Every now and then, writers get the chance to work in worlds they didn’t create. This is uniquely enjoyable; it gives a writer the chance to pretend to be someone else, or to riff on somebody else’s good idea. But these stories, however much fun they are to write, often fall by the wayside once written. They’re neither fish nor fowl, not wholly the product of the writer or of the person who devised the setup he or she is using.

Other People’s Playgrounds collects a baker’s dozen such stories. Harry Turtledove has fun in the worlds of writers as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft and Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson and Jerome K. Jerome, Philip José Farmer and S. M. Stirling, or J. D. Salinger and Fred Saberhagen.

What might happen if the Three Men of Three Men in a Boat ran into a vampire or a werewolf? What was the fall of the mighty imperial world, Trantor, in Asimov’s Foundation universe really like? And what did Martin Padway, the resourceful hero of Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, forget till almost too late? The stories in Other People’s Playgrounds answer questions like these and more.