Science Fiction Books

There was a sudden crash that hung sharply in the air, as if a tree had been hit by lightning some distance away. Then another. Alan stopped, puzzled. Two more blasts, quickly together, and the sound of a scream faintly. Frowning, worrying about the sounds, Alan momentarily forgot to watch his step until his foot suddenly plunged into an ant hill, throwing him to the jungle floor. "Damn!" He... more...

The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues. Jon Karyl was bolting in a new baffle plate on the stationary rocket engine. It was a tedious job and took all his concentration. So he wasn't paying too much attention to what was going on... more...

Ambitious Brill slid smoothly into her berth in the Brooklyn Navy Yard after far too many weeks at sea, as far as her crew were concerned. After all the necessary preliminaries had been waded through, the majority of that happy crew went ashore to enjoy a well-earned and long-anticipated leave in the depths of the brick-and-glass canyons of Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson. The trip had been uneventful, in so... more...

"Now watch," Remm said, indicating the native. Macker had been absent, exploring the countryside in the immediate vicinity of their landing place, and had not witnessed the capture of the native, or the tests his two companions made on it. Macker followed Remm's gaze to where the biped native sat hunched. The creature was bent into an ungainly position, its body crooked at incongruous... more...

Tyndall heard the rockets begin to roar, and it seemed as though the very blood in his veins pulsated with the surging of those mighty jets. Going? They couldn't be going. Not yet. Not without him! And he heard the roaring rise to a mighty crescendo, and he felt the trembling of the ground beneath the room in which he lay, and then the great sound grew less, and grew dim, and finally dissipated in... more...

We gave this story to a very competent, and very pretty gal artist. We said, "Read this carefully, dream on it, and come up with an illustration." A week later, she returned with the finished drawing. "The hero," she said. We did a double take. "Hey! That's not the hero." She looked us straight in the eye. "Can you prove it?" She had us. We couldn't, and she... more...

We humans are a strange breed, unique in the Universe. Of all the races met among the stars, only homo sapiens thrives on deliberate self-delusion. Perhaps this is the secret of our greatness, for we are great. In power, if not in supernal wisdom. Legends, I think, are our strength. If one day a man stands on the rim of the Galaxy and looks out across the gulfs toward the seetee suns of Andromeda, it... more...

Interplanetary Press, Circa 2022—Septimus Spink, the first Earthman to reach and return from New Mu in a flying saucer, threw a hydroactive bombshell into the meeting of the leading cosmogonists at the University of Cincinnatus today. The amazing Spink, uninvited, crashed this august body of scientists and laughed at a statement made by Professor Apsox Zalpha as to the origin of Earth and other... more...

ungrily, the cradled vessel's great steel nose pointed up to the distant stars. She was the Cosmos XII, newest and sleekest of the Space Service's rapidly-expanding wing of interstellar scout ships, and she was now ready for operational work. Major Lance Cooper, a big man with space-tanned features, stood in the shadow of the control bunker and watched the swarm of ground crewmen working at... more...

I am sitting on the edge of what passes for a bed. It is made of loosely woven strips of steel, and there is no mattress, only an extra blanket of thin olive-drab. It isn't comfortable; but of course they expect to make me still more uncomfortable. They expect to take me out of this precinct jail to the District prison and eventually to the death house. Sure, there will be a trial first, but that... more...