Download or read book The Secret of Pad 34 written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space? That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol. His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find. HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.
Download or read book The Space Race Trilogy Omnibus written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays. Time Slips What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong? To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity? Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself. HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far. What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with? The Secret of Pad 34 Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space? That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol. His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find. HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary. Beach House on the Moon The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings. But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be? She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mind-bending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice. Her life will never be the same. Miskatonic University in the Cold War and Contemporary Era How would H.P. Lovecraft's famous fictional institution of higher education have developed through the second half of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first? Space: Gernsbeck vs. Lovecraft A look at the fundamental worldviews underlying the approaches of Hugo Gernsbeck and H.P. Lovecraft to the portrayal of outer space, aliens, and space travel.
Download or read book The Stirge written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Liphrel's family fell too far on their debts, he was sold to the priests of the death god. But his family were followers of the birth goddess, which left him in a difficult position.
Download or read book The Baying of the Hounds written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the world we know, Nikola Tesla's Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion? In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe. Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds. A short story originally published in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu
Download or read book Tell Me a Story written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on 2023-02-20 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Storytelling is as old as humanity. Given the importance of reading to children in their intellectual development, it is certain that we will take the storytelling tradition with us into space as we build permanent settlements beyond Earth. As one generation after another take a beloved childhood story further from Earth, it is seen in new ways by children for whom the pre-spaceflight view of the Moon is increasingly alien. Originally published in the anthology Rocket Science, edited by Ian Sales.
Download or read book The Day the War Struck Home written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on 2023-02-20 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She's to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts -- but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF's. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events. It's the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it's the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. However, the intelligence proves incomplete -- the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps. It's a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined. A short story of the Grissom timeline. Originally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest. This version includes a bonus essay on the genesis of the Energy Wars.
Download or read book A Hymn for Those Who Fall Forever written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on 2023-02-27 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Endings always hurt, but Vitali Grigorenko never expected a nightmare in orbit. Assigned to command the last flight of the orbiter Baikal, Vitali had started the mission in a nostalgic mood. That went out the airlock when he saw the body tumbling through space just beyond the flight deck windows. A body in NASA blue, not Russian tan. Now he's trying to get to the bottom of a murder in space, and his own country's space program as much a hindrance as a help. It's becoming clear that politics is involved, on both sides of what used to be the Iron Curtain, and he's going to need to go clear to the top. A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Download or read book Once a Chekist written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on 2023-02-20 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Katya Burinskaya carries a deadly secret. So when she is summoned to the Lubyanka for a personal meeting with the head of Imperial Security, she fears the worst. However, this meeting does not concern her, but her daughter. Tasha has become entangled with a troublesome genomic prince of the Imperial House, and both mother and daughter may suffer if Katya does not assist Security Minister Chalkov in investigating a family affair of his own, which also involves Prince Yevgenny Yakovlevich. Politics makes strange bedfellows in the new Russian Empire born of human cloning and Cold War genetic experiments. Chalkov was once an officer of the old Soviet KGB. And as Katya's husband often warns, once a Chekist, always a Chekist. A short story of the Grissom timeline. Originally published in the anthology Mortis Operandi.
Download or read book Phoenix in the Machine written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreams come true in cyberspace -- but so do nightmares. Roger remembers dying in a fire on the launchpad. He's reconciled it with being alive again. However, being an infomorph in a simulated environment has been a difficult adjustment. Toni tells him he went mad the first time he awoke, and she had to crash the computer. Now he helps her playtest the games her employer designs. But cyberspace outside Toni's local area network is a dangerous place. A disastrous experiment in Bangladesh left the world in a moral panic about AI and machine consciousness. When a careless connection betrays him to those who cannot distinguish between an AI and a post-biological human being, he and Toni must flee. Their cross-country journey will either destroy him or deliver him the spaceflight he's awaited for a century.
Download or read book Perfect Darkness written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would perfect darkness look like? And what would happen if you saw it? When Pavlik becomes obsessed with the idea of seeing perfect darkness, it becomes a distraction from the pod's duty as asteroid miners. Little does he know that danger lies in opening one's mind to the things that lurk in perfect darkness. Things that endanger his pod-brothers, even all of Briar's Children.
Download or read book Love in the Time of Campaigning written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Frank Correra brings his family to a lunar settlement to get them away from a worsening political situation on Earth, he reminisces about how he and his wife met. Frank had always dreamed of the skies. As a clone of an astronaut who subsequently became a US Senator, Frank thought he had a clear path ahead of him. But when it comes time to apply for the Air Force Academy, it is an election year. His ur-brother can't promise a nomination until he's won another term, and this year promises a hard race to run. When the other side puts up an ugly attack ad, can Frank find a way to discredit it before it destroys his ur-brother's chance of re-election, and with it Frank's slot at an Academy appointment? A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Download or read book Technoserf written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on 2023-02-20 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Madrian Empire rules worlds as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach. When the Madrians conquered Roby's homeworld, they brought him to this godforsaken lump of a world, to toil at their will. Now the Gate has failed, leaving them without communications or transport to the rest of the Empire. When Roby identifies the problem, he's offered a chance to fix it. Roby now faces a quandry. Even if he can repair the damage, should he? Will he be better off reunited with the masters' metropole? Or will he only complicate a difficult life?
Download or read book Beach House on the Moon written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings. But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be? She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mindbending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice. Her life will never be the same.
Download or read book A Gift of Koi written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human? Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn't find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi's side, he knows he's found a kindred spirit. But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish. A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Download or read book The Wonderful Traveling Medicine Show written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on 2023-02-20 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surrounded by a family who were happy with life in their West Virginia mining town, Janeen struggled against the pressure to keep her head down and conform. A dreamer, everyone said, Just like her father. And look what that got him, dead in the Turkish war. But Janeen knew she was meant for a wider world, and one day it came to her in the form of a broken-down steamer and its mysterious owner.
Download or read book She Dreams Day and Night written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nancy White they called her, a good, solid name for a troubled girl. But she knew her father had called her by another name, before he disappeared through the gate into another world of strange stars and stranger moons. No matter how hard the staff of Hildred House try to force her to forget, she remembers. And longs to reopen the gate, to rejoin her father on that alien shore where cloud-waves break.
Download or read book The Shadow of a Dead God written by Leigh Kimmel and published by Starship Cat Press. This book was released on with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What secrets lie beneath an alien world? A routine archeological dig on a world once ruled by the mysterious Star Tyrants. For Moon-born Liu Shang, working on a planetary surface might be unsettling, but she could manage -- until the dreams started. Unwilling to drag others into a harebrained search, she headed out alone, contrary to mission rules. Just as she was about to give up, she found an unlikely artifact. Handling it connects her to the mind of a long-ago rebel against the Star Tyrants' rule. Nothing will ever be the same. A short story.