[Gutenberg 64511] • Black Priestess of Varda

Space Opera at Its Finest! That's how readers in the know described the late, lamented pulp science fiction magazine Planet Stories. Famed for its vigorous, colorful covers and even more vigorous, colorful lead novels, the magazine of "strange adventures on other worlds and the universe of future centuries" (as the masthead read), has become a rare and highly-prized item among collectors. But now you can read two of its enthralling "book-length novels" in one ebook. If you love Star Trek, Star Wars, and other television and motion picture space operas, you will thrill to Nebula Nominee Ross Rocklynne's exciting blend of pulse pounding adventure and hard science, "Captives of the Weir-Wind." Ruthless space pirate, Julian Darnay, finds himself in the power of Julie Gunndardsen, being swept on a terror-flight through the void by a woman who knows how to hold her trumps. Their objective--if they live to reach it--is was a world beyond all worlds ... the planet of a binary where strange physics create the howling weir-winds that can sweep a man clean of sins or rip him to shreds in an instant, with only a lake of radium to mark his grave. And Darnay shudders, wondering which the weir-wind will make him, if he lives, sniveling saint or glowing corpse? Then travel through the dimensions with crippled Eldon Carmichael who is catapulted to a world of magical science and scientific magic, where he is the legendary El-ve-don fated to face Sin, raven-tressed witch of evil, in Erik Fennel's classic "Black Priestess of Varda." Sin is well-named--foul sorceress and raving beauty--and beloved of Sasso, the Dark Power from another dimension who seeks to conquer, with her help, the lovely, innocent world of Varda. Outlawed, sentenced to the Vat, only a few of Varda's people still defy foul Sasso's lovely witch. And Sasso's only fear is a whispered legend--El-ve-don, the Savior ... But surely a God can have nothing to fear and Varda nothing to hope for from the crippled idiot who has blundered through a shower of sparks into their time and space. Surely he can not be El-ve-don, the Savior!