Bøger udgivet af Wildside Press

In a future where interstellar space travel is commonplace, following the invention of the Nulgrav Drive, planetoids and meteorites pose the only threat to spacecraft. The solution: a space engineering company, Planetoid Disposals Ltd., is created to destroy rogue stellar bodies and sweep the space lanes clear of debris. With the Galactic Patrol enforcing peace throughout the galaxy, it is a time of prosperity. But when a non-human race finds a way to checkmate the Patrol, it means war with humanity. The Vendians launch their mighty fleet against an unearmed Earth, and only Planetoid Disposals' fleet of ships stands in their way...

Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine is back with a new issue and a new editor. Here are tales in mystery and detection in the classic manner, with a fine selection of new stories, features, and a classic Holmes reprint. Here are:BEAUTY AND THE BEYOTCH, by Barb GoffmanTHE CASE OF THE COLONEL'S SUICIDE, by Rafe McGregorTHE HOLMES IMPERSONATOR AND THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS, by Janice LawTHE BODY IN THE BACKYARD, by Peter DiChellisThe Adventure of the Geek Interpreter, by Hal CharlesCEREAL KILLING, by J.P. SeewaldLAST WISH AND TESTAMENT, by V.P. KavaFROM GREEN TO RED, by Mike McHoneFAILURE TO OBEY, by Rebecca K. JonesTRACE EVIDENCE, by Keith BrookeTHE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAIN, by Sir Arthur Conan DoyleFeatures by Darrell Schweitzer, Kim Newman, and Martha Hudson.Now edited by Carla Kaessinger Coupe.

Robert Edmond Alter, best known as a mystery author, turns his considerable talents to stories of heroes and courage under difficult circumstances. These true-life historical retellings include tales of war, heroism, adventure, and survival-all of which required courage under extreme pressure or life-threatening circumstances.

One of famed crime author Robert Edmond Alter's less-well-known books, Henry M. Stanley: The Man from Africa concerns the life of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, explorer, journalist, soldier, colonial administrator, author and politician who was famous for his exploration of Central Africa and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone, whom he later claimed to have greeted with the now-famous line: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Leo's mother, Madam Sara Bresson, wasn't good with babies. She never claimed to be. She had her Gift, her charisma, her successful career as a Spiritualist medium, and there simply wasn't room in her life for sleepless nights or soggy nappies. Therefore, with her husband (Leo's father Maurice Moon, a music hall conjuror and xylophone player) out of the picture having recently decamped, she donated Leo as soon as was decent to her widowed mother Clare.An agreeably wealthy woman, Clare had conveniently just returned from India following the alcohol-related death of her husband, a senior officer in the British army there. Clare welcomed a grandchild. It was good to be needed.Now, today, eighty-odd years later, Leo is living again in the house in Cheltenham that his grandmother Clare bought all those years ago. And D. G. Compton, previously better known perhaps as a science fiction writer, has set himself a biographical task here, charting at least a few of the more significant vicissitudes, big and little, that have shaped Leo's nature and life, and have left us with this slightly wise (he hopes) old gent.

In her first published mystery, Agatha Christie introduced readers to her Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. When the wealthy mistress of Styles Court is murdered, Poirot is on hand to wade through the confusing clues and long list of suspects! A classic whodunit.

The masked woman called herself Madame Madcap, and she gathered a gang ofcutthroats determined to loot high society of all its riches... starting withthe notorious womanizer Hamilton Brone. She worked her criminal magic... andgrew rich as millionaires swooned at her feet. Members of her gang worshippedher. She could do no wrong. And yet a curious pattern began to emerge, and astrange vengeance took shape -- not just against the men of high society, but against the men of her own brave band of criminals!

A diabolical fiend uses the weapons of modern science to threaten humanity!Follow the Phantom as he embarks on one of the most exciting manhunts of hisentire career -- and answers fire with fire! Ripped from the pages ofThe Phantom Detective magazine, here is the lead novel from the February1938 issue!

