Stories of Futures Past

This week's novelette is the third installment in the series of standalone short stories about «Venus Equilateral», a communications relay space station located in the forward Trojan point of Venus, so to keep the lines of communications open between the planets of the solar system even when they are on opposite sides of the sun from each other.



The stories are about the scientists that work at the station, and how they use science and common sense to solve the varied crises that pop up, and thereby defeat the evils that beset mankind, i.e. greedy corporations, inept business management, and bureucratic machinations... it seems bone-headed decisions by the higher ups in business politics never changes...in this one, Don and Arden are off to Mars on their honeymoon and Walt is acting director back at the relay station, and is also experimenting with building new tech: a cannon that shoots electrons, to knock out meteorites in the paths of space ships, when a new threat rises in the tri-planet system: a pirate with several heavily armed spaceships, extorting the spacelanes for protection money, and on his way to take over the unarmed Venus Equilateral!


This is hard science fiction written in a light tone, not Spaceman Spiff style skiffy adventures. The technobabble is pretty well done, and the author certainly seems to know his stuff about electronics and radio communication, even though the technology is a projection of what existed in the 1940s, and thus very obsolete by today's standards. George O. Smith's was himself an electronics technician, which shows!

22 hours ago | [YT] | 13

Stories of Futures Past

This week's longer story is a cracking tale about a rogue rocket ship and its mismatched crew of grudgebearing criminals, every one with their own reason to hate the society they came from. They are searching for planets with rich radioactive ores they can mine, illegally of course. They set down on a promising planet, and start mining away, dreaming about how they are going to spend their new fortunes on getting back at humanity. Then they meet the planet's unassuming inhabitants, who turn out to be much more than they can handle... and they have to ask themselves, how much exactly, do they really hate the rest of humanity?


The original blurb:
They flung themselves across light years of space to show the world their hatred and contempt. And
out among the stars, they learned at last what hatred could really mean to them and what they hated!

1 week ago | [YT] | 19

Stories of Futures Past

This week's longer story is a cracking hard science fiction tale of an astronaut who happens to be on a space walk to fix something on his cargo rocket on the way from Earth to the orbiting space station when a meteor impacts it and he gets blasted away from his rocket. Since everyone now presumes him dead he is completely on his own in his space suit and with only some debris and a cargo cannister filled for the most part by toiletries for the space station crew close by... how to cope when stuck in an elliptical orbit around the Earth with less than twelve hours of air left in his suit, and no hope of rescue?


The original blurb:
“Far” is strictly a relative term. Half a world away from home is, sometimes, no distance at all!

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 19

Stories of Futures Past

This story marks a special milestone for me, your humble narrator, an event worthy of celebration!

This is the first story where I have done all the things to get it published at gutenberg.org. From the intitial identification as possibly not having its copyright renewed, to doing all the required research, and then having that research validated by the gutenberg clearance team; to transcribing the story, processing the text and images, and doing all the things necessary to turn it into an ebook, up to and including actually getting it published at gutenberg.org, thus making the story available to the world once more! Huzzah!

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77254

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbOj6...

In the time this story was written, Mount Everest was still unconquered (and incidentially, between when it was written and when it was published, the first climbers reached the summit, thereby disproving at least some of the premise of the story...hence the original blurb:



Perhaps you’ve read how Everest has now been climbed? But have you heard of Planetary Survey? Here’s the real truth about it. Everest has been climbed twice. )



Asimov wrote this story in one sitting, while waiting in the publisher's office one morning in the spring of 1953. He took the editor Bea Mahaffey out for a nice meal with the payment for the story.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 27

Stories of Futures Past

This week's longer story is an interesting take on what might happen in early seventeenth century Germany, where our hero Jonas the telepath plays the part of a possible wizard and puts himself into mortal danger trying to prove something to the local Inquisiton...

an excerpt:
Jonas did not, in spite of his pose, look like the typical hero of folk tale or scribe's tome; he was not seven feet tall, for instance, nor did he have a handsome, lovesome face with flashing blue eyes, or a broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted marvel of a figure. He was, instead, somewhat shorter than the average of men in Europe in 1605 and for some time thereafter. He had small, almost hidden eyes that seemed to see a great deal, but failed completely to make a fuss about the fact. And while his figure was just a trifle dumpy, his face completed the rhyme by being extraordinarily lumpy. The nose, as a matter of strict truth, was hard to distinguish from the other contusions, swellings and marks that covered the head.
Nor, of course, did he carry the sword of a great hero, or a noble. Jonas had no von to stick on his name, and he had never thought it worth his while to claim one and accept the tiny risk of disclosure. After all, a noble was only a man like other men.
And, besides, Jonas knew perfectly well that he had no need of a sword.



