Showing posts with label Abraham Merritt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abraham Merritt. Show all posts

Sunday, April 3, 2011

"Thrilling Wonder Stories", Vol 8 No 2 (October 1936) (ed Mort Weisinger): Annotated table of contents

Cover image of Thrilling Wonder Stories magazine, October 1936 issue. It shows the climax of the story Man-Jewels for Xothar by Hal K Wells - an earthman against an invader from outer galaxies.
This magazine's scans in CBR format are online at Crosseyed Cyclops.
Caution:  I've linked this magazine without ToC in the past; regulars might already have the CBR on local storage.

Table of contents. 

Links on author fetch more fiction by author.

  1. [novelette] Ray Cummings' "Shadow Gold": "Johnny Hall boards the Transition Express for Bhana, the city beyond space, where treasure is cheap as dirt & enemies lust for power!"
  2. [novelette] Hal K Wells' "Man-Jewels for Xothar": "Giant worm-beings from beyond the solar system descend to earth, armed with death!"
  3. [novelette] Ralph Milne Farley's "Liquid Life": "Bio-chemical science discovers an amazing alien being that thinks, talks--and destroys!"
  4. [novelette] Arthur J Burks' "Dictator of the Atoms": "A fiendish wizard straitjackets the forces of science to wreck a cosmic catastrophe!"
  5. [ss] Edmond Hamilton's "Cosmic Quest": "To save a race from destruction, a star-roving explorer speeds through a boundless universe!"
  6. [ss] Abraham Merritt's "Rhythm of the Spheres": "A world where robots reign--and the last poet strikes out for freedom!"
  7. [ss] Paul Ernst's "The Microscopic Giants": "Men go forty thousand feet below the surface to find copper--and battle with the scurrying, Lilliputian denizens of a strange land of atomic compression!"
  8. [ss] D L James' "Crystals of Madness": "Humanity is menaced by an insidious, sentient life-force on the satellite Deimos!"

See also.

  1. Fiction from Thrilling Wonder Stories
  2. Fiction from old "pulp" magazines.
  3. Fiction from 1930s.
Credits: I found editor's name from ISFDB

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Free fiction: Abraham Merritt, Greg Bear

  1. G W Thomas links a lot of online stories of Abraham Merritt at Dark Worlds (some appear to be under pseudonyms).
  2. Free SF Reader links Greg Bear's collection Sleepside at Webscription. 3 stories from collection are online.

    He also links MP3 audio of one of these stories, "Webster", at Internet Archive.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Abraham Merritt's "The Moon Pool" (novelette, lost civilization, free)

Illustration accompanying the reprint of the short story The Moon Pool by Abraham Merritt in Jim Baen's Universe, December 2008. Click image for full sized original.While it didn't really work for me, there are well known sources that appear to hold a high opinion of this story:

  1. Jim Baen's Universe, #16 (December 2008), includes it in its Classic section.
  2. It's included in one of the Hartwell/Cramer anthologies (I think).
  3. God in Eric Frank Russell's "Hobbyist" is too similar to the "dweller" in this story.
  4. Strange affliction that is spreading through the countryside in Kono Tensei's "Hikari" affects people in ways somewhat similar to the way the branded (by "dweller") human's affected skin behaves in this story.

Story summary.

Dr David Throckmartin led an expedition to the "island of Ponape in the Carolines" somewhere in the Pacific. The island is part of a chain. Chain has ancient ruins considered haunted by "great spirits—ani—who were particularly powerful when the moon was at the full". Locals avoid the ruins - even more so during the nights of full moon. Expedition included David's wife Edith, his assistant Dr Charles Stanton, & "a Swedish woman, Thora Helversen, who had been Edith Throckmartin’s nurse in babyhood".

Their adventure will lead to discovery of an ancient elder race "that blossomed ages before the seeds of Egypt were sown". All four members of the expedition will be lost.

Fact sheet.

First published: All-Story Weekly, 22 July 1919. (I've a feeling this magazine was one of the many names of Argosy during its long life, or at least related to it in some way. But am not sure.)
Rating: B.
Download full text from Gaslight.
Note: This post is based on a reading the version of the story that appeared in Jim Baen's Universe, #16 (December 2008), but this Gaslight version appears to be the same. There is a 6-times longer novel version at Project Gutenberg. G W Thomas has more to say on the history of this story & its novelization.