John W Campbell's "Dead Knowledge" (as by Don A Stuart) (novelette, alien invasion): "Molecular", microscopic, space traveling, light-eating alien invaders want to control us as tools!

Three human star travelers have arrived at a new world 27 light years from earth, only to find that it once harbored intelligent, highly developed, humanoid civilization that is now dead. And, curiously, it's long dead residents have their bodies well preserved & they all apparently committed suicide!!

It drags on for a while, until the visitors themselves start committing suicide - first one, then other. It's the final one who will enlighten us on the nature of infection before himself committing suicide.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, January 1938.
Rating: B.
Nominated for Retro Hugo Awards 1939 in novelette category.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Works of John Campbell (as by Don A Stuart).

John Campbell's "The Invaders" (short story) & "Rebellion" (novelette)

These two, in sequence, are often listed as part of a 3-story series, with the first story as "The Machine". But these two are only marginally related to "The Machine". And these two stories are actually one long story, split probably because of publishing constraints of the day.

Story summary.

At the beginning of "The Invaders", earth is an idyllic place; The Machine had eliminated all threats to humans, including microbes, thousands of years ago. And humans are a bit like Eloi in "The Time Machine" of H G Wells - intellectually degenerated into animals because no skills are required to survive in this world.

That's when alien invaders come & make earth their own. They domesticate the humans, treating & breeding them as animals. There is a very moving scene at the beginning of invasion where aliens are dissecting a woman while her man watches helplessly, not understanding the enormity of what is happening.

"Rebellion" happens several thousand years later. Aliens are well entrenched. Humans are bred into many different strains. Accidentally, a mutation gives back a human the power to lie. And circumstances place him in a situation where he can forge official breeding records.

The mutation is stealthily propagated, until eventually the descendents build a gadget that can overcome the firepower of ruling aliens & the rebels force the aliens to leave earth.

Collected in.

1. Lester del Rey (ed)'s "The Best of John W Campbell".

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, June 1935 ("The Invaders") & August 1935 ("Rebellion).
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of John Campbell.

Campbell's "Astounding Science Fiction Anthology" post is now complete

Main post.

John W Campbell, Jr (ed)'s "The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology": Annotated table of contents & review

23 stories, all originally published in Astounding magazine.

Not only does it include 2 stories penned by Kuttner/Moore (neither of them anywhere near authors' best), it includes one of their fan fictions too - by William Tenn. This Tenn story must be among the best fanfic of the genre & a beautiful read on its own too.

And Simak's is probably the best immortality story I've read so far.

List below is generally in order I liked - best first, unread last. But I'd read many of these stories years back & have mostly forgotten; I'll probably reorder the list if I were to read all of them today.

Where I know of an online copy of a story, I include download link too. My rating appears in brackets (ABC; A = worth the time; C = don't bother). Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there.

1. [novelette] Murray Leinster's "First Contact" (A); download text as part of a larger package or audio; May 1945: How to go about establishing trust with strangers when the cost of misplaced trust can be unacceptably high?
2. [novelette] William Tenn's "Child's Play" (A); read online or download audio; March 1947: What if Kuttner & Moore retold "Frankenstein"?
3. [novelette] Clifford D Simak's "Eternity Lost" (A); July 1949: A lawmaker considers himself above law...
4. [novelette] James H Schmitz's "The Witches of Karres" (A); download from Baen CD or Internet Archive; December 1949: I've an impression what I'd read several years back was a novel; I'm not sure I've read this novelette version.
   
   It's a space opera, but features a community of supermen/women ("witches" of title) who have unusual mental abilities.
5. [novelette] Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall" (A); download text/audio; September 1941: On a world orbiting a sun in a system of 6 suns, all suns never set except once in several thousand years. How would the natives react to darkness they're completely unfamiliar with.
   
