24 Free Vintage Sci-Fi

The Jewels of Aptor combine elements of fantasy and science fiction into a far-future, dying-earth tale.

It's an interplanetary Hunger Games, in which a survivor of the Twenties (a fittest-person challenge) tries to navigate a harsh realm of planets seemingly on the brink of nuclear war. There are also symbiotic aliens and more weirdness as the protagonists try to defuse worlds on the brink of destruction.

Deathworld is a sort of parallel story to Harrison's famous Stainless Steel Rat series, taking place in the same sort of framework but focusing on a gambler thrust onto a hellish world full of dangerous beasts and awful weather on a smuggling trip.

Schlocky goodness, it involves mad scientists and genetic engineering.

In Search of the Unknown is about a search for rare animals, cryptids, and out-and-out monsters from the perspective of a world-traveling zoologist. It has fewer horror overtones and is more geared toward telling adventure stories of secret lands and hidden species.

The Buck Rogers we came to know was a swashbuckling space opera hero; this novel is definitely terrestrial, though filled with fabulous flying weapons of mass destruction and other far-future technologies. The tone is a little different, too. Still, this was the start of one of the most influential heroes of the pulp era.

Tale of two men staying in a house that opens to a hellish other dimension from which gruesome pig-men continually escape. The novel straddles a line between horror and science fiction and includes elements of time travel and dimension hopping.

Munro is largely forgotten today, but A Trip to Venus is important for what it predicted all the way back in 1897: that the best way to get between planets in the solar system might be to get there by rocket. (In the story, however, much of the technology here relies on anti-gravity mechanisms rather than combustion.)

This is the tale of a two dimensional square who makes a new friend – a three dimensional sphere. The novella also serves as a primer in geometry, concisely explaining the first, second, and third dimensions while also critiquing Victorian culture's narrow-mindedness.

We know that many scientists believe that life may originally have come to earth in the form of spores, from other solar systems and other universes. We therefore might really have had our home dim ages ago, on worlds distantly removed from our earth.

The ability to travel the interstellar spaces, however, might also be possessed by other creatures—creatures driven by fear, necessity and by the will to conquer. And if they come, in mighty waves, with scientific powers far beyond us, to dominate the earth, a terrible time will face the puny human race.

And in this story they do come, and provoke some of the strangest and most exciting adventures that have yet been recorded.

The Terran system is growing and expanding all the time. But an old and corrupt Centaurian Empire is holding Terra down, as it encircles the Terran system and will not let the humans grow out of their current empire. For this reason Terra is at war with Proxima Centauri and is trying to find a way of breaking free from the Centaurian’s hold upon them.

The General was in mufti. He stood briefly within the entrance of Models and Miniatures, Inc., feeling a mild envy of the civilians who brushed past him, coming and going. They looked so easy, so relaxed, so casual in posture and dress. He was wistfully aware of the West Point ramrod that was his spine, the razor-edged bandbox neatness of his banker’s grey suit, the Herbert Hoover four-squareness of his homburg, the stiff-symmetry of his dark-blue fore-in-hand.

A nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West has reduced much of the world to a barren wasteland. The war continues however among the scattered remains of humanity. The Western forces have recently developed “claws”, which are autonomous self-replicating robots to fight on their side. It is one of Dick’s many stories in which nuclear war has rendered the Earth’s surface uninhabitable.

Interplanetary commerce, if and when it begins, will be fraught with all of the dangers that accompany pioneering expeditions. There will be the terrible climatic conditions on other worlds to be faced, strange beasts and plants; and perhaps desperate and greedy men. That was the case when every new land was opened on earth and it may be expected to be true when we conquer the solar planets.

World-by-world, Terran colonists have driven the Beetles—the original inhabitants of the Betelgeuse system—from the star’s 23 planets. This is the last planet, and the aliens’ last stand. Young Tony Rossi has moral qualms and shiny-shelled Beetle playmates, much to the disgust of his father, and trouble is coming.

Beth Danson was about twenty-five and, besides her deep auburn-brown hair and lovely face, she boasted an equally attractive body. He found himself captivated by the warm thrust of her breasts beneath the silk blouse. The clear milk of her flesh, at the “V” of her throat excited him in a strange way. When he thought of her as his wife, it was frightening. It was as though someone had tossed him a woman and expected him to just fall into the routine of marriage. It wouldn’t be hard to come to love this woman, but it would take awhile. Hell, he didn’t know her. She was a complete stranger who had suddenly told him they were married. There was nothing familiar about her; even the fingers that were softly working over his face were alien.

… across half a Galaxy, the Terran Empire maintains its sovereignty with the consent of the governed. It is a peaceful reign, held by compact and not by conquest. Again and again, when rebellion threatens the Terran Peace, the natives of the rebellious world have turned against their own people and sided with the men of Terra; not from fear, but from a sense of dedication.

There has never been open war. The battle for these worlds is fought in the minds of a few men who stand between worlds; bound to one world by interest, loyalties and allegiance; bound to the other by love.

Such a world is Wolf. Such a man was Race Cargill of the Terran Secret Service.

Far, far in the future the Earth is still spinning around the Sun, on the edge of the galaxy, dozing in obscurity, forgotten by it’s trillions of progeny and completely irrelevant. But this doesn’t matter to the few millions who still live there in simplicity and quiet happiness. But then interstellar politics dictates that they must all leave Earth because … well, listen to the story as told by the great Poul Anderson as he explores what the Earth means to humans and to one man in particular.

During the System States’ War, Poictesme was the general HQ and supply depot for the final thrust at the enemy. And, persisting over the decades, is the legend of Merlin, the super-computer said to have planned the grand strategy which successfully concluded the war. “If we could only find Merlin,” the inhabitants said to each other, “all our problems would be solved.”

Then young Conn Maxwell returned from Earth, with a university degree, and a few clues about the location and the true nature of Merlin. And the sure knowledge that finding the Cosmic Computer would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to his home world.