The Black Star Passes

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The Black Star Passes, by John W Campbell

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Title: The Black Star Passes
Author: John W Campbell
Illustrator: Jerome Podwil
Release Date: February 27, 2007 [EBook #20707]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THREE AGAINST THE STARS
A sky pirate armed with superior weapons of his own invention....
First contact with an alien race dangerous enough to threaten the safety of two planets....
The arrival of an unseen dark sun whose attendant marauders aimed at the very end of civilization in this Solar System....
These were the three challenges that tested the skill and minds of the brilliant team of scientist-astronauts Arcot, Wade, and Morey. Their initial adventures are a classic of science-fiction which first brought the name of their author, John W. Campbell, into prominence as a master of the inventive imagination.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL first started writing in 1930 when his first short story, When the Atoms Failed, was accepted by a science-fiction magazine. At that time he was twenty years old and still a student at college. As the title of the story indicates, he was even at that time occupied with the significance of atomic energy and nuclear physics.
For the next seven years, Campbell, bolstered by a scientific background that ran from childhood experiments, to study at Duke University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote and sold science-fiction, achieving for himself an enviable reputation in the field.
In 1937 he became the editor of Astounding Stories magazine and applied himself at once to the task of bettering the magazine and the field of s-f writing in general. His influence on science-fiction since then cannot be underestimated. Today he still remains as the editor of that magazine's evolved and redesigned successor, Analog.

THE BLACK STAR PASSES
JOHN W. CAMPBELL

ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036

THE BLACK STAR PASSES
Copyright, 1953, by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Copyright, 1930, by Experimenter Publications, Inc.
An Ace Book, by arrangement with the author.
Cover art by Jerome Podwil.

Printed in U.S.A.

Contents
Introduction 7
BOOK ONE
Piracy Preferred 11
BOOK TWO
Solarite 71
BOOK THREE
The Black Star Passes 145
[Illustration]

INTRODUCTION
These stories were written nearly a quarter of a century ago, for the old Amazing Stories magazine. The essence of any magazine is not its name, but its philosophy, its purpose. That old Amazing Stories is long since gone; the magazine of the same name today is as different as the times today are different from the world of 1930.
Science-fiction was new, in 1930; atomic energy was a dream we believed in, and space-travel was something we tried to understand better. Today, science-fiction has become a broad field, atomic energy--despite the feelings of many present adults!--is no dream. (Nor is it a nightmare; it is simply a fact, and calling it a nightmare is another form of effort to push it out of reality.)
In 1930, the only audience for science-fiction was among those who were still young enough in spirit to be willing to hope and speculate on a new and wider future--and in 1930 that meant almost nothing but teen-agers. It meant the brightest group of teen-agers, youngsters who were willing to play with ideas and understandings of physics and chemistry and astronomy that most of their contemporaries considered "too hard work."
I grew up with that group; the stories I wrote over the years, and, later, the stories I bought for Astounding Science Fiction changed and grew more mature too. Astounding Science Fiction today has many of the audience that read those early stories; they're not high school and college students any more, of course, but professional engineers, technologists and researchers now. Naturally, for them we need a totally different kind of story. In growing with them, I and my work had to lose much of the enthusiastic scope that went with the earlier science fiction.
When a young man goes to college, he is apt to say, "I want to be a scientist," or "I want to be an engineer," but his concepts are broad and generalized. Most major technical schools, well knowing this, have the first year course for all students the same. Only in the second and subsequent years does specialization start.
By the sophomore year, a student may say, "I want to be a chemical engineer."
At graduation, he may say, "I'm going into chemical engineering construction."
Ten years later he may explain that he's a chemical engineer specializing in the construction of corrosion-resistant structures, such as electroplating baths and pickling tanks