Times Without Number

The cover of this novel features a futuristic Spanish conquistador standing in front of a futuristic device.

Times Without Number by John Brunner
Ace Books, 1962
Price I paid: $6.99 ÷ 2

Traveling backwards in time, Don Miguel had to undo the errors and interruptions of other time-interlopers; he had to preserve the present. Even the most insignificant nudging of the past could entirely alter his world! And he suspected that this had already happened: that a maniacal genius crazed with a desire for nationalist vindication had plotted to alter the victorious outcome of the Spanish Armada of 1588—thus changing recorded history and perhaps even imperiling the mighty Spanish Empire of 1988!
If Don Miguel did not successfully intercede, when he came back to the present he might find a different world…a different time…a time in which he probably didn’t even exist!

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The Long Winter

The Long Winter by John Christopher
Fawcett Gold Medal, 1962
Price I paid: 50¢

THE LONG WINTER is the terrorizing story of what happens when a new Ice Age devastates the Northern Hemisphere, when civilization disappears into a voiceless polar night, when men and women turn into human wolf packs in their agonized struggle for survival…and when the only place left to run is filled with another kind of death.

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Doomsday, 1999

Doomsday, 1999 by Paul MacTyre
Ace Books, 1962
Price I paid: none

What would happen if man’s mastery of the world was suddenly snatched away by a new and more advanced type of life? This is the startling premise of this unusual novel.

It fell to two people to face the news that mankind was about to follow the dinosaurs off the Earth’s stage. One was Angus, veteran of a defeated Western army in a world devastated by atomic warfare. The other was Liu, woman officer of a conquering army she already knew was destined for destruction.

How these two found the new master species and what they did about it is an exciting and thought-provoking science-fiction adventure.

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The Flying Eyes

The Flying Eyes by J. Hunter Holly
Monarch Books, 1962
Price I paid: none

Linc Hosler was sitting in a packed football stadium when the Flying Eyes appeared and cast their hypnotic power over half the crowd. Thousands of people suddenly began marching zombie-like into the woods where they vanished into a black pit.

Linc used every resource of the Space Research Lab and the National Guard to destroy the Eyes. But nothing could stop them, for they proved immune to bullets and bombs.

In desperation, Linc captured an Eye and found a way to communicate with it through his mind. He learned that radiation was fuel for the creatures’ lives. And then they issued their terrible ultimatum: Explode a series of atom bombs to supply them with radiation or they would turn the world’s population into mindless robots!

It gave the world two harrowing choices—self-destruction via fallout from the bombs or annihilation via the sinister Flying Eyes…

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D-99

D-99 by H.B. Fyfe
Pyramid Books, 1962
Price I paid: None

EARTHMEN IN TROUBLE

Harris was caged in an underwater “zoo” by a pack of blue lobsters

Maria drew a five-year sentence on a puritanical planet for trying to buy a souvenir—and for being excessively feminine

Taranto & Meyers had committed the crime of being shipwrecked on a planet that didn’t like strangers

Gerson was simply kidnapped—and nobody had any idea why

Five citizens of Terra were being held on other worlds—and the ultra-secret Department 99 existed only to set them, and others like them, free.

This tense novel is the story of one evening’s work for Department 99—their successes and failures—and of the strange crisis that almost wrecked

D-99

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Mars Is My Destination

Mars Is My Destination by Frank Belknap Long
Pyramid Books, 1962
Price I paid: 90¢

There was trouble brewing on Mars—bad trouble. Two giant industrial empires fought for control there, and their struggle imperiled the whole Mars colony. Civil war—atomic civil war—could break out any second, leaving Earth’s only foothold in Space a mass of radioactive rubble.

But both antagonists were too politically powerful for the Colonization Board to take a direct hand. One man was needed to take charge—one man who could act fast and decisively, brutally if he had to.

Ralph Graham got the job.

And then people started dying around him…

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