Some online fiction by well known authors

Most are courtesy of Free Speculative Fiction Online. Where I have a post on a story, link on title goes there. Link labeled "download" fetches the actual story. Link on author fetches more fiction by author.

Among the ones I've read, my favorite is "Two Yards of Dragon".

1. Arthur Clarke's "A Walk in the Dark"; download text/audio; horror: Our primeval fears...
2. L Sprague de Camp's "Nothing in the Rules; download; humor: What if mermaids were allowed in women's swimming competitions?
3. L Sprage de Camp's "Two Yards of Dragon" (A); download: Adventures dragon hunting...
4. Fritz Leiber's "The Bleak Shore"; download.
5. Murray Leinster's "Nightmare Planet"; download: I don't recollect this title but it appears to be yet another variant of "The Mad Planet".
6. Frederik Pohl's "The Kindly Isle"; download.
7. Manly Wade Wellman's "O Ugly Bird!"; download.
8. Alice Sheldon's "The Man Who Walked Home" (as by James Tiptree, Jr); download.
9. John Varley's "Air Raid"; download.

Murray Leinster's "Planet of Dread" (novelette, free): Adventure on a world of giant insects & fungi

How many variants of the excellent "The Mad Planet" (download) did Leinster pen? I know of at least two novelette or novella length sequels, plus a fix-up novel, besides the current one.

May be I've read too much of the series. It's readable & fast moving - among my faster finishes of a story of this length. But it's very pulpy & with sensibilities of a different era.

Story summary.

With mankind spanning the galaxy, a group of revolutionaries escape their world, & intend to lie low elsewhere for a while. During a port, their ship is hijacked by a local fugitive - the hero of the story who's eventually overpowered. For complicated reasons, they land of an uninhabited world to maroon the hijacker - only this world turns out to be a forgotten & unfinished terraforming job of mankind, & a nightmare world now.

They'll have adventure there, & strike treasure left by a shipwreck 150 years old, & finally all will end well.

Fact sheet.

First published: Fantastic Stories of Imagination, May 1962.

Download full text from Project Gutenberg.

Download audio read by Phil Chenevert from LibriVox. [via QuasarDragon]
Rating: B.

Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

Free fiction: Murray Leinster's "Creatures of the Abyss" (novel, 1961)

@Internet Archive. [via Greg Weeks @pbscans]

Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

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), August 1956 (ed John Campbell) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

I've read "Exploration Team" & "Minor Ingradient" elsewhere before, but don't recall much of them now.

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

Table of contents (best first, unread last).

1. [ss] Herbert L Cooper's "A Nice Little Niche" (B): When vitamin K craving alien bacteria invaded human guts...
2. [ss] Algis Budrys' "Man in the Sky" (B): Cold engineering vs public opinion.
   
   It's a story about early spaceflight, before there was space flight.
3. [novelette] Murray Leinster's "Exploration Team": "The perfect machine for exploring a new plant would, of course, be self-repairing, self-maintaining, able to construct its own repair parts from local materials, & even able to replace itself with a new unit..."
4. [ss] Eric Frank Russell's "Minor Ingradient": "A critically necessary lesson any true officer must learn is the crushing burden it is to be Master of a slave..."
5. [serial - 2/3] Robert Heinlein's "Double Star": "Lorenzo, the conceited pipsqueak, was stretched & inflated to fill a mold. But Lorenzo, while conceited beyond question--was not a fool!"

Fact sheet.

Labeled: "Vol XII No 8 (British Edition)".
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.

Murray Leinster's "The Extra Intelligence" (short story, body snatching, free): Something evil is looking for a brain it can take control of

A mad scientist has discovered a way to revive the dead, & is about to try his experiment on a dog, with the help of a friend & a woman assistant. A friend who has built a machine to measure, quantitatively, how conscious a thing is - where the thing could be any animal or plant!

They not only are successful in reviving the dog, for a short while, but the revived dog is behaving as if it's very smart - smarter than a man, in fact. But the woman assistant has observed something the men didn't - dog's intelligence is probably not dog's own...

Mad scientist will later try the procedure on himself, in the hope that he will become an intellectual superman - kill himself & set up the circumstances so friend is forced to try reviving him. Only the woman's theory is right...

