Publisher's Synopsis
1928 was Amazing Stories third year and the best yet for a magazine that was improving with leaps and bounds each issue. This best of the year compilation is headlined by Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Clare Winter Harris, David H. Keller MD, Miles J. Breuer MD, and other greats of early science fiction. Plus stunning illustrations by the pioneer and genius of science fiction art, Frank R. Paul.Here you will find Comet Doom, a feature novel and intergalactic extravaganza, by a man who was already one of science fiction's leading stars, Edmond Hamilton (which concludes this anthology). Plus The Revolt of the Pedestrians," the first story by David H. Keller, M.D. (a psychiatrist specializing in abnormal psychology with a correspondingly dyspeptic view of life), who followed it up with over 100 more stories and a dozen novels of exceptional quality, if decidedly conservative viewpoint. Also the brilliant (top honors in the Haverford College intelligence test and an Edison Scholarship finalist) Charles Cloukey's initial offering, "Sub-Satellite," the first story to investigate the question of what would happen to a bullet fired in the Moon's lighter gravity (and the first of only nine superior stories he would pen before typhoid cut his life tragically short at twenty). And, Clare Winger Harris' "The Miracle of the Lily," a double-edged tale of the reintroduction of plant life onto a future Earth sterilized by ecological disaster, which established Harris as an indisputably better sf writer than most of her male colleagues; Harold Donitz's architectural utopia, "A Visitor from the Twentieth Century"; "The Metal Man," first story by Jack Williamson, a thought provoking, Merrittesque tale of crystalline and metallic life; Miles J. Breuer's imaginative fourth-dimensional jape, 'The Appendix and the Spectacles"; and Edwin K. Sloat's "Flight to Venus," a curiously affecting tale which focuses more on psychological and cultural reactions to the adventure than the adventure itself (Bleiler terms it, "intelligent, with amusing touches"). These stories helped shape science fiction and provided hours of thought-provoking reading for the fans of the era. We believe they will do the same for readers of today.
