The World Turned Upside Down
David Drake
Language: English
Pages: 752
ISBN: 1416520686
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Publisher Jim Baen joins two of his top authors to collect the stories which made them SF readers in their youth and fitted them to make major impacts on the SF field today. The quality of the stories in this huge volume compares favorably with that of any collection in the past fifty years--there's been nothing of equal size and quality since Groff Conklin's Omnibus of Science Fiction in 1952. Nevertheless the selection wasn't through some would-be objective standard but rather by a deliberately subjective process: these are the stories which, when the editors read them, turned their worlds around. Each story was picked because of the emotional charge it gave one or more of the editors on first reading. The story sources range from Analog to Weird Tales, the first appearances from the early '30s to the mid '60s. Many were written by the greatest names in the SF field. These are stories that made the editors think and feel. They will do the same for you.
The Plumie stepped confidently out into the topsy-turvy corridors of the Niccola. He was about the size of a ten-year-old human boy, and features which were definitely not grotesque showed through the clear plastic of his helmet. His pressure suit was, engineering-wise, a very clean job. His whole appearance was prepossessing. When he spoke, very clear and quite high sounds—soprano sounds—came from a small speaker-unit at his shoulder. "For us to talk," said the skipper heavily, "is pure
drunk and sober, see and hear and photograph the Improbable eating whales: Wednesday, the 20th of August: Richard Chisholm, fifty, grizzled, British, has entered the Improbable in his log. Has stirred one wrinkled cerebrum, accustomed to the investigation of probabilities, in unaccustomed ways. Zoologist Heinrich Wilhelm Sturm leaned with polished elbows on a polished rail and stared at a burnished sea. Daughter Marie Elsa Sturm leaned and stared beside him. Secretary Rudolf Walter Weltmann
rose black against the sunrise, burned silver white in the blaze of noon . . . They went—they returned—and none questioned their coming or going. War on the edge of America. War between white man and brown—and more than man behind the brown. Death rained from the sky on little brown men scattering in open deserts, on green jungles where brown men might be lurking, on rotten rock where brown men might have tunneled. Death poisoned the streams and the rock-hewn cenotes, death lay like a yellow
blue eyes bulged a little in amazement. "Angela—fair name, that! Like to meet her. Perhaps after we get this muddle cleared up, we might have a bit of a set-to on behalf of our respective ladies." Jim gulped slightly. "Oh, you've got one, too?" "Absolutely. And she's tremendous. The Lady Elinor—" The knight turned about in his saddle and began to fumble about his equipment. Jim, on reaching the ground, had at once started out along the causeway in the direction of the Tower, so that the
your dinosaur with? Oh, you hadn't thought, eh? Well, sit there a minute . . . Here you are: my own private gun for that work, a Continental .600. Does look like a shotgun, doesn't it? But it's rifled, as you can see by looking through the barrels. Shoots a pair of .600 Nitro Express cartridges the size of bananas; weighs fourteen and a half pounds and has a muzzle energy of over seven thousand foot-pounds. Costs fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. Lot of money for a gun, what? I have