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Novels — page 34
2,236 public-domain novels books, summarised. Page 34 of 47.
The Keeper
H. Beam Piper
This story of an aging guardian on a dying world captures the weight of an inherited duty and the quiet heartbreak of seeing an era come to an end. It follows a man who lives in solitude, protecting a priceless historical relic for a civilization that has forgotten its own origins.
The Last Generation: A Story of the Future
James Elroy Flecker
This haunting vision of the end of humanity explores what happens when a society achieves all its material desires but loses its soul. It is a brief, chilling meditation on the emptiness of a world without struggle, purpose, or children.
The Mad Planet
Murray Leinster
A young man discovers that the terrifying monsters dominating his world can be defeated, sparking a slow, perilous shift from cowering prey to hunter. He moves through a landscape of nightmare flora to claim his own survival.
The Next Logical Step
Ben Bova
A sophisticated simulation machine forces military leaders to witness the absolute, brutal conclusion of their own war games. This terrifying glimpse into the future of conflict asks whether truth can serve as the ultimate deterrent.
Viennese medley
Edith O'Shaughnessy
A displaced woman navigates the wreckage of post-war Vienna, relying on the tenuous charity of her fractured family to survive a world that has discarded its middle class.
Carson of Red River
Harold Bindloss
A young engineer braves shipyard betrayal and Canadian wilds to forge his own destiny and win the woman who truly understands him.
Earth needs a killer
Bryce Walton
A brawling space bum on Mars is plucked from the streets by telepathic supermen and sent across dimensional barriers to commit a cosmic assassination.
Firegod
Algis Budrys
D'hai Merssu abandons his collapsing interstellar empire to play a long game of divine deception on a primitive world, only to fall victim to the very civilization he seeded there.
General Max Shorter
Kris Neville
On a hostile, storm-lashed colony world, an aging military commander faces an investigative committee after a genocidal atmospheric conversion wipes out a silent alien civilization.
Homo Inferior
Mari Wolf
This story is a poignant exploration of alienation and the drive to transcend a static, comfortable existence. It follows a young man, born into a society that has lost its ambition, as he seeks to reconnect with the restless spirit of his ancestors by piloting a derelict starship. It has endured as a classic of…
No talent, and Phil's pansies
Lucy Ellen Guernsey
An orphaned heiress and an impoverished boy learn that true purpose is found not in grand ambitions, but in small, faithful acts of kindness.
Rough Beast
Roger D. Aycock
An escaped alien super-predator crashes into the Florida Everglades, setting off a panic among distant spacefarers and local humans alike, only to meet an unexpected end at the claws of a swamp hermit's scarred tomcat.
Tales of the Wonder Club, Volume III
M. Y. Halidom
Hidden within a black box for decades, these tales weave together the scholarly debates of a nineteenth-century social circle with the dark, melodramatic hauntings of a vanishing past.
Tension
E. M. Delafield
An educational college in rural Devon becomes a class-conscious crucible where sentimental philanthropy masks emotional fatigue, quiet class warfare, and unvoiced romantic misalignments.
The Novel on the Tram
Benito Pérez Galdós
A tram ride across Madrid spirals into an obsessive, hallucinatory murder investigation when a talkative doctor, a torn newspaper serial, and a sleeping daydream blur into a waking crime story.
The Ultimate Quest
Hal Annas
In a far-future society where citizens erase their minds every six weeks to escape overthinking, Art Fillmore prepares for a remote wedding and a universe-shattering realization.
The way out
Richard Rein Smith
In a brutal interplanetary war where the ultimate weapon is information, the most terrifying fate a soldier can face is betrayal from within his own mind.
This World is Ours!
Emil Petaja
An unassuming science fiction writer discovers that his new, highly successful cosmic-themed magazine is actually an elaborate alien fifth-column operation designed to conquer Earth.
This World Must Die!
H. B. (Horace Bowne) Fyfe
This story follows four convicts, deemed "violently inclined" by a hyper-civilized future, who are tasked with a suicide mission to destroy a quarantined plague ship before it can reach a populated planet.
Bouncing Bet
Joslyn Gray
A young girl’s secret mission to save her friend’s sight leads to an unexpected transformation of her own character and the quiet village they call home.
Easy Does It
E. G. Von Wald
The rigid peace of a perfectly conditioned life is shattered by a simple mechanical failure. In this stark psychological portrait, a man of extreme privilege must confront the chaotic, raw reality of survival and the unsettling emotions that follow.
Freedom
Mack Reynolds
A chilling, taut examination of political fervor, this story depicts a high-ranking state security agent who finds himself infected by the very ideology he is tasked to suppress. It remains a stark, unsentimental portrait of how easily a monolithic power structure can lose its grip when its citizens begin to dream…
Miracle
Ray Cummings
Driven by an inexplicable, preordained compulsion, a modern man journeys into the seventeenth century to rescue two ancestors whose survival is essential to his own existence.
The Great Dome on Mercury
Arthur Leo Zagat
An Earthman risks everything to defend a vital mining outpost under the blazing Mercurian sun from an alien saboteur and his bloodthirsty horde.
The Ideal
Stanley G. (Stanley Grauman) Weinbaum
Capturing a mind’s secret perfection reveals a face too beautiful to exist, creating a longing that transforms real life into a landscape of disappointment.
