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Reviews by Contributor: Schmidt, Stanley (4)

Tis No Small Thing To Serve A King

Lifeboat Earth  (Kyyra, volume 2)

By Stanley Schmidt  

2 Feb, 2025

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

5 comments

1978’s Lifeboat Earth is the second volume in Stanley Schmidt’s Kyyra series. Whereas the first volume was a novel, Lifeboat Earth is a fix-up, composed primarily of novelettes.

With the wavefront from the Milky Way’s exploding core only eighteen years from Earth, the only way out is to equip Earth with a propulsion system provided by the alien Kyyra and flee for the Andromeda Galaxy.

The plans exist! The technology exists! The only impediment is the inefficient governments running the Earth. By the time the dithering officials make a decision, the Earth will be dead.

Clearly the only reasonable solution is for Henry Clark, the World Science Foundation’s Lieutenant Commissioner of Grants, to appoint himself Earth’s supreme autocrat.

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Lifeboat Earth!

The Sins of the Fathers  (Kyyra, volume 1)

By Stanley Schmidt  

22 Aug, 2021

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

2 comments

Stanley Schmidt’s The Sins of the Fathers is the first volume in his Kyyra duology. It was first published as an Analog serial in 1973 and came out in a mass-market paperback edition in 1976.

The starship Archaeopteryx is sent out with a three-man crew to a point 130 light-years from Earth, there to use modern astronomical equipment to intercept the wave front from the S Andromeda supernova. The ship returns with unexpected results. 

Things did not go well on the ship. Dr. Donald Lewiston went mad and murdered skipper Dirk Borowski before he was subdued by ship’s mate Jonel Turabian. This is a major disappointment to Henry Clark, Lieutenant Commissioner of Grants, since the expedition falls under his purview. 

Things will not go well for the Earth. Turabian informs his bosses that the core of the galaxy has exploded. A lethal wavefront of deadly radiation has spent 30,000 years creeping across the 30,000 light-years between the core and Earth. That wave front is at most twenty light-years from Earth.

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The Days of the Old Schoolyard

Analog’s Children of the Future  (Analog Anthologies, volume 3)

 Edited by Stanley Schmidt 

1 Jul, 2021

Special Requests

5 comments

1982’s Analogs Children of the Future is the third installment in the Analog Anthologies, all of which were edited by Stanley Schmidt. As one might guess from the title, all of the stories are drawn from the pages of Analog(some from the days when it was called Astounding). All of the stories involve children.


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