James H Schmitz's "The Hub: Dangerous Territory" (ed Eric Flint) (collection, free): Annotated table of contents & review

Whole book is online at Baen Books. Includes one novel & nine short stories.

Table of contents (10 stories, best first).

1. [novel] "The Demon Breed" aka "The Tuvela" (A); download; Analog, September/October 1968: Humanity has secret super-human rulers!
2. [novelette] "Grandpa" (A); download; Analog, February 1955: A group of early explorers on a newly opened world is trapped by a local lifeform. Only the ingenuity of our teenage hero can save the group's life...
3. [novelette] "Trouble Tide" (A); download; Analog, May 1965: Detectives burst a smuggling operation.
4. [novella] "The Searcher" (B); download; Analog, February 1966: Human heroes fight off an evil alien.
5. [ss] "Balanced Ecology" (B); download; Analog, March 1965: A jungle world knows how to defend itself against greedy humans.
6. "The Other Likeness" (B); download; Analog, July 1962: A small band of humans thinks redesigned, human-looking, aliens have penetrated the human worlds - to destroy the human civilization. So they're doing what they can to catch the aliens...
7. "Attitudes" (B); download; F&SF, February 1969: Sole survivor of an accidentally destroyed human world has has come to civilization seeking help - he's carrying brain dumps of a lot of his dead compatriots. He wants Federation to supply him with many artificially created human bodies which he will animate with his dead friends. He also wants help colonizing a new world with this crowd. Federation helps, but someone is wondering...
8. "The Machmen" (B); download; Analog, September 1964: "Machmen" are machine-men, some medically-induced transformation that turns them into "Homo
   Superior". Only, it's illegal & unsafe. One of the would-be victims being chased for forcible transformation into machman turns out to be someone more capable than strongmen expected.
9. [novelette] "The Winds of Time" (B); download; Analog, September 1962: A man & a woman are trapped, kidnapped, & ... harassed ... by ... aliens.
10. [ss] "A Nice Day for Screaming" (B); download; Analog, January 1965: One of the early exploration ships in "pseudospace", a kind of parallel space, is chased by ... something.
    

Related: Stories of James H Schmitz.

Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations & Other Stories" (ed Eric Flint) (collection, free): Annotated table of contents & review

Entire collection is online at Baen CD. One story in this online version, "The Gulf Between", has been extensively edited by Eric Flint because it "was very dated". I personally prefer originals, even if dated; download link for this story below, therefore, goes to an unedited copy elsewhere.

Table of contents (9 stories, best first, unread last).

If I have a separate post on a story, link on title goes there. Links on publisher or year fetch more matching fiction. My rating is in brackets.

1. [novelette] "The Cold Equations" (A); download; Astounding, August 1954: An innocent girl is to be executed due to apathy of administration (according to author, due to nature's laws, but that's now how it comes across in the story). Intensely emotional.
2. [novel] "The Survivors" aka "Space Prison" (A); download; 1958; survival: Never give up hope.
3. [novelette] "--And Devious the Line of Duty" (A); download; Analog, December 1962; diplomacy: A young man gets his heart broken as part of his work!
4. [novelette] "No Species Alone" (A); download; Universe Science Fiction, November 1954: Snakes are afraid of cats!
5. [novelette] "Empathy" (A); download; Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, October 1959: Actions speak louder than words.
6. [novella] "Mother of Invention" (B); download; Astounding, December 1953; problem solving: Marooned space explorers find a way to end their predicament.
7. [ss] "Brain Teaser" (B); download; If, October 1956: Solving an impossible physics problem!
8. [novella] "The Gulf Between" (B); download; Astounding, October 1953: Man & machine (AI) will forever think differently.
9. [ss] "The Harvest" (C); download; Venture Science Fiction, July 1957: Something I cannot make out head or tail of.
   
   Biblical(?) "angels" are carnivorous energy beings living outside earth's atmosphere, & they feed of "fralings" - (probably) souls of people who've died on surface? Something.

Fact sheet.

First published: 2003.
Related: Stories of Tom Godwin.

