"Other Worlds Science Stories", Vol 1 No 4 (May 1950) (ed Raymond A Palmer) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents
"Dear Devil" must be amongst the most loved stories of science fiction, going by the number of personal thank you notes I receive from people who had read it long ago, forgot title & author, kept looking for story based on description for decades, & eventually found it via Google & Variety SF. A kind-hearted Martian explorer chooses to strand himself on earth to uplift back to civilization the once great but now primitive post-apocalypse humanity.
Table of contents.
Links on author fetch more fiction by author.
- [novelette] Eric Frank Russell's "Dear Devil" (A): 'Terror drove fathers from their children, & love seemed lost to the Earth. But then came an octopus-armed "devil" to cradle a little boy.'
- [novelette] A E van Vogt's "War of Nerves"; part of the author's Space Beagle series: "The spaceship flashed through the void--& all at once there began a battle of wits to the death between the crew & a non-human race on a planet still light years away ..."
- [ss] Raymond F Jones' "Portrait of Narcissus": "Psychaitrists might say that when Narcissus looked into the pool & fell in love with his own image, he was hypnotized; for beauty may well have hypnotic conditioning powers."
- [ss] Jerome Bixby's "--And All For One": 'a spaceship wreck on the most desolate world in the void--& it was four hungry survivors, "one for all--& all for one"'.
- [novella] S J Byrne's "Colossus"; sequel to author's "Prometheus II" in Amazing Stories: 'The king sat quietly as the bullets struck his body. "The fourth bullet will be a dud," he predicted. The fourth bullet was a dud.'
- [ss] Millen Cooke's "Edmund Latimer's Milking Machine": "Edmund invented a miling machine that was perfection in iteself, except for one flaw. "Milk went it, but never came out. But then a strange man showed up who seemed to thing Edmund had done something quite marvelous."
- [ss] William Wallrich's "The Scissors": "The seemed just an ordinary pair of scissors, but when you opened & closed them, the earth itself opened--& shut."