   I personally read its novel version before this shorter version. While the later half of novel is useless bloat, I liked first half of it corresponding to original short story far better than the shorter version itself.
6. [novelette] Eric Frank Russell's "Late Night Final" (A); December 1948: A variant of "... And Then There Were None" (download), but with a very different ending.
7. [novelette] L Sprague de Camp's "The Exalted" (A); download; November 1940: I remember I'd loved this when I first read it. A funny piece about the adventures of a nutty professor & his uplifted bear.
8. [ss] H B Fyfe's "Protected Species" (A); March 1951: Arrogant humans are humbled. 
9. [ss] Lester del Rey's "Over the Top" (A); download as part of a larger package; November 1949: Men go to war, unless distracted!
10. [ss] John Pierce's "Invariant" (A); April 1944: Serious consequences of rejuvenation treatment... 
11. [ss] Murray Leinster's "Historical Note" (A); read online; February 1951: What if personal flying machines become a reality? Story is extremely satirical of communist Soviet Union.
12. [non-fact] W K Lessing's "Meihemin Ce Klasrum" (as by Dolton Edwards) (A); download; September 1946; humor: A plan to turn written English into a phonetic language.
13. [novelette] Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "When the Bough Breaks" (as by Lewis Padgett) (B); download as part of a larger package; November 1944: A baby is a superman - the first of the new race "homo superior", causing much anguish & heartburn in his parents.
14. [novelette] Robert Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" (B); download; September 1940: It'll be safer if nuclear power plants were located in space rather than on earth. I don't recollect how it proposed to get the power generated in space down to earth.
15. [ss] Jack Williamson's "Hindsight" (B); download; May 1940: Time travel cannot change significant history!
16. [novelette] A E van Vogt's "Vault of the Beast" (B); August 1940: I don't remember much of it. Something about an alien (invader?) from another dimension trapped in a vault on Mars & some human getting involved in removing the resulting threat to humanity.
17. [novella] Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "Clash by Night" (as by Lawrence O'Donnell) (B); March 1943: Description of a war in a society where countries don't keep militaries, but hire the services of independent military companies for both attack & defense! Set on Venus.
18. [novelette] Eric Frank Russell's "Hobbyist" (B); September 1947: A stranded spaceman on an alien planet hasn't realized he's actually met god!
19. [novelette] T L Sherred's "E For Effort" (B); May 1947: Using a past-viewer to abolish war! 
20. [novella] H Beam Piper's "Last Enemy" (B); download; August 1950: An adventure to rescue a damsel in distress, involving travel across the "levels" of "paratime" "sectors" & some space travel. Took me almost a week to finish it.
21. [ss] Kris Neville's "Cold War" (B); October 1949: US military superiority is a double-edged sword...
22. [novelette] Theodore Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses" (B); download; November 1947: Finding hope for humanity in an angry world...
23. [ss] William T Powers' "Meteor" (C); September 1950: Very confused, & to me pointless & boring, description of a meteor scare involving earth & Mars.

Fact sheet.

First published: 1952.
Related: The stories edited by John Campbell for Astounding/Analog.

Norman Spinrad's "Outward Bound" (novelette, free)

This is a classic "technology as an enabler of freedom" story: government is hell bent to bury a newly developing technology because it cuts into some of its power - think decade old debates & controls on encryption, e.g.

In the story, it's the "Overdrive" - an FTL drive. Earth has a kingdom spanning a few stars, maintained with slower than light ships. These outworlds are always behind earth in technology because ships bringing them earth's information take decades or centuries. (Why don't the outworlds develop their own tech?)

Now someone is onto a theory that can lead to FTL, ending earth's hegemony. So earth has sent a military to nip the technology in the bud...

Fact sheet.

First published: Analog, March 1964.
Download full text from Baen Books.
Rating: B.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Stories of Norman Spinrad.

Lester del Rey (ed)'s "The Best of John W Campbell" (collection): Annotated table of contents & review

"Who Goes There?" has been filmed more than once & is among his best known stories. And I loved "Forgetfulness". "Twilight" is widely anthologized, but didn't work for me; to me it sounded like a bad imitation of some themes from H G Wells' "The Time Machine". "Cloak of Aesir" is also a well known story, but it works best when read after "Out of the Night"; the two actually form one complete story. "The Last Evolution" is the oldest story I've read on the idea of singularity. "Blindness" is now very dated. "The Invaders" & "Rebellion" also need to be read together & in sequence; they too together form a single complete story.

