The People of the Black Circle is a collection of fantasy short stories written by Robert E. Howard featuring his seminal sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian. Hill chieftan Conan heads into the Himelian mountains to rescue the Vendhyan queen, as Turanians, Afghulis, and Irakzais are caught in the machinations of demonic sorcerors of the Black Circle.
Dave stared around the office. He went to the window and stared upwards at the crazy patchwork of the sky. For all he knew, in such a sky there might be cracks. In fact, as he looked, he could make out a rift, and beyond that a... hole... a small patch where there was no color, and yet the sky there was not black. There were no stars there, though points of light were clustered around the edges, apparently retreating.
A young woman objects to being sedated into placidity, as is the norm in the overcrowded, genetically optimized future.She also refuses to be paired with a somnolent drip of a fellow, who needs medication to act at an even minimal level of energy. Then you've got the young spacer, who believes he has discovered an efficient hyperdrive that could open the stars to humanity. He is told to cool his heels in a dead-end assignment until he discovers the error in his mathematics.
The underlying struggle, if you look into the characters' hearts, is terrifyingly real and human--the kind of struggle so many of us go through. But Sam Meecham was lucky. He not only got what he wanted, but something he hadn't realized he wanted.
Hugo Danner, a man endowed from birth with extraodinary strength and speed. But Danner is no altruist. He spends his life trying to cope with his abilities, becoming a sports hero in college, later a sideshow act, a war hero, never truly finding peace with himself.
Bradley had one fear in his life. He had to escape regeneration. To do that, he was willing to take any chance, coward though he was--even if it meant that he had to become a god!
