Author: jmstine

A Never-Reprinted Pulp Classic!

Written during the darkest days of WWII, this thundering novel, with its color and strong mood setting, telling of of a super-scientific secret tended by a mysterious tribe in the remote fastness of the jungle, could only have been penned by the king of pulp sf, Edmond Hamilton.

From the author of The Star Kings and The Sun Smasher comes this tale of the legendary Flame of Life that conferred invulnerability and immortality upon those who bathed in its fires. As the Japanese close in on the lost city whose priesthood guards the flame, pilot John Terrell and nurse Ruth Dunn must penetrate the Golden City, survive encounters with the deadly Snakemen, battle super-scientific wizardry, and discover the incredible secret of the Flame of Life—before the enemy does! This is the first ever reprinting of this masterful book-length novel from the December 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

Cover: from a painting for H.W. McCauley for a war-era Fantastic Adventures.

All Three Caspak Novels in One eBook!

Complete and unabridged! The Land that Time Forgot, The People that Time Forgot, and Out of Time's Abyss—in one ebook for one low price.

A German submarine lost on a secret mission, a daring aviator crashed on an uncharted island, his friend, desperate to find and rescue him—they all come together on Caspak, the continent where time stands still and dinosaurs and cave men continue to rule supreme.  Battling saber-toothed tigers, giant reptiles, pterodactyls and human treachery, the castaways find love, death, loyalty, betrayal, and a new understanding of themselves.

"One of Burroughs' most exciting adventure novels…  In Caspak, the strange land where Time stood still, Burroughs made one of his most imaginative creations … thrilling."  —Lin Carter.

All three books complete and unabridged—over 600 pages in hardcover.

Cover: J. Allen St. John

"1950s Pulp Alien Invasion Shocker too Intense for Book Publication!"

When The Usurpers first appeared in the magazine Imagination during the early 1950s, Nebula and Hugo Award winner Robert Silverberg wrote that Geoff St. Reynard's work is "off the beaten track. The concept of aliens masquerading in human form is not at all new but this story is different and powerful, a minor SF classic."

Considered too strong by the hard- and softcover SF book publishers of the era, The Usurpers has never been republished in the half-century since. Now you can read this SF classic and judge for yourself. Here is a story that is bound to remind you of Night of the Living Dead and The Thing.

Science fiction has often speculated on the possibility of aliens walking the Earth masquerading as human beings—Jerry Wolfe discovered it was true! He had seen the aliens in their actual form! He must be high, you say. Don't laugh! Your best friend is one of them! Discover what happens when a handful of brave men and women decide to pit their puny forces against the might of Earth's secret masters and the governments they control! You will find romance, action, and daring speculation in this lost classic, in its first ever book publication!

Three Fast-Paced, Colorful Classics by a "Highly Regarded" "Founding Father" of Pulp Science Fiction!

Two masterpieces from the pages of the Clayton Astounding Stories, and his most famous novel. The Girl in the Golden Atom was the author's debut work of SF, a groundbreaking tale of romance and warfare inside a miniature world visible only through the most powerful microscope.

You'll also see a pair of novels from the legendary Astounding: first, out of their unknown fourth-dimensional realm materializes a horde of White Invaders with power invincible, and with the U.S. at bay, only a courageous woman and a small handful of men stand between humanity and slavery; second, further adventures in the world of the microscopic as evil plotters scheme to disrupt and conquer two worlds in Beyond the Vanishing Point.

Three Complete Classics by Hugo Award Winning Author.

In book one, research scientist Joseph Burke and his secretary Sandy Lund discover their love for each other and plan to marry, when strange signal from an unknown asteroid puts their passion on hold. The alien message screams of doom for Earth. But what doom? When the two lovers join a courageous crew of humans using a scientific breakthrough to reach the asteroid, what they find upsets their world even more than the screaming messages!

In book two, TV producer Jed Cochrane sets out to cover the discovery of a faster-than-light drive, then faster than you could say "Einstein," Jed finds himself trapped inside a spacecraft with his kooky secretary and a reluctant psychiatrist, being hurled far beyond the confines of the Solar System.

