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The Weapon Shops of Isher

By the year 4784, the Empire of Isher ruled the universe and an impetuous willful girl ruled the empire. Into this epoch, the most scientifically powerful period humanity ever knew, a time-staggering bombshell was tossed. It came in the form of a man from today, a victim of a conflict which was as old as that empire and which now threatened to be the end of both Isher and its worlds.

Gateway to Elsewhere

Tony Gregg was just an ordinary everyday American until the day he came into possession of an old Barkut coin. He knew that it was more than just a collector's curio because there was no such place on any map of Earth, past or present. He learned then that it could be used as a key - a key to a GATEWAY TO ELSEWHERE.

With the publication, in the July 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, of the story Seesaw, van Vogt began unfolding the complex tale of the oppressive Empire of Isher and the mysterious Weapon Shops. This volume, The Weapon Shops of Isher, includes the first three parts of the saga and introduces perhaps the most famous political slogan of science fiction: The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to Be Free. Born at the height of Nazi conquest, the Isher stories suggested that an oppressive government could never completely subjugate its own citizens if they were well armed. The audience appeal was immediate and has endured long beyond other stories of alien invasion, global conflict and post war nuclear angst.

Imagine: a future empire of super-science, so strong that it had lasted thousands of years, so vast that it encompassed the entire Solar System, and whose ruler was a glamorous and thoroughly willful young woman. Yet, this tremendous set-up was completely unable to cope with the machinations of one solitary outlaw.

That man was the amazing Robert Hedrock, and though Hedrock had been declared a kill-on-sight outcast even by those who had once been his own faction, neither they nor their empress foe suspected that he alone could provide the solution to their deadliest cosmic crisis.