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....
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,...
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...
News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. In the book, the narrator, William Guest,...
The trials of a patent lawyer are usually highly technical tribulations--and among the greatest is the fact that Inventors are only slightly less predictable than their Inventions!
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?
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...
The happiness of some lives is distributed pretty evenly over the whole stretch from the cradle to the grave, while that of others comes all at once, glorifying some particular epoch and leaving the rest in...
You can measure everything these days--heat, light, gravity, reflexes, force-fields, star-drives. And now I know there even is a... Measure for a Loner.
"Missing Link" is vintage Frank Herbert. It tells the story of Lewis Orne, junior I-A field man, on the planet Gienah III. He is there to investigate a missing ship, and the natives are nothing but trouble...
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