Fact sheet.

First published: Argosy Weekly, 30 November 1935.
Download full text as part of the scans of the magazine it originally appeared in, or read online at UNZ (UNZ site seems to have some way to download pdf too but I could not get it to work).
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

"Argosy Weekly", 30 November 1935 (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

While Argosy did publish some science fiction, it wasn't exclusively a science fiction magazine. It published all sorts of action stories.

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

Table of contents (best first, unread last).

1. [ss] Murray Leinster's "The Extra Intelligence" (B): Something evil is looking for a human brain it can take control of ...
2. [serial - 1/6] George Bruce'd "Flying Circus": "The first of the aerial daredevils".
3. [serial - 2/3] Judson P Philips' "Off-Side!": "Dirty politics & clean football don't mix".
4. [serial - 3/6] J D Newsom's "Fool's Mate": "The Foreign Legion--a feud within the ranks".
5. [serial - 4/6] Arthur Hawthorne Carhart's "Rodeo": "Drama in the West's greatest show".
6. [novelette] Anthony M Rud's "Byng of Ballarat": "One man's fight in the Australian goldfields".
7. [ss] R V Gery's "Goliath": "Fighting sea wolves of the Medeterranean".
8. [ss] Odgers T Gurnee's "Taos Men Were Mountain Men": "With the army of the West in the days of Fremont".

Fact sheet.

Labeled: Vol 260, No 3.
Download scans as a CBZ file. [via Mark Pruett @pulpscans]
Related: Fiction from Argosy; old "pulps"; 1930s.

Murray Leinster's "Space Platform" (novel, space station, free): US putting up a nuclear missiles facility in orbit

I won't put it anywhere among the better stories of Leinster, but it's action packed - if occasionally a bit draggy. And if you are interested in machine tools, particularly in balancing things rotating fast around an axis, parts of it may be hard sf.

Story summary.

US is putting a space station ("Space Platform") in orbit around earth. It will be primarily a military facility capable of throwing nuclear weapons anywhere on earth. Reason given is a rather pious one: US wants to force a warring world to stop fighting!

Much of the world, of course, doesn't buy this peace argument; so there are major attempts to sabotage the building of the space station.

Hero, of course, will repeatedly frustrate these sabotage attempts. And of course, US will successfully launch it, in spite of all the sabotage attempts.

Notes.

1. Story also gives 2 secondary reasons for building the space platform: as a launching pad to go to stars, & as a launching pad for laboratories to do experiments too dangerous to do on earth.

See also.

1. Eric Frank Russell's "Wasp" (download): Another novel primarily about sabotage that I found far more interesting. And often hilarious.
2. Alfred Bester's "Adam & No Eve" (download comic book adaptation) & Larry Niven's "The Hole Man": Two popular examples of experiments that can threaten the home world. Experiments that Leinster proposes to conduct far away from earth, in labs launched from space platform, so earth won't be threatened.

Fact sheet.

First published: 1953.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks., Feedbooks.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

Murray Leinster's "Historical Note" (short story, satire, free): What if personal flyers became a reality?

I have a feeling I've read this before, though I didn't remember the details.

It's both a lampooning of communist Soviet Union & a science fictional "what if" on small personal flyers. Indian readers should find some of the idiocy of the lampooning parts familiar.

Collected in.

1. John W Campbell, Jr (ed)'s "The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology".

See also.

1. Clifford D Simak's "City" (novelette, 1944): Leinster's version also deals with the central idea (how suburbs will be remade if personal fliers became widely owned) of this widely loved story, but only in a passing way.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, February 1951.
Read online at Docin.
Among the stories from John Campbell's Astounding/Analog.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

Murray Leinster's "Operation Terror" (novel, alien invasion, free)

Good paced action adventure, but with a farcical & utterly unbelievable ending.

It features a softer version of a death ray, & a ray to explode gunpowder at a distance.

Story summary.