ToC below is in order of my preference, best first (4 commented stories at the end of list are where I need to refer to my notes; will come back on them later). My rating is in brackets. Links on publisher or year fetches more matching fiction. Where I'm aware of an online copy, I include that link too.

1. [novella] "Who Goes There?" (A); download; Astounding, August 1938: When the curious opened the bottle, & let the jinn out...
2. [novelette] "Forgetfulness" (as by Don A Stuart) (A); Astounding, June 1937: Technological progress involves forgetting old knowledge.
3. [ss] "The Machine" (as by Don A Stuart) (B); Astounding, February 1935: North is the best!
4. [ss] "Elimination" (B); Astounding, May 1936: Two men build a "chronoscope" that lets you see, on a TV screen, all places & times in future or past. The inventors begin looking at their own possible futures, & the view is very ugly...
5. [ss] "Blindness" (B); Astounding, March 1935: A great inventor spends substantial time in close proximity to sun, studying it to discover the secret of "atomic power" - an activity that succeeded but blinded him. Ironic ending as another of his earlier inventions, an alloy called "thermlectrium", has outdated the need for atomic power in the meantime.
6. [ss] "The Last Evolution" (C); download; Amazing Stories, August 1932: Probably among the earliest stories about singularity, decades before the term was coined.
7. [ss] "Twilight"; Astounding, November 1934: Description of the last days of human race, as narrated by a time traveler to future...
8. [ss] "The Invaders"; Astounding, June 1935.
9. [novelette] "Rebellion"; Astounding, August 1935.
10. [novelette] "Out of the Night"; Astounding, October 1937.
11. [novelette] "Cloak of Aesir"; Astounding, March 1939.

Fact sheet.

First published: 1976.
Related: Stories of John Campbell; Fiction from 1930s.

John W Campbell's "The Machine" (as by Don A Stuart) (short story, post-apocalypse): North is the best!

This has the feel of one of those so called "proto-sf" stories. And there is clear influence of H G Wells.

Most of the story is of post-apocalypse survival. There is a very curious notion here, apparently borrowed from H G Wells' "The Time Machine", but in a different form. Wells makes an argument that fittest people are those that live in the toughest environments; luxury is ... sort of ... anti-survival. Campbell offers a variation of it: Since north is much colder & tougher to live in than moderate climate of south, biggest & most survival success stories among the post-apocalypse humans will be found in the north!

"The Machine" of title is actually an alien AI. There is a long-winded explanation & history of it that could have made several separate stories, but the important point is: it has tended to the needs of humans for several generations, & now suddenly it has decided to withdraw from earth - bringing in a collapse of civilization.

Notes.

1. Story features a steam powered aircraft that could fly off someone's balcony.

Collected in.

1. "The Best of John W Campbell".

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, February 1935.
Rating: B.
Series: "The Machine" (this story), "The Invaders", "Rebellion".
Related: Stories of John Campbell (as by Don A Stuart).

Online: "John W. Campbell, Collected Editorials From Analog" (ed Harry Harrison)

@Internet Archive. [via SF Signal]

Related: Works of John Campbell, Harry Harrison.

John W Campbell, Jr's "Forgetfulness" (as by Don A Stuart) (novelette, first contact): Technological progress involves forgetting old knowledge

I wonder if van Vogt's fantastic story, "The Monster", was inspired by this? Both involve advanced aliens visiting earth, & trying to bully a single apparantly harmless & unarmed man, & ... getting surprised. van Vogt's version is by far the better of the two; that was the story that made me notice van Vogt.

Story summary.

A pioneering 100-strong alien expedition has arrived on earth ("Rhth", to aliens) from Pareeth. Millions of years ago, their distant animal ancestors were uplifted by humans, & perhaps they've come to pay homage to their benefactors.

What they find here are abandoned cities, a tiny village with virtually no technology, & what remains of the human race apparently living a primitive existence off land.

Aliens are respectful, for old times sake, & a bit arrogant too. Seun, a very humble man, shows them around the dead city, but humanity seems to have forgotten much of the technology that made this city tick.

Aliens go back home. Only to return with a colonizing expedition that has instructions to move the remnants of humanity off to some sort of reservation & use only minimal force, in case of resistance, because of its past glory.

