Search Worlds Without End

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Doomsday, Anyone? - essay
• And Madly Teach - (1966) - novelette
• The Double-Edged Rope - (1967) - short story
• Eye for an Eye - (1974) - novelette
• First Love - (1959) - short story
• Who's on First? - (1958) - novelette
• Round Trip to Esidarap - (1960) - novelette
• No Biz Like Show Biz - (1974) - short story
• What Hath God Wrought! - (1974) - novelette

Hugo Award nominated story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fact -> Fiction, June 1961. The story can also be found in the anthology Analog 1 (1963), edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. It was later expanded to the full novel Monument (1974).

Monument is a science fiction novel about destructive tourism -- a serious subject, but as usual with Biggle, handled in a lighter vein, and at times frankly humorous. A classic science fiction novel from the author of ALL THE COLORS OF DARKNESS.

His name was Vladislav Kuznetsov, and he had been a twenty-one-year-old student at Mount Harwell College in Mount Harwell, Ohio. On a Friday afternoon, March 24, 2001, he succumbed to a sudden attack of spring fever and cut his classes for a stroll in a public park near the campus. Even after fifty years and several hundred centuries, he remembered it as vividly as though it had happened an hour before.

It was a warm, fresh day with a promise of spring--the first really pleasant day of the year after the usual vagaries of a midwest winter. He strolled leisurely through the park, thinking with shameless delight of the stuffy classrooms he was avoiding. Eventually he seated himself on a patch of greening grass with a convenient tree to lean against and enjoyed the soft breeze and the peaceful surroundings while he absently whittled on a twig he had picked up. He felt sleepy. Probably he dozed off.

Then came a tremendous jerk, like having a chair pulled from under him at the same instant that a truck hit him, and he almost lost consciousness. He landed with a painful bump and skidded for a short distance along a very rough wood floor. For a moment he sat gazing about him dazedly. He had been abruptly translated from his seat on the ground in a pleasant park on a lovely spring day to a seat on a wood floor in a large, dim room with a thunderstorm raging outside. He had a distinct impression that the two scenes had been linked by an earthquake. He tried hard to focus his thoughts, staring first at a table where a candle burned brightly and then at an animal tied to one of the table's legs by a short leash. It was a hairy pig. He raised his eyes to the room's two small, water-streaked windows and saw nothing beyond but branches swaying in a strong wind...

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1971. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year #1 (1972), edited by Terry Carr.

The object arrived without warning, tearing a spiral path of devastation across the rural landscape. After the explotion, searchers sifted through the immense pile of debris... to discover a fantastically instrumented capsule, and a strangely human pilot, stone dead. Bowden Karvel's theory, that the capsule's port of origin lay in the distant future, seemed a plausible explanation.

But while investigating, the capsule was accidentally dispatched again through time... only to reappear with an alien navigator, this time destroying a small French town. One thing seemed imperative: a human operator must man the intricate controls of the capsule, riding it forward to its mysterious point of origin. And Bowden Karvel seemed the perfect choice to make the trip...

Humanity has stretched out over thousands and thousands of worlds. Each planet is virtually independent from one another. Various intelligent species have been discovered but humans start putting them in camps, killing them, refusing to grant them any rights, and branding them with derogatory names (for example, animaloids). This massive anti-animaloid furor spreading across the populated worlds threatens to envelope the tourist-trap planet Donev. However, Donev does not appear to have any indigenous animaloids of their own.

Lloyd Biggie is not only a writer, but also a musician. In THE METALLIC MUSE he has included seven science fiction stories, written over several years, all of which in some way relate to the arts. Thoroughly entertaining and provocative, many of the stories explore the intricate relationship between life and art, and all of them contain very pertinent ideas about present and future experience. Superbly demonstrating their author's depth of insight to the human condition, they offer to all who read them an intriguing blend of accurate analysis and sometimes devastating speculation.

Table of Contents:

• The Tunesmith - (1957) - novelette
• Leading Man - (1957) - short story
• Spare the Rod - (1958) - novelette
• Orphan of the Void - (1960) - novelette
• Well of the Deep Wish - (1961) - short story
• In His Own Image - (1968) - short story
• The Botticelli Horror - (1960) - novelette

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1967) - essay
• The Rule of the Door - (1958) - novelette
• Petty Larceny - (1958) - short story
• On the Dotted Line - (1957) - novelette
• Judgement Day - (1958) - short story
• Secret Weapon - (1958) - short story
• The Perfect Punishment - (1965) - novelette
• A Slight Case of Limbo - (1963) - short story
• D.F.C. - (1957) - short story
• Wings of Song - (1963) - short story

The Puzzle Planet

Enigma of an unexplored world

Roy Auckland had been asked to join the expedition now on the remote planet Carolus. Despite the fact that he was a communications expert, not an explorer, he was excited about the opportunity to visit an unknown world. But he wondered why he had been requested personally by the head of the expedition.

Once on Carolus, Roy met the weird creatures called the vaec and was immediately intrigued by their mirth-loving nature and their patient devotion to practical jokes.

But was it one of their practical jokes that almost exploded alongside Dr.. James' skull? Or was it a made-on-Earth murder gimmick?

Suddenly, Roy Auckland realized that behind their "native Simplicity" the Vaec were dangerously and subtly deceptive. And he also realized that somehow he had to break through their mask to understand them--or Dr. James would be only the first of the Earthmen to die.

The Angry Espers

Walk on air--or fall in flames!

Slowly the fog of unconsciousness thinned and Paul Corban began to remember. The spaceship had crashed, but first he had called the Galactic Federation Space Navy to report that he was lost...Wait a minute-yes, he had been lost and he had crashed, and...

Now he saw the strange men hovering over him. Doctors? Had they kept him alive? Was he dead? The men vanished; they blinked out of existence! Now, was he dead?

