Free summaries
Novels — page 35
2,236 public-domain novels books, summarised. Page 35 of 47.
Vulcan's Workshop
Harl Vincent
This story follows a hardened, brawling criminal who finds himself sentenced to a lethal penal colony on the planet Vulcan. Through a high-stakes alliance with an unlikely cellmate, he discovers that true power lies not in brute strength, but in the combination of courage and intellect.
A Gift from Earth
Manly Banister
HOOK A technologically advanced civilization arrives on a distant planet, offering "gifts" that slowly turn a thriving local business empire into a total, debt-ridden vassal state of Earth.
Beyond the Yellow Fog
Robert Emmett McDowell
HOOK A hardened manhunter goes undercover aboard a notorious slave ship, only to find himself trapped in a space-time distortion that threatens his sanity and reveals a vast corporate conspiracy.
Category Phoenix
Boyd Ellanby
Living under the thumb of an all-seeing dictator, a scientist secretly discovers the key to eternal youth, only to realize that immortality in a totalitarian state is a death sentence.
Confidence Game
Jim Harmon
The protagonist, a caffeine-addicted drifter, navigates a surreal, rain-slicked city while guarding a brilliant, decaying mentor whose ability to manipulate time threatens the foundations of human reality.
Daughter of the Night
Richard S. Shaver
HOOK In a world governed by magnetic poles of life and ancient, stone-turning curses, a warrior must navigate the treacherous, glowing allure of goddesses to save his lost love.
Dead Giveaway
Randall Garrett
An abandoned alien city on a dead world turns out to be an active, automated classroom designed to coax humanity into its next evolutionary stage.
Disowned
Victor A. Endersby
** A freak accident leaves a man trapped in a terrifying, permanent state of gravitational reversal, where the sky below his feet acts as a bottomless, hungry abyss.
Dora Deane
Mary Jane Holmes
The story of a virtuous, mistreated orphan who finds her place in the world through grace and perseverance. This domestic novel explores themes of family legacy, social standing, and the long-term consequences of character.
Lair of the Dragonbird
Robert Silverberg
This science fiction tale follows a desperate pilot who is coerced into a perilous jungle expedition to hunt a mythical creature, only to discover that the boundary between monster and man is dangerously thin.
Precious bane
Mary Webb
A young woman born with a physical disability finds her own path to dignity in the harsh, isolated landscape of the Shropshire countryside.
The Fourth Invasion
Robert A. W. (Robert Augustine Ward) Lowndes
A group of students witnesses an apparent alien invasion, only to be accused of perpetrating a hoax that ultimately masks a far more calculated and sinister reality.
The Man Who Staked the Stars
Katherine MacLean
A ruthless corporate kingpin faces a silent, invisible threat when his own board of directors deploys a psychological assassin to dismantle his ambition from the inside.
The terror
Alfred Coppel
A lone pilot returns from the void with evidence of an alien invasion, triggering a desperate global mobilization that ends the Cold War but hides a profound and calculated deception.
The Unprotected Species
Melvin Sturgis
A survey crew on a distant planet is stalked by an invisible, psychological terror that turns rational men into paranoid murderers. This story captures the frantic, claustrophobic spiral of a mission gone wrong as the survivors struggle to identify their unseen enemy before they destroy one another.
The Vicious Delinquents
Mark Reinsberg
The cycle of violence is a trap that even death cannot break, until one chooses to walk away from the wreckage of a life built on conflict.
Under the Skin
Leslie Perri
An Earth journalist and a spirited photographer find their professional detachment shattered when they become unwitting accomplices in an illicit, cross-species escape.
A Madman on Board
Robert Silverberg
HOOK A disgraced engineer, shanghaied into a lethal space-station labor camp, must stop a high-ranking official from launching a devastating attack on Earth.
A whizzer on Willer Crick
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
The open road beckons two weary cowboys who find themselves tangled in a lethal family feud, proving that sometimes the best way to escape a deadly inheritance is to ride fast and leave the relatives behind.
Black Priestess of Varda
Erik Fennel
A crippled man, thrust through a tear in space, finds himself the unlikely savior of an alien world locked in a brutal struggle for survival.
Blood on my jets
Algis Budrys
This story follows Ash Holcomb, a cynical "Detached Operative" or hired gun, who finds himself entangled in a high-stakes conspiracy involving a stolen experimental drive, a beautiful woman from his past, and a rogue warlord threatening the survival of Earth.
"Chinkie's Flat": 1904
Louis Becke
In the harsh, sun-drenched frontier of 1904 Queensland, a struggling mining camp finds new life through the grit of a determined prospector and the sudden arrival of an independent young woman.
Circle of Confusion
George O. (George Oliver) Smith
HOOK A massive artificial sun, essential to the life of Pluto, shatters when a reckless pilot attempts to fly through its delicate gravitational lens.
Corbow's Theory
Lee Wallot
In a remote moon-based laboratory, two clashing physicists must reconcile their opposing visions of the past and future to overcome a fatal flaw in a revolutionary, cost-saving space travel theory.
Fog of the Forgotten
Basil Wells
In the mist-shrouded world of Arba, a courageous outcast named Ho Dyak risks everything to reclaim the forbidden mechanical knowledge of his ancestors. His journey, fueled by the arrival of lost space travelers, bridges the gap between primitive superstition and a forgotten technological heritage.
