Monday, November 12, 2012

"Astounding Science Fiction" (British Edition), November 1956 (ed John W Campbell) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents & review

Cover by Freas of the British edition of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, November 1956. Cover illustrates the story Plus X by Eric Frank Russell.
I'd read "Next of Kin", the novelization of "Plus X" (another longer variant of the story is "The Space Willis"), when I went through a Russell phase some years ago, & just loved it. Now, reading the original novelette in this issue, I had a milder reaction, but it still made me laugh at many places. It's a funny jailbreak story - a human smart alec vs his dimwitted alien captors.

Table of contents.

  1. [novelette] Eric Frank Russell's "Plus X" (A); humor: Didn't you know that humans can only exist in pairs?
  2. [novelette]  Robert Silverberg & Randall Garrett's "The Chosen People" (as by Robert Randall) (A): Teaching the scientific method to deeply tradition bound.
  3. [ss] Poul Anderson's "The Live Coward" (B): Cop catches a fugitive in colorful circumstances.
  4. [ss] Algis Budrys's "The Peasant Girl" (as by Paul Janvier) (B): Humans are supermen to supermen!
  5. [ss] Thomas N Scortia's "Sea Change": 'Of course, everybody knows what "being human" means--it's just that they can't define it, but of course they know what it means..."

Fact sheet.

Labeled: Vol XII, No 11.
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.

3 comments:

LarryS said...

Sounds interesting, but how do I open CBR files? I extracted it from the rar file but my phone is unable to read CBR files!

Tinkoo said...

On my Android phone, I use "Moon+ Reader" I downloaded from Google Play. There must be others, & yet other ones for iPhone. Search for "cbr reader" or "book reader" on the relevant market (Moon+ is a generic book reader that can handle many formats, including cbr).

On PC, I use CDisplay software.

LarryS said...

Ah Ive used FBreader on an android phone I used to have, will try that, thanks.