The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated, endured, and most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets are classic celebrations of the greatest, the brightest, the eternally constellated.

Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck-or perhaps some combination of them all-leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his day. . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard -- until he pushed his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly succeeded in convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended to prove his theory that the earth was hollow and ripe for exploitation; his quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest admirers. Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures and the other nine men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions-acts of excavation and reclamation-to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.

The editor of Metaworlds, Penguin's successful compilation of Australian science fiction, presents here for the first time a volume of his own work. Long established as an author, editor and publisher of the influential Void series of magazines and books, this collection of stories provides for the first time a comprehensive overview of the work of one of Australia's leading science fiction figures. "This is largely what SF is all about: presenting plausible themes to suggest that things such as invisibility, Jekyl & Hyde potions, creation of Frankenstein monsters, the rebirth of dinosaurs, et al, might be possible. SF is an explorative genre, and here Paul Collins explores." - Jack Wodhams

Gilbon the dragon was the last of his kind. His black and grey mottled hide testified to a great age; his once sharp teeth were now blunted instruments with which he ground his greens; his silvery wings were now somewhat tarnished since he hadn't used them much for eons; his once taut body had run to fat. He had two broken and blackened horns that vaguely resembled the spinal mounds that ran the length of his back. Tall as a stone hut and twice as long, he might at first glance seem a formidable foe. He stretched languorously beneath a towering singsong tree. Its funnel fronds whistled myriad tunes as a gentle breeze combed their hair-thin antennae. The dragon heaved a sigh of contentment. Retirement wasn't all that bad, he mused. ........