Futures Past

Futures Past, A.E. van Vogt, Tachyon Publications, 1999

This is a group of lesser known science fiction stories, first published from the 1940s to the 1960s, by one of the all-time masters of the field, recently deceased. When writers like Asimov and Heinlein were hitting their stride, van Vogt was the pinnacle to which they aspired. When the first specialty book publishers were looking for material to republish after World War II, he was their first stop.

In this book, the last survivor of a spaceship that crash lands on Mars finds a deserted Martian village. Natives of the Andes Mountains are able to survive in the thin atmosphere of Mars, without pressure suits, to the great resentment of those born at sea level. A human and an ezwal, a large, blue, three-eyed being with the power of telepathic communication, crash land on a jungle planet and are forced to cooperate with each other to stay alive. This is despite the fact that the ezwal hates humans and would just as soon tear the human into lots of little pieces. A creature, actually the galaxy's greatest mathematician, is held in a huge vault on Mars, made of ultimate metal, and whose time-lock is keyed to the ultimate prime number.

These may not be classic, well-known stories, but they still run rings around most of what was, and is, in the Science Fiction section of the average chain bookstore.