Free fiction: Universe, #1 (June 1953)

Someone posted scans of this issue as pdf via a torrent.

Includes a then controversial story of Theodore Sturgeon, & one of the minor stories of Murray Leinster (assuming I'm recollecting the right story of Leinster!) Other notable authors include Mack Reynolds & Mark Clifton.

Related: Old pulps; fiction from 1950s.

"Astounding Science Fiction" (British Edition), May 1958 (ed John Campbell) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Where I have a separate post on a story, link on its title goes there. Where I'm aware of another text version of a story, I include that link too. Links on author fetch more of their works. My rating for read stories appears in brackets.

Table of contents (best first).

1. [ss] Eric Frank Russell's "Brute Farce" (A); humor: Introducing a lateral thinker... 
2. [novelette] L Sprague de Camp's "Aristotle and the Gun" (A): Teaching the scientific method to Aristotle... 
3. [novel - 1 (this), 2, 3 of 3] Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Counts" (A): What if, during the creation of Israel during the 1940s, US had sided with Arabs instead of Israel? A very colorful fantasized variant of it.
4. [article] Mark Clifton's "The Dread Tomato Addiction" (A); download; satire: How to reach wrong conclusions from the right data! 
5. [ss] Jon Stopa's "Hot Water" (B): This government doesn't know how to handle civil unrest; both sides are throwing atom bombs at each other!
6. [ss] Christopher Anvil's "Achilles' Heel" (B); download: Starfaring humanity's military commander finally gets insight on how to defeat "Wij-Wij", aliens that look like "giant inchworms" & with whom earth is at war. 
7. [ss] Robert Silverberg's "No Way Out" (B): Chief executive of an overpopulated earth still breeding uncontrollably finally has enlightenment: to take measures to cut the breeding rate!

Fact sheet.

Labeled: "Vol XIV, No 5 (British Edition)".
Download scans as a CBR file. [via Bob@pulpscans]
Note: Link fetches a RAR that contains target CBR, probably to work around the file naming conventions of hosting service.

Related.

1. Stories from Astounding/Analog (whole issues only).
2. Fiction from 1950s, old "pulps".
3. Stories from the Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.

Alex Apostolides & Mark Clifton's "We're Civilized!" (short story, colonialism, free): Martians are savage to Man, Man is to...

First human expedition to Mars, led by a military commander, claims all of Mars for Western Alliance. The process involves a general genocide of Martians, but who has time to notice such minor details...

Our pioneers of Mars return to earth & are being felicitated. Only all doesn't go according to organizers plan...

See also.

1. A Bertram Chandler's "Familiar Pattern" (download): Very similar idea.

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy, August 1953.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Mark Clifton.

Free fiction: Recently posted to Project Gutenberg

1. Alex Apostolides & Mark Clifton's "We're Civilized!"; download; Galaxy, August 1953: "Naturally, the superior race should win ... but superior by which standards ... and whose?"
2. Edward W Ludwig's "The Lonely Ones"; download; If, July 1953: "The line between noble dreams and madness is thin, and loneliness can push men past it..." 

Related: Fiction from old "pulps".

Mark Clifton's "A Woman's Place" (novelette, free): A woman & 2 men marooned on a virgin world

Early parts of it sounded like a story that might have been too bold for its time. It's not, but it's still quite readable, if not always self-consistent.

Story summary.

A freighter spaceship wreck due to some sort of space "warp". Three of the survivors end up in a lifeboat - a woman & two men. On reaching earth, they find it's not their earth but a parallel one. An earth where primates never evolved - so it's a virgin earth.

A woman & two men, marooned on a virgin earth, with little hope of ever getting back home...

See also.

1. Robert Reed's "A Billion Eves": A man, with a machine that can take a good sized volume of space around it to a parallel earth on a one way trip, takes a classful of girls for his harem. And discovers belatedly that it's not very safe to be the sole hated man in company of many women...

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy, May 1955.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Internet Archive.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Mark Clifton.

New at Project Gutenberg (16 June 2010)

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

Of the less well known authors, I personally have had good experience with Mark Clifton & Winston K Marks. Clifton can sometimes be very good; Marks is generally consistently readable. I haven't read their specific pieces included here, however.

1. [novel] William Richard Bradshaw's "The Goddess of Atvatabar: Being the history of the discovery of the interior world and conquest of Atvatabar" (1891); download: I'm not sure, but it sounds like a genre work. Some sort of adventure involving a polar expedition.
2. Dorothy Quick's "The Lost Door"; download; Weird Tales, October 1936: "An alluring but deadly horror out of past centuries menaced the life of the young American--a fascinating tale of a strange and eery love".
3. Richard S Shaver's "Daughter of the Night"; download; Amazing Stories, December 1948: "The evil magic of the Goddess Diana turned men to stone. Would the power of the strange Eos be strong enough to turn them back to living men?"
4. Philip K Dick's "Piper in the Woods"; download; Imagination, February 1953: "Earth maintained an important garrison on Asteroid Y-3. Now suddenly it was imperiled with a biological impossibility--men becoming plants!"
5. Winston K Marks' "Backlash"; download; Galaxy, January 1954: "They were the perfect servants--they were willing to do everything for nothing. The obvious question is: How much is nothing?"
6. Mark Clifton's "A Woman's Place"; download; Galaxy, May 1955: "Home is where you hang up your spaceship--that is, if you have any Miss Kitty along!"
7. Stephen Marlowe's "Think Yourself to Death"; download; Amazing Stories, March 1957: "If you've never read a Johnny Mayhem story before, you are in for a treat. Johnny, who wears different bodies the way ordinary people wear clothes, is one of the most fascinating series characters in science fiction."