An alien ship has landed in a lake at the heart of a what is being developed as a national park in the US. Creatures come out of it, explore around. They have a "terror beam" weapon: a searchlight like thing. Whenever the beam touches anyone, it excites all sorts of nerve endings in a way so confusing the person eventually paralyzes - temporarily, till the beam is shut off. Immediate vicinity of landing is evacuated; military cordons off the region.

But among the trapped are a man named Lockley rescuing a stranded girl Jill. Story unfolds from Lockley's perspective, as the couple try getting out of region & make guesses about the nature of aliens & their weapons.

See also.

1. Arthur Clarke & Michael Kube-McDowell's "The Trigger": What would the society be like if we had a weapon that could remotely trigger gunpowder explosion?
2. Murray Leinster's "Invasion" (download): Another similar "Martian" invasion of US.

Fact sheet.

First published: 1962.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks.
Download audiobook from LibriVox.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

Murray Leinster's "The Greks Bring Gifts" (novel, alien invasion): "Helpful" aliens with a nasty secret agenda

Earth has recently received an alien ship with two kinds of very helpful aliens - Greks & Aldarians, Greks the senior of the two. They're offering great new technology, & are willing to train human scientists in Grek science. They don't claim to have any expectations from humanity, apart from giving the gifts.

But Jim Hackett is noticing some anomalies in their behavior. While Aldarians are genuinely helpful, Greks' gifting feels like contempt, Grek ship is far too big compared to their declared numbers, his suspicion during his training in Grek science that they're being taught nonsense, ... His investigations, with the help of a small band of helpers, will unravel the aliens' nasty designs as well as a weapon to beat them at their own game.

See also.

1. Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" (download text scans as part of a larger package): Similar concept at short story length.

Fact sheet.

First published: 1964.
Rating: B.
Included in "grubthrower"'s "Top 10 obscure but superb science fiction novels".
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

Murray Leinster's "Checkpoint Lambda" aka "Stopover in Space" (novel): Young hero foils a major robbery attempt

This is one of the more mundane stories of the author. Fast moving action, yes, but irritating repetitions, & at least one major event is resolved by convenient last-minute arrangement of circumstances.

Title is the name of a space station in orbit around a star called Canis Lambda. The station is located at the intersection of major space lanes of a star-faring humanity, & serves both as a lighthouse & a way station. This is where most of action happens.

Story summary.

The Golconda Ship, with its fabulous but unspecified treasures, is expected to dock with Checkpoint Lambda. So a gang of robbers have taken control of the Checkpoint ahead of arrival - killing all crew & transit passengers at station.

That's when Scott, a newly minted Space Patrol officer, arrives to take charge of the station. Of course, 2 dozen robbers already in control of station don't stand a chance against a Space Patrol officer.

A substantial part of the story is devoted to surviving a disaster - cores of 4 comets will soon impact the station, & few available maneuver options are frustrated by robbers' chief who doesn't believe there is a danger here.

Fact sheet.

First published: Amazing Stories, June & August 1966.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

Murray Leinster's "Operation: Outer Space" (novel, space opera, free): Party explores 3 earth-like worlds

It's not a bad read. But not among the better stories of author, either. Leave logic somewhere, & enjoy the roller-coaster with a mad scientist who can put together the first-ever FTL ship in a few weeks, a super-businessman, & some others in exploring 3 earth-like worlds in far-away star systems: a glacial world, a world with large cattle herds ready to be hunted, & a world that has never known life.

Fact sheet.

First published: 1954.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedbooks.
Download audio from LibriVox.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

Murray Leinster's "The Black Galaxy" (novel, space opera, free): Accidental human hero takes on murderous aliens

This is a very pulpish story; easy quick read, though.

Story summary.

The first human interstellar ship, Stellaris, still half finished, accidentally takes off due to a short circuit - with the hero & ship's designer, Rod Cantrell, on board with his girlfriend Kit. Plus some workers who didn't go out during lunch time.

They'll have major adventures hunting an alien race of murderous barbarians. Barbarians that wait for civilizations to mature, then come kill the whole world with a death ray & do the lootings!

Fact sheet.

First published: 1949.
Download full text from Internet Archive.
Note: The 1954 novel version I've linked is either an expanded form of a novella of the same title that first appeared in Startling Stories, March 1949, or the same novella published as a novel. I'm not sure.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster; Space opera fiction.