Aliens are in for a shock, when they threaten to use this minimal force...

Collected in.

1. Raymond J Healy & J Francis McComas (Eds)' "Adventures in Time and Space".

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, June 1937.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of John Campbell (as by Don A Stuart); fiction from 1930s.

And the Campbell Award goes to ... novel that Campbell would have disliked most!

Andrew Wheeler has some observations on the subject, in the context of this year's Campbell & Sturgeon award winners announced a couple of days back.

Related.

1. "best of" lists.
2. Fiction authored or edited by John Campbell.
3. Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

"Astounding Science Fiction", June 1955 (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Scans of this magazine in CBR format are online as part of a larger package.

Table of contents.

1. [short novel] Everett B Cole's "Final Weapon": "Man has developed many a deadly weapon. Today, the weapon most effective in destroying a man's hopes & security is the file folder ... & that was the weapon Morley knew & loved. But there was something more potent to come."
2. [novelette] E G von Wald's "Shock Absorber" (B); download: A man acts on what he believes the facts are, not on the facts. He lives or dies by what the facts are. Now sometimes you don't have time to correct a man's beliefs, yet he must act correctly ..."
3. [ss] Irving Cox, Jr's "The Guardians": "It's not always "The Truth shall set you free!" Sometimes it's "Want of the Truth shall drive you to escape!" And that can be dangerous!"
4. [ss] J Francis McComas' "Criminal Negligence": "Somebody was going to have to be left behind ... & who it would be was perfectly obvious ..."
5. [ss] John O'Keefe's "As Long As You Wish": "If, somehow, you get trapped in a circular time system ... how long is the circumference of an infinitely retraced circle?"
6. [serial - part 3/4] Poul Anderson's "The Long Way Home": "It's almost impossible for a man with one life-long orientation to understand someone whose thinking is all oriented in a widely different culture. And that makes for unpredictability. But it is, also, always a two-edged sword!"

See also.

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

"Astounding Science Fiction", November 1945 (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Scans of this magazine in CBR format are online as part of a larger package., but with some pages missing.

Table of contents

1. [serial - part 1/2] Isaac Asimov's "The Mule": "the one factor even Hari Sheldon could not predict - could not defend the Foundation against. The defenses were based on human psychology; the Mule was a mutant!"
   
   This is the second novel in Asimov's famous Foundation Trilogy. second part of the serial is also online somewhere.
2. [novelette] Geoff St Reynard's "By Yon Bonnie Banks": "A fantasy of a fog, & a wrong turn that led through time - back from one war, to a battle of long ago, where the outcome was foreordained - & still unsuspected."
3. [novelette] George O Smith's "Identity".
   
   Note: Initial pages of this story are missing.
4. [ss] Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "Line to Tomorrow" (as by Lewis Padgett): "It was a perfectly ordinary telephone, but some wires got a little crossed - & it turned out to be a party line, with one party in Tomorrow!"
5. [ss] Frank Belknap Long's "The Critters": "The Critters from Venus simply could not be fought by all of Man's physical science - because their primary weapon wasn't physical. An old man & a cuckoo clock had part of the answer, though ..."
   
   Note: Many tail pages of this story are missing.

See also.

1. Fiction from Analog/Astounding (only issues edited by Harry Bates, John Campbell).
2. Stories written by John Campbell.
3. Fiction from old "pulp" magazines.
4. Fiction from 1940s.
   

"Astounding Science-Fiction", January 1942 (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Scans of this magazine in CBR format are online as part of a larger package.

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

My rating is in brackets. Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there. Link on author fetches more fiction by author.

1. [novelette] Eric Frank Russell's "Mechanistria" (B): Adventure on planet Mechanistria, a world ruled by very hostile robots.
   
   
   Collected in author's "Men, Martians and Machines".
2. [novelette] Jack Williamson's "Breakdown": "A city is an instrument - built, albeit unconsciously, for a purpose. When that purpose dies - the city dies!"
3. [novelette] L Ron Hubbard's "The Invaders": "The Post Commander was proud of his station - of its importance - of his importance. The technician sent to aid him made a discovery -"
4. [ss] Kolin Keith's "Soup King": "The cook fell in the soup; the crew fell in a gold mine. But the crew was broke & the cook a millionaire. Which was logical, on Venus!"
5. [ss] Normab L Knight's "Fugitive from Vangard": "He came to an ultramodern world with cloths a thousand years out of date, & no memory of where or when - or even whether! - he had been born!"
6. [serial - part 3/4] E E "doc" Smith's "Second Stage Lensmen": "Kimball Kinnison starts a new line of attack - as an officer in the Royal Guard of the zwilnik overlord!"

