Fiction Books

CHAPTER I THE GIRL The afternoon was intensely, terribly hot. Looked at from the high ground where they were encamped above the river, the sea, a mile or two to her right—for this was the coast of Pondo-land—to little Rachel Dove staring at it with sad eyes, seemed an illimitable sheet of stagnant oil. Yet there was no sun, for a grey haze hung like a veil beneath the arch of the sky, so dense and... more...

When the radiogram came in it was 10:28 ship's time and old 29 was exactly 3.4 light years away from Diomed III. Travis threw her wide open and hoped for the best. By 4:10 that same afternoon, minus three burned out generators and fronting a warped ion screen, old 29 touched the atmosphere and began homing down. It was a very tense moment. Somewhere down in that great blue disc below a Mapping... more...

CHAPTER I GOLIAH AND THE PURPLE LID One of my highbrow reg’lars at the Physical Culture Studio, a gent that mixes up in charity works, like organizin’ debatin’ societies in the deaf and dumb asylums, was tellin’ me awhile back of a great scheme of his to help out the stranger in our fair village. He wants to open public information bureaus, where a jay might go and find out anything he wanted... more...

A note about this story This story is from my collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," published by Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I've released this story, along with five others, under the terms of a Creative Commons license that gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyright normally reserves for me, the creator. I recently did the... more...

CHAPTER I. During the régime of Governor Monk, of Upper Canada, the military road was cut through the virgin pine from Lake Ontario to the waters leading into Georgian Bay. The clearings followed, then the homesteads, then the corners, where the country store and the smithy flourished in primitive dignity. The roadside hostelry soon had a place on the highway, and deep into its centre was Nancy... more...

There wasn’t anything underneath but clouds, and there wasn’t anything overhead but sky. Joe Kenmore looked out the plane window past the co-pilot’s shoulder. He stared ahead to where the sky and cloud bank joined—it was many miles away—and tried to picture the job before him. Back in the cargo space of the plane there were four big crates. They contained the pilot gyros for the most... more...

CHAPTER I. The huge London church was crowded in every part, and men had been standing in the aisles from the first moment that the service began. The preacher who had attracted so huge a crowd at two-thirty on a weekday afternoon, was one of the very youngest of the "coming men" of the English church. Tall, thin, with a magnificent head crowned by a mane of hair that was fast becoming... more...

CHAPTER I ANTHONY PATCH In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As... more...

~I~ He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them. He knew why in an oak forest, for instance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and why no two beeches in the whole world were alike. People asked him down to paint a favorite lime or silver birch, for he caught the individuality of a tree as some catch the individuality of a... more...

"Pigs Is Pigs" Butler quite surpasses himself in this story. The intricacies in radio are so great, and the changes occur so quickly that no one can afford to make a will wherein a radio provision figures. Once we thought of having a radio loud speaker installed in our coffin to keep us company and make it less lonesome. After reading this story we quickly changed our mind. The possibilities... more...