Guest the One-Eyed
Gunnar Gunnarsson
A haunting, elegiac portrait of an Icelandic dynasty, this narrative traverses the rugged intersection of inherited trauma, the search for personal redemption, and the inescapable weight of the land itself.
In the Border Country
Josephine Daskam Bacon
An artist collapses under the strain of living for herself, her husband, and her children, and slips into a shadowy, dreamlike realm where three encounters with extraordinary women rewrite her understanding of womanhood and duty.
John Holder's Weapon
Robert Moore Williams
HOOK A captive scientist discovers a terrifying mental power that allows him to disintegrate matter—and human beings—with a single thought.
Mother America
Sam McClatchie
A geneticist orchestrates a national competition to select the perfect parents for a state-sponsored child, only to find himself entangled in a scheme to bypass the cold bureaucracy of artificial reproduction.
The Copper-Clad World
Harl Vincent
Drifting off course near the asteroid belt, a cargo ship carrying a fortune in rare metal is hijacked and driven deep into the Jovian system, where its crew discovers a hidden civilization plotting to rip its own moon from orbit to invade Earth.
The Lady Paramount
Henry Harland
A game of masks and inheritance unfolds between two brilliant, headstrong aristocrats. Through a tangle of deception and wit, they must decide if their connection is a matter of convenient strategy or a genuine, irrevocable destiny.
The Man Who Played to Lose
Laurence M. Janifer
The job is to dismantle a rebellion not by crushing it, but by giving the rebels exactly what they ask for until they destroy themselves. This is a story about the lethal irony of getting one’s own way.
The Outcasts of Solar III
Robert Emmett McDowell
A gifted scientist discovers that his entire life—and the fate of the human race—is a grand, cold-blooded experiment orchestrated by mysterious observers from the stars. He must reconcile his hidden origins with his love for a human spy to save humanity from its own destructive nature.
The Rapids
Alan Sullivan
A dynamic promoter descends on a sleepy Canadian border town, intent on bending its wild river and vast forests to his industrial will, only to find that building an empire demands more than sheer force of belief.
Warrior of Two Worlds
Manly Wade Wellman
A man awakens on a distant, bifurcated planet with no memory of his past, only to find himself cast as the prophesied savior in a brutal, endless war. He must navigate a labyrinth of political machinations, hypnotism, and shifting allegiances to uncover the truth of his own identity and bring peace to a fractured…
Danger in the Void
Charles E. Fritch
The deep, cold silence of space becomes the ultimate testing ground for a fractured marriage, as a husband and wife discover that their plans for divorce have made them targets of a lethal, shadowy organization. Survival becomes a desperate game of shifting allegiances when the very person you intend to abandon is…
Destination—Death
Wilbur S. Peacock
Trapped on the freezing, high-gravity surface of Uranus, two explorers fight for survival while their desperate greed turns them against each other in a race against a dwindling oxygen supply.
Fair and Warmer
E. G. Von Wald
This story explores the friction between a society of god-like, detached beings and the messy, visceral reality of a primitive species. It is a cynical, darkly comic examination of what happens when absolute control meets human unpredictability.
Mindsnake
Jim Harmon
In a future where instant travel across the stars risks the total dissolution of the human soul, a solitary wanderer must navigate the psychic wreckage of the void. He is a man apart, a "Witch" whose only tether to sanity is the simple, non-human presence of a dog.
Of Stegner's Folly
Richard S. Shaver
A scientist’s invention to cure aging and disease inadvertently creates a race of power-hungry giants, forcing humanity to evolve its own super-soldiers to prevent a global catastrophe.
Paradise Planet
Richard S. Shaver
The vast, silent void of space leads a weary traveler to a planet that mirrors his own, only to reveal a chilling, artificial perfection. He must decide whether to retain his fragile humanity or succumb to a manufactured, timeless existence.
Quest of Thig
Basil Wells
The alien traveler who came to conquer Earth finds his cold, programmed heart irrevocably thawed by the warmth of a human family and the unpredictable beauty of a world he meant to destroy.
The Animated Pinup
Lewis Parker
A practical talent scout discovers that an artist’s drawings can step off the page, leading to a grim, impossible bargain to resolve a romantic stalemate between a man and his imaginary creation.
The Last Monster
Gardner F. (Gardner Francis) Fox
A lone, immortal sentinel on a dead planet encounters four desperate humans seeking a cure for a lethal space-borne plague. Their meeting hinges on an alien power source that offers salvation to one civilization while sentencing another to oblivion.
The Making of Mary
Jean N. (Jean Newton) McIlwraith
A young woman’s search for belonging tests the limits of charity, ego, and belief in this sharp, turn-of-the-century exploration of domestic life. A household’s equilibrium is permanently altered by the arrival of a spirited, unsettled ward.
Treasure of Triton
Charles A. Baker
A desperate pirate risks everything to steal a legendary artifact from a frozen moon, only to find that nature’s most guarded treasures are not always what they seem.
Archibald Malmaison
Julian Hawthorne
The aristocratic life of an English estate becomes a stage for a haunting, psychological mystery where the boundaries of identity shift and collapse. This work explores how a singular, traumatic event can fracture a man’s existence into two distinct, alternating selves, creating a narrative that blends Gothic…
Evidently not
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
The dusty, high-stakes comedy of two drifters mistaken for traveling preachers offers a sharp, spirited look at the absurdities of frontier justice.