The Implosion Effect

The Implosion Effect by Gary Paulsen
Major Books, 1976
Price I paid: none

THE INTERNATIONAL COMBINE

They swore to Jason that there was nothing genuinely illegal about building a secret satellite tracking station…just smart businessmen getting the jump on the stock market.

And for half a million dollars, Jason Theiss was ready to believe them. That was before the murders began, and before some over-anxious governments decided to muscle in.

Continue reading “The Implosion Effect” →

The End of Man?

The End of Man? by Olof Johannesson (Hannes Alfvén)
Award Books, 1969
Price I paid: 90¢

Panic broke out. The computers had stopped working! There was no heat, no food, no communication. The death toll was long past the million mark.

No one knew what caused the breakdown. Was it human error, or a plot devised by the computers themselves?

Whatever the cause, when it was over most of the human population of the earth had perished. It was the dawn of a new era—when the computers ruled. And since the machines had learned to reproduce themselves without man’s help, there was no need for even a single human being.

So the nightmare battle began—between the few surviving humans and the super-being of their own creation—The Big Computer!

Continue reading “The End of Man?” →

Doomstar

Doomstar by Edmond Hamilton
Belmont Tower Books, 1966
Price I paid: 75¢

By mid-afternoon the brilliant intense sun shone on barren space. It had blasted each of its four planets out of existence.

SOMEONE HAD FOUND A WAY TO POISON A STAR!

Someone had to be found who could prevent the takeover or destruction of the entire universe by the madman who’d engineered the disaster.
The choice fell on Johnny Kettrick, banned from the Cluster World for space piracy. Now he was to be sent back there to search out the Doomstar—to find it before it burned out another world!

Continue reading “Doomstar” →