Freshly graduated and commissioned Planeteer Lt. Rip Foster is tasked with retrieving an asteroid made of pure thorium from the asteroid belt and bringing it to Earth for use as fissionable material. But the totalitarian Connies have their own plans for the asteroid...
Since Logic derives from postulates, it never has, and never will, change a postulate. And a religious belief is a system of postulates. so how can a man fight a native superstition with logic? Or anything else...?
Consider the plasmoids...Ancient living machines that after millennia of stillness suddenly begin to move under their own power, for reasons that remain a mystery to men. Holati Tate discovered them - then disappeared. Trigger Argee was his closet associate - she means to find him. She's brilliant, beautiful, and skilled in every known martial art. She's worth plenty - dead or alive - to more than one faction in this obscure battle.
A Providence, Rhode Island resident teams up with his beloved, antiquarian uncle in studying why a decrepit 18th century house has been left vacant for so long. It appears that anyone who lives in the house long enough goes crazy and/or wastes to death. Of course, our protagonists decide to spend an evening in the cellar of the house...
The story is described as a "duel of the cosmic magicians." It involves two witch doctors who conjure up ghosts and demons against each other and might appear to be fantasy. But Norton bases the wizards' magic on the use of mildly hallucinogenic drugs, psychological manipulation and latent telepathy, which place the story within the realm of science fiction.
The Planet Savers, introduces the reader to the now legendary world of Gotten IV., and it reveals the awesome and terrifying powers of the infamous Sharra Matrix.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame. The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly. He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.