The Million Cities

The Million Cities by J.T. McIntosh
Pyramid Books, 1963
Price I paid: none

THE MILLION CITIES

covered every inch of Earth’s surface with a gleaming metal skin—and penetrated almost to the planet’s core. Billions of people crowded them, using up the last depleted resources of an aging world. There was no hope for mankind but exploring and colonizing new frontiers beyond the sky.

The Chartists were the only people with the ability to build a spaceship—were within reach of success…

And then the government outlawed space travel—and began a vicious reign of terror against the Chartists!

The literally shattering climax of this fast-paced story by the author of One in Three Hundred offers a double surprise—for the Chartists are not what they seem….

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The Planet Strappers

The Planet Strappers by Raymond Z. Gallun
Pyramid Books, 1961
Price I paid: none

THE PLANET STRAPPERS

started out as The Bunch, a group of student-astronauts in the back room of a store in Jarviston, Minnesota. They wanted off Earth, and they begged, borrowed, and built what they needed to make it.

THE PLANET STRAPPERS got what they wanted—a start on the road to the stars—but no one brought up on Earth could have imagined what was waiting for them Out There!

In THE PLANET STRAPPERS, Ray Gallun has written a story of the Day After Tomorrow—a story of what it will be like for the men who cross the space frontier—a story that some of us will be living some day….

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The Sentinel Stars

The Sentinel Stars by Louis Charbonneau
Bantam Books, 1963
Price I paid: none

RIGID!
LOCKED!
ENSLAVED!

that was our Earth in 2200. East and West had merged at last so there were no more wars, no more political differences.

Citizens everywhere could concentrate on working off their TAX DEBTS! If you were capable and industrious you might be able to make freeman status for the last few years of your life.

No one questioned. No one spoke out. No one rebelled until one bright morning Citizen TRH-247 decided not to go to work—and worse than that, became desirous of a girl below his own classification!

Thus he made himself an outcast with the whole world against him and mere survival dependent on his wits, his daring, and his strength.

THE SENTINEL STARS—a novel of our world run as the Bureau of Internal Revenue would run it!

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The Hamelin Plague

The Hamelin Plague by A. Bertram Chandler
Monarch Books, 1963
Price I paid: 75¢

It began with a few small items in the newspapers—dead dogs and cats, a mutilated child, a series of unexplained fires. Then, suddenly, it exploded into a full-sized catastrophe.

Huge mutants—half rat, half man—began to take over the world, stealing children for slaves and destroying whole cities and their populations.

Only a few people escaped, among them Tim Barrett, his wife, Jane, and a handful of survivors. Alone on the high seas in a small ship, they set off to find the island where Dr. Theodore Piper had been experimenting with a sonic death ray.

They knew Dr. Piper was their only hope for personal and world survival—if he was still alive…if the King Rats hadn’t forced him to serve their evil purpose…and if he could find a way to stop the spreading horror of invasion.

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Planet Big Zero

Planet Big Zero by Franklin Hadley
Monarch Books, 1964
Price I paid: none

In the past few months, 18 Terran ships had vanished from the galaxy. Terra had to find out what—or who—was behind it.

Lieutenant Ted Narly of the Terran Defense Corps discovered the cause: a new totalitarian regime of Deotians, determined to take revenge for their defeat in the Great Wars thirty years before.

Taken captive, Narly was escorted to the secret Deotian empire, Planet Big Zero, a huge black nebula with only one entrance—a cone shaped funnel with a curtain of fire at the end.

Narly knew if the Terran fleet attempted to attack through the funnel, every ship would be destroyed. It was up to him to save mankind from destruction…but what could one man do against a hate-filled enemy bent on mastery of the universe?

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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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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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Come Die With Me

Come Die With Me by James Dark
Signet Books, 1965
Price I paid: 50¢

FORTRESS OF DEATH

It rises high and remote in the Brazilian mountains—a hermitage walled by sheer cliffs of dazzling white, lethally wired concrete. In this secret lair, a madman’s plot is being spawned, a scheme that will bring the world to heel.

Intertrust agent Mark Hood is the only one who can combat the evil plan. And he has been forced to join in its operation. Intertrust agent Mark Hood is sitting on top of an exploding time bomb as the seconds tick away…as the unsuspecting world hurtles toward tyranny…and death.

COME DIE WITH ME is a grand-slam of the sinister and sensational, delivered by JAMES DARK, new champion of the spy-cological thriller.

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Utopia Minus X

Utopia Minus X by Rex Gordon
Ace Books, 1966
Price I paid: 75¢

It took two hundred years to go to the nearest star and come back, but for astronaut Morgan Harvey it seemed but a short trip of a few months. Such is the nature of relative-time at near-light speeds.

So when Harvey got back to Earth he was still the same young patriotic Free World soldier he had been at the start of his flight. But the world he came back to was seemingly one in which his nation’s foes had triumphed and which now called itself The Perfect World.

And Utopia it certainly seemed, but Harvey refused to be brainwashed into accepting it. But until he met the man marked X, the problem of saving not only himself but humanity seemed beyond solution.

A remarkable new novel by the author of FIRST TO THE STARS.

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