The world's first lunar spacecraft is about to launch. The ship, Prometheus, is built from two separate components—one designed to travel from Earth's atmosphere to the Moon and back, and the other to carry the first component through Earth's atmosphere and into orbit. Sound familiar? That's because it's the basic description of the first space shuttle—well before its launch in 1971. Prelude to Space was published in 1951—well before the first...

Excerpt: "There was nothing unusual about the traffic accident victim with a broken leg until intern Frank Corson found he had two heartbeats. He thought that strange, but not as strange as passing the identical man in the street a few minutes later. One by one eight identical strangers are discovered, five dead, and each with two hearts. Eight artificial creatures, identical in every respect down to the fingerprints, and none of them human. They...

Little Fuzzy is a science fiction novel set on the planet Zarathustra, a world rich in natural resources being exploited by a huge chartered company from Earth. Jack Holloway is a free-lance sunstone miner working on the outskirts of civilization when he encounters a small, fuzzy animal which turns out to be remarkably intelligent. He soon begins to suspect that “Little Fuzzy” and his family are more than just clever animals, but in fact a new...

The first and shortest version was published in Beyond Fantasy Fiction in July 1954 under the title "No More Stars" with the pseudonym Charles Satterfield. It first appeared in book form in 1963 with Badge of Infamy as "Two Complete Novels" in a Galaxy paperback original. The first book-length version was published in 1973 by Ace Books. Computer engineer Dave Hanson is transported from Earth to a world where the rules of science and physics are replaced...

Space Platform tells the exciting story of a young man helping to build this first station. With scientific accuracy and imagination Murray Leinster, one of the world's top science-fiction writers, describes the building and launching of the platform. Here is a fast-paced story of sabotage and murder directed against a project more secret and valuable than the atom bomb Reaching for the Stars....Ever since ancient man first gazed in wonder at the...

A novel of star-crossed love from the New York Times–bestselling author of Nebula and Hugo Award–winning novel Dreamsnake. In a future where space travel moves at faster-than-light speed, starship crews can only survive transit if drugged nearly to death. Then there are those like Laenea Trevelyan, who want to become pilots so badly they will go through years of training and major surgery to free themselves of biological rhythms. But though...

Some stories are epic.The Earth is in a state of collapse, with wars breaking out over resources and an environment pushed to the edge by human greed.Three living generation ships have been built with a combination of genetic mastery, artificial intelligence, technology, and raw materials harvested from the asteroid belt. This is the story of one of them-43 Ariadne, or Forever, as her inhabitants call her-a living world that carries the remaining...

ZNIDD SUDDABIT! So the Ulleran challenge begins, with the rantings of a prophet and a seemingly incidental street riot. Only when a dose of poison lands in the governor-general's whiskey does it become clear that the "geeks" have had it up to their double-lidded eyeballs with the imperialist Terran Federation's Chartered Uller Company. Then, overnight, war is everywhere. How it will end is in the (merely) two Terran hands of the new governor-general,...

The town of Superior, Ohio, certainly was living up to its name. In what was undoubtedly the most spectacular feat of the century, it simply picked itself up one night and rose two full miles above Earth. Radio messages stated simply that Superior had seceded from Earth. But Don Cort, stranded on that rising town, was beginning to suspect that nothing was simple about Superior except its citizens.

Talents, Incorporated was first published in 1962, at the height of the Cold War. The order of the day was MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and Murray Leinster, pseudonym for William F. Jenkins, author of Talents, Incorporated, does a better job of presenting the absurdity of governing for defeat than does Wibberley. Wibberley assails the patronizing near Imperialism of the anti-Communist frenzy of the era. Both are hilarious, disconcerting, and...