Positronic Publishing imprint: 381 books

Those clever ones are the beggars to make a muddle. Their plans are clever enough, but they don’t work, and then they make a mess of things much worse than you or me.

And though I had seen him go forth with his terrific spear, and mighty elephant-hunter though he was, yet his was a fearful quest for I knew that it was none other than to avenge Perdóndaris by slaying that monster with the single tusk who had overthrown it suddenly in a day.

So I came down through the wood on the bank of Yann and found, as had been prophesied, the ship Bird of the River about to loose her cable. The captain sat cross-legged upon the white deck with his scimitar lying beside him in its jeweled scabbard, and the sailors toiled to spread the nimble sails...

“How can I ever thank you?” he said to me then. “We have been thirteen at table for thirty years and I never dared to insult them because I had wronged them all, and now you have done it and I know they will never dine here again.”

And the Book of the Knowledge of the gods tells further how the day on which Pompeides found the gods shall be kept for ever as a fast until the evening and called the Fast of the Departing, but in the evening shall a feast be held which is named the Feast of the Relenting, for on that evening Sarnidac pitied the whole world and tarried.

A crown should not be worn upon the head. A sceptre should not be carried in Kings’ hands. But a crown should be wrought into a golden chain, and a sceptre driven stake-wise into the ground so that a King may be chained to it by the ankle. Then he would know that he might not stray away into the...

Worlds of If was a three time winner of the Hugo Award for best science fiction magazine. Worlds of If discovered many talented writers who would go on to dominate genre fiction. This is the third in our Worlds of If series with even more memorable stories from its tremendous run. ‘The Yillian Way’...

Advanced races generally are eager to share their knowledge with primitive ones. In this case ... with Earthmen!

He wondered, with a brief giddiness, if the dark witch before him could be as evil as her enemies said. Strong and ruthless, yes—but so was he. When he learned the full truth about her soaring plans, he might even decide they were right.

A curious and terrifying story about an artist who sold his soul that he might paint a living picture.

Decrypting a 500 year-old document from a distant planet is like looking for a needle in a haystack. You can see some of the themes from Dune in their infancy here.

The way we feel about another person, or about objects, is often bound up in associations that have no direct connection with the person or object at all. Often, what we call a “change of heart” comes about sheerly from a change in the many associations which make up our present viewpoint. Now,...

The gifting of animals with human speech is scarcely an unique idea—see Dal Stivens’ THE UNDOING OF CARNEY JIMMY in this issue should you have doubts—the idea of a talking horse goes back at least to the siege of Troy, for certainly there must have been some dialogue amongst the Greek warriors...

In abandoned cisterns and old wells, in moldy heaps of straw forgotten in the corners of deserted barns, in reedy pools deep in the woods, in fungied hollows of dead trees, in all such secret places apart from man, strange life engenders, drifts in and takes root and form. In a place called Yancey’s Meadow such a thing grew and waxed and made itself a shape, listened and dozed and waited.