Maxima Library

An anthology of stories edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H Greenberg and Charles G Waugh In this collection, one of the great classics of science fiction, Asimov set out the principles of robot behavior that we know as the Three Laws of Robotics. Here are stories of robots gone mad, mind-reading robots, robots with a sense of humor, robot politicians, and robots who secretly run the world, all told with Asimov's trademark dramatic blend of science fact and science fiction.

Determined to be on the first rocket flight from the moon to Mars, stowaway Chuck Svensen endangers the experiment by hiding on board the Eros.

In a nuclear plant in Kimberly, workers are nervous when a congressional committee comes for a surprise inspection. A few minor problems come up during the inspection, but the plant continues to run at full capacity — at least at first.

Half-way through the inspection, one of the converters has a major failure. Jorgenson and his team had been trying to use a new isotope in the giant reactors, but the unstable isotope causes disaster to strike. The reactor walls give out, and Jorgenson is stuck inside.

Jorgenson is the only survivor, and the only person who knows how to stop the reactor from causing a disaster that could wipe out half of the continent, but he is stuck inside the reactor with no way to communicate with anyone. It’s a race against time to rescue Jorgenson so that he can save the world from nuclear fallout.

The magazine version of Lester del Rey's frightening novel appeared in 1942, long before Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl. Some see this book as a scarily accurate prediction of later nuclear meltdowns. Del Rey was an important science fiction writer and publisher, but none of his work had greater impact than this early novel.

SF’s most protean personality—writer, editor, critic, publisher—sets off an incomparable fireworks display in these tales of robots and humans, animals and aliens, ghosts and gods, science and the supernatural…

Everything your rulers never wanted you to know and you were afraid to ask…

Ten classic stories from the birth of modern science fiction writing

The Golden Age of Science Fiction, from the early 1940s through the 1950s, saw an explosion of talent in SF writing including authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Their writing helped science fiction gained wide public attention, and left a lasting impression upon society. The same writers formed the mould for the next three decades of science fiction, and much of their writing remains as fresh today as it was then.

Collected in one giant volume, here is the very best of the golden era. The stories include:

• A.E. van Vogt, ‘The Weapons Shop’

• Isaac Asimov, ‘The Big and the Little’

• Lester del Rey, ‘Nerves’

• Fredric Brown, ‘Daymare’

• Theodore Sturgeon, ‘Killdozer!’

• C.L. Moore, ‘No Woman Born’

• A. Bertram Chandler, ‘Giant Killer’.

About the Story: Del Rey wrote the original (and much longer) version of this novella many years earlier, was unable to place it and only hauled it from the trunk when Horace Gold in mid-1950 solicited something for his new magazine. THE WIND BETWEEN THE WORLDS is at least in conception a standard ASTOUNDING problem-solving story (interstellar matter transmitter is sabotaged; Earth and alien ports are in danger, resourceful engineer-protagonist figures out the solution) with a standard STARTLING STORIES subplot (engineer and his pretty female assistant are deeply attracted but he’s too dedicated to his job to get fresh). The premise however is ingenious - alien cultures intervene and as a result of this Earth is given the means for interstellar trade before the planet has even achieved space travel. Teleportation as an instrument of routine commerce (and profit) was a fairly original concept at the time this story was published. Del Rey’s altered culture is lived-in, letting the story act as a letter from the future. Gold wanted the story significantly cut and del Rey of course complied; in THE EARLY DEL REY he used the original version and appended some notes on the nature of Horace’s intervention.

About the Author: Lester del Rey (1915-1993) was born Leonard Knapp (but this became known only long after his death), somewhere in the Midwest and after a spotty, abbreviated education and itinerant existence headed to New York where he became almost immediately a significant constituent of ASTOUNDING and John Campbell’s celebrated GOLDEN AGE. Del Rey sold his first story to John Campbell in the first months of Campbell’s editorship and over the next several years he sold him many more, including his female-android story HELEN O’LOY (1938), perhaps the first true science fiction romance and NERVES (1942, novelized in 1956), a brilliant novella of atomic pile disruption, amazingly prescient of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Del Rey’s apostosaic and profoundly controversial short novel FOR I AM A JEALOUS PEOPLE (1956), positing a malevolent Deity, is also very well known. Del Rey worked (at the same time as Damon Knight and James Blish) in the Scott Meredith Fee Department in the late 1940’s, edited science fiction magazines in the early 50’s, published some noted juveniles (THE RUNAWAY ROBOT) in the mid-fifties and eventually became the founding editor of Del Rey Books, a fantasy & science fiction imprint under the aegis of Ballantine. In collaboration with his third wife, Judy-Lynn, del Rey’s imprint became the most successful fantasy & science fiction publisher in history. The two of them nurtured fantasy writers like Stephen Donaldson, Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks to bestselling status. In 1991, del Rey was named a Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died only a few months after his retirement from Ballantine.

About The Galaxy Project: Horace Gold led GALAXY magazine from its first issue dated October 1950 to science fiction’s most admired, widely circulated and influential magazine throughout its initial decade. Its legendary importance came from publication of full length novels, novellas and novelettes. GALAXY published nearly every giant in the science fiction field.

The Galaxy Project is a selection of the best of GALAXY with new forewords by some of today’s best science fiction writers. The initial selections in alphabetical order include work by Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn (Phillip Klass) and Kurt Vonnegut with new Forewords by Paul di Filippo, David Drake, John Lutz, Barry Malzberg and Robert Silverberg. The Galaxy Project is committed to publishing new work in the spirit GALAXY magazine and its founding editor Horace Gold.