Ray Cummings – Schlock Value

Wandl the Invader by Ray Cummings
Ace Books, 1961
Originally published in Astounding Stories, 1932
Price I paid: none

There were nine major planets in the Solar System and it was within their boundaries that man first set up interplanetary commerce and began trading with the ancient Martian civilization. And then they discovered a tenth planet—a maverick!
This tenth world, if it had an orbit, had a strange one, for it was heading inwards from interstellar space, heading close to the Earth-Mars spaceways, upsetting astronautic calculations and raising turmoil on the two inhabited worlds.
But even so none suspected then just how much trouble this new world would make. For it was WANDL THE INVADER and it was no barren planetoid. It was a manned world, manned by minds and monsters and traveling into our system with a purpose beyond that of astronomical accident!
It’s a terrific novel from the classic days of great science-fiction adventure—now first published in book form.
From the inside flap

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Brigands of the Moon by Ray Cummings
Ace Science Fiction, 1931
Price I paid: none

A pioneer of imaginative writing, Ray Cummings is one of the founding fathers of modern American science-fiction. For in his novels and short stories, this talented writer—once an associate of Thomas Edison himself—first originated many of the soaring conceptions that became part and parcel of all science-fiction since then.

Cummings spanned the gap between the early gropings of H.G. Wells and the full vision of our atomic future. His vivid tales were the first to fully explore the cosmos from the interiors of atoms to the farthest bounds of the galactic universe.

BRIGANDS OF THE MOON is one of Cummings’ classic novels—a thrilling novel of the clash of two planets in the fight for super-power ore, an adventure in interplanetary piracy, and a prediction of the mining and colonization of the moon that is still as timely as the day it was written.

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