Books with author Ray Cummings

A CLASSIC NOVEL OF INTERPLANETARY WARFAREThere were nine major planets in the Solar System and it was within their boundaries that man first set up interplanetary commerce and began trading with the ancient Martian civilization. And then they discovered a tenth planet -- a maverick!This tenth world, if it had an orbit, had a strange one, for it was heading inwards from interstellar space, heading close to the Earth-Mars spaceways, upsetting astronautic calculations and raising turmoil on the two inhabited worlds.But even so none suspected then just how much trouble this new world would make. For it was Wandl the Invader and it was no barren planetoid. It was a manned world, manned by minds and monsters and traveling into our system with a purpose beyond that of astronomical accident!It's a terrific novel from the classic days of great science-fiction adventure -- now first published in book form. When Ray Cummings took leave of this planet early in 1957, the world of modern science-fiction lost one of its genuine founding fathers. For the imagination of this talented writer supplied a great many of the most basic themes upon which the present superstructure of science-fiction is based. Following the lead of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Cummings successfully bridged the gap between the early dawning of science-fiction in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century and the full flowering of the field in these middle decades of the Twentieth.*Born in 1887, Cummings acquired insight into the vast possibilities of future science by a personal association with Thomas Alva Edison. During the 1920s and 1930s, he thrilled millions of readers with his vivid tales of space and time. The infinite and the infinitesimal were all parts of his canvas, and past, present, and future, the interplanetary and the extra-dimensional, all made their initial impact on the reading public through his many stories and novels.

Wandl the Invader 1 "It's a planet," I said. "A little world." "How little?" Venza demanded. "One-fifth the mass of the Moon. That's what they've calculated now." "And how far is it away?" Anita asked. "I heard a newscaster say yesterday...." "Newscasters!" Venza broke in scornfully. "Say, you can take what they tell you about any danger or trouble and cut it in half; and even then you'll be on the gloomy side. See here, Gregg Haljan." "I'm not giving you newscasters' blare," I retorted. Venza's extravagant vehemence was always refreshing. The Venus girl glared at me. I added: "Anita mentioned newscasters; I didn't." Anita was in no mood for smiling. "Tell us, Gregg." She sat upright and tense, her chin cupped in her hands. "Tell us." "For a fact, they don't know much about it yet. You can call it a planet, a wanderer." "I should say it was a wanderer!" Venza exclaimed. "Coming from heaven knows where beyond the stars, swimming in here like a comet." "They calculated its distance yesterday at some sixty-five million miles from Earth," I said. "It isn't so far beyond the orbit of Mars, coming diagonally and heading very nearly for the Sun. But it's not a comet." The thing was indeed inexplicable; for many weeks now, astronomers had been studying it. This was early summer of the year 2070 A.D. All of us had recently returned from those extraordinary events I have already recounted, when we came close to losing Johnny Grantline's radiactum treasure on the Moon, and our lives as well. My ship, the Planetara, in the astronomical seasons whe

E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, essayist, painter, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous paintings and drawings. He is remembered as an unsurpassed voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most popular, even today. Cummings attended Harvard, receiving both his bachelor’s and master’s by 1916. A year later, he enlisted in the ambulance service as a driver with a friend for six months in France. Because of an error of the military censor, Cummings spent three months in a French prison. From this experience came “The Enormous Room”, a prose account of life in a military prison that contains no traces of bitterness or self-pity commonly found in such works. Instead, Cummings looked at the daily life and the strange characters in the enormous room with the playful eye and original wit so often apparent in his poems. Readers will delight in this early work by one of America’s most unique literary voices. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.