Book detail for So Close To Home

Cover tagline

Deadlines for Today

Back cover text

James Blish author of Hugo Award winning A Case of Conscience, has selected a group of his own stories about futures that may be just around the next corner. To these he has added a brand new story, "The Abattoir Effect," which has never appeared anywhere else before.

With customary, but still astonishing attention to ingenious detail, Blish leads one through a series of lively and entertaining stories which could become fact — as indeed have so many stories which, not long ago, were considered wild flights of imagination.

Most of the world doesn't pretend to understand the technological developments of the past twenty or thirty years. But all people can understand the effects of these advances because it is Joe Doaks who lives with them — or dies because of them. And so it is with effects that James Blish is most concerned, the immediate, urgent and often very personal results involved for people who can't tell a fission from a fusion. But who still know a good story when they read one.

Support SF Paperbacks.com, buy this book using the links below

Interior text

Next year, next month, next week, today....

• What might happen if the atom bomb fell into the hands of "primitive" people
• And a possible genetic effect of radio-activity
• A subtly satiric excursion into the lotus-eating environs of mathematical theoreticians
• And New York enveloped in an impenetrable dome of gray — great for the commuters, but how about the folks inside?
• Here a woman in a world of rocketeers who still can't strike a match properly
• And a poet turned amateur doctor — who's frighteningly practical
• A young girl who designs complex decorations for ladies' fingernails — but with a kicker

And many more — your world, your life — as it could be today