Showing results for "SHECKLEY" in Science Fiction & Fantasy

First, the stars in the Milkey Way go dark. Then everyone on earth hears in their minds a very real voice speaking in their own language, dialect, and gender at the precise same time: ''Judgment of the inhabitants of the planet Earth will be held in five days. Please prepare yourselves for the final examination and departure. That is all". Humanity prepares for the rapture. But wait, fate takes a turn.

Man was leaving Earth. Man--but not woman. Light-years from Earth were little worlds without women - and men were not happy about it. Since real women could not go to them, scientists on Earth developed substitutes. Android females were developed, the surrogates, and shipped to the colonies. Everything seemed to go well - for a while. Ralph Garvey is about to find that the package containing the promise of extreme sexual delight is not quite what he had expected.

Professor Carver and his assistant Fred are investigating the culture of the primitive Lorayan community. The snobbish professor is ready to dismiss the Lorayans as uneducated savages until he witnesses the healing power of the locally produced sersee juice. He is very keen to accumulate a store of this remarkable restorative in order to learn how to manufacture it on Earth and become extremely wealthy. However, he soon discovers that the application of the juice can produce unexpected effects.

The Leech was waiting for food. For millennia it had been drifting, without consciousness, across the vast emptiness of space. A planet claimed it, with other stellar debris, and the leech fell, still dead—seeming within its tough spore case. One speck of dust among many, fell to the Earth. Nourishment soaked in, permeating the spore case. It grew—and began to feed.

Twenty-four of the greatest science fiction stories of all time in this fourth sci-fi short story collection, including works by Jerry Dunham, Emmett Dowell, James Causey, Gordon Randall Garrett, James A. Cox, Phyllis Sterling Smith, Richard A. Sternbach, Robert Sheckley, E. G. Von Wald, Keith Laumer, Jerome Bixby, Frederik Pohl, Roger Dee, Arnold Marmore, James H. Schmitz, Lester del Rey, Cordwainer Smith, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick.

In "The Robot Who Looked Like Me," a busy man and a busy woman find a way to carve out time to romance each other—by having look-alike robots made to do the job—who then run away together.

If a society was created entirely by criminals with no memory of their former world, what would they come up with? It couldn't be crazier than Omega, where the religion is the worship of evil, humans are hunted for fun, status is attained one corpse at a time, and life expectancy is three years...if you're lucky. Omega - a fun place to live, if the plants, animals, weather, or your neighbors don't kill you first.

Incredible Science Fiction: Amazing Tales from the 50's and Beyond, Volume Two collates a collection of some of the very best science-fiction stories published in the '50s together. All these stories (with the exception of The Anatomy of Fear) are now in the public domain and were original published in various science-fiction magazines that were very popular in the 1950s. This is a lovingly curated collection of some of the very best stories published during this time. This collection includes a further story from the Hugo Award-nominated Rog Phillips.

If easy payment plans were to be really efficient, patrons' lifetimes had to be extended!

Classic science-fiction writer Robert Sheckley presents this short story about a lonely prospector who ponders his existence on a small rock in an asteroid belt that he names Martha.

"The Status Civilization" is a science fiction novel by Robert Sheckley. The protagonist is Will Barrent, who finds himself, without memory of any crime, or, indeed, of his previous life, being shipped across space to the planet Omega. Omega, used to imprison extreme offenders, has a hierarchical society of extreme brutality, where the only way to advance (and avoid dying) is to commit an endless series of crimes. The average life expectancy from time of arrival on Omega is three years.

Engineers have created an intelligent robot bird and its main objective is to prevent murder! The robot is encouraged to study what murder is, and its definition of murder expands until humans find themselves no longer able to operate on dying patients or to eat a salad because of the salad's feelings! What to do? Terminate the robots or starve to death.

Launch your imagination and break the bonds of time and space with radio's highly acclaimed science-fiction anthology X Minus One! Produced in cooperation with science fiction magazines of the day, the series featured provocative stories by the genre's top genre authors. Ray Bradbury, Ernest Kinoy, Robert Sheckley, and more helped Americans of the 1950s look to the future. Dramatized with an atmosphere of excitement, top radio voices like Raymond Edward Johnson, Les Damon, Staats Cotsworth, Ruby Dee, Mandel Kramer, Joe DeSantis, and Bill Lipton gave voice to their visionary tales.

X Minus One premiered in April 1955 on NBC and ran until January 1958. Like its predecessor series, Dimension X, X Minus One featured stories by the greatest names in modern science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and many more.

X Minus One premiered in April 1955 on NBC and ran until January 1958. Like its predecessor series, Dimension X, X Minus One featured stories by the greatest names in modern science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and many more.

X Minus One premiered in April 1955 on NBC and ran until January 1958. Like its predecessor series, Dimension X, X Minus One featured stories by the greatest names in modern science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and many more.

X Minus One premiered in April 1955 on NBC and ran until January 1958. Like its predecessor series, Dimension X, X Minus One featured stories by the greatest names in modern science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and many more.

X Minus One premiered in April 1955 on NBC and ran until January 1958. Like its predecessor series, Dimension X, X Minus One featured stories by the greatest names in modern science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and many more.

X Minus One premiered in April 1955 on NBC and ran until January 1958. Like its predecessor series, Dimension X, X Minus One featured stories by the greatest names in modern science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and many more.

X Minus One premiered in April 1955 on NBC and ran until January 1958. Like its predecessor series, Dimension X, X Minus One featured stories by the greatest names in modern science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and many more.