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The Black Star Passes

John Wood Campbell

Book Overview: 

A sky pirate armed with superior weapons of his own invention… First contact with an alien race dangerous enough to threaten the safety of two planets… The arrival of an unseen dark sun whose attendant marauders aimed at the very end of civilization in this Solar System. These were the three challenges that tested the skill and minds of the brilliant team of scientist-astronauts Arcot, Wade, and Morey. Their initial adventures are a classic of science-fiction which first brought the name of their author, John W. Campbell, into prominence as a master of the inventive imagination.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .Pg. 50]there was a click and the instrument flopped back to 300—it was registering in pounds now! Then the needle moved to zero, and the mighty structure floated into the air, slowly moving down the field as a breeze carried it along the ground.

The men outside saw it rise swiftly into the sky, straight toward the blue vault of heaven. In two or three minutes it was disappearing. The glistening ship shrank to a tiny point of light; then it was gone! It must have been rising at fully three hundred miles an hour!

To the men in the car there had been a tremendous increase in weight that had forced them into the air cushions like leaden masses. Then the ground fell away with a speed that made them look in amazement. The house, the construction shed, the lake, all seemed contracting beneath them. So quickly were they rising that they had not time to adjust their mental attitude. To them all the world seemed shrinking about them.

Now they were . . . Read More

Community Reviews

Great classic science fiction novel. I fully enjoyed reading it. Highly suggested for those of you who like reading this type of literature

John W. Campbell is known as a legendary scifi editor and the author of the novella Who Goes There?, which of course was the basis for two great films, i.e. Christian Nyby's / Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World (1951) and John Carpenter's The Thing (1982).

I liked Who Goes There? a lot and,

Time for a bit of sci-fi after the subdued but serious craziness of "The Good Soldier." No sci-fi there, just adults with a lot of defects of character. Mr. Campbell was a sci-fi pioneer who gave up writing fiction to focus on publishing/editing early sci-fi periodicals. This slim, volume was first

The three stories that make up this novel were all written in 1930, so they are quite dated, yet fun. This was science fiction's adolescence. Science fiction was beginning to find its legs and John W. Campbell helped in many ways. First as a writer in this fairly new genre, he was writing some amazi

Vacillating between 3 and 4 stars, I ultimately give this the higher rank, because despite its flaws, I certainly remembered it vividly over a decade after I first read it. This was the second book I read of the legendary John W. Campbell, the first being "The Ultimate Weapon," of which I had not be

This is three connected, sequential stories (based on 22nd century Earth) that don't quite form a novel: In the first story, our heroes Arcot and Morey must defeat an ingenious sky pirate who operates by paralyzing everyone in a plane (somehow) and stealing the sick cash money that they're still car

Arcot, Morey and Wade discover there IS life on other planets, and with it comes terrible and amazing new technology that will help them save their own planet and eventually the solar system from threat of destruction!

Science fiction as a genre is relatively young, compared to what is available on t

This was originally published in 1930, serialized in one of the pulps. Campbell went on to become one of the most influential editors of SF & this was the kind of story he liked. As he says in his introduction, it was written for the young minds of the day, those that wanted the stars & could releas

Back in the late 1970s and early '80s, some of my favorite reading material, sci-fi-wise, was the wonderful series of 21 "Best of" anthologies put out by Ballantine. In an early indication of my future tastes, my favorites among those 21 collections were those by C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Bra

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