The story is set in 2158 A.D., after the invention of a medicine called Anti-Gerasone, which is made from mud and dandelions and is thus inexpensive and widely available. Anti-Gerasone halts the aging process and prevents people from dying of old age as long as they keep taking it; as a result, America now suffers from severe overpopulation and shortages of food and resources.
The flight into space that made Pilot-Capt. Dan Barstow famous. He was one of the very first astronauts to leave the earth -- and what he found surprised even him. "Another world." Small and too dark to see from the earth -- but large enough to capture his spacecraft. Large enough to get trapped on it.
Two miles of American front had gone dead. And on two lone infantrymen, lost in the menace of the fog-gas and the tanks, depended the outcome of the war of 1932.
"My uncle," said the man with the glass eye, "was what you might call a hemi-semi-demi millionaire. He was worth about a hundred and twenty thousand. Quite. And he left me all his money." I glanced at the shiny sleeve of his coat, and my eye travelled up to the frayed collar. "Every penny," said the man with the glass eye, and I caught the active pupil looking at me with a touch of offence.
In The Lord of Death, four scientists, aided by reverse-magnetism, travel to a dead planet where they discover that one human's lust for power destroyed all life there-except for him. In suspended animation, he awaits the newcomers. In The Queen of Life, (considered a feminist tale) the scientists (one has revealed herself as a woman) travel to a planet encased in a glass sphere to protect the overpopulated planet from the sun's radiation. Conflict leads to a riot.