Soon, Paul corban found that he was indeed alive and in his right mind--and that it would have been better for him and the universe if he had died, if he had gone insane, if he had lost him memory. Because the results of his survival could be infinitely disastrous!

Fifty years after the nearly total annihilation of Earth by war and disease, three agents of the galactic federation set out to reopen contact with the closed world and reestablish trade with the planet's shattered civilization.

The IPR Bureau (whose motto is "Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny") works to bring newly discovered planets up to the point where they have a planetary democratic government and then induct them into the galactic federation. Unfortunately, the planet Furnil offers problems. The continent of Kurr has a well-entrenched monarchy, and the citizens seem little inclined to change. In fact, they immerse themselves in art rather than politics...and have been doing so for more than 400 years! So what's a poor IPR agent to do...? Classic science fiction!

Branoff IV is a planet famous for its aristocratic culture and mistreatment of its indigenous population. When Cedd Farrari and a team of Cultural Survey experts are sent to Branoff IV to help bring about a shift to democratic goverment, the world seems an ideal candidate for political change. But all is not as it seems... A thrilling science fiction novel from the author of All the Colors of Darkness!

Someone is sabotaging the Universal Transmitting Company's new technology--instantaneous transport of objects and people around the world. When Detective Jan Darzek investigates, the mystery seems inexplicable--out of this world.

Sinister, invisible forces of a secret mental weapon known only as The Dark are threatening the entire Primores galaxy, several transmitting leaps away from Earth. By the time a bizarre Mr. Smith comes to detective Jan Darzek's New York office, whole planets have been lain waste. Darzek is offered a million dollars by Smith to accept a job that will almost certainly be fatal: identify the incredible power that is about to overwhelm the few remaining planets in the beleagered galaxy, so that these worlds might somehow halt the rampage.

A superb science fiction novel by a master of the genre!

Sweeping through the Small Magellanic Cloud, leaving a trail of ravished worlds and destroyed civilization, is the Udef -- the Unidentified Death Force. The best scientific minds of two galaxies can make nothing of it. The Udef is invisible. No scientific instrument can detect its presence. The only marks of its passing are the screams of its victims and the piles of dead left in its wake.

Momentarily safe on the world of Montura, Jan Darzek's strategy against the Udeffalters. He and his assistant Effie have been ordered there by a supreme computer -- that isn't telling why. There is nothing to do on Montura but frantically wheel and deal in its spectacular interworld trading market. Supreme has also sent a perplexed Dr. Malina Darr from Earth, whose apparent purpose is to cure an unknown disease in an alien life form no one has ever seen...

The three of them must content with a mad mixture of Montura's mysterious race of natives, the melange of self-serving life forms in the marketplace, and the Kloatraz -- the universe's strangest "living" computer -- while the Udef comes ever closer to wiping out every intelligent life form in the universe. Somehow it must be stopped before no one is left to fight it.

Twenty agents of the Galactic Sythesis are missing on the Silent Planet of Kamm -- the victims, it seems, of the most powerful death ray the universe has ever known. But how could the primitive technology of the Kammians have produced such a weapon? And why would they unleashed its power against the Sythesis? It's Jan Darzek's mission to find out...

Jan Darzek, former private detective from Earth and now First Councilor of the Galaxy, has encountered his most baffling case. The planet Nifron D has been inexplicably turned into a sun. A quarter of a galaxy away, a native on the planet Skarnaf has been found horribly disfigured by an impossibly massive dose of radiation. While Darzek searches for a connection between the two events, the populous and prosperous world of Vezpro receives a blackmail letter that threatens it with the fate of Nifron D. In a crimeless society, has a master scientist turned master criminal? Darzek must decide quickly whether the letter is a monstrous hoax. If it is not, how can the impossible demands be met -- or five billion inhabitants evacuated in time?

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Nebula Award Stories Seven) - (1972) - essay by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
• 1971: The Year in Science Fiction - (1972) - essay by Damon Knight
• The Queen of Air and Darkness - (1971) - novella by Poul Anderson
• The Last Ghost - (1971) - short story by Stephen Goldin
• The Encounter - (1970) - novelette by Kate Wilhelm
• Sky - (1971) - short story by R. A. Lafferty
• Mount Charity - (1971) - novelette by Edgar Pangborn
• Good News from the Vatican - (1971) - shortstory by Robert Silverberg
• Horse of Air - (1970) - short story by Gardner Dozois
• Heathen God - (1971) - short story by George Zebrowski
• Poor Man, Beggar Man - (1971) - novelette by Joanna Russ
• The Giberel - (1971) - short story by Doris Pitkin Buck
• The Missing Man - (1971) - novella by Katherine MacLean
• Nebula Award Science Fiction, 1965-1970, The Science - (1972) - essay by Poul Anderson
• Nebula Award Science Fiction, 1965-1970, The Fiction - (1972) - essay by Theodore Sturgeon
• In Memoriam (Nebula Award Stories Seven) - essay by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
• Award-Winning Science Fiction, 1965-1971 (Nebula Award Stories Seven) - essay by uncredited

Eye for Eye:

Mick Winger is only seventeen -- and already he's killed over a dozen people. Not on purpose; he never meant to hurt anyone. But when Mick gets angry, people die, even the people he loves the most. Now he's on the run from his own terrible talent, and from those who would use his power for their own obscene purposes. But Mick is not alone. There are others like him. And if he will not join them, they will make him pay -- Eye for Eye.

The Tunesmith:

Erlin Baque is the last true musician on Earth. Commercial jingles have replaced real art. The Performers' Guild enforces mediocrity on pain of blacklisting. And the powerful overlords of business and industry are not about to let a lone tunesmith change this very profitable arrangement. But Basque has one weapon his enemies cannot resist: his music.