SCINTILLATING STORIES FROM THE SILVER AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION From the author of Venus Equilateral and Highways in Hiding. THE BIG FIX So what happens in the future when gamblers get an ESP edge? A man named Barcelona tried to find out big time in none other than the Kentucky Derby . . . with racy results. HISTORY REPEATS Buregarde was an intelligent dog working with special galactic terrestrials to clean up the Xanabar, the trading post of the galaxy -- and Xanabar was rotten to its catty core. INSTINCT The aliens had trapped the Terran astronaut in a metal prison light years from Earth to see how he ticked. But little did they realize that humans could "tock" as well!

Author Biography

George Oliver Smith (A1911 - 1981) (also known by the pseudonym Wesley Long) was an American science fiction author. Smith was an active contributor to Astounding Science Fiction during the Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940s. His collaboration with the magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. was interrupted when Campbell's first wife, Do a, left him in 1949 and married Smith. Smith continued regularly publishing science fiction novels and stories until 1960. His output greatly diminished in the 1960s and 1970s when he had a job that required his undivided attention. He was given the First Fandom Hall of Fame award in 1980. He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers. Smith wrote mainly about outer space, with such works as Operation Interstellar (1950), Lost in Space (1959), and Troubled Star (1957). He is remembered chiefly for his Venus Equilateral series of short stories about a communications station in outer space. Most of the stories were collected in Venus Equilateral (1947), which was later expanded with the remaining three stories as The Complete Venus Equilateral (1976). His novel The Fourth "R" (1959) - re-published as The Brain Machine (1968) - was a digression from his focus on outer space and an examination of a child prodigy.