 1928 – May 5, 1988) was an American author of science fiction, sports fiction, and historical fiction. He was born to an Italian immigrant father (the family name was originally spelled Sciarra, which in Italian is pronounced in a similar way) in Jersey City, New Jersey, graduated in 1951 from Rutgers University, where he joined Theta Chi, and served as a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division prior to the Korean War.

Before Shaara began selling science fiction stories to fiction magazines during the 1950s, he was an amateur boxer and police officer. He later taught literature at Florida State University while continuing to write fiction. The stress of this and his cigarette smoking caused him, at the early age of 36, to have a heart attack, from which he recovered completely. His novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. Shaara died of a heart attack in 1988 aged fifty-nine.

Shaara's children, Jeffrey and Lila, are also novelists. In 1997, Jeffrey Shaara established the annual *Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction*, awarded at Gettysburg College. 

**Source**: [Michael Shaara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shaara) on Wikipedia.