When Cities Implode: Golden Age Space Opera Tales

Cities have long been a powder keg – just waiting for that spark of insurrection to bring them down into darkness.

While our history is filled with dystopian tales of post-collapse survival, our future-history on other planets is also rich with these.

Post apocryphal stories is the stuff of legends, even where they occurred – or have yet to occur.

Enjoy these talents who are all gone now, leaving only their stories that haven’t happened yet – or have they? Far away on distant shores, where the ocean laps at the ruined harbor of a city where the survivors, well, survive…

This collection of stories from the 40’s and 50’s of Science Fiction’s Golden Age are modern in style, but still use space opera elements to tell their tales. Please enjoy.

Space Opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance, and risk-taking. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it usually involves conflict between opponents possessing advanced abilities, futuristic weapons, and other sophisticated technology.

The term has no relation to music, as in a traditional opera, but is instead a play on the terms “soap opera”, a melodramatic television series, and “horse opera”, which was coined during the 1930s to indicate a formulaic Western movie. Space operas emerged in the 1930s and continue to be produced in literature, film, comics, television, and video games.

The Golden Age of Pulp Magazine Fiction derives from pulp magazines (often referred to as “the pulps”) as they were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called “glossies” or “slicks”.

The pulps gave rise to the term pulp fiction. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were proving grounds for those authors like Robert Heinlein, Louis LaMour, “Max Brand”, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and many others. The best writers moved onto longer fiction required by paperback publishers. Many of these authors have never been out of print, even long after their passing.

Anthology containing:

• The Wheel is Death by Roger D. Aycock
• The Burnt Planet by William Brittain
• In His Image by Bryce Walton
• Proof of the Pudding by Robert Sheckley
• Homecoming by Miguel Hidalgo
• “Phone Me in Central Park” by James V. McConnell
• Bridge Crossing by Dave Dryfoos
• Breakdown by Herbert D. Kastle
• After Some Tomorrow by Mack Reynolds
• To Pay the Piper by James Blish
• Little Boy by Jerome Bixby
• The Moon is Green by Fritz Leiber
• The Ambassadors From Venus by Kendell Foster Crossen
• The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Leiber

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