By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion.Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room, unless prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world.For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world.
A manuscript is found: filled with small, precise writing and smelling of pit-water, it tells the story of an old recluse and his strange home - and its even stranger, jade-green double, seen by the recluse on an otherworldly plain where gigantic gods and monsters roam.
A. Square, a mathematician and resident of the two-dimensional Flatland, where women-thin, straight lines-are the lowliest of shapes, and where men may have any number of sides, depending on their social status. Square has adventures in Spaceland (three dimensions), Lineland (one dimension) and Pointland (no dimensions) and ultimately entertains thoughts of visiting a land of four dimensions, a revolutionary idea for which he is returned to his two-dimensional world.
Even in our picayune little corner of the universe, we find in the insect kingdom a form of life that has survived through every possible earth catastrophe in the last 40 mill. years. With their skeletons on the outside of their bodies,insects are able to protect their bodies from heat, cold, and from accidents that would kill us. If the insect's shell were harder and thicker and made of heat resisting material, it might conceivablybe able to live in space without other protection.
A man can be killed by a toy gun--he can die of fright, for heart attacks can kill. What, then, is the deadly thing that must be sealed away, forever locked in buried concrete--a thing or an idea?
Art Berry lives in a world just slightly askew from the rest of us. In our increasingly wireless world of instant and constant communication, he gives his loyalty not to a state or a company or family and friends he sees regularly, but to the Eastern Standard Tribe-a largely faceless collection of people whose home time zone is the Eastern Standard Zone, who are locked in cutthroat competition with other tribes aligned with other time zones...
Grimly Eric John Stark slogged toward that ancient Martian city-with every step he cursed the talisman of Ban Cruach that flamed in his blood-stained belt Behind him screamed the hordes of Ciaran, hungering for that magic jewel-ahead lay the dread abode of the Ice Creatures-at his side stalked the whispering spectre of Ban Cruach, urging him on to a battle Stark knew he must lose!
There have been a number of interesting theories advanced about life on Mars, but the intriguing picture of the world of Longtree and Channeljumper in its infinite variations, tonal and thematic. The Mars of these two is an old culture, old and finite.