Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Nightmare Planetby Murray Leinster
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Light, easy reading science fiction. This is another in a series regarding humans which languished for countless generations upon a far distant earth-like world wherein giant insects dominate and men have been reduced to (almost) mindless savages. Entertaining, yet hardly profound or insightful from a scientific perspective. ( ) Nightmare Planet The Directory-ship Tethys made the first landing on the planet, L21612. It was a goodly world, with an ample atmosphere and many seas, which the nearby sun warmed so lavishly that a perpetual cloud-bank hid them and all the solid ground from view. It had mountains and islands and high plateaus. It had day and night and rain. It had an equable climate, rather on the tropical side. But it possessed no life. No animals roamed its solid surface. No vegetation grew from its rocks. Not even bacteria struggled with the stones to turn them into soil. No living thing, however small, swam in its oceans. It was one of that disappointing vast majority of otherwise admirable worlds which was unsuited for colonization solely because it had not been colonized before. It could be used for biological experiments in a completely germ-free environment, or ships could land upon it for water and supplies of air. The water was pure and the air breathable, but it had no other present utility. Such was the case with an overwhelming number of Earth-type planets when first discovered in the exploration of the galaxy. Life simply hadn't started there. So the ship which first landed upon it made due note for the Galactic Directory and went away, and no other ship came near the planet for eight hundred years. But nearly a millennium later, the Seed-Ship Orana arrived. It landed and carefully seeded the useless world. It circled endlessly above the clouds, dribbling out a fine dust comprised of the spores of every conceivable microorganism that could break down rock to powder and turn the powder to organic matter. It also seeded with moulds and fungi and lichens, and everything that could turn powdery primitive soil into stuff on which higher forms of life could grow. The Orana seeded the seas with plankton. Then it, too, went away. no reviews | add a review
Fiction.
Science Fiction.
Short Stories.
HTML: The novella Nightmare Planet is the conclusion to Murray Leinster's popular Argosy series and is most closely linked to his previous tales The Mad Planet and The Red Dust. A spaceship lands on a seemingly uninhabited planet that turns out to be the vestiges of a grotesque science experiment gone horribly awry. Will the crew members be able to survive in this hostile territory? .No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)808.83876Literature By Topic Rhetoric and anthologies Anthologies & Collections Fiction Genre fiction Adventure fiction Science and Fantasy FictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |