The Cosmic Eye

The Cosmic Eye by Mack Reynolds
Belmont, 1969
Price I paid: 50¢

Morris should have functioned perfectly in the rigid totalitarian society of the future where every thought, every word, every action was controlled by the superstate. A state where everyone was watched night and day by the Great Eye of the internal security forces. It was a strange, in many ways inhuman world, but the rewards were great for those who belonged to the right caste. Morris belonged to the master class which ruled the entire world by brain power or brutality, depending on which was needed. Morris was born right at the top—he had everything the Technate Society could provide—and yet he didn’t belong. Nonconformity could mean liquidation, but he was prepared to take the risk.

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World Without Men

World Without Men by Charles Eric Maine
Ace Books, 1958
Price I paid: none

THE SEARCH FOR
THE 47th CHROMOSOME

The world of five thousand years from now was a world of only one sex—women. Love was an unnatural affair, fostered by the inhuman hand of the unseen government. Babies were created by laboratory techniques based on mass-deception.

There was one all-important project that supplied humanity’s only motive for continued existence—the struggle to re-create the male sex. Yet the very act of realizing this dream was to set up a crisis the world of women had never anticipated—and could not control!

Here is a truly unique novel which dares to discuss a scientific subject hitherto untouched by science-fiction. Slanted for the intelligent adult reader, it will be ranked with 1984 and Brave New World.

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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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