Fiction

The twenty-nine of us were E.T.I. Team 17, whose assignment was the asteroids. We were four years and three months out of Terra, and we'd reached Vesta right on schedule. Ten minutes after landing, we had known that the clod was part of the crust of Planet X -- or Sorn, to give it its right name -- one of the few such parts that hadn't been blown clean out of the Solar System.

"If you called me here to tell me to have a child," Mary Pornsen said, "you can just forget about it. We girls have made up our minds."

Stories of the old West were filled with bad men who lived by the speed of their gun hand. Well, meet Buck Tarrant, who could outdraw them all. His secret: he didn't even have to reach for his weapon....

A man in a bar has a headache, but it's not from drink.

He stood watching while George Atkinson spun around, dark eyes flashing, hair tousled. There was a two days' growth of beard darkening Atkinson's face. "Why, George," Loveral said, swiftly examining the litter of metal and wood which was spread over a table behind Atkinson. There was a home-made hammer in Atkinson's hand. "What have we here, George?" "Something for you," Atkinson said, tightening his fingers about the handle of the hammer. Loveral grinned his famous Loveral grin. "That's fine.

This is a classic science fiction short story by James H. Schmitz that first appeared in Analog Science Fact and Fiction. The following passage is part of its intriguing intro: 'There is no predictable correlation between intelligence and ethics, nor is ruthlessness necessarily an evil thing

“Why don’t you find yourself some nice little American girl,” his father had often repeated.

John Stewart Williamson, who wrote as Jack Williamson and sometimes under the pseudonym Will Stewart, was a U.S. writer often referred to as the "Dean of Science Fiction" following the death of Robert A. Heinlein. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for science fiction in 2002.

Suddenly, Honath lost his temper. "Lose it, then!" he shouted. "Let us unlearn everything we know only by rote, go back to the beginning, learn all over again, and continue to learn, from our own experience. Spokesman, you are an old man, but there are still some of us who haven't forgotten what curiosity means!" "Quiet!" the Spokesman said. "We have heard enough. We call on Alaskon the Navigator." "Much of the Book is clearly untrue," Alaskon said flatly, rising. "As a handbook of small trades it has served us well. As a guide to how the universe is made, it is nonsense, in my opinion; Honath is too kind to it. I've made no secret of what I think, and I still think it." "And will pay for it," the Spokesman said, blinking slowly down at Alaskon. "Charl the Reader." "Nothing," Charl said, without standing, or even looking up.

The Moralist is presented here in a high quality paperback edition.

Dead World is presented here in a high quality paperback edition.

So begins this eerie science fiction and cautionary tale that takes place in the year 2951. Written in 1889 by the founder and editor of Life magazine, John Ames Mitchell, The Last American is a quick though somewhat unsettling read. Beginning in Persia, the reader is taken along with a group of travelers who voyage across the ocean to find the remains of a once great nation, Merhika. Landing first in Nh-Yok and later then in Washington, the reader follows these travelers as they make their way about the ruins, all the while commenting and comparing Persian society with the lost American society that they have found a society, a race of people that they saw as purely imitative; simply an enlarged copy of other nationalities extant at the time