Tricky Tonnage E-Book

Malcolm Jameson

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 29

Beschreibung

Elmer Nicklheim was an amateur inventor, and it got to the point folks around town expected the strange stinks coming from the Nicklheim barn. But when Elmer's father died, he seemed to settle down and take up hauling work with his father old truck. But hauling was incidental. The truck was powered by gravity, as part of Elmer's solution to the Unified Field Theory—which made all sorts of unusual events possible.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

TRICKY TONNAGE, by Malcolm Jameson

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1944 by Malcolm Jameson.

First published in Astounding Science Fiction, December 1944.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

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

TRICKY TONNAGE,by Malcolm Jameson

WHEN you’ve lived across the fence from an amateur inventor, you come to expect anything. When the wind was right we used to get some of the awfullest chemical stinks from the Nicklheim barn, and we got so used to hearing explosions that they didn’t bother us any more than automobile backfires. We just took it for granted when we’d see Elmer, the boy next door, walking around with his eyebrows singed off and the rest of him wrapped up in bandages.

When Elmer was a little tad, he was a great enthusiast for scientific fiction. You hardly ever saw him unless he was lugging some Jules Vernian opus around, and he ate up all he read with dead earnestness. With that yen for science it might have been expected that he would shine at school, but it did not work out that way. He wouldn’t go along in the rut laid out for the run-of-the-mill student. The physics prof finally had him kicked out for some crazy stunt he pulled with the school’s equipment. Elmer hooked it all together in a very unorthodox way, and the resulting fireworks was quite a show.