The Man Who Mastered Time – Ray Cummings
It took what seemed but half a day’s traveling to traverse the 28,000 years that separated Loto Rogers from the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He had expected to find mighty cities and a flowering civilization in that future world, but instead he found only ice and snow — and Azeela.
The Woman Who Couldn’t Die – Arthur Stringer
Originally serialized in three parts in the ‘Pictorial Review’ magazine under the title, ‘The Blond Woman.’ A Viking woman who, almost a thousand years previous, had been abducted and carried across the Atlantic to Canada’s frigid Northwest Territories, is reborn as “romance bridges the gulf of time and brings to this year of grace the living presence of the Woman Who Couldn’t Die.”
The Moon That Vanished – Leigh Brackett
Anthem – Ayn Rand
ANTHEM is a dystopian fiction novella by Ayn Rand, written in 1937 and first published in 1938 in England. It takes place at some unspecified future date when mankind has entered another dark age. Technological advancement is now carefully planned and the concept of individuality has been eliminated.
Equality 7-2521, writing by candlelight in a tunnel under the earth, tells the story of his life up to that point. He exclusively uses plural pronoun(s) (“we”, “our”, “they”) to refer to himself and others. He was raised like all children in his society, away from his parents in collective homes. Later, he realized that he was born with a “curse”, that makes him learn quickly and ask many questions. He excelled at the Science of Things and dreamed of becoming a Scholar. However, a Council of Vocations assigns all people to their Life Mandate, and he was assigned to be a Street Sweeper.
He accepts his street sweeping assignment as penance for his “Transgression of Preference” in secretly desiring to be a Scholar. He finds an entrance to a tunnel in their assigned work area. Despite his friend’s protests that any exploration unauthorized by a Council is forbidden, Equality enters the tunnel and finds that it contains metal tracks. He realizes that the tunnel is from the Unmentionable Times of the distant past .
The Big Time Fritz Leiber
Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn’t seem to recall exactly the same past from one day to the next? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, then you’ve had hints of the Change War.
It’s been going on for a billion years and it will last another billion or so. Up and down the timeline, the two sides–“Spiders” and “Snakes”–battle endlessly to change the future and the past. Our lives, our memories, are their battleground. And in the midst of the war is the Place, outside space and time, where Greta Forzane and the other Entertainers provide solace and r-&-r for tired time warriors.
Drink We Deep – Arthur Leo Zagat
Nestled in the Heidelberg Hills of New York State lies Lake Wankoona. Beneath its tranquil blue surface broods another world, a place inhabited by a race of beings unknown in human history. Impelled by an eerie summons he cannot comprehend, archaeologist Hugh Lambert is drawn into the lake’s placid depths—and into a vortex of unreality. There, he encounters the unearthly Little Men, who work their scientific necromancy upon the cold corpses of those who had the misfortune to fall into the lake’s uncanny bottomlessness. There, also, he meets the coldly beautiful and cruelly enthralling Nalinah, and learns of a sinister scheme to conquer the Upper World—with he, himself, destined to be in the vanguard! Arthur Leo Zagat was famed as “The Horror Story Man,” owing to his numerous Weird Menace stories written for Terror Tales and similar magazines of horror. But Zagat also proved capable of writing quality fantasy fiction in the style of A. Merritt, as he proved in the pages of Argosy magazine with memorable novels such as the classic Seven Out of Time and the haunting Drink We Deep.
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