The original blurb:
"Behold the Tortoise: He maketh no progress unless he sticketh out his neck." But he maketh very little progress unless he pick the right time and place to "sticketh out his neck"—which can be quite a sticky problem for a man in a medieval culture!

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 15

Stories of Futures Past

This week's longer story is a cracking novelette by the Queen of Space Opera, Leigh Brackett herself. A rip-roaring adventure mixing Space Opera with a spot of Cosmic Horror, featuring hypnotic mind-entralling alien seductresses, betrayal, a deep dive into black waters and a long trek across the luminescent seabed of Venus, carnivorous undersea flowers, a sunken city with some very strange inhabitants, volcanic streams carrying extreme danger, and an overpowering madness-driven compulsion to look into the shadowed eyes of perfect beauty...

Venus is experiencing bouts of madness, men suddenly driven to desert their families and kill, following something only they can see. It is called The Madness from Beyond, or The Vampire Lure, caused by some alien something that recently appeared. Our hero Lundy and his wounded partner Jackie, Special Branch members of the Tri-World Police, are on their way back to base after a successful capture of one of the hypno-enslaving aliens, and its mad human thrall Farrell, currently strapped down and screaming his head off in the back of the flier they are in over the black Venusian ocean...Are the instruments' readouts even real? Or has the alien's influence already clouded Lundy's mind? And what about the wounded Mercurian Jackie? Is he himself?




The original blurb:
An eerie story of a silver land beneath the black Venusian seas. A grim tale of brooding terror whirling out of space to drive men mad, of a menace without name or form, and of the man, Lundy, who fought the horror, his eyes blinded by his will. For to see the terror was to become its slave—a mindless automaton whose only wish was to see behind the shadowed mysterious eyelids of "IT".

4 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 16

Stories of Futures Past

Huzzah! Another landmark reached! Thank you all! Please keep enjoying the stories!

The 4000 subscriber special is live:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCP0P...

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4 weeks ago | [YT] | 33

Stories of Futures Past

To wrap up the Week of Horror Science Fiction we have this most excellent novelette by Master of such things Frank Belknap Long.


In the red deserts of Mars, the elusive Martians whisper on the wind but never show themselves. The Earth workers at the construction camp are as rough and rugged as they come, enduring the harsh conditions. They have a legend of Larsen, a Paul Bunyon-like larger-than-life persona that gets the blame for every misdeed that might happen. Your firewood gone missing? Larsen took it. Playing cards marked? Larsen marked them! Your food disappeared? Larsen ate it!

One day the workers wake up to find one of their own brutally beaten to death... and very large footprints around the corpse. Who did it? And Why?

An excerpt:
You have to make allowances for a lot of things on Mars. You have to start right off by accepting hardship and privation as your daily lot. You have to get accustomed to living in construction camps in the desert, with the red dust making you feel all hollow and dried up inside. Making you feel like a drum, a shriveled pea pod, a salted fish hung up to dry. Dust inside of you, rattling around, canal water seepage rotting the soles of your boots.

So you wake up and you stare. The night before you'd collected driftwood and stacked it by the fire. The driftwood has disappeared. Someone has stolen your very precious driftwood. The Martians? Guess again.


The original blurb:
No mortal had ever seen the Martians, but they had heard their whisperings—without knowing the terrible secret they kept hidden.

1 month ago | [YT] | 19

Stories of Futures Past

A full week of Horror!





The run up to Halloween this year will be a celebration of Vintage Horror Science Fiction. The upcoming handful of videos will feature stories that all represent different flavours of horror story with a science fictional or fantastical slant. I hope you will enjoy these as much as I do!







(That said, there is Horror and then there is Horror. These stories might not be all that scary as such -at least not until you let them sink in...)

1 month ago | [YT] | 24

Stories of Futures Past

It looks like the post thingy is not working today it says this was posted many hours ago like it was supposed to, but it is not showing up...try, try again!

This week's longer story is a cracking tale; a hard science fiction story about the flight of the Argosy, humanity's first space warp faster than light traveller, and a desperate undertaking to go to Sirius to bring back the massive armed interstellar exploration ship Thunderbolt -humanity's last best hope to defeat the alien Slug Cruisers that appeared in the undefended solar system a few years after Thunderbolt left.

When the Argosy gets shot badly up by the Slug cruisers just at it translates into the warp, our hero Carl is left alone in an unknown dimension, with an unknown warp drive, in a dying ship, apparently travelling both forward and backward and sideways in several different directions, and a moronic supercomputer that knows everything but needs to be told how to do anything. Is it even possible to survive, let alone get the mission done, bring Thunderbolt back home to save Earth?



The original blurb:
How can a ship travel both forward and backward and sideways in two different directions, be going twice as fast as the speed of light—and still be completely motionless?

1 month ago | [YT] | 16