A Playboy is someone with power, too much time on his hands, and too little sense of a goal worth achieving. And if the Playboy happens to belong to a highly advanced culture....
Captain Brandon was a pioneer. He explored the far reaches of space and reported back on how things were out there. So it was pretty disquieting to find out that the “far reaches of space” knew more about...
The Gravity Gang was a group of geniuses--devoting its brilliance to creating a realistic Solar System for Disneyland. That was the story, anyway. No one would have believed all that stuff about cops and robbers...
Selling a whole town, and doing it inconspicuously, can be a little difficult … either giving it away freely, or in a more normal sense of "selling". People don't quite believe it….
The societal picture painted by Cole is mainly gray: for second and third class citizens, life is literally lived underground, at subsistence or lower, and closely monitored in all aspects. The few ruling elite,...
There are devices a high-level culture could produce that simply don't belong in the hands of incompetents of lower cultural evolution. The finest, and most civilized of tools can be made a menace ...
Most useful high explosives, like ammonium nitrate, are enormously violent ... once they're triggered. But they will remain seemingly inert when beaten, burned, variously punished--until the particular shock...
Hugo nominated in 1962, originally published in Analog Science Fact-Science Fiction as "Sense of Obligation." Brion has just won the Twenties, a global competition to test achievements in 20 categories of human...
For the young cadets of the famous Space Academy Polaris unit a month's leave would seem to be a perfect time for rest. But they have other ideas when they plan a trip to the jungles of Venus. There they hope...
He knew the theory of repairing the gizmo all right. He had that nicely taped. But there was the little matter of threading a wire through a too-small hole while under zero-g, and working in a spacesuit!
A Utopian vision in which the title character leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, and becomes dictator of America.
What is a "phony"? Someone who believes he can do X, when he can't, however sincerely he believes it? Or someone who can do X, believes he can't, and believes he is pretending he can?
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