Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Science Fiction

A space portal to remote colonies held by Earth is captured by a hostile species, which wants to place a toll on it. While authorities on Earth and considering whether to wage war, they manage to capture an alien spaceship, and hand it over to a group of scientists for military research. Will the scientists succeed in discovering any secrets that will give humanity the upper hand in the impending conflict?

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.

When on Pru'ut, you must do as the natives do—and that includes dying as they do! Finding himself trapped on a planet inhabited by an unfriendly species, Earthman James Grady is searching for an ingenious way to escape execution resulting from his breaking a local taboo.

Yorkan Varr was exiled to the prison planet for a crime he knew he had never committed. Oddly, the man who had sent him there was a prisoner too!

Giant Spiders. Death Ray Guns. Personal Flyers. Cannibals. Sword Fights. From the fertile mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs comes the tale of A Fighting Man of Mars. Hadron of Hastor sets out to rescue a lovely kidnapped woman he believes he is in love with. Along the way, his adventures among the little-known ancient cities of Mars, his comradeship with a brave warrior-woman named Tavia, and their struggle together against the hordes of a cunning monarch, make for an exciting classic science fiction adventure.

When a Terran outpost is destroyed by the menacing insectoid Throgs, two human (and two wolverines) survivors must find a way to survive being hunted on a hostile planet. Only an unlikely alliance with the telepathic saurian inhabitants—and the wisdom to distinguish between dreams and reality—will lead them out of darkness and towards a united future.

Ulysses Paxton, mortally wounded on the battlefields of WWI France, is transported to the planet of his dreams, Barsoom (Mars). There he becomes the assistant of the Master Mind of Mars, Ras Thavas, a medical genius. Burroughs anticipated such modern marvels as organ and limb transplants, exploding bullets, anti-grav fliers, and some we haven’t yet invented! When Ras Thavas switches the brains of an evil and wizened Jeddara (queen) into the body of a gorgeous young woman, our hero vows to right the wrong. Swords and sci-fi action abound in this sixth of ERB’s Mars series.

A physics professor at the American College in Istanbul, Dave Coglan, is visited by Lieutenant Ghalil of the Istanbul Police and M. Duval, a French scholar. After much deliberation, they query if, by any chance, he has been visiting the 13th Century. At first, Coglan does not take them seriously. Along with Ghalil and Duval, however, is a 700-year-old book with notations in English that includes his name and address. Further, the book has Coghlan's fingerprints and refers to an address and a reference to killing someone.

Here, it was almost inevitable that this subject would attract the interest of H.G Wells in the batch of sci-fi novels that he wrote between 1895 and 1901. In Well's story, the vehicle is not a balloon, as in many of the previous accounts, but a sphere made of a mysterious substance, named "cavorite" after its inventor, Cavor, who accompanies the narrator, Bedford, on the trek to the moon. The ascent is made possible by the fact the "cavorite" is, in Well's words, "transparent to gravity."

In the future, Earth is ruled by women and many of the men have fled to other planets. Ferdinand is a boy on a spaceship headed to Venus where the men are said to be plentiful. He's with his older sister, Evelyn, who decided to leave Earth in search of a husband. After Ferdinand stumbles on a stowaway named Butt Lee Brown, a battle of the sexes ensues. Satire and humor abound in this tale from William Tenn.

Time travel may have its consequences. We can only speculate. Philip K. Dick takes us there.

There were ten humanoid robots somewhere in the United States, each one carrying a fragment of a TC bomb. TC! The race for sheer horror in bomb-ery had ended there. TC! Total Conversion! The sun was no longer a synonym one could use. Total conversion made the sun a penny candle.

"Time Pawn" is a novelette by Philip K. Dick published in Thrilling Wonder Stories. Vol. 44, no. 1, summer 1954. Travel with award-winning audiobook narrator, Mike Vendetti, and Dr. Parsons to our world in the distant future where everyone and everything is perfect. But wait; there's more!

Written as a sequel to Second Variety, this is an exciting and thought-provoking view into a different world than the one left in "Second Variety". We have a fascination with time travel. But what could go wrong? Give this a listen, and see what you think.

A child goes into the garage and finds his father talking to himself. No, really talking to himself, as in two identical people. The boy; however, can sense the "thing" from his father. And then the thing comes to the dinner table...

The Invisible Man was the fourth sci-fi novel written by Wells in the 1890s. The main character, Griffin, is one of the intimidating villains in all popular literature. The archetypal "mad scientist," Griffin devotes himself to an obsessive study of optics and realizes his ambition to render livings things permanently invisible. After making a cat invisible, he successfully applies the procedure to himself. After causing chaos in London, he travels to the village of Iping in Sussex and takes up residence in a local hotel.

A German scientist discovers an ancient runic message, which when translated proves to be a map to the center of a hollow Earth! The professor and his nephew then embark on a dangerous adventure down an Icelandic volcano to explore a fantastic world in the interior of the Earth. A classic tale from Jules Verne, one of the originators of science fiction, and author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon.

"Youth" is a surprisingly complex short tale, with a deep core of thought-provoking reasoning. What is our motivation? Where is our growth? What do we consider valuable? These questions and more are brought to light in this story by Isaac Asimov. Youth is one of the rare Asimov stories with alien characters.

Kurt Vonnegut creates a near-perfect world. There are no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, and no wars. All diseases were conquered. So is old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers. The population of the United States is stabilized at forty-million souls. Have a problem? Not really, just call the Federal Bureau of Termination. Nothing to it. Just pick up the phone and call 2BR02B. Thus the title, "To be or not to be".

Charming and thought-provoking, this short story from American master of science fiction Ray Bradbury and narrated by Mike Vendetti follows the misadventures of a group of elderly women who have poured their life savings into a final trip to an outer-space paradise, only to find out that the promised journey doesn't pan out quite the way they expected it to.