Related: Fiction from old "pulp" magazines.

Mark Clifton's "The Dread Tomato Addiction" (flash fiction, satire, free): Logic as used by certain classes of people!

This funny piece must be among the better flash fiction by anyone. OK - original Astounding classification for it is "essay", but it reads well as fiction too.

This is about the convenient logic used by "The average politician", "The advertising copywriter", & "The dedicated moralist". Their logic is demonstrated by arguing how tomatoes are so addictive, in spite of being absolutely fatal! A couple of examples (story has many more):

1. "Of those people born before the year 1800, regardless of race, color, creed or caste, and known to have eaten tomatoes, there has been one hundred per cent mortality!"
2. "Obtain two dozen tomatoes ... crush them to a pulp in exactly the state they would have if introduced into the stomach, pour the vile juice and pulp into a bowl, and place a goldfish therein. Within minutes the goldfish will be dead!"

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, February 1958.
Rating: A.
Download full text.
Alternate download links (these are slightly edited version of the original): link1, link2.
Listed among the stories from John Campbell's Astounding/Analog.
Related: Stories of Mark Clifton.

Mark Clifton's "Clerical Error" (novelette, free): Good doctor bends the inflexible system for patient's sake

I liked it so much when I read it that I actually looked up several other stories of the author. Now, at a distance of many days, I still have good impressions but am slightly less enthusiastic. It packages familiar tropes in an entertaining story - sometimes quite satirical.

Office workers should see some familiar things here - related to job promotions. Told in a cynical way.

Story summary.

A dystopia where conformance is valued, & deviation seriously discouraged. David Storm, a conformist who's never had an original thought, rose quickly through the ranks to top of a government research organization, a position requiring a high security clearance. But at the pinnacle, no one tells him what to do; he must find it himself. A slow self discovery till he discovers the nature of his ailment. Insanity ensues.

Dr K Heidrich Kingston heads the asylum where David is admitted. But David is in a secure ward, under the charge of a second rate & manipulative Dr Ernest Moss; Dr Kingston doesn't have security clearance to enter this ward "because we might hear the poor demented fellows mumbling secrets". How does he help the patient?

Story is Dr Kingston's sometimes frustrating, other times heroic efforts to see the patient.

Eventually a happy ending.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding Science Fiction, February 1956.
Rating: A
Download full text from Internet Archive.
Included in Ellen Datlow's Sci Fiction classics.
Related: All stories of Mark Clifton.

Mark Clifton's "What Now, Little Man?" (novelette, science fiction, free): On racial superiority prejudices

During the last month or two, I've sampled may be a dozen authors I'd not read before from scifi.com classics section. Two have been good finds - Bertram Chandler & Clifton; I'm ready to consume more of their stories.

While Clifton's endings don't really have great resolutions, he appears to address rather big subjects - sometimes without easy answers. I liked both his stories while I was reading, though their details were easy to forget afterward.

Story summary.

When humans colonized a new world Libo, they found "goonies" among its natives. Goonies have body structure rather similar to humans, though they're not humanoid. And they are in some kind of symbiosis with a local tree called "pal"; each goonie is attached to its own pal tree, & would rather die than eat the fruits of any other tree. And their newborn numbers are automatically regulated to available pal tree population.

Humans consider them animals. This is the story of slow downing on humans of their true nature, & the innate human nature to stubbornly refuse to accept things that violate established prejudices in spite of hard evidence.

There is a thin thread based on Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent protests - a rather passive form of Mahatma's methods. Goonies submit to every cruelty humans have afflicted on them - they just stand & get slaughtered when hunted, they meekly & cheerfully submit to hard labor or physical abuse, ...

Story is narrated by Jim MacPherson, a human colonist & a goonie "farmer". He began by planting pal trees, hence making goonie breed. And using goonies as meat animals. He slowly found they can be trained for virtually any task - in the end, tasks that even many humans are bad at - & their full potential nowhere in sight. This leads to ill will among people, & tension in the story.

In the end, there is wild speculation by Jim - may be goonies are aliens at a post-human stage of development, ... I found the arguments in this part unsatisfactory. That's where the title comes from - human nature has not outgrown its earth bound complexes even after going out to stars:

"Go out to the stars, young man, and grow up with the universe!

All right! We're out there!

What now, little man?"

Fact sheet.

First published: F&SF, December 1959.
Rating: A
Download full text from Internet Archive.
Included in Ellen Datlow's Sci Fiction classics.
Related: All stories of Mark Clifton.