Frank Herbert's "You Take the High Road" (short story, detective, free)

Here is a peaceful place, its peacefulness asserted by its natives. Natives that were told beforehand that they'll get a significant prize if they're peaceful! And there are no obvious signs that suggest they're not peaceful.

But a detective's got a hunch they're putting up a false show...

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, May 1958.
Download full text as part of the scans of Astounding (British ed), August 1958.
This is the first of the four stories that went into the making of author's fixup novel "The Godmakers".
Rating: A.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Stories of Frank Herbert.

"Astounding Science Fiction" (British edition), August 1958 (magazine, free) (ed John W Campbell): Annotated table of contents

Links on author fetch more fiction by author. Where I've read the story, my rating appears in brackets. If I have a separate post on a story, link on its title goes there.

Table of contents (best first, unread last).

1. [novel - 1/3] Hal Clement's "Close to Critical" (A): "Meet Tenebra, the planet where raindrops are fifty feet through ... & hard quartz rocks dissolve away like salt. Under three gravities, & a monstrously deep atmosphere, with oily seas of sulphuric acid, two children touch off a political situation that is ... close to critical".
2. [ss] Frank Herbert's "You Take the High Road" (A); detective: Is this village really of peaceful people?
3. [ss] Stanley Mullen's "Fool Killer" (A): What if law allowed you one murder!
4. [ss] John Rackham's "One-Eye" (B): A man has an unusual gift - he "sees" bad things happen just before they do happen. And figuring out the nature of this "gift" gets him in trouble.
   
   Title is from the story about a one-eyed man among the blind ones. As is the man with the gift among the ordinary humans.
5. [novelette] Charles V de Vet's "Special Feature": "What constitutes public entertainment changes with the mores of a society. The Romans liked the circuses ... but the feline devil loose in their city might have been a bit too stimulating for them..."
6. [ss] Gordon R Dickson's "The Question": "It wasn't too surprising that aliens couldn't answer the Question. After all, we've been trying for millenia ourselves!"

Fact sheet.

Labeled: Vol XIV No 8.
Download scans as a CBR file. [via Bob@pulpscans]
Note: Link points to a RAR file that contains target CBR, probably to work around some hosting service file naming constraints.
Related: Stories from the Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell, old "pulps", 1950s.

Frank Herbert's "Rat Race" (short story, detective, free): Rats are to men as men are to...

A police detective, during a routine errand to a mortuary, asks an idle question about something kept there. He gets an evasive response. He smells rat, & we are on to something really big...

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, July 1955.
Download full text as part of scans of Astounding (British Edition), December 1955.
Rating: A.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Stories of Frank Herbert; fiction where men are lab animals to aliens.

"Astounding Science Fiction" (British Edition), December 1955 (ed John Campbell) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents & review

Links on author fetch more fiction by author. Where I've read a story, my rating appears in brackets. Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there.

Table of contents (best first, unread last).

1. [ss] Eric Frank Russell's "The Waitabits" (A): Different people run their lives at different pace. What happens when faster ones try to bring up the slower ones to their pace? 
2. [ss] Frank Herbert's "Rat Race" (A): Rats are to men as men are to...
3. [ss] Algis Budrys' "In Clouds of Glory": "Combat of Champions is an old method of settling disputes--but when hiring champions, there is a certain danger they aren't fighting for quite the goals you think..."
4. [serial - conclusion] Poul Anderson's "The Long Way Home": "Sooner or later, every adult human being makes a discovery--or lives dissatisfied, unhappy. That there never was, & never will be, a way to go home ... but there is always a way to make home."

Fact sheet.

Labeled: Vol XI No 12.
Download scans as a CBR file. [via Bob@pulpscans]
Note: Download link points to a RAR file that contains the target CBR as its sole contents, probably to work around some file naming constraint of hosting service.

See also.

1. Fiction from Analog/Astounding (only issues edited by Harry Bates, John Campbell; whole issues only).
2. Fiction from old "pulp" magazines.
3. Fiction from 1950s.

Frank Herbert's "Dune" (novel): Life on a parched desert world

This was my third attempt at reading this book. I distinctly remember that on each of the two earlier occasions, I gave up within first few dozen pages -  because I found names in the story impossible to spell! This time I had no such difficulty. Only difference between then & now is: I now have some experience reading sf; then I was new to the genre. So if you are a genre novice who discovered sf relatively late in life & cannot relate to the book everyone praises, may be try it a few years down the line. This also makes me wonder if I'll still like the stories I then loved!

While the story has a couple of scenes I found very silly (a completely unnecessary knife duel near the end, a 3-4 year old supremely endowed girl happily fighting on the battlefront of a dirty war), I generally liked the book.

While there are a lot of issues this book of epic scope deals with, one of the most memorable, if macabre, part for me was: the water is so precious & scarce on this desert world of Arrakis that a part of the funeral rituals for the dead involves extracting the water from the dead body for later community use!

There are any number of summaries of this book on the net; so I'll skip that part.

Fact sheet.

First published: (as novel) 1965.
This is a fix up novel, based on author's 2 earlier works: "Dune World" (Analog, December 1963 - February 1964 in 3 parts) & "The Prophet of Dune" (Analog, January-May 1965 in 5 parts).
Rating: A. 
Winner of Hugo Award 1966 in novel category.
Winner of Nebula Award 1965 in novel category.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Stories of Frank Herbert.

Frank Herbert's "Operation Haystack" (novelette, free): Spy exposes a secret society

I got a feeling there is an undercurrent here, & it is a general comment on women's character. But I don't know the atmosphere in US when this story was written; someone familiar with the period will likely see more here.

While the plot itself is not much, it's a fast moving spy story: a government agent exposes a very old secret society of women with Arabic roots, determined to achieve a single goal - political control of the galaxy.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, May 1959.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedooks.
Rating: B.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Stories of Frank Herbert.

Decoding "Dune"

Near end of this post on Frank Herbert, Frederik Pohl tells us how to maps some real world places & people to imaginary ones in "Dune".

Free fiction: Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, February 1960

At Internet Archive in multiple formats.

Editor: Cele Goldsmith.
Among the authors: Frank Herbert, Murray Leinster, Fritz Leiber.

Related: Fiction from old "pulps", 1960s.

"Astounding Science Fiction", January 1956 (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Available online at Internet Archive in multiple formats.
Note: I'd posted this link, sans ToC, sometime back. Regulars might already have it on their disk.

Has a lot of pages missing, among them at least two of the stories - "The Executioner" & "Won't You Walk-". Means the only complete story is "Indirection".

Table of contents (4 stories).

Links on author fetch more matching fiction.

1. [novelette] Algis Budrys' "The Executioner": Not available in online copy linked above.
   
   Not read.
2. [novelette] Theodore Sturgeon's "Won't You Walk-": Not available in online copy linked above.
   
   Not read.
3. [ss] Everett B Cole's "Indirection" (B): "The best way to keep a secret is to publish it in a quite unbelievable form—and insist that it is the truth."
4. [serial - conclusion (probably part 3/3] Frank Herbert's "Under Pressure": "There was a factor present that held the men together under that grinding, unendurable pressure ... that wouldn't fit into the psychodynamic equations. Essentially, they weren't machines, and the dynamics of machines didn't apply!"
   
   Not read.

See also.

1. Fiction from Analog/Astounding (only issues edited by Harry Bates, John Campbell).
2. Stories written by John Campbell.
3. Fiction from 1950s.
   
4. Old "pulp" magazines.