Showing results by narrator "John W. Michaels" in All Categories

You can imagine the chagrin of a handsome young man when he wakes up next to the Toad Witch who drugged him the night before and had her way with him.

H. P. Lovecraft's tale of horror first appeared in Fantasy magazine in 1935. Alien beings invade the minds of the inhabitants of a planet, ours in this case, exchanging bodies. Imagine falling asleep in your room in your own body, and awakening on a strange planet in the body of a gray worm.

Willianson's world, a culture that seemed a hideous nightmare to men who know nothing of beauty, must be destroyed. Philip Dick's characters have an exciting way of letting their logically motivated self-interest lead them straight down the flaming road to ruin. We suspect that it is this distinctly individual approach which has made him one of the most admired and widely read of science fiction writers of the past few years.

Do vampires visit the dentist? Fangs, after all, are one of the vampire's tools of the trade. "Hello Doc. Got a little job for you." So fascinated was Dr. King at the fangs protruding from the horrible mouth, that he failed to hear the stranger's words.

From Boston to Liverpool in a little over four hours? Jules Verne tells us how it might be done.

How cold the beautiful smile! How warm the glowing ruby! How treacherous the garden of… The Last Druid.

Imagine if you will, Hitler or a person as evil as Hitler, who instead of crawling into his bunker and dying, goes into his bunker and into suspended animation to return thousands of years later, to meet an exiled human. The being is from a society that is so far advanced, it has done away with war and evil. Imagine also that this other exile can enter the minds of others and is appalled at what he finds in this evil creature. So appalled in fact that he must perform an act totally unknown in the peaceful society he came from.

The influence of the First World War was strong on H. P. Lovecraft, for in his youth he was an ardent Anglophile and remained almost fanatically so long after the end of that conflict. Thus the portrayal of the "Prussian beast" created by propagandists was accepted by him at face value and utilized in this story of a U-boat that ran afoul of an unearthly foe.

He had long wondered what lay outside; and now, Marvin's father was taking him on the long-awaited trip. One that he would never forget.

The Ghost Patrol portrays the dilemma men face when they are put out to pasture. Don Dorgan was such a man. He was a cop, and he loved his beat. When he returns to his old beat, he becomes the Ghost Patrol.

John Henry Cole's life has quieted down from what it had always been, and he can now settle down and make improvements on his small ranch. But everything changes when an old rancher named Wilson rides in with his two sons. Wilson is willing to pay Cole $5,000 to help get back his wife Lenora who has been taken hostage by Lucky Jack Dancer, an outlaw who had robbed the train on which she was a passenger.

Do you despise rock 'n' roll? Do you think Elvis is a hound dog? Do you understand the words of any popular song? Here, for the first time, the whole ghastly plot is revealed, the Conspiracy of Cacophony traced to its Cosmic Lair.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic short story of a man born in his 70s who ages backward as those around him age in the normal direction. Both humorous and heartbreaking at times, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was the basis for the David Fincher movie of the same name, though the movie differs in several key ways from Fitzgerald's original story.

A 1950s supercomputer’s purpose is to help fight battles, but what happens when the pompous general in charge of the project chooses to berate the rather meek and mild "Nerd" Dr. Milquetoast, whose job it is to program the massive machine, is a classic case of getting even.

The possibility that robots, in common with certain humanoids, might in time share certain emotions with their creators, has been frequently considered.

A Hitch in Space. Hitch as in hitch hike by Fritz Leiber or hitch as in hiccough - neither is advisable in space.

In struggles for supremacy, from a spat in the kitchen to the war of the worlds, the woman is never unarmed.

Talk about missing the boat. A charming short story of the last of the unicorns, an explanation of why there are no unicorns with us today.

It seemed like a good idea at the time to rescue the tribe of Amuk from their primitive ways and move them into modern society. Pibo, their a-lot-smarter-then-he-looked leader, however, had other ideas. Pibo liked his job too much to allow Scout Lieutenant Holroyd Aldo to bring in the mother ship and its extensive reorientation of his people.

"Alethia Phrikodes", or "Frightful Truth", is an intense vision of Lovecraft's cosmicist viewpoint, that humankind is nothing but an aspiring race of mites and mortal vermin, a speck of nothing in an immense cosmos.