See also.

1. Fiction from Analog/Astounding (only issues edited by Harry Bates, John Campbell).
2. Stories written by John Campbell.
3. Old "pulp" magazines.
4. Fiction from 1940s.

"Astounding Science-Fiction", February 1945 (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Scans of this magazine in CBR format are online as part of a larger package, but with pages missing (including cover & ToC page). ToC below was constructed by scanning the available pages & may be incomplete.

"Wanted - An Enemy" is one of the coolest stories of the genre, though writing style is very pulp era.

Table of contents (4 stories, best first, unread last).

My rating is in brackets. Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there. Link on author fetches more fiction by author. Where I know of alternate download locations, I provide those links with specific stories.

1. Fritz Leiber, Jr's "Wanted - An Enemy" (A): A man is trying to convince Martians to attack & vandalize earth. Yet he has the best interests of humanity in mind!
2. Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "The Piper's Son" (B); read online (no download): Zero tolerance for racists poisoning children's minds.
   
   Incomplete text (initial pages missing).
3. Malcolm Jameson's "Lilies of Life": "There was a disease on Venus, & the natives seemed to have a cure. But the symbiosis involved was madder even than the usual madness of Venus' life-cycles -"
4. [serial - part 3/3] Wesley Long's "Nomad": "Driven from Earth, hated by Mars to start with, driven from Mephisto, Guy Meynard turns to his last possible refuge - Ertene. The pressure is building on him, pressure maneuvered & built up to force him in one, inescapable path."
   
   Note: Probably tail pages are missing.

See also.

1. Fiction from Analog/Astounding (only issues edited by Harry Bates, John Campbell).
2. Stories written by John Campbell.
3. Old "pulp" magazines.
4. Fiction from 1940s.
   

"Astounding Science-Fiction", February 1942 (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Scans of this magazine in CBR format are online as part of a larger package.

Table of contents

1. [novelette] C L Moore's "There Shall be Darkness": "The last commander of Earth's legions on Venus is called home - back to a failing, dying empire. Should he go & die with the empire - or stay, trying to start a new upward surge -"
2. [novelette] Kurt von Rachen's "The Rebels": "The Kilkenny Cats had not succeeded in killing themselves; Colonel Gailbraith prevented that. So now they would kill Gailbraith -"
3. [ss] Leigh Brackett's "The Sorcerer of Rhiannon": "The Martians had survival power - power to survive in their own way, until a new race reached their planet -"
4. [ss] Raymond F Jones' "Starting Point": When textbook formulas begin to work in spaceship flight, men tend to forget pioneering, forget there are other ways of doing things than the textbook ways -"
5. [ss] Theodore Sturgeon's "Medusa": "Nice way to start off a voyage - have the glad news that every man on your ship has been successfully & carefully turned into a madman, & that you alone will be sane -"
6. [serial - part 4/4] E E "doc" Smith's "Second Stage Lensmen".

See also.

1. Fiction from Analog/Astounding (only issues edited by Harry Bates, John Campbell).
2. Stories written by John Campbell.
3. Old "pulp" magazines.
4. Fiction from 1940s.
   

John W Campbell, Jr's "The Brain Stealers of Mars" (novelette, puzzle, free): Precursor to "Who Goes There?" & "Mars is Heaven"

I know of at least two very famous stories directly descended from it: Campbell's own "Who Goes There?" (download) & Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven" (download MP3). Plus any number of less well known ones, among them Eric Frank Russell's "Mesmerica", Philip K Dick's "The Father-Thing" (read online), & Fredric Brown's "Nothing Sirius" (download as part of a larger package).

Telling style is very pulp-era, but it's not a bad read & an important classic.

Story summary.

