Foreword
Welcome to the third annual installment of Unidentified Funny Objects—an anthology series of humorous, lighthearted, wacky, and downright unidentifiable stories.
In this, our thickest volume to date, you’ll find a traveling robot salesman and a vampire novelist, a brain-in-a-jar superhero and a jinn trapped in a mattress. You’ll visit the scene of an alien invasion alongside a local news team and become embroiled in the board elections at a condo populated by magical beings.
Our regular readers will get the chance to revisit settings introduced in the previous UFO volumes, in stories by Jim C. Hines, Matt Mikalatos, and Jody Lynn Nye. New readers need not worry; each story stands on its own and doesn’t require familiarity with the previous episodes.
All but two of the stories in this book are original. Of the two reprints, the history of “Company Store” by Robert Silverberg is especially interesting. This story was originally published in the 1950s and hasn’t been reprinted in English since the 1970s. In fact, it’s been out of circulation for so long that even the author did not have a digital copy. He photocopied the story pages out of a paperback and sent them for us to type up.
Although “Company Store” may be unfamiliar to most English-speaking readers, this story is very well-known to Russian fans. The translated version (titled “The Contract” in Russian) was published in numerous Russian anthologies, and a short animated film based on it was produced in the 1980s. It was broadcast regularly on one of only two national TV channels during the final years of the Soviet Union, and so is as familiar to that generation of Soviet viewers as ThunderCats or the Care Bears are to their American counterparts.
I invite you to rediscover this lost gem and to enjoy the other fine and varied stories collected within.
Happy reading!