For authors: Eric Flint on getting published

In "The Internet is not a Magic Wand" at JBU, #18 (April 2009):

1. "Spend no significant time or effort promoting your work, which is minimal to begin with. Instead, sit your ass down and write. As soon as you’ve written something, submit it to a professional publisher. While you’re waiting to hear the results, write something else. Yes, it’s a dreary business. Yes, it will get damn depressing. But it’s the way I got published and it’s the way almost all authors initially get published. And if it makes you feel any better, the one bright side to the whole dark and dismal process is that good writing is actually fairly rare. If you can genuinely write well, you will eventually get published—as long as you stick to it, and don’t let yourself get sidetracked by ..."
2. "The fact of the matter is that the writing in slush piles is notoriously bad. With a few exceptions, the best of it only rises to mediocrity."
3. 'If you can write—and understanding that most people need to write a lot before they start writing anything good enough to get published—you will eventually get published. But that means you should spend almost all of your time writing, not frittering it away doing “promotional work.” Most of that promotional work will be useless and even the little that has some value has only minimal or marginal value.'

Related: "For authors" series; Eric Flint's works.

Free fiction: A E Van Vogt

These are 2 or 3 months old links that were lost in my bookmarks.

Three stories from A E Van Vogt's collection Transgalactic (ed Eric Flint & David Drake) at Webscription:

1. "A Son is Born"; download; Astounding, May 1946.
2. "Child of the Gods"; download; Astounding, August 1946.
3. "Hand of the Gods"; download; Astounding, December 1946.

Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" (collection, free): Annotated table of contents & review

A very good online collection with 3 short stories & 3 novels, plus an introduction to author by Barry N Malzberg. I've read each of the 3 shorts, I would rate each of them an A.

Table of contents (6 stories, best first, unread last).

1. [ss] "A Logic Named Joe" (as by Will L Jenkins) (A); download text or MP3 (dramatized); Astounding, March 1946; humor: Exploits of a super-intelligent AI, but one without human ethics or morals.
   
2. [ss] "Dear Charles" (A); download; Murray Leinster (Ed)'s "Twists in Time", Avon Books, 1960; humor: A young man's girlfriend is also his great-great-...-grandmother!
   
3. [ss] "The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator" (A); download; Astounding, December 1935; humor: Very interesting implications of ability to pull a physical object from a different time into the present, & vice-versa.
   
4. [novel] "Gateway to Elsewhere" (B); download; as a double novel by Ace Books, 1954; adventure, parallel universe: What if djinns actually existed!
5. [novel] "The Duplicators" (A); download; as a double novel by Ace Books, 1964: Social implications of material duplication technology.
6. [novel] "The Pirates of Zan" (A); download; Astounding, February/March/April 1959; space opera: A young man's struggle to up his social station.
   

Fact sheet.

First published: June 2005 (Baen Books).
Compiled by: Eric Flint.
Legend: ss = short story.

David Drake, Jim Baen, & Eric Flint (Ed)'s "The World Turned Upside Down" (anthology, science fiction, classics, free)

Today, Rusty at Best Science Fiction Stories linked this online copy of the book that is promising to turn out to be one of the best collections of old science fiction stories I've seen.

Among the stories I'd not yet seen online is one of the genre's best - Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations".

Also included are the first published stories of C L Moore, & A E van Vogt. These two selections are not their authors' best, but very good first stories.

Annotated able of contents (29 stories, best first, unread last).

Link on story title goes to my post on the story, if there is one. Link on author name (when there is one) goes to more information on author or his/her stories. My rating is in brackets. Download link appears alongside the story.

1. Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" (A); download; Astounding, August 1954; science fiction: An innocent girl is to be executed due to apathy of administration (according to author, due to nature's laws, but that's not how it comes across in the story). Intensely emotional.
2. Issac Asimov's "The Last Question" (A); download; Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956: An intelligent machine is assigned an impossible task...
3. Arthur Clarke's "Rescue Party" (A); download; Astounding, May 1946: There is life even after apocalypse - so don't lose hope.
4. [ss] Robert Sheckley's "Hunting Problem" (A); download:; Galaxy, September 1955; humor: Alien can be totally incomprehensible!
5. [ss] Keith Laumer's "The Last Command" (A); download; Analog, January 1967: A buried war machine, awakened accidentally decades after the end of war, is unaware of war's end & considers everything nearby as the enemy!
6. [novella] John W Campbell, Jr's "Who Goes There?" (as by Don A Stuart) (A); download; Astounding, August 1938; thriller: Curious figuratively & inadvertently open the bottle to let the djinn out, & all hell breaks loose.
7. [ss] Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air" (A); download: "survival in the face of desperate circumstances".
8. [novelette] L Sprague de Camp's "A Gun for Dinosaur" (A); download; Galaxy, March 1956: Detailed description of ancient world where dinosaurs roamed. Told as a colonial-style hunting story - time travel to past to hunt dinosaurs.
9. [novelette] Murray Leinster's "The Aliens" (A); download; Astounding, August 1959: First human contact with aliens begins on a very hostile note, but ends in peace. Except for some rather dramatic scenes, it's generally a gripping story.
10. H Beam Piper's "Omnilingual" (A); download; Astounding, February 1957: A universal rosetta stone to decode the writings of a long dead civilization known to be at about our level of technological ability.
11. [ss] Ross Rocklynne's "Quietus" (A); download; Astounding, September 1940: "who we are creates a bias in how we view the world".
12. [ss] Poul Anderson's "Turning Point" (A); download:; If, May 1963: When human space farers met alien super-genius hunter/gatherers.
13. [ss] Michael Shaara's "All the Way Back" (A); download; Astounding, July 1952: An answer to "why haven't we met aliens yet?"
14. [novella] Christopher Anvil's "The Gentle Earth" (A); download: Alien cold-blooded invaders have occupied much of US, but are losing battle against earth's weather. Often humorous, but with a lame ending.
15. Robert Heinlein's "The Menace from Earth" (A); download: A 15 year old girl is confused about love & life. Story is set on moon, & we get treated to a lot of things peculiar to life in Luna City.
16. A E Van Vogt's "Black Destroyer" (A); download: A practically immortal super-being of an alien world is attacking human visitors & threatens to overrun inhabited galaxy. First published story of van Vogt. I found the ending incomprehensible, but it was a very interesting read.
17. [novelette] C L Moore's "Shambleau" (A); download; Weird Tales, November 1933: A cocktail of a vampire story & the story of Medusa from Homer's "Odyssey" - science fictionalized. First published story of Moore.
18. [ff] Fredric Brown's "Answer" (A); download: It's not safe to invent god!
19. [novelette] Theodore Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses" (B); download; Astounding, November 1947: A nuclear war has doomed US. Some survivors awaiting death are trying to prevent retaliation it's still capable of inflicting - to give humanity a chance, even if it is without the US.
20. C M Kornbluth's "The Only Thing We Learn" (B); download: Frontiersmen always return as raiders of their ancient homes...
21. Rick Raphael's "Code Three" (B); download: A day in the life of a (road) traffic police patrol car.
22. James H Schmitz's "Goblin Night"; (B); download: A human psychopath on a colony world loves hunting humans visitors to a game park with the aid of his pet nocturnal carnivore.
23. P Schuyler Miller's "Spawn" (B); download: Alien spores have found earth a fertile ground. Much of the story is gore violence, & is generally more fantasy than science fiction.
24. Wyman Guin's "Trigger Tide" (B); download: An assassin, on a mission to kill leader of a group of despots on a human colony world, learns of strange effects of interaction of its many moons with local piezoelectric rock formations.
25. Gordon R Dickson's "St Dragon and the George" (B); download; fantasy: An adventure involving time travel & body transfer with hypnotism & sorcery, fighting with & against dragons, & also featuring an ogre, a "Worm", a magician, a chivalrous knight.
26. Chester S Geier's "Environment" (B); download: An apparently dead city on an alien world transforms visiting humanoids into super-beings.
27. Lee Gregor's "Heavy Planet" (B); download: A native of a super-high gravity & super-dense atmosphere world has found an invaluable relic of alien origin.
28. Jack Vance's "Liane the Wayfarer" (B); download; fantasy: A criminal wayfarer needs to steal something from a magical superman because his girl demands it.
29. Robert Ernest Gilbert's "Thy Rocks and Rills" (B); download: On a future US gone macho in the sense of Hollywood's Western movies, & talking & intelligent cows made so by radiation exposure of their long dead ancestors near US' first nuclear bomb test site, we will witness two unusual fights between man/man & intelligent bull/man.

Fact sheet.

First published: Baen Books, January 2005.