Rod Blake & Ted Penton ran away to Mars, after adventures on moon & Venus, when human authorities got hot on them for doing some banned experiments with atomics. So far, they are the only humans capable of interplanetary flight.

They will meet two kinds of natives on Mars: "thushols" & "centaurs".

1. Thushols are parasites capable of both shape shifting & reading your mind.
2. Centaurs are local intelligent beings that once had a technological civilization that now lies in ruins. Because they've lost the urge. Because thushols now comprise 31% of centaur population, indistinguishable from normal centaurs. They kill centaur babies & implant themselves in their place - always maintaining the magic ratio. Centaurs cannot kill even the ones they suspect, because, if they're wrong, they'll be killing their own!

Thushols had once visited earth, as centaurs' parasites, when centaurs tried to establish colonies there. That was hundreds of years back, & it didn't work out. But that's the source of centaur legends on earth.

Now that Man has advanced to space travel, thushols have decided he would make a worthy host. So they've put impostors among the two human visitors - there are now 13 Blakes & 12 Pentons! How will the originals distinguish from the fake ones, & ensure not only that thushols don't reach earth but warn the earthmen of danger?

Notes.

1. "Campbell's interest in the idea of a shape-changing alien can be traced to his early childhood, when his mother and her identical twin frequently put on each other's clothes in order to play a trick on him. "
2. 'The "Penton and Blake" series impressed a young Isaac Asimov so much that he started his own "Powell and Donovan" stories about two robot-snafu troubleshooters'.
3. It appears to be a curious feature of many old stories - physical travel is possible to far away places, but not electronic communications!
4. Another rather common feature of old stories: advanced animal telepaths inhabit Mars, but Venus is a jungle world of "ferocious plants".

Fact sheet.

First published: Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1936.
Read full text at Scribd.
Rating: A.
According to ISFDB, this story is the first in a series of 6.

Related.

1. Stories authored/edited by John Campbell.
2. Stories about Mars or its moons.
3. Tuesday Classics.
4. Fiction from 1930s.

John W Campbell, Jr's "The Last Evolution" (short story, singularity, free)

While the story itself is unremarkable, there is one thing here that makes it noteworthy: it's probably among the earliest stories about singularity, decades before the term was coined. At least it's the earliest I've read.

Story summary.

Story is narrated by a ... robot or AI or something. Humans have built machines that can build better versions of themselves. But they still serve man.

That's when earth gets attacked by a huge alien armada - but aliens without self-improving machines. So these machines go into superfast evolution as defense. In the end, all humans will be dead before the machines can build something way beyond aliens' capability & throw them out.

So now these machines have inherited earth.

Fact sheet.

First published: Amazing Stories, August 1932.
Rating: C.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg or Manybooks; or MP3 from LibriVox. [via QuasarDragon]
Related: Stories of John Campbell.

Free fiction: Comic book adaptations of 3 important stories

In four issues of comic book anthology series Starstream, at Crosseyed Cyclops. [via QuasarDragon]

Among the lot are:

1. John W Campbell, Jr's "Who Goes There?": This already has several versions online - at least one comic version, original text, some text scans, as well as a movie adaptation.
2. Poul Anderson's "Call me Joe".
3. Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God": With the exception of fix-up novel "More Than Human" (& its original short story, "Baby is Three"), this is probably the best known story of Sturgeon.

These 3 are among the best of science fiction. At least their original texts were, in my book anyway.

Free fiction: Eando Binder, Gordon Dickson, Christopher Anvil, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Pierre Boulle, James P Hogan, John Campbell, C M Kornbluth

Via QuasarDragon: Comic book version of Eando Binder's excellent story "I, Robot" at Grantbridge Street & other misadventures. Apart from being a great story, this was the story that bootstrapped Isaac Asimov's robot stories. Based on reading of the first page, this illustrated version appears to be a faithful & close adaptation of the original story text.

Original story is from Amazing Stories, January 1939. Why does Grantbridge attribute it to Weird Fantasy, #11?

Via Free SF Reader: 3 stories from Gordon R Dickson's collection "The Human Edge" at Webscription:

1. "Danger—Human"; download; Astounding, December 1957.
2. "Sleight of Wit"; download; Analog, December 1961.
3. "In the Bone"; download; If,, October 1966.

