The Silurian Tales Volume 1 The 400-Million-Year Itch, Volume 1 of The Silurian Tales, represents the first volume of a master work by one of the SF genre's greatest short story writers. The stories in Steven Utley's Silurian Tales have appeared in Asimov's, Analog, SciFiction, F&SF, and Cosmos, and have been beguiling readers with glimpses of prehistoric life since the mid-1990s. These tales have been described by Brian Stableford in Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia as "[t]he most elaborate reconstruction of a past era in recent speculative fiction." The series employs a variety of literary techniques in recounting the adventures and misadventures of a scientific expedition in the Paleozoic Era and also address some implications of the "many-worlds" hypothesis in quantum physics; several of the stories have been reprinted in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies and the Year's Best SF edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.