Science Fiction Books

Lincoln said it eons ago.... It took a speck of one-celled plant life on a world parsecs away to prove it for all the galaxy.The following manuscript was discovered during the excavation of a lateral connecting link between the North-South streamways in Narhil Province near Issahar on Kwashior. The excavator, while passing through a small valley about 20 yursts south of the city, was jammed by a mass of... more...

Warden Halloran smiled slightly. "You expect to have criminals on Mars, then?" he asked. "Is that why you want me?" "Of course we don't, sir!" snapped the lieutenant general. His name was Knox. "We need men of your administrative ability—" "Pardon me, general," Lansing interposed smoothly, "I rather think we'd better give the warden a ... a more... more...

"But what is reality?" asked the gnomelike man. He gestured at the tall banks of buildings that loomed around Central Park, with their countless windows glowing like the cave fires of a city of Cro-Magnon people. "All is dream, all is illusion; I am your vision as you are mine." Dan Burke, struggling for clarity of thought through the fumes of liquor, stared without comprehension at the... more...

SECTION 1 Of the Nature of Flatland I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space. Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power... more...

An Empty Room The house where the long trail started was one of gray walls, gray rooms and gray corridors, with carpets that muffled the feet which at intervals passed along them. It was a house of silence, brooding within the high fence that shut it and the grounds from a landscape torpid under the hot sun of summer, and across which occasionally drifted the lonely, mournful whistle of a train on a... more...

It was a very different thing, Algernon Weaver decided, actually to travel in space. When you read about it, or thought about it in terms of what you read, it was more a business of going from one name to another. Algol to Sirius. Aldebaran to Epsilon Ceti. You read the names, and the descriptions that went with them, and the whole thing—although breathtaking in concept, of course, when you really... more...

I watched Don Phillips, the commercial announcer, out of the corner of my eye. The camera in front of me swung around and lined up on my set. "... And now, on with the show," Phillips was saying. "And here, ready to test your wits, is your quizzing quiz master, Smiling Jim Parsons." I smiled into the camera and waited while the audience applauded. The camera tally light went on and the... more...

harlie Holmes lost touch with reality amid rending and shattering sounds that lingered dimly. Blackness engulfed him in a wave of agony. He was not sure exactly when the possibility of opening his eyes occurred to him. Vaguely, he could sense—"remember" was too definite—much tugging and hauling upon his supine body. It doubtless seemed justifiable, but he flinched from recalling more... more...

The troupers of the Big Time lack no art to sway a crowd— or to change all history! ITo bring the dead to lifeIs no great magic.Few are wholly dead:Blow on a dead man's embersAnd a live flame will start.—Graves I dipped through the filmy curtain into the boys' half of the dressing room and there was Sid sitting at the star's dressing table in his threadbare yellowed undershirt, the... more...

By accident Bobby discovered the rocket was about to be shot to the Moon. Naturally he wanted to go along. But could he smuggle himself aboard?Illustrated by Lloyd RognanDad had already gone when Bobby got up. This disappointed Bobby a little but then he remembered—this was the big day. Naturally Dad would get over to the project early. And at four o'clock— Bobby shivered deliciously at the... more...