The Penetrator #12: Bloody Boston

The Penetrator #12: Bloody Boston by Chet Cunningham
Book Margins, Inc., 1976
Price I paid: $1.50

The Penetrator wanted nothing more than to destroy the Mafia. But when his college roommate Tony Rossi, the son of Boston’s most powerful Don, asked him for help, Hardin couldn’t refuse. Somebody was masquerading as Mark’s buddy, trying to take over the drug trade in Boston, and if the fake didn’t succeed, Rossi’s wife and son would lose their lives. Whatever it took, the Penetrator swore he would save the innocent—and make sure the corrupt could never harm anyone again.

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The Penetrator #10: The Hellbomb Flight

The Penetrator #10: The Hellbomb Flight
Book Margins, Inc., 1975
Price I paid: $1.50

Once second in command at NASA, Dr. Orlando Fitzmueller built a secret computer base in the Nevada desert. Through careful planning, diligent calculations, and sheer brilliance, he had developed a strategy that would help him realize his impossible dream of controlling world atomic power. It was up to the Penetrator Mark Hardin to stop Fitzmueller—and time was running out. For if the scientist’s demands weren’t met, he would ignite a holocaust from space that would kill 150 million people in the first thirty seconds.

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The Wrong End of Time

The Wrong End of Time by John Brunner
DAW Books, 1971
Price I paid: 90¢

The time is the future. The place, an America so isolated by fear that it is cut off from the rest of the world by a massive defense system. Into this armed, barricaded state comes a young Russian scientist bearing a strange—and almost unbelievable story:

Superior, intelligent life—of a far higher order than any on earth—has been detected near the planet Pluto. Immune themselves by virtue of their far greater intelligence, these Aliens are about to destroy the planet Earth.

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Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue

Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown
Berkley Medallion Books, 1966
Price I paid: 90¢

THE FUZZ: VINTAGE 1990

When Sibyl Sue Blue, unique police sergeant of the future, smokes a benzale cigarette, she has a strange dream about the disappearance of her husband on the mysterious planet of Radix.

So she pulls of [sic] her wig and rouges her knees, and goes off to Radix with sinister millionaire Stuart Grant, and crew, in his space ship.

She finds her husband there, horribly transformed, and is in great danger of the same fate herself, unless she can get back to Earth in time. But this presents difficulties, because only Sibyl and the loathsome Dr. Beadle are in any shape to fly the ship, and neither one of them has ever done it before….

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Walkers On the Sky

Walkers On the Sky by David J. Lake
DAW Books, 1976
Price I paid: none

Sometimes the sky held only clouds, but at other times it could get quite busy. It could be full of sailing ships or bands of mounted warriors or even single figures strolling carefully across the empty air.

From the viewpoint of those below they were either apparitions or gods, but in any case to be ignored.

From the viewpoint of the sky walkers, those below were neither phantoms nor gods, yet certainly always beneath their notice.

Both viewpoints were wrong.

Because the time had come when one of the sky walkers was going to do the incredible—fall through. And when that happened, all hell was going to break loose. And did!

It’s not fantasy. It’s science fiction, and you never read another novel like it!

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The Planet of the Blind

The Planet of the Blind by Paul Corey
Paperback Library, 1968
Price I paid: none

What would happen to an intelligent, sighted inhabitant of Earth marooned on a planet inhabited by an unsighted people with a technology equal or superior to his? Further, let us suppose that this man heads a world organization that controls the now expanding field of tests and testing—Mr. Test himself. How would he fare on this PLANET OF THE BLIND? This is the story of Dr. Thur Stone in just such a situation.

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The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles

The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles by Robert Moore Williams
Ace Books, 1961
Price I paid: none

A Hollywood star, a housewife, a nurse…A doctor, a G-man, an engineer…They were among the pitiful handful of survivors who faced starvation, disease, and something infinitely worse—the terror that roamed the ruins! The horde of monsters had once been men and women, but now wre transformed into something never before seen on Earth!

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Games Psyborgs Play

Games Psyborgs Play by Pierre Barbet
DAW Books, 1973
Price I paid: $1.25

Captain Setni, of all the officers of space, was the most immune to hypnotic suggestion and psychological delusions. Hence, when reports reached the Great Brains of a strange new planet in the Hydra group, Setni was the logical astronaut to check it out.

Because by all accounts the planet seemed a double of Old Earth—but of Earth as it had been in the far past—and legendary beings were alive and well there.

Setni was specially trained for the task, but even the best training in disbelief was not sufficient. For on that pseudo-Earth, not only was Charlemagne in power and knighthood in flower, but the pagan gods were visible, physically real, and devilishly active.

Setni knew it was no illusion—
but then what was the reality?

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Alph

Alph by Charles Eric Maine
Ballantine Books, 1972
Price I paid: none

The four hundred and fifty-fourth microcytological transfer succeeded—it produced a cell with the basic forty-seven chromosomes, the masculinegenetic structure.

In other words, a living male embryo.

A special laboratory was set up for the care and growth of this embryo, known as the Alpha project. With specially trained cytologists. And special guards. Why not? The world had not seen a “man” in over 500 years.

There was no telling what the strange creature might do…

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World Without Men

World Without Men by Charles Eric Maine
Ace Books, 1958
Price I paid: none

THE SEARCH FOR
THE 47th CHROMOSOME

The world of five thousand years from now was a world of only one sex—women. Love was an unnatural affair, fostered by the inhuman hand of the unseen government. Babies were created by laboratory techniques based on mass-deception.

There was one all-important project that supplied humanity’s only motive for continued existence—the struggle to re-create the male sex. Yet the very act of realizing this dream was to set up a crisis the world of women had never anticipated—and could not control!

Here is a truly unique novel which dares to discuss a scientific subject hitherto untouched by science-fiction. Slanted for the intelligent adult reader, it will be ranked with 1984 and Brave New World.

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