The Goddess' Legacy E-Book

Malcolm Jameson

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 34

Beschreibung

Greece, World War II. There was one thing that the Gestapo could not conquer—one legacy of ancient days that took them, one by one...

Das E-Book The Goddess' Legacy wird angeboten von Wildside Press und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
fantasy;adventure;greece;world war ii;war;greek;athena

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

THE GODDESS’ LEGACY

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2021 by Wildside Press LLC.

All rights reserved.

“The Goddess’ Legacy” originally appeared in Unknown Worlds, 1942.

Copyright © 1942, 1970 by Street & Smith.

INTRODUCTION

Malcolm Jameson (1891–1945) was an American science fiction author who based much of his work on his background as an officer in the U.S. Navy. Jameson’s first published fiction appeared in Astounding in 1938. He was active in American pulp magazines for only 7 years, but he helped set the standard for quality during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He wrote not just for John W. Campbell’s magazines, Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown Worlds, but also for magazines like Startling Stories and Weird Tales. His writing career began when complications from throat cancer limited his activity.

His stories of Solar System exploration about “Bullard of the Space Patrol” were posthumously collected in 1951 as a fixup novel and won the Boys Clubs of America Award. Reviewing that collection, critics Boucher and McComas praised Bullard as “the most successfully drawn series character in modern science fiction.” P. Schuyler Miller wrote that Jameson drew on his own naval experience to give the stories “a warm atmosphere of reality.”

Jameson’s story “Doubled and Redoubled” may be the earliest work of fiction to feature a time loop. And his story “Blind Alley” from Unknown was filmed as an episode of The Twilight Zone (retitled “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville”).

Alfred Bester described meeting Jameson in about 1939 this way: “Mort Weisinger introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties... Malcolm Jameson, author of navy-oriented space stories, was there, tall, gaunt, prematurely grey, speaking in slow, heavy tones. Now and then he brought along his pretty daughter, who turned everybody’s head.”

Had he lived another 20 years, the shape of the science fiction field might have been significantly different, with Jameson’s name up there with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and van Vogt.

—John Betancourt

Cabin John, Maryland

THE GODDESS’ LEGACY

When man bites dog, they say, that’s news. It’s news, too, when a waiter tips his customer. I saw that done not long ago—quite surreptitiously to be sure—in the dining room of the Hotel Angleterre in Athens. To say that I was amazed would be to put it mildly, for I knew both men and the thing was impossible. It was not that Herr Scheer took the gold—for gold it was, strangely enough—but that Mike Pappadopoulos should have offered it. I would have thought that Mike would let himself be torn apart by wild horses before trafficking with the enemy. But there it was; I couldn’t blink it. The fierce old patriot must have broken under the strain of sustained tyranny. No other explanation of the bribe was tenable. For bribe I took it to be, and wondered what extremity had driven the old Greek to the necessity of giving it.

The part played by Herr Scheer in the furtive transaction was no mystery at all. He was simply a murderous, blood-sucking leech of the type all too frequent in Europe these days. I had known him for some time as the traveling representative of an optical house in Berlin and as such had often had business dealings with him. But with the coming of the troops of the occupation forces he promptly dropped the mask and showed himself in his true colors. Anton Scheer had been the advance man of the dreaded Gestapo. It was from his long-prepared secret lists that hundreds of victims for arrest and spoliation were selected, and from those same lists that the few Hellenic Quislings were appointed to puppet administrative posts. Now that he was the resident chief of Hitler’s secret operatives, his cruelty and rapacity knew no bounds. It was also common knowledge that his zeal for his beloved Fuehrer and Fatherland was not untinged by keen self-interest. In other words, Herr Scheer could be “had.” Enough money, discreetly conveyed, would unlock the tightest prison gates.