The Willows is a novella by Algernon Blackwood, first published in 1907. It is often considered one of Blackwood's greatest works and a classic of supernatural fiction. The story is renowned for its atmospheric tension and exploration of the unknown.Two friends, the unnamed narrator and his companion known as "The Swede," embark on a canoe trip down the Danube River. They venture into a remote and desolate region filled with dense willows, far from civilization. The landscape is eerie and otherworldly, with the river seeming to possess a life of its own.As they set up camp on a small island surrounded by willows, they begin to experience strange and unsettling phenomena. The willows seem to move and whisper, creating an overwhelming sense of unease. The natural environment appears hostile and alive, contributing to the growing tension.The protagonists soon realize they are not alone. They sense the presence of malevolent, unseen entities that inhabit the area. These forces are beyond human understanding and defy logical explanation. The isolation, coupled with the oppressive atmosphere, drives the men to the brink of madness.Throughout the story, Blackwood masterfully builds a sense of dread through his vivid descriptions of the landscape and the psychological effects on the characters. The story's power lies in its ability to evoke the unknown and the inexplicable, leaving readers with a lingering sense of fear and wonder.

It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary. In an age when every standard of decent conduct has either been torn down or is threatened with destruction; when every newspaper is daily reporting scenes of violence, divorce, and arson; when quite young girls smoke cigarettes and even, I am assured, sometimes cigars; when mature women, the mothers of unhappy children, enter the sea in one-piece bathing-costumes; and when married men, the heads of households, prefer the flicker of the cinematograph to the Athanasian Creed -- then it is obviously a task, not to be justifiably avoided, to place some higher example before the world. For some time -- I am now forty-seven -- I had been feeling this with increasing urgency. And when not only my wife and her four sisters, but the vicar of my parish, the Reverend Simeon Whey, approached me with the same suggestion, I felt that delay would amount to sin. That sin, by many persons, is now lightly regarded, I am, of course, only too well aware. That its very existence is denied by others is a fact equally familiar to me. But I am not one of them. On every ground I am an unflinching opponent of sin. I have continually rebuked it in others. I have strictly refrained from it in myself. And for that reason alone I have deemed it incumbent upon me to issue this volume.

As vacation time approached, Dick and Doc had become as hard as nails and as active as a couple of manus, which you will know, if your education has not been neglected, is the ape-word for monkeys. Then it was that the big surprise came in a letter that Dick received from his mother. Tarzan of the Apes had invited them all to visit him and spend two months on his great African estate! The boys were so excited that they talked until three o'clock the next morning and flunked in all their classes that day.

While I was attached to the Malakand Field Force I wrote a series of letters for the London Daily Telegraph. The favorable manner in which these letters were received, encouraged me to attempt a more substantial work. This volume is the result. The original letters have been broken up, and I have freely availed myself of all passages, phrases, and facts, that seemed appropriate. The views they contained have not been altered, though several opinions and expressions, which seemed mild in the invigorating atmosphere of a camp, have been modified, to suit the more temperate climate of peace. -- Sir Winston S. Churchill

For the twenty-second time since the great wave had washed him from the steamer's deck and hurled him, choking and sputtering, upon this inhospitable shore, Waldo Emerson saw the sun sinking rapidly toward the western horizon. Suddenly Waldo became conscious from the corner of his eye that something was creeping upon him from behind out of the dark cave before which he had fought. Simultaneously with the realization of it he swung his cudgel in a wicked blow at this new enemy as he turned to meet it. The creature dodged back and the blow that would have crushed its skull grazed a hairbreadth from its face. Waldo struck no second blow and the cold sweat sprang to his forehead when he realized how nearly he had come to murdering a young girl. She crouched now in the mouth of the cave, eying him fearfully. Waldo removed his tattered cap, bowing low. "I crave your pardon," he said. "I had no idea that there was a lady here. I am very glad that I did not injure you." But now his attention was required by more pressing affairs -- the cave men were returning to the attack. They carried stones this time, and, while some of them threw the missiles at Waldo, the others attempted to rush his position. It was then that the girl hurried back into the cave, only to reappear a moment later carrying some stone utensils in her arms.

