Classic Science Fiction: 86 books

The complete magazine from February 1930.

Sophisticated, excellent novella-length story set on Darkover. A good example of the best kind of SF writing, where the story is about the characters and the setting is seamlessly integrated into it. Manages to pack in challenges that are psychological, physical and scientific.

A strange tale of alien visitors amid the cold war. An interesting short story / novella by Diffin.

A continuation of the story The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, commissioned by The New York Evening Journal.

SAMUEL R. DELANY considers Captives of the Flame to be the first of a trilogy dealing with the same epoch and characters. It is, however, his second published novel, his first being The Jewels of Aptor.

A powerful short story about an old soldier, greed and a mysterious being. This may be a short story, but it is an amazing, very strange little read.

The story of a confrontation between a human overlord and alien servants, with an ironic twist at the end. Like most of Piper's best work, Uller Uprising is modeled after an actual event in human history; in this case the Sepoy Mutiny -- though not a mere retelling of the Indian Mutiny, but rather an analysis of an historical event applied to a similar situation in the far future.

Adapted to film in 1951 as The Day the Earth Stood Still, this short tale contains a shocker not quite viewed in the movie.

A Playboy is someone with power, too much time on his hands, and too little sense of a goal worth achieving. And if the Playboy happens to belong to a highly advanced culture....

A group has to survive in post apocalyptic America.

When you have an engine with no fuel, and fuel without an engine, and a life-and-death deadline to meet, you have a problem indeed. Unless you are a stubborn Dutchman--and Jan Van Artevelde was the stubbornest Dutchman on Venus.

Was this ill-fated expedition the end of a proud, old race--or the beginning of a new one? There are strange gaps in our records of the past. We find traces of man-like things--but, suddenly, man appears, far too much developed to be the "next step" in a well-linked chain of evolutionary evidence. Perhaps something like the events of this story furnishes the answer to the riddle.

The product of an amazing biological experiment, Hugo Danner was born and grew up free from the fears that inhibit other men... with an infinitely superior mind and a sex-drive that put insatiable women at his feet and turned men green with envy. Considered by many to be the inspiration for the character Superman.