Sunday, November 28, 2010

Irving W Lande's "Slingshot" (short story, cold war, free): Description of fighter-plane combat equivalent in near-earth space

Illustration by Emsh accompanying the original publication in Astounding Science Fiction of short story Slingshot by Irving W Lande. Picture shows near earth combat of two rocketships.
It's a US/USSR cold war story where there are military bases in space stations around earth. Story is mostly a description of a single "dogfight" between two fighter spaceships, with the US both the good side & the winner.

Near the end of the story, an idea is thrown around - idea of an air-to-air automatic target-locking missile that sounded as if it was from before there were such missiles. Title apparently refers to that. But no missiles are actually used in the story; only manually operated guns mounted on the sides of spaceships.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, November 1955.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedbooks.
Rating: B.
Among the stories edited by John Campbell for Astounding/Analog.
Related: Cold war fiction.

2 comments:

Krishnan said...

Hi Tinkoo re: your "My personal reading has become too one dimensional because of daily posts. Need to get back to diversified reading habits I had before I started blogging", I would like you know what are your reading interests apart from science fiction.

Tinkoo said...

Ha ha - very diversified, & pretty much everything under the sun. Indian fiction, general fiction, non-fiction of all sorts, computers & software, business, ... Recently I've been reading quite a bit on stock investing - & trying to practice this art too. Am currently partway through 2 anthologies - Niven's Convergent Series (that's sf), & an anthology of stock market investing wisdom titled "Just One Thing" (ed John Mauldin).

In fact, about the only science fiction I'd read before I started blogging was Asimov (pretty much all his novels, a lot of short fiction, some of his non-fiction), plus what I picked up accidentally as normal fiction - Hitchhiker's Guide series, Contact, Earth's Children series, Ayn Rand, etc. It sounds so weird now - only 3 years back, I'd not even heard the name of Ray Bradbury, let alone "minor" luminaries like Hal Clement & Kurt Vonnegut!