Free summaries
Science-Fiction & Fantasy — page 4
174 public-domain science-fiction & fantasy books, summarised. Page 4 of 4.
Zero Hour
Alexander Blade
A young boy sneaks onto a government rocket, convinced he is destined for the moon with his father. He discovers too late that imagination and reality occupy vastly different orbits.
Hunt the red roe
John Jakes
The hunter sought only to escape his poverty, but in the shimmering fog of Venus, he found a target that forced him to choose between his survival and his soul.
Security
Ernest M. Kenyon
A brilliant scientist trapped in a high-security facility discovers that the only way to survive the crushing weight of state censorship is to encode his life’s work into the language of an unrelated field.
Dearest
H. Beam Piper
Colonel Ashley Hampton, an aging veteran, finds himself trapped in his own home by relatives who plan to have him committed. His only ally is an invisible, telepathic presence he calls Dearest.
Roadtown
Edgar Chambless
A continuous concrete building stretches across miles of open countryside, carrying a high-speed monorail below and a public promenade above.
Up for Renewal
Lucius Daniel
Aging can be turned backward at a price, but when a man's life span reaches its limit, the ultimate treatment becomes a gamble against instant death.
Vanishing Point
C. C. (Charles Clarence) Beck
A practical painter tries to explain why his intellectually obsessed associate suddenly fled their joint studio, leaving behind a bizarre machine that challenges the physical rules of geometry, spatial perspective, and consensus reality itself.
Crossroads of Destiny
H. Beam Piper
Late at night in a train's club car, five strangers casually discuss alternate timelines, completely unaware that a quiet passenger beside them has slipped across the boundary from a vastly different reality.
Survival Type
Jesse F. (Jesse Franklin) Bone
Human survival on the alien world of Niobe depends on overcoming a deadly environment, but a lone explorer discovers that true adaptation requires surrendering human pride to native wisdom.
The Second Voice
Mann Rubin
An acclaimed ventriloquist agrees to lend his unique performance range to a military scientific test, only to discover that broadcasting into deep space carries consequences no one anticipated.
Zen
Jerome Bixby
A paleontologist exploring a barren asteroid discovers the ultimate survivor of a shattered world: a tiny, immortal alien desperately begging for death.
Total Recall
Larry Sternig
HOOK With the solar system hours away from total annihilation, a lone scientist must reach into his own suppressed past to recover a lost weapon before the enemy arrives.
Blood lands
Alfred Coppel
A lone starman confronts the horrific truth about a lost colony, where a desperate, regressed human population has traded its humanity to survive. The planet Kana is not merely a home; it is a predator.
Tree, Spare that Woodman
Dave Dryfoos
Fear is the deadliest weapon on a world where thoughts are tangible, but a child’s imagination may be the only shield strong enough to survive the forest’s psychic reach.
Final Examination
Robert Sheckley
When a celestial voice announces that humanity’s final judgment is imminent, the world briefly finds salvation—until the date is pushed back by a decade, leaving a civilization to unravel in the face of its own fragile morality.
Vital Ingredient
Charles V. De Vet
This story follows three interstellar observers who encounter a primitive native on a low-gravity planet. In an attempt to correct a physical injury they accidentally inflicted, they inadvertently doom the creature they intended to save.
Adolescents Only
Cox, Irving E., Jr.
A frustrated schoolteacher discovers a crashed alien vessel, only to find his rowdy students have accidentally ingested the secrets of a dying civilization, triggering a global crisis of gold and chaos.
Big Baby
Jack Sharkey
A telepathic predator haunts a colony by mimicking the deepest, safest memories of its victims. To stop the slaughter, a man must confront the most dangerous "baby" in the universe.
Criminal Negligence
J. Francis McComas
As a global ecological catastrophe looms, a prison warden and his staff must decide whether to join an elite escape to Mars or remain behind to face the end with the people they serve.
Test Rocket!
Jack Douglas
A space-faring civilization discovers that their experimental rocket program is merely a mirror of a larger, alien experiment. They are not the masters of the stars, but the subjects of a cosmic test.
The Republic of the Southern Cross, and other stories
Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov
A chilling exploration of reality, these stories blur the fragile line between the waking world and the terrifying depths of the imagination.
All Jackson's Children
Daniel F. Galouye
HOOK A pair of salvagers discovers a stranded colony of robots that have developed a strange, mechanical theology based on the memory of a long-dead human crewman.
Proof of the Pudding
Robert Sheckley
In a world reduced to ash and silence, a lone survivor discovers the godlike ability to manifest anything he imagines, only to confront the terrifying suspicion that his reality—and his companion—might be mere figments of his own mind.
The Street That Wasn't There
Clifford D. Simak
A reclusive scholar discovers that the physical world is dissolving, held together only by the collective force of human belief—and as humanity dies off, reality itself is being reclaimed by an alien intelligence.
Hanging by a Thread
Randall Garrett
HOOK A simple, overlooked mechanical flaw leaves a cargo ship drifting in the void. Five survivors face a desperate race against physics to fix their only beacon before their air runs out.
In the Garden
R. A. Lafferty
The crew of a small starship stumbles upon a world that seems to be a perfect, living echo of the Garden of Eden, only to discover that the most heavenly sights are often the most predatory traps.
In Case of Fire
Randall Garrett
A delicate balance of human frailty keeps the gears of interstellar politics spinning.
The sunken world
Stanton A. (Stanton Arthur) Coblentz
Caught in a violent maelstrom while aboard a submarine, an American crew plunges into an unsuspected subterranean abyss. There they discover Atlantis, an idyllic, glass-sheltered utopian society operating in total isolation far beneath the ocean floor.
Last Resort
Stephen Bartholomew
It was supposed to be a simple pinhole leak, but millions of miles from home, it becomes a slow-motion execution.
The Altar at Midnight
C. M. (Cyril M.) Kornbluth
A young spacer whose body is ruined by the drive that makes space travel possible seeks human warmth in a Skid Row dive bar, accompanied by an older drunk who shares a secret connection to his plight.