Via Free SF Reader: 8 stories at Webscription from Christopher Anvil's collection "War Games":

1. "Truce By Boomerang"; download; Astounding, December 1957.
2. "A Rose By Any Other Name ..."; download; Astounding, January 1960.
3. "The New Member"; download; Galaxy, April 1967.
4. "Babel II"; download; Analog, August 1967.
5. "The Trojan Bombardment"; download; Galaxy, February 1967.
6. "Problem of Command"; download; Analog, November 1963.
7. "Uncalculated Risk"; download; Analog, March 1962.
8. "Torch"; download; Astounding, April 1957.

Via Free SF Reader: 5 stories at Webscription from Christopher Anvil's collection "The Trouble With Aliens" (Ed Eric Flint):

1. "The Prisoner"; download; Astounding, February 1956
2. "Seller's Market"; download; Astounding, December 1958
3. "Top Rung"; download; Astounding, July 1958
4. "Symbols"; download; Analog, September 1966
5. "Foghead"; download; Astounding, September 1958

Via Free SF Reader: MP3 audio versions of 5 stories of Ray Bradbury from The Zombie Astronaut Digest:

1. "The Whole Town's Sleeping"; download MP3.
2. "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl"; download MP3.
3. "The Flying Machine"; download MP3.
4. "Hail & Farewell"; download MP3.
5. "The Golden Apples of the Sun"; download MP3.

Via Free SF Reader: 2 stories of Stephen King from z0mbieastronaut:

1. "Jerusalem's Lot"; download.
2. "Children of the Corn"; download.

Via Dark Worlds: An audio version of the "Planet of the Apes" from BrokenSea. "an audio dramatization of the 1968 film". "Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle and original screenplay by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, this new audio series features additional scenes, original sound design". "Written, directed and produced by Bill Hollweg."

Via Free SF Reader: 2 stories of James P Hogan at Webscription:

1. "The Tree of Dreams"; download.
2. "Jailhouse Rock"; download.

Via QuasarDragon: "SF Signal is streaming The Thing (1982) from Hulu... Watch it HERE. (It is also available directly at Hulu Here, but you have to register to watch it there.)"

This movie is an adaptation of John W Campbell's excellent first contact story "Who Goes There?" Text of original story was already online.

Caution: The movie is DRMed - accessible only within US. Very likely connections anonymized with Tor will also have trouble accessing.

This QD link is actually a month old. I wanted to watch it before linking, but I'm not motivated enough to watch it via a US based proxy.

Via QuasarDragon: Downloadable video in multiple formats at Internet Archive of C M Kornbluth's story "The Little Black Bag".

I haven't seen the video, but this is among the better stories of Kornbluth - similar in spirit to several Henry Kuttner/C L Moore stories about mysterious gadgets.

Note: Relevant entries have been added to the list of stories from John Campbell's Astounding.

Update: List of stories from John W Campbell's Astounding (later Analog)

3 more entries in the big list of stories from among issues of Astounding/Analog edited by John W Campbell, Jr:

1. April 1960: Rick Raphael's "Make Mine Homogenized" (B); download; humor: When exposure to radiation from a nuclear bomb testing facility did strange things to the milk of a cows & eggs laid by hens in a neighboring farm.
2. May 1960: John Cory's "Egocentric Orbit" (C); download: First men in space, making a few rounds around earth, all go mad because...
   
   I'm actually surprised because of publication date - a story from 1960 talking about this!
   
   There are thematic similarities with Tom Godwin's "The Nothing Equation" - but Godwin's story is at least set outside the galaxy & is not likely to get tested soon.
3. January 1972: Jerry Pournelle's "A Matter of Sovereignty" (as by Wade Curtis) (B); download: A US company is practically taking over a small Pacific island republic!
   
   Part of the story is an adventure - a company-mobilized gang forcibly frees its cargo ship seized by a neighboring country for some violation or the other. Then there is a conservation project of a kind that makes me see red - big talk of whale conservation by characters that have little regard for other forms of life. There is also an unrelated tangent background thread about towing glaciers from Antarctica to meet fresh water needs of some place on US west coast!!!