In book three, Joe Kenmore has a simple-sounding assignment: Deliver supplies and atomic weapons to the new U.S. space station, then help prepare for the first practical moon base. But physics and enemy agents place seemingly impossible obstacles in his way!

Murray Leinster is the winner of both the Hugo Award and the Retro-Hugo Award. He was one of the most distinguished writers associated with John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction and the golden age of the sf pulps.

Nebula Nominee Author's Lost Pulp Saga of Man Ordered to Kill the Woman He Loves in Order to Save Earth!

This volume contains the final two stories in Nebula Award nominee writer Ross Rocklynne's lost pulp science fiction series, Hallmeyer, Destroyer of Worlds. As with the first volume of this series, all the stories are reprinted for the first time in more than sixty years.

The second Hallmeyer tale in this volume, "The Bubble Dwellers," has the distinction of being both the only novel-length work in the series and the final story, bringing the saga to an unexpectedly satisfying conclusion. In "Slaves of the Ninth Moon", undercover jobs too dirty and tough for the IPF had always been assigned to Hallmeyer. But never, in even his wildest dreams, had he thought that to fulfill his mission he would have to murder the woman he loved.

Then in his final adventure, "The Bubble Dwellers", Hallmeyer finds the perfect woman for the happy ending he needs—if she doesn't kill him first! The hell-planet of Vulcan had spawned a deadly menace that might entrap the civilized worlds. Only Sydney Hallmeyer could halt that force, only he could stop the fiendish Zondat—and he was helpless, a slave laborer of the man he fought, condemned for life to Vulcan's depths!

Golden Age Pulp Series by Nebula Nominee—First Time Ever in Book Form!

For the first time since their original appearance in the legendary pulp Planet Stories in the early 1940s, here are the three novelettes that launched the adventures of Sidney Hallmeyer, interstellar agent—one of the era's most trail-blazing series—now, together in the first of two single novels.

In essence, Hallmeyer is a scientific secret agent with a license to kill—entire cultures and worlds! If needed or if so ordered, when they stand in the way of Earth's territorial expansion and dream of empire. In fact, Hallmeyer is most often instructed to terminate utopias—with prejudice. In "Exiles of the Desert Star," for instance, his assignment, as the original magazine blurb announced, is "Murder. Murder among the asteroids. Hallmeyer had orders to transform small Elron's brisk atmosphere to krypton. It meant killing that last gallant handful of royal exiles as surely as if his hand held a ray-gun."

Hallmeyer's charm and saving grace, and the surest sign of his creator's penetrant insight, is his conscience. For unlike, say, James Bond, and long before him, Hallmeyer is aware of the dubious nature of his profession. The Hallmeyer series was clearly cut from such contrapuntal cloth that it is easy to understand why it made a big stir in the science fiction world of the time.

Yet, paradoxically, for all the series' fame and popularity, no Hallmeyer story has ever been reprinted. Thus this two-volume eBook republication of this landmark series by Nebula nominee Ross Rocklynne is a major science fiction event.

BONUS FEATURE: Excerpt from classic pulp novel, The Man Who Saved the Universe.

The Character who Changed Science Fiction and Became the Symbol of Space Opera!

By the author of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Thrill to jetting rockets and sizzling ray guns. Before Hawk Carse, during the Hugo Gernsback/Amazing Stories era of science fiction, the typical story involved reams of scientific exposition by a group of friends, one of whom invented a space ship, as they then took a trip to another planet, a tour of that world's futuristic technology, a revolt or warfare of some kind involving imaginative weaponry, and sometimes a princess in need of rescue—with each invention and incident explained at length.

When editor Harry Bates founded Astounding Stories of Super Science, the magazine that would eclipse Amazing Stories—and all other science fiction magazines—for the next two decades, he created Hawk Carse, the Space Hawk, as a model of the streamlined, action-oriented science fiction he envisioned writers producing for the magazine, with the scientific explanations worked in briefly into the narrative flow, rather than dominating it.

