Deathworld

 Brion has just won the Twenties, a global competition to test achievements in 20 categories of human activities -- but before he can enjoy his victory he's forced to leave his homeworld to help salvage Dis, the most hellish planet in the galaxy.

(linked ToC)

How could a robot--a machine, after all--be involved in something like law application and violence? Harry Harrison tells what happens when a police robot hits an outpost on Mars.

This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work by Harry Harrison, which is now, at last, again available to you.

Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside The Repairman:

The nearest beacon to the broken-down Proxima Centauri Beacon was on one of the planets of Beta Circinus and I headed there first, a short trip of only about nine days in hyperspace.

...We travel in well-stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything; only one man to a ship because that is all it takes to operate the overly efficient repair machinery.

...They had a safety factor built into the computer so you couldn't end up inside a star no matter how hard you tried.

...The repairs didn't take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get at the power leads.

It might seem a little careless to lose track of something as big as a battleship... but interstellar space is on a different scale of magnitude. But a misplaced battleship--in the wrong hands!--can be most dangerous.

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

Nortons Solar Queen stories are told from the viewpoint of Dane Thorson, an apprentice-Cargo Master who is introduced in Sargasso of Space, the first Solar Queen novel, as a lanky, very young man in an ill-fitting Traders tunic. Most of this authors heroes and heroines are young, uncertain of themselves, shy, with a tendency to trip over their own enthusiasms and load themselves up with guilt at the slightest opportunity. They are very likeable and their adventures are narrated in remarkably lean prose with just the right touch of description.

After ten years of schooling, orphan Dane Thorson is assigned via a computer analysis of his psychological profile--not to a safe berth on a sleek Company-run starship that his classmates were vying for--but to a battered tramp of a Free Trader. To say that the Solar Queen lacked a great many refinements and luxurious fittings which the Company ships boasted was an understatement. But she was a tightly-run ship and what she lacked in refinement, she made up for in adventure. Dane soon settles in under Cargo Master Van Rycke and learns to his dismay what large gaps unfortunately existed in his training.

Plague Ship takes the crew of the Solar Queen to Sargol, where the enigmatic feline natives seem very reluctant to trade away their fabulous scented gemstones. When Dane Thorson discovers an herb that the Salariki are willing to swap for their gems, he fears that his eagerness to make a trade breakthrough might have poisoned a native child.

That becomes the least of his worries when the Solar Queen blasts off from Sargol with invisible, undetectable stowaways that would brand the free traders anathema to all inhabited worlds.

Even the elements which tend to date these novels add a sort of nostalgic charm that I find irresistable.

We start with exiles from a warring Earth founding a colony on Astra a habitual planet somewhere in outer space. The exiles find scattered throughout their immediate area of settlement-abandoned cities, remnants of a prior civilization apparently destroyed in an atomic war. A deep distrust of technology and fear of weapons caused to exiles to avoid visiting the cities of Those Others as the natives are called. In addition to developing city destroying weapons Those Others bred a race of mermen - folk who can live both on land and under water. The mermen revolted against Those Others and eventually formed an alliance with the exiles. What starts out as an exploratory expedition by a pair of merman-exile youths turns into a quite entertain and exciting novel when Those Other team up with a new expedition from Earth to reclaim some of there ancient technology.

Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.
- wikipedia