El Kudz, as Arabs call Jerusalem, is, from a certain distance, as they also call it, shellabi kabir. Extremely beautiful. Beautiful upon a mountain. El Kudz means The City, and in a certain sense it is that, to unnumbered millions of people. Ludicrous, uproarious, dignified, pious, sinful, naïvely confidential, secretive, altruistic, realistic. Hoary-ancient and ultra-modern. Very, very proud of its name Jerusalem, which means City of Peace. Full to the brim with the malice of certainly fifty religions, fifty races, and five hundred thousand curious political chicaneries disguised as plans to save our souls from hell and fill some fellow's purse. The jails are full.

Anyone could say of any short story, "A mere anecdote," just as anyone can say "Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felt hopelessly open to a paralyzing and unanswerable charge, and one's ease and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and more marred by the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress as vague and inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning, and presently one shivered and wanted to go indoors . . . It is the absurd fate of the imaginative writer that he should be thus sensitive to atmospheric conditions. But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain. I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective tendency towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically the more abundant and irregular forms. But this world is not for the weary, and in the long-run it is the new and variant that matter. -- From Wells's introduction to THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND AND OTHER STORIES.

Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman ' so bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the street with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at ' in her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length mink coat in our town, and Ganz's shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Hers were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women.

Now we are led, protesting, up to a grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so often English), from shorts to Etons. With which modest preamble you are asked to be patient with Miss Fanny Brandeis, aged thirteen. Not only must you suffer Fanny, but Fanny's mother as well, without whom there could be no understanding Fanny. For that matter, we shouldn't wonder if Mrs. Brandeis were to turn out the heroine in the end. She is that kind of person.

The ill nature of the cartoon, for instance, which showed Tish in a pair of khaki trousers on her back under a racing-car was quite uncalled for. Tish did not wear the khaki trousers; she merely took them along in case of emergency. Nor was it true that Tish took Aggie along as a mechanician and brutally pushed her off the car because she was not pumping enough oil. The fact was that Aggie sneezed on a curve and fell out of the car, and would no doubt have been killed had she not been thrown into a pile of sand. It was in early September that Eliza Bailey, my cousin, decided to go to London, ostensibly for a rest, but really to get some cretonne at Liberty's. Eliza wrote me at Lake Penzance asking me to go to Morris Valley and look after Bettina. . . .

For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-bye to my friends, and, after watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply does not depend on a tank on the roof. And then -- the madness seized me. When I look back over the months I spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. As it is, I show the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I have turned very gray -- Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery, instead of a yellowish white. I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things and I snapped her off. "No," I said sharply, "I'm not going to use bluing at my time of life, or starch, either."

Twelve Stories and a Dream -- "A Dream of Armageddon": "That book," he repeated, pointing a lean finger, "is about dreams. Dreams tell you nothing." I did not catch his meaning for a second. "They don't know," he added. I looked a little more attentively at his face. "There are dreams," he said, "and dreams."

The biological truth Wells has given us would slow down an alien encounters on Star Trek or Farscape, where intrepid adventurers rarely worry about local languages, much less breathing the local air. The aliens have invaded because they have a fondness for human blood, sucked from living beings (how they discovered they had a taste for us is unclear, but it makes dramatic theater, anyway). If you haven't read Wells, you need to; Wells created a landmark -- he is a thoughtful social commentator, a pioneer of what makes SF intellectually appealing, and a damned fine storyteller, too.The novel is the first-person narrative of both an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and of his younger brother in London as southern England is invaded by Martians.

A century ago, H.G. Wells was one of the men who all but created the science fiction novel. Wells wrote three classics in four years: The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). The Invisible Man, owes an obvious debt to Frankenstein, as it explores the nature of mankind, asking weather an invisible man still be bound by the morality that seems natural to us. Seems like a natural thing, doesn't it? But listen to the story Wells tells, and the doubt he places on a thing seemingly obvious: A researcher working (more or less) as a graduate student in physics, discovers a treatment that will make himself invisible. Griffin -- our invisible man -- may well be morally bankrupt before he takes the treatment. He begins by making himself invisible to avoid paying his rent -- and, as he sneaks out of the building, he sets it afire as a "lesson" for his landlord. He steals money entrusted to his father -- and causes his father to suicide in shame . . . but that's only the beginning . . .