Dann & Dozois' first theme anthology, Aliens!, was published in 1980 by Pocket Books, with classic stories by Edgar Pangborn, Philip K. Dick, and Damon Knight, and then recent stories by Larry Niven, James Tiptree, Jr., and others. The book also included an extensive "guide to further reading," with nine pages of novel and story titles.

Two years later they began a series of fantasy anthologies for Ace, with further exclamatory titles, at roughly annual intervals. Though several of these were mostly science fiction (e.g. Invaders!), they shifted to science fiction exclusively (and lost the exclamation points) in the 1990s with Hackers. Throughout the series the editors drew heavily on stories of recent decades, occasionally using older works but avoiding well-known, already frequently anthologized stories. (There's no Isaac Asimov story in Robots, for example.) Many of these volumes, though not all, included lists of additional titles.

Most reprinted authors: Avram Davidson and L. Sprague de Camp (11 each), Michael Swanwick (10), Howard Waldrop (9), then Gardner Dozois, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Reed, Robert Silverberg, and Gene Wolfe (8 each).