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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Star Winds

Star Winds by Barrington J. Bayley
DAW Books, 1978
Price I paid: none

The sails were the product of the Old Technology, lost long ago in the depleted Earth, and they were priceless. For with those fantastic sheets of etheric material, ships could sail the sky and even brave the radiant tides between worlds and stars.

The alchemists who had replaced the scientists still sought the ancient secrets…and Rachad, apprentice to such a would-be wizard, learned that the key to his quest lay in a book abandoned in a Martian colonial ruin long, long ago.

But how to get to Mars? There was one way left—take a sea vessel, caulk it airtight, steal new sails, and fly the star winds in the way of the ancient windjammers.

Here is an intriguing, unusual and colorful novel of ships that sail the stars riding before the solar breeze that blows between the worlds.

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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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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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