Space Hawk was an immediate hit with readers, and it is easy to see why, for the interplanetary adventure never stops in this short novel that launched the series. Although Bates meant his portrayal of the pilot of Carse's ship as African-American to be revolutionary at a time when most characters of color in pulp magazine fiction played only menial roles or were villains, the effect is marred today by stereotyped aspects of the man's character and the unfortunate choice of the name "Friday." Such was Bates' range as an author that hardly a decade later, he would pen a series of groundbreaking "thought variant" stories for Astounding, including "Farewell to the Master," which became the film adaptations we know as The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Comic SF with a Point from the Hugo-Winning Novelist!

What if you were a personnel director assigned to prevent the company's most productive employee from resigning—and discovered her four-year-old daughter was creating havoc in the company's daycare center by making objects fly through the air? What would you do to halt a kindergarten poltergeist from turning your factory upside down?

That's what happens to Ralph Kennedy in Hugo Award winning author Mark Clifton's hilarious, but pointed, What Thin Partitions, and things only become more complicated when Kennedy encounters a fake fortune-teller who has no idea his string of successful guesses results from an unconscious ability to read minds! The comic dilemmas only become worse as Kennedy finds himself encountering an assortment of people with paranormal gifts, each posing a unique problem.

Lighthearted throughout, What Thin Partitions rises to a touching and inspiring conclusion when Kennedy's efforts unwittingly bring these characters all together and they discover a collective destiny in which he cannot share. Here is classic science fiction that will make you laugh, think and cry—a must-read!

"Mark Clifton is one of the twelve most influential writers of science fiction," says writer, critic and Nebula award winner Barry Maltzberg. Clifton's novel, They'd Rather Be Right, with collaborator Frank Riley, won the 1955 Hugo Award. Many of his stories have been selected for various "best of" anthologies both before and since his passing. The four novelettes that comprise What Thin Partitions was never issued in book form due to Clifton's untimely and unanticipated passing (although, strangely, its sequel, When they Come from Space, was published in hardcover).

The Prize Winning Classic of the Space Patrol!

Originally published for adults, this 1950s saga of a young man growing up in the Space Patrol won a Boys Clubs of America Award when it was republished for a young adult audience. Galaxy Science Fiction magazine said, "Nice to have these and expert space operas by the late Malcolm Jameson available in one volume. The stories gain their charm and durability from the simplicity and directness with which they were conceived and written. There is no cheap melodrama. Plenty of action, but action kept within human and possible range, all taking place in the Solar System. Odd and complicated scientific devices abound; there is much competition between the crew of Bullard's Pollux and that of her sister ship the Castor; and enough—but not too much—of the weird and inexplicable take place in space and on the planets, moons and asteroids that are the natural and lawful prowling grounds of the Patrol. Certainly y/a readers (and adults, too) with an ounce of adventurousness in their bones will go all-out for these swiftly moving and very real-seeming tales of tomorrow's adventures in space."

As a hero of science fiction, Commander Bullard has no equal. His fantastic, often humorous, but always logical adventures have long been favorites of science fiction addicts. John Bullard was born on Terra, in the ancient district of Ohio, in 3915, and his story is science fiction in the tradition of fine storytelling. Here are the adventures of a clever man, not physically outstanding in any way, who passed almost unnoticed from the Patrol Academy into the Service, there to prove himself in a series of exploits that transform him into an almost legendary hero of the space fleet.

His job, helping keep the peace of the inner and outer planets, was no easy one. It fell to Bullard to put down rebellious criminals long since banished to other planets, to fight in grim wars which encompassed many corners of the universe, and last but not least, to cut through the red tape of Terra's bureaucracy. His clever use of the extraordinary machines and weapons of a future age bring him a fame unequaled among the mariners of deep space. Bullard's author, Malcolm Jameson (1891-1945), drew from his own experiences as an officer in the U.S. navy in imagining the background, characters, and events of the Bullard Saga.