The impossible invention
Robert Moore Williams
A desperate inventor discovers a way to transmit power through the fourth dimension, only to realize that opening the gateway could destroy the very world he hopes to save.
The medicine-man
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
A desperate rancher, a web of rustled cattle, and a gambler with a secret talisman collide in this lean, fast-paced tale of frontier justice.
Vestigia. Vol. II
George Fleming
Bound by a desperate political oath he can no longer embrace, a young man struggles to reconcile his love for a simple life with the shadow of an impending assassination plot.
A Butterfly on the Wheel: A Novel
Guy Thorne
When a high-society romance founders under the glare of publicity, a single night's mischance threatens to destroy a young woman’s life before the court ever reaches a verdict.
Anything You Can Do!
Randall Garrett
This science fiction work follows an extraordinary, high-stakes duel between a surgically engineered human and a stranded, formidable alien. It explores the blurred line between duty and identity as its protagonist prepares for an inevitable, brutal confrontation.
Cicely
Mrs. Molesworth
Grief and the quiet persistence of love reshape the lives of those navigating the fading traditions of the 19th-century landed gentry.
Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures
T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur
HOOK Every heart carries a private, heavy history that remains largely unseen by the world. This collection of narratives seeks to reveal those hidden burdens and remind us of our shared, fragile humanity.
Menace From Vega
Randall Garrett
The psychiatrist James Lawrence finds himself in a high-stakes struggle for galactic security, tasked with rescuing a catatonic scientist from a dangerous alien faction that aims to conquer the universe. He must infiltrate their formidable base and retrieve a weapon of mass annihilation before it falls into the…
Ruth Erskine's Crosses
Pansy
HOOK A young woman struggles to reconcile her refined upbringing with the sudden arrival of an unpolished stepmother and sister, discovering that the most difficult crosses in life are often the ones we carry in our own hearts.
The Dominion in 1983
Ralph Centennius
This speculative vision of a future Canada imagines a century of rapid technological and moral evolution, transforming a struggling 19th-century Dominion into a prosperous, technologically advanced global powerhouse.
The Little Pets of Arkkhan
Bill Garson
HOOK A crew of stranded exiles finds that the price of alien companionship is the total loss of their own minds. To reclaim their humanity, they must navigate a battlefield of thought and agony.
Tramps of the range
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
HOOK Two drifting cowboys arrive in a suspicious cow town, only to find themselves entangled in a web of greed, false accusations, and a legendary outlaw.
A Search For A Secret: A Novel. Vol. 2
G. A. (George Alfred) Henty
A desperate search for a missing inheritance drives two families into a web of secrets, where the promise of a lost will dictates the boundaries of love, duty, and survival.
Back to Julie
Richard Wilson
A man capable of shifting between dimensions accepts a dangerous commission from a corrupt politician, only to discover that the ultimate prize is not the power he was hired to steal, but the life he can build for himself.
Bear Trap
Alan Edward Nourse
This taut science fiction thriller explores the high cost of truth in a world governed by state-mandated deception. It follows a disillusioned propaganda writer who discovers that the architect of his nation's endless, manufactured wars is attempting a desperate, singular act of liberation from the Moon.
Corsairs of the cosmos
Edmond Hamilton
HOOK When a race of masterless machines invades our galaxy to harvest suns, the Interstellar Patrol must orchestrate the most audacious counter-attack in cosmic history.
Jack of No Trades
Evelyn E. Smith
The world of the future is built on psychic perfection, leaving those without "psi" powers to drift in social and professional exile. In this society, a young man discovers his own hidden, miraculous talent only to learn that being useful to others is not the same as being understood.
Needler
Randall Garrett
HOOK A persistent, invisible enemy weapon leaves the human fleet’s most elite crews in a state of catatonic shock. One investigator must determine if the fault lies with the aliens or their own advanced technology.
Princess of Chaos
Bryce Walton
The story follows a battle-hardened outcast on a mission of vengeance across a hostile, mist-shrouded Venus. He must navigate alien arenas and treacherous dimensions to confront a mysterious, furred princess who has long oppressed his people.
Rich Living
Michael Cathal
This is a haunting, melancholic exploration of the human cost of immortality, set on a remote planet where time flows in reverse. It is a story of five strangers who arrive as elderly millionaires desperate to buy more life, only to find themselves trapped as the physical aging process strips them of their…
Stalemate
Basil Wells
A calculated, high-stakes game of survival on an orbital satellite descends into a raw, intimate study of the human cost of institutionalized combat. Two men, representing warring nations, navigate the thin line between being strategic adversaries and shared victims of a system that demands their mutual destruction.
Sword of Fire
Robert Emmett McDowell
A stranded spacefarer finds himself the reluctant messiah of a primitive world, forced to lead a rebellion against parasitic overlords to secure the fuel needed for his journey home.
The Ultimate Eve
H. Sanford (Harold Sanford) Effron
This science fiction tale from the mid-1950s follows an extraterrestrial mission to conquer Earth using a single, psychologically engineered "weapon": a woman of perfect, hypnotic beauty. It explores themes of military hubris, the fallibility of intelligence, and the unintended consequences of weaponizing human desire.