Murray Leinster's "The Trans-Human" (short story, war): Loneliness does strange things to a teenager

There are a lot of stories where a baby is raised by another species & grows up thinking it's of its adoptive species rather than its real one - Mogli raised by wolves, eagle baby raised among the chicken, ... This story is of this kind.

Story summary.

Human colonization of galaxy has brought them in conflict with Khasr, spider-like aliens. Khasr had destroyed a lot of human colony worlds before humans suspected aliens' existence. Then the war began.

The story is of Johnny, a 2 year old baby boy kidnapped by Khasr before they destroyed his world. He's fed carefully chosen propaganda & grows up thinking he's a mutilated Khasr, mutilated by violent human action. Aliens will deploy him on a suicide mission to destroy earth when he's 14.

Only, he's naive at subterfuge & is quickly caught near earth. And then come his hormonal reactions on his first ever landing on earth, physical contact with a girl, living with a family, ...

Meanwhile, humans will use Khasr weapon on aliens themselves.

Fact sheet.

First published: Science-Fiction Plus, December 1953.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster (an annotated selection of his "good" works).

Online copies of yesterday & today's stories

While I found both yesterday's story, Russell's "Bitter End", & today's, "The Trans-Human" by Murray Leinster, online, I haven't included download links with relevant stories for a reason: I found them both as a part of a small hoard of ancient pulp magazines, but at a place that appears to include a lot of clearly illegitimate stuff.

Magazine hoard is all html rather than cbr, & the magazine issue containing both these stories - Science-Fiction Plus, December 1953 - is in file "Science Fiction Plus 1953.12 v1.0.htm". Try the file name or some of its keywords with Google, & you might get lucky (I haven't tried).

Some good fiction of Murray Leinster

Rather than burying this inside a comment thread, I thought I'd put it in a separate post.

I've posted on about half the Leinster stories I've read so far; here is a selection of some good ones from among those posted.

He's generally a reliable author. I've read dozens of his stories, including some novels, & I don't think many were disappointing. Some of his stories, however, are more thoughtful than others which are more of adventures.

1. "First Contact" (download text scans as part of Astounding issue it originally appeared in, or as MP3 of a radio adaptation): Probably his most famous story - the one that coined the term "first contact" in modern sense. This is a story about establishing trust among strangers, where the cost of a breach of trust are unacceptably high. His solution is not really applicable to the problem of trust among the strangers on internet, but I liked the story.
2. "The Aliens" (download text, or two part audio): Similar situation as "First Contact", but a less famous story. Circumstances ensure that the murderous first contact between humans & aliens has a peaceful outcome.
3. Medship series of stories (download) are consistently good - a young medic/diplomat solves a major problem in a society in each story. My personal favorites are "The Grandfathers' War" (download) & "The Mutant Weapon" (download), but most others are good too. Former is an intensely emotional story about a tragedy that actually happens in a lot of families, later is one of the better thrillers on colonizing by spreading a plague to which colonizers are immune.
4. "Dear Charles" (download) is one of the coolest & hilarious reads on grandfather paradox.
5. "The Swamp Was Upside Down" (download) is very interesting read on landslides, one of his few hard sf stories.
6. "A Logic Names Joe" (download text/radio adaptation) is a very funny classic that gets a lot right about social implications of modern computers & internet - something very rare for a 60 year old story, written when even the modern terms about computers were yet to be invented.
7. "The Mad Planet" (download) is one of his most famous stories - a post-apocalypse story that's actually about a fun adventure on a curious world.
8. "Solar Constant" (download) is one of the more interesting terraforming stories by anyone.
9. "Sidewise in Time": One of his most famous stories - the story that invented parallel universe & alternate history subgenres. I personally didn't like it much though, & have a feeling US readers might like it more than others.
10. "The Ethical Equations" is not only a good read, but is probably important in that it led to Arthur Clarke's very famous novel "Rendezvous with Rama" via Clarke's own "Jupiter Five". "Jupiter Five" is practically a rehash of "The Ethical Equations". Story is of a ... sort of, but not quite ... first contact with alien visitors to Sol. It's online somewhere, but I don't have the URL handy.
11. "The Lonely Planet" is a very curious story of a sentient world, treated by humans as they would treat a draft animal! Adventure follows the human discovery that the animal is far smarter than them.
12. "Proxima Centauri" is one of the best bug-eyed monster stories, though I found the ending less interesting than rest of it. Human visitors to Proxima Centauri are treated by local intelligent plant beings the way we treat vegetation! It's online, but I don't have the URL handy.
13. "The Strange Case of John Kingman" is one of the rare low-key stories of Leinster. No great adventure - just the observations about a very curious inmate of ... was it a lunatic asylum? I don't quite recollect the place. I think this is online, but I don't have the URL.
14. "Sam, This is You" (download text/audio): While this is not quite in the class of stories above, I note it because 2010 Hindi movie "Karthik Calling Karthik" (@IMDB) had exactly this idea.
15. "The Runaway Skyscraper" (download) is his first science fiction story (I think). Nowhere in the class of stories above, but may be of particular interest to residents of New York city. Adventure of people inside a building in modern New York in the world that existed at their geographical location some centuries back, when a variant of an earthquake "sank" their building in time rather than space!

