Interplanetary commerce, if and when it begins, will be fraught with all of the dangers that accompany pioneering expeditions. There will be the terrible climatic conditions on other worlds to be faced, strange beasts and plants; and perhaps desperate and greedy men. That was the case when every new land was opened on Earth and it may be expected to be true when we conquer the solar planets....
A short story that takes place in the Venus Colonization. Man has been asked to create a new colony on the planet "next door" to earth and a new adventure is about to begin....
The story is described as a "space mage duel". It involves two witch doctors who instigate ghosts and demons against each other and may seem like a fantasy. But Norton bases the magic of magicians on the use of mildly hallucinogenic drugs, psychological manipulations and hidden telepathy, which put history into the realm of science fiction....
On January the Fifth, 1888--that is eleven months and four days after-my uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, who certainly went aboard the Lady Vain at Callao, and who had been considered drowned, was picked up in latitude 5 degrees 3' S. and longitude 101 degrees W. in a small open boat of which the name was illegible, but which is supposed to have belonged to the missing schooner Ipecacuanha. He gave such a strange account of himself that he was supposed demented. Subsequently he alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape from the Lady Vain. His case was...
The name of Bram Stoker needs no introduction - for more than a hundred years, the novel "Dracula" has not left the lists of best-sellers of different countries in the category "mysticism". And only true connoisseurs know that Stocker is also the author of small prose, written in the best traditions of classical English literature of the turn of the century. Bram Stoker in little prose showed himself no less creatively, vividly and mysteriously than in his most famous novel. Who in their right mind decides to take a night walk during Walpurgis Night, when there is a “great Sabbath” on Brocken...
A natural pause appears to have come in the career of Mr. H.G. Wells. After so many years of travelling up and down through time and space, familiarizing himself with all the various parts of the solar system and presenting himself imaginatively at all the various geological epochs, from the Stone Age to the end of the world, he has for good and all domesticated himself in his own planet and point of time. This gradual process of slowing down, so to speak, had been evident from the moment of his first appearance. The most obvious fact about his romances of science, considered as a series, is...
Here is a story that has been at rest for seven hundred years. It was first suppressed by one of the English kings of Plantagenet. It was later forgotten. I happened to dig it by accident. The incident was the relationship of my wife's cousin with a certain abbot of a father in a very ancient monastery in Europe. He let me figure out the number of moldy and musty manuscripts, and I came across this. This is very interesting - partly because it is a bit of an unwritten story, but mainly because it records the story of the most remarkable revenge and adventurous life of her innocent victim -...
A man may be a scoundrel, a crook, a high-phased confidence man, and still work toward a great dream which will be worth far more than the momentary damage his swindles cost....
"Strayed off again--the young idiot! If he's playing in the shallows, with this tide going out...." Pater let the sentence hang blackly. He leaned upslope as far as he could stretch, angrily scanning the shoreward reaches where light filtered more brightly down through the murky water, where the sea-surface glinted like bits of broken mirror....
“The heart of the wise is in the house of weeping, and the heart of the foolish is in the house of fun,” warned the biblical Ecclesiastes. So for the young beauty Lily Bart, New York at the turn of the century symbolizes not only the Golden Age, but the golden cage. Only a profitable marriage will help her regain the high position lost by the Bart family as a result of her father's bankruptcy - but over and over again Lily misses a profitable chance, consumed either by the demon of self-destruction, or by the expectation of great love. And not without reason she was compared with another...
Daniel Feldman was already a doctor. He violated the rules of the hospital lobby and made a mistake to save his friend's life. Now he avoids pariah, everything, and forbids touching another patient. But there is more and more freedom on Mars. There, Doc Feldman greets the colonizers, even if they are hunted by force. However, Feldman sees himself as the main character, realizing that the Martian plague could soon destroy humanity on two planets. The war began. The world is ready to destroy the colonies of Mars. Treating the plague is the price of peace, and only Feldman can find it....
