Search Worlds Without End

Run For The Stars:

The Kyben demolished Deald's World and their armada was heading for Earth. All that stood in their way was a man on Deald's World named Benno Tallant, about as lousy a candidate for hero as one could imagine: junkie, looter, coward, betrayer. The retreating Earth forces decide to make him the last man on Deald's World. They surgically implant a cataclysmic bomb in his body, turn him loose, and let the Kyben hunt him down.

See Benno Run. Run, Benno, Run Like Hell.

Echoes of Thunder:

No man, Mohawk or white, walks the high steel like John Stranger.

Contents of Tor Double:

• 1 - Introduction: Beauty, Stupidity, Injustice, and Science Fiction - essay by Damon Knight (variant of Beauty, Stupidity, Injustice, and Science Fiction 1990)
• 19 - Rule Golden - (1954) - novella by Damon Knight
• 103 - Double Meaning - (1953) - novella by Damon Knight Note: An expanded version of this story was published under the title "The Rithian Terror" by Ace Books(1965).

Rule Golden:

As a newspaper publisher, Robert James Dahls found the news disconcerting; in fact, inexplicable. News items like two boxers simultaneously knocking each other out, prison guards sick and unable to guard the prisoners, policemen shooting fleeing culprits and collapsing themselves, battered wives with husbands suffering the same injuries that they inflicted.

Dahl catches wind of a large experimental facility that is being led by the U.S. Department of Defense. His suspicions coincide with the strange, beyond-coincidental behavior that he's been observing. For what's on the grounds of the facility is much more radical than anything that was claimed to be found in Roswell. Not just an alien but one that has a strange effect on the human race. Where the Golden Rule in reversed: Be done by as you do to others. How can we get along without conflict? What will happen to the human race? Dahl soon finds himself a fugitive helping a bizarre alien save or destroy the Earth!

Double Meaning:

A psychological thriller that follows an Earth security officer in the future who is racing against time to locate an alien spy.

First published in 1953, this is probably the first sci-fi book to feature a surveillance drone.

Silent Thunder:

A techno thriller. A unique mix of Sci-Fi and historic fiction. It's said to resonate with political events of the 1991 timeframe.

Universe:

This novelette was combined with its sequel, "Common Sense", to form "Orphans of the Sky" in 1963.

The gigantic, cylindrical generation ship Vanguard, originally destined for "Far Centaurus", is cruising without guidance through the interstellar medium as a result of a long-ago mutiny that killed most of the officers. Over time, the descendants of the surviving loyal crew have forgotten the purpose and nature of their ship and lapsed into a pre-technological culture marked by superstition. They come to believe the "Ship" is the entire universe, so that "To move the ship" is considered an oxymoron, and references to the Ship's "voyage" are interpreted as religious metaphor. They are ruled by an oligarchy of "officers" and "scientists". Most crew members are simple illiterate farmers, seldom or never venturing to the "upper decks" where the "muties" (an abbreviation of "mutants" or "mutineers") dwell. Among the crew, all identifiable mutants are killed at birth.