The magazines
Published stories
Seventeen stories and one poem, from the 1930 Science Wonder Stories prize through the posthumous Tumithak novella of 2005. Click any title to read it in full.
The Color of Space
Hugo Gernsback’s $150 first-prize winner. A kidnapped chemist is shown a shuttered window onto the stars — and the one scientific error on a magazine cover becomes the twist.
10 min read
The Flight of the Mercury
From the winner of the Science Wonder cover contest: a voyage toward Mars aboard a ship that still believes in the ether.
29 min read
Tumithak of the Corridors
Two millennia after the Shelks of Venus drove mankind into the tunnels, a young man of Loor finds an ancient book and climbs toward the sun to kill a Shelk.
114 min read
Tumithak in Shawm
The sequel. Tumithak leads a war-party back to the surface to take the fight to the Shelks — and finds other human nations waiting in the light.
144 min read
The Vanishing Diamonds
Written for Amazing’s first Ziff-Davis issue. Professor Isaac N. Stillwell — Tanner’s favorite of his own characters — investigates jewels that will not stay stolen.
22 min read
Out of the Jar
A weird-fantasy bottle story: something old, sealed, and unwise is let back into the world.
20 min read
The Stillwell Degravitator
Professor Stillwell returns with a machine that argues with gravity — and with anyone standing underneath it.
25 min read
The Improbable
A compact puzzle of chance, invention, and the one outcome no reasonable man would bet on.
23 min read
Tumithak and the Towers of Fire
The third Tumithak adventure. The war for the surface reaches the burning towers, and the corridors send up another generation of fighters.
61 min read
Cham of the Hills
A cousin to Tumithak: another attempt to rebuild civilization from the hills after the old world has fallen.
63 min read
The Luck of Enoch Higgins
A run of fortune so stubborn it starts to look like a natural law — until Enoch Higgins tries to spend it.
29 min read
The Revolt of the Machine Men
The servants of metal decide they have been servants long enough.
36 min read
Mutiny in the Void
A Planet Stories space-opera: a crew, a void, and the moment discipline snaps between the stars.
25 min read
Mr. Garfinkel and the Lepra-Cohen
A late comic fantasy: a Jewish leprechaun, a stubborn mortal, and a bargain that will not stay in the old country.
30 min read
Johnny Goodturn
A good deed with a long half-life — and a hero who cannot quite stop doing the next one.
25 min read
Angus MacAuliffe and the Gowden Tooch
Scottish comic fantasy: Angus, a golden tooth, and more trouble than a man can reasonably chew.
35 min read
The Princess of Mars
A late poem in homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Martian tales Tanner had been reading since “Under the Moons of Mars.”
6 min read
Tumithak and the Ancient Word
Written in 1952, unpublished until the 2005 collection. Tumithak’s reconquest of the surface and the long work of rebuilding a world.
69 min read