Science-fiction

An advanced civilization on a dying planet mobilizes all its resources to build and send out a hundred spaceships, each with a thousand volunteers on board, to find new worlds on which they could ensure the survival of their race. This is the tragic story of the one that landed on Earth.
This terrific golden-age sci-fi story by the English author John Wyndham was first published in the March 1941 issue of the American monthly magazine Amazing Stories as “Phoney Meteor” under the pen-name (…)

This was, we do believe, the first novel on the theme of conflict with alien civilisations in the history of literature.
It has remained justly famous for its dramatic story line — the invading Martians have superior tecHnology and are more advanced scientifically than mankind — and its introduction of such novel concepts as interplanetary rocketry, chemical and biological warfare, heat rays and robot-like giant machines that wreaked havoc upon London, the greatest city on Earth at the (…)

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific author in many diverse domains (novels, short stories, social commentary, history, satire and biography) and a very engaged social commentator and critic. He was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
But he is best remembered today for his pioneering works of science fiction, The Time Machine (1895) , The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898), that established him — with his (…)

One of the most famous novels of its time and certainly the best-known and most widely-read science-fiction novel of all time, Nineteen Eighty-Four is an extrapolation some forty years into the future of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union — that had just been extended to a significant part of Europe — to England and most of the rest of the world.
Written in 1948, Orwell cleverly reversed the last two digits of that year to provide a connection to his own time while leaving a credible (…)

A scientific expedition in Antarctica discovers the remnants of an alien spaceship that had crashed there millions of years ago, and decides – unwisely – to melt the frozen remnants of one of the forms found nearby. When the alien being revives and reveals incredible shape-changing abilities and other stupendous powers, the race is on not only to save themselves but also and especially to save the whole human race from destruction.
(22,500 words)
First published in the August 1938 issue (…)

Narrated in the first person in the local dialect by a very uneducated, very unsophisticated and very unusual young man who lives in a remote mountain town in the hills of Kentucky with his equally unusual family, this very funny story relates the adventures of a visiting professor from New York who wants to find out more about the strange and wonderful abilities of this family, who are more than content to continue living peacefully in their out-of-the-way southern town where nothing much (…)

First published in the May 1953 issue of Future Science Fiction, this amusing, insightful and thought-provoking satire of human pretentiousness in a galactic environment – the Earth is invaded by warring very-superior, very-different and very-uncaring aliens, with very terrifying results – was one of the best stories of the distinguished university professor Philip Klass (1920-2010), author of some 60-odd excellent science-fiction stories, mostly under the pen-name of William Tenn. (6,500 (…)

This quite wonderful exploration of man-woman relationships by an enormously superior being from another dimension of space-time will for sure have you chuckling and nodding in agreement throughout, and admiring the skill and talent of Theodore Sturgeon in his initial and possibly most creative period in the early forties, just before taking a break of several years before embarking on other s-f directions.
This clever, amusing, quite timeless little masterpiece was sort of hidden away (…)

If you liked Frederic Brown’s superb story The Star Mouse about the rocket scientist Professor Oberburger and his precious and very precocious mouse-assistant Mitkey – and how could you not have liked/loved it ? – then you will want to catch up on the later adventures of Mitkey and his Minnie published in the November 1950 issue of the magazine Planet Stories, whose striking cover by Allen Anderson and several story illustrations by Herman Vestal are all included here.
(8,000 words)
An (…)

First published in the October 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, this ambitious story became the basis of one of the most highly-regarded science-fiction films of its time and even all time, the quite wonderful "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951), the title under which this thoughtful, well-paced and very ambitious story has been known ever since.
(16,000 words)
We have included here the several original – and most worthwhile – 1940 Astounding illustrations by Kramer.
An (…)