Related: Stories of Murray Leinster; "best of" lists.

New at Project Gutenberg (28 May 2010)

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

1. John Murray Reynolds' "The Golden Amazons of Venus"; download; Planet Stories, Winter 1939: "Dakta death, horrible beyond the weirdest fever-dreams of Earth-men, faced Space Ship Commander Gerry Norton. The laconic interplanetary explorer knew too much. He stood in the dynamic path of Lansa, Lord of the Scaly Ones, the crafty monster bent on conquering the fair City of Larr and all the rich, shadowless lands of the glorious Amazons of Venus."
2. Robert Moore Williams' "The Lost Warship"; download; Amazing Stories, January 1943: "Jap bombs rained down, there was a tremendous blast--and a weird thing happened to the Idaho".
3. Howard Carleton Browne's "Twelve Times Zero"; download; If, March 1952: "It was a love-triangle murder that made today's headlines but the answer lay hundreds of thousands of light years away!"
4. Ralph Sholto's '"And That's How It Was, Officer"'; download; If, July 1952: "When Uncle Peter decided to clean out the underworld, it was a fine thing for the town, but it was tough on the folks in Tibet."
5. Murray Leinster's "The Ambulance Made Two Trips"; download; Astounding, April 1960: "If you should set a thief to catch a thief, what does it take to stop a racketeer...?"
   
   Note: This appears to be a repost or update. I'd read it long back. An adventure involving a gadget that acts as a lucky charm, or something.

Related: Fiction from onld "pulp" magazines.

Murray Leinster's "The Invaders" (novella, first contact, free): What could aliens technologically only a few centuries ahead of us want from us?

Coburn accidentally discovered aliens masquerading as humans in remote Greece. He'll convince officialdom of their existance. Whole NATO military gets out after them. But the aliens are behaving in a very peculiar, friendly, manner...

Notes.

1. This is a cold war story, from US side. A lot of descriptions are clearly very biased.

Fact sheet.

First published: Amazing Stories, April-May 1953.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedbooks.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster, from 1950s.

Murray Leinster's "Sam, This is You" (short story, humor, free): Girlfriend trouble due to cross-time talking!

Sam Yoder, a telephone lineman, has been building a hacking gadget: to make private calls over a "party-line". While his gadget won't let him do this, it lets him do something else instead: it lets him talk to himself 10 days in future! Or in past!

That's useful ability, e.g., to make money from betting. That can also land him in trouble with girlfriend!

See also.

1.  C L Moore's "Greater Than Gods" also features a cross-time communicator. A man's two potential descendants from far future are each canvassing to make him marry a particular woman, one that will enable the respective descendant's existence! One of them is even prepared to kill this remote ancestor over the com link if he doesn't choose the right woman! (Hugo Gernsback's "The Killing Flash" (download) involves use of ordinary landline phone network as a murder weapon.)

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy, May 1955.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks.
Download old XMinus radio adaptation from Internet Archive.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster, from 1950s.