During the science-fiction boom of the 1930s, there were over a dozen pulp magazines dedicated to the subject. Analog, Startling Stories, Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Captain Future and Super Science Stories were just a few. In 1939, the pulp magazine publisher of Jungle Stories, and many others, added its own entry into the sci-fi field, Planet Stories. Until it folded in 1955, it published ground-breaking science fiction from some of the genre's brightest stars, including such luminaries as Ray Cummings, Frederic Arnold Kummer, Jr., Eando Binder, Leight Bracket, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, Henry Kuttner, Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl, James Blish, A.E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Alan E. Nourse and Robert Sheckley. Planet Stories returns in these vintage pulp tales, reissued for today’s readers in electronic format.
Table of Contents:
Four Star-Flung Novelets
Highway J
by Charles Erie Maine
He was Ingram of 1953, inventor of J-rotation... and along with his lightweight bicycle, directly responsible for the most gigantic nuisance of the 25th century.
The Prison Of The Stars
by Stanley Mullen
To head out beyond Pluto a venturer needs more than a super-spaceship... he needs men as super-desperate and freedom-mad as himself... people strange and daring. Wilding, the trespasser, found them on Alcatraz, the rogue asteroid... the prison of the stars.
Purple Forever
by Jack Lewis
Three men on Venus... lolling about in their shirt sleeves and breathing an atmosphere of chlorine and ammonia that was certain to kill a man in thirty seconds. The pictures lied... they must lie. Trick photography?... Or the greatest hoax ever staged?
Beyond The X Ecliptic
by Fox B. Holden
Earthman was dying slowly of boredom. Hope had become folly; work a means to avoid insanity; and death was the great reward... until Cragin, step-son of darkest space, dared the Barrier; dared to soar beyond the dread X Ecliptic where The Owners grimly governed all the fading galaxies.
Four Exciting Short Stories
The Golden Apples Of The Sun
by Ray Bradbury
Toward the sun... south toward the vastest of all burning hearths sped the refrigerated, ice-sheathed rocket... run by proud and vain men hoping to sting the lion and escape the maw.
Slay-Ride
by Winston K. Marks
It was a great cosmic joke when the wholesale triggerman, the pirate of the spaceways, became the victim of a simple, webbed nylon garment known as spaceman’s underwear.
Password
by J.W. Groves
Professor Medcalfe had it. And he meant to keep it. For all men were fools... and only the Lanyiah deserved the Earthen jackpot.
The Fatal Third
by Theo. L. Thomas
Huge, violent Webster was moulded for war — but he lived in an age of peace. So he huffed, and he puffed, and he blew down Uranus... and smiled at his victory.
and
The Vizigraph
Of mice and men and affectionate fen.
