"Удивительные истории" (Astounding Stories) - это журнал научной фантастики, который был издан в США в первой половине 20-го века. Выпуск от апреля 1931 года содержал несколько фантастических рассказов, в том числе "Последний человек на Земле" (The Last Man on Earth) от Джонa Кэмпбелла. В этой истории автор рассказывает о некоем вирусе, который уничтожил всю человеческую расу, кроме одного выжившего. Чтобы выжить, герой вынужден столкнуться с множеством опасностей и пройти через много боли и страданий. Книга представляет собой увлекательное чтение для любителей научной фантастики и позволяет окунуться в мир, где все возможно и где границы реальности смещаются.
Fungi from the Future by Clark Ashton Smith "If any living thing or place with a code of life or identity gave its death-blow such arrangements suffered. And the farthest land, the farthest crystal-clear stream, the one with which we had joined in solemn sympathy, was traitorously contracted into oblivion at the hands of one who looked and thought and worked and dissembled, and even lived like us, but lived—lived—with a belief which we could not share, with a trust in an idolatry which was pure Horror to our understanding. For a world is only a tapped well, dear reader, when it supports a civilization that has learned Truth about the Unnameable Abyss that writhes in the vault of the universe behind it." The Black Star by Fritz Leiber "It... will mean the utter ruin of all we hold dear. It is as though some monstrous Guest from an age when the sun itself was a liar, and nightmares savager the human spirit, has come to our world and demanded that we feed him with flesh and blood; for all bounties paid before God and Man alike, there is one last bounty left to secure his passage through our hereafter—that he be power put away on Earth." The Phials by John W. Campbell, Jr "In anything that can be expressed in words or symbols, all men are brothers in agreement. But there are unwritten laws more potent than going laws, unthinking laws too great for intelligent reason, and these unwritten and unthinking and formless laws mark out starkly the lines which separate orders, species, races, coming millennia apart in time or space." Turning Men from Eve by Edward Bulwer-Lytton "There are seventeen hundred and three days in a century, Jerry, beaming back through the black glass from that little red planet beyond Saturn, flashed the Venusian scoutship's pilot. Seven thousand two hundred fifty-two days at a pace of ninety-six Earthdays per each of said days, and springing for two intercalary days at either end, or maybe one day in the first hundred years, fourteen years and five days later, regardless of the calendar used. So... the three subsequent months, inclusive of leap day, are to be added." The Big Squeeze by Cordwainer Smith "Her idea in desperation must be taken seriously. Unless the consequences will not be subdued which are brought upon us by a woman injected with a fleetingness of emotion, how much would her persuasiveness have been counterpoised with the smoothness with which she scattered jumbled information in apparent casualty?" The Test by J. Hammond Reed "She believed in God. Everybody does; everybody believes in somebody. But if everybody believed in the same thing, that wasn't religion. Religion, really, is the acknowledgement of fear, and the dignity afforded by knowing, without being contradicted in any way, simply that there is something terrible out there and that's what we have to unite against."
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