New at Project Gutenberg (12 June 2010)

Links on author, publisher, or year fetch more matching fiction.

1. Robert Turner's "Success Story"; download; If, January 1953: "What is to be will be. Our only refuge lies in that which might not have been."
2. Walter M Miller's "The Ties That Bind"; download; If, May 1954: "The Earth was green and quiet. Nature had survived Man, and Man had survived himself. Then, one day, the great silvery ships broke the tranquillity of the skies, bringing Man's twenty-thousand-year-lost inheritance back to Earth..."

There is also a collection titled "The Great Keinplatz Experiment and Other Tales of Twilight and the Unseen" (download) by Arthur Conan Doyle that may be genre, but I'm not sure.

Related: Fiction from old "pulp" magazines.

Free fiction: Genre fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle

G W Thomas at Dark Worlds links a lot of online fiction of Arthur Conon Doyle in sf & related genres.

Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Los Amigos Fiasco" (short story, humor, free): A method to turn mere mortals into supermen!

This sometimes hilarious, other times merely amusing, story dates from early days of electric power. And needs to be read with substantially suspended credulity.

Story summary.

A town called Los Amigos to the west of New York (state?) in the US is using electric chair for the first time for execution of a criminal. Since recent experience of NY wasn't happy - victim took a long time dying - this city will use much higher voltage.

Only the result is what the task-focused executioners see as a fiasco. This high charge has turned Duncan Warner, the condemned man, into a superman! "Electricity is life, and you have charged him with it to the utmost." "What you have done with your electricity is that you have increased this man's vitality until he can defy death for centuries... it will take the wear of hundreds of years to exhaust the enormous nervous energy with which you have drenched him."

Fact sheet.

First published: The Idler, December 1892.
Rating: A
Download full text from The Wondersmith.