Ooooo, Canadian.

Untouched By Human Hands-Robert Sheckley (1954) 2nd Printing 1960
Cover-Blanchard

13 short stories from 1952 & 1953 originally appearing in Astounding,Galaxy,Amazing Stories,Fantasy Magazine and F & SF

I've sung the praises for Robert Sheckley previously so I'll just say when I'm looking for short stories with a breezy,humorous touch he's my go-to author.Highlights here include

The Seventh Victim-original short story later novelized and made into the movie The 10th Victim
Cost of Living-Keeping up with all the latest techno gadgets on credit can keep you in debt,and your child and grandchildren as well.This story rings true more than ever
The Impacted Man-Contractor Carienomen specializes in the construction of universes made to order.His last is an artistic masterpiece except for a small unstable zone on earth and a man who keeps falling into a time warp
Untouched By Human Hands-You land on a long deserted planet,starving and thirsty.You find a warehouse of canned and boxed goods.How do you know whats edible or poison?

These and 9 others are enjoyable SF or Fantasy stories with a touch of humor or satire.Good stuff

I read the first three Casteneda books back in the early 80s, I think it was. I remember liking the third one best, Journey to Ixtlan.

Robert Sheckley is great. Looking forward to reading this one and a lot more, once I get back into 20th century SF.

How many books have been inspired or influenced by The Prisoner of Zenda, I wonder? ERB had The Mad King, Fraser had Royal Flash ... I still haven't read Zenda itself, must get around to that someday.

Alastair Maclean came up in the movie thread because of the film version of one of his best books, The Guns of Navarone. I was looking at his wiki page, and I see that I read nearly all of his thrillers up Breakheart Pass (1974). Here are my favourites, as far as I can remember them:

1. When Eight Bells Toll
2. Where Eagles Dare
3. The Guns of Navarone
4. Last frontier
5. Puppet on a Chain
6. Fear is the Key
7. The Satan Bug
8. The Golden Rendezvous
9. Caravan to Vaccarès

The rest haven't left enough of an impression to go by, plus there were three or four I haven't read at all. All his books are good, fast reads, if anyone's looking for something along those lines.

I guess everyone has a few clunkers in them.

Good grief. It's no secret that I've paid next to no attention to the sf field over the last 3 decades or so (the other day, just for the heck of it, I was looking at a Wikipedia listing of all the Hugo nominees & winners, & IIRC the only ones I'd read in the last quarter-century were Brittle Innings & one of George Alec Effinger's later novels ... unless Effinger had more than one on the list, in which case I read it/them, too), but that was brought home to me anew today when I received an SFBC email proclaiming, "A long lost Sci-Fi author returns!"

Turns out it's Paul Park.

Ummm ... who is Paul Park?

Then again, probably the way any "long long sf author" who I give a damn about (or would even recognize) could return is via cloning ...

I decided to read some short stories after that longer novel... this one claims to be a selection of the 'best science fiction and stories of 1956'.  If so, it wasn't a great year.   I did think it was neat it was printed by Fawcett, though

So, 6 stories (which is true) but only 2 involve leaving Earth.. so the 'Worlds Beyond' part is a bit of a misnomer.

Jungle Doctor By Robert F. Young -  A young telepathic Psychiatrist missed her destination and beams to Earth by mistake, and is found and saved by a local Drunk in a small town in the United States.   A pretty basic, predictable story, but I really liked the writing style.  This could have easily been a novel, and had no sci fi in it at all, and it would have been your typical Oprah book club type book.  Wikipedia tells me he only wrote a couple novels, but I may just check one out.

The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith -  Mr. Smith was smoking some good stuff on the day he wrote this.  Humans travel the spaceways with people called Pinlighters and their telepathically linked 'Partners' (house cats) protecting them... apparently, the combined mental power of a telepathic human and their cat can hurl light bombs at the dark creatures that stalk the ships of humanity (called Dragons by the humans and Rats by the cats) fast enough to scare them off.   Yeah.   That's it.  

Dream Street by Frank M. Robinson -  A boy runs away from an ophanage to try to get to Roswell, and into space.  Very nicely written version of a classic trope.  Like Jungle Doctor, the Sci fi elements were kinda thrown in and not all that relevant (it could have easily been going out to sea or joining the circus) but a good story nonetheless.

You Created Us by Tom Godwin -  A nuclear engineer out in San Fran sees two weird lizards in the desert with glowing green eyes.   He's haunted by them for years, until finally he goes back to Death Valley to find them.  It turns out a new race of Super Lizards were created by Nuclear testing, and not only are they smarter than humans, they can read and control their minds from anywhere on Earth.  They tell the main character their plan to get humans to kill each other in Nuclear war so they can have the planet, then make him forget about it and send him on his way.   Since we're still here, I'm guessing they failed.   Much like Cold Equations , this was a cool nugget for a story that just didn't quite get executed right.

I Do Not Love Thee, Doctor Fell by Robert Bloch -  Not a sci fi story, but still really good.  A Hollywood press agent is feeling like he's losing himself in his work and his clients, so he goes to get psychiatric advice.  Dr. Fell is able to help him find himself, but not in the way you'd think.  

On the Shores of Night by Thomas Scortia - The book could easily been called 'On the Shores of Night and other stories' as this is more a novella, clocking in at 71 pages, where the others were all 20 or less.   Sadly, it was also the least entertaining.  At least the space cat one was funny.   Here we have a very poor version of the story I just read in Rescue Mode only on a different scale.  Our 'heroes' test a star drive that's not working yet in Pluto orbit as the government has people on the way to close down the program.  They fail, and the pilot is blinded.. so they try again (after kidnapping the government people), and it works, only to have them not leave themselves enough air.  Then it gets really weird, with the main character (I think) flash freezing and getting put in an android body, where he tries to visit his estranged son, who's lost at sea... yeah, it's pretty weird.   Maybe if I hadn't just read a great space story, and if I wasn't a little sleepy on the train home while reading it, it would have made more sense.