Search Worlds Without End

"30 Day Wonder" is a great tale in which Aliens comically invade Earth, written by science fiction specialist, Richard Wilson.

The story revolves around a reporter--a good one--who's an average guy with a sense of humor and reasonable views about the rights of his fellow man. Maybe that's why the Monolithians picked him to head up their public-relations program. After all, they had to reach a lot of average people and even though they were invulnerable, they couldn't afford to take chances. Because they had a message, and EVERYBODY had to be convinced. So he didn't have any choice in the matter... That's where the system went wrong... no choice. Act peaceful. Love thy neighbor. Obey the law. Why, people could go mad living that way. And many would.

Nebula Award winning and Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Orbit 3 (1968), edited by Damon Knight. The story can also be found in the anthologies Nebula Award Stories Four (1969), edited by Poul Anderson and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume III (1981), edited by Arthur C. Clarke. It is included in the collection The Man Without a Planet and Other Stories (2012).

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1965. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 15th Series (1966), edited by Edward L. Ferman and the collection The Story Writer and Other Stories (2011).

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Destinies, April-June 1979, edited by Jim Baen. The story can also be found in the anthology The 1980 Annual World's Best SF, edtied by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha. It is included in the collection The Story Writer and Other Stories (2011).

THE STORY WRITER And Other Stories is the second volume in John Pelan's DANCING TUATARA PRESS SF SERIES, and it includes eight short stories, as well as a novella, "At the Sign of the Boar's Head Nebula", written in 1978 for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions.

Table of Contents:

• At the Sign of the Boar's Head Nebula - (2011) - novella
• Mary Hell's - (1954) - novelette
• If You Were the Only-- - (1953) - shortstory
• Success Story - (1957) - shortstory
• A Man Spekith - (1969) - novelette
• The Purple Bat - (1941) - shortstory
• The Story Writer - (1979) - novella
• The Hoaxters - (1952) - novelette
• The Eight Billion - (1965) - shortstory
• The Evil Ones - (1967) - novelette

The Sioux Spaceman

Redskin raiders on the galactic rim.

Kade Whitehawk had two strikes against him in the Space Service. First, he had bungled his assignment on the planet Lodi. Second, he believed all creatures had a right to freedom and dignity - and having such opinions was strictly against the rules.

But when he ws assigned to Khot, he found the Ikkinni there - tortured yet defiant slaves of a vicious tyrant race.

Right then Kade swung the last pitch. For rules or no rules, THE SIOUX SPACEMAN knew that he had to help these strange creatures gain freedom... and that he alone, because of his Indian blood, had the key to win it for them.

And Then the Town Took Off

The town of Superior, Ohio was certainly living up to its name! In what was undoubtedly the most spectacular feat of the century, it simply picked itself up one night and rose two full miles above Earth!

Radio messages simply stated that Superior had seceded from Earth. But Don Cort, stranded on that rising town, was beginning to suspect that nothing was simple about Superior except its citizens. Calmly they accepted their rise in the world as being due to one of their local townspeople, a crackpot professor.

But after a couple of weeks of floating around, it began to be obvious that the professor had no idea how to get them down. So then it was up to Cort: either find a way to anchor Superior, or spend the rest of his days on the smallest - and nuttiest - planet in the galaxy!

The late Richard Wilson's fifty-year career began with "Retribution" in Oswald Train's zine Science Adventure Stories and finished in 1988 with "The Name on the Book" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine.

Wilson's writing was particularly noteworthy for its consistently high level of quality. Whether working at novel length or with short stories, Wilson was incapable of writing anything less than professional, highly polished work.

This volume collects nearly two dozen of his best stories, ranging from "The Hoaxters," "The Inhabited," and "Those Idiots from Earth" to his brilliant posthumously-published novella "At the Sign of the Boar's Head Nebula," originally slated for The Last Dangerous Visions and kindly made available to us by Harlan Ellison.

"At the Sign of the Boar's Head Nebula" is considered by several knowledgeable critics of the genre to be the finest single work that Mr. Wilson produced. It is in remarkably good company, joined with two other powerful novellas, "The Far King" and "The Nineteenth-Century Spaceship," giving Richard Wilson a fair claim to being one of the founding fathers of steampunk.

Along with the stories, this collection includes several highly regarded novelettes, including the Nebula Award-winning "Mother to the World," "The Story Writer," "Gone Past," "If A Man Answers," "It's Cold Outside," "A Man Spekith," and "See Me Not." Rounding out the book are a selection of the author's finest short pieces, making this a cornerstone volume for any serious collection of modern science fiction.

Richard Wilson (1920-1987), a member of the near-legendary Futurians, is considered by many to have been one of the most consistently excellent writers of science fiction. A journalist by trade, Wilson brought to his fiction a crisp economy of style and a precise language in a field often criticized for overly-florid prose. With stories running the gamut from the humorous to bone-chilling horror and everything in between, Richard Wilson could quite accurately be said to have written something for everyone.