JOURNEY TO INFINITY

New York: Gnome Press Incorporated Publishers, [1951]. First edition. Former owner's bookplate affixed to front paste down, corners slightly bruised, a nearly fine copy in a fine, bright, dust jacket. (30680). Octavo, cloth backed boards. Collects twelve stories, most first published in ASTOUNDING, by Jack Williamson, John D. MacDonald, Edward E. Smith, Fredric Brown, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon, and others, arranged as a future history of mankind. Several depict dystopias: "Breakdown" by Jack Williamson and "Overthrow" by Cleve Cartmill. Includes "There Shall be Darkness" by C. L. Moore, abandoned colonies on Venus revert to a culture equivalent to that of Earth's Dark Ages, and "Metamorphosite" by Eric Frank Russell, a story set in the far future, "with its much-borrowed finale of apotheosis or transcendence" (ESF), in which pacifistic telepathic super humans from Earth make first contact with their less evolved human counterparts who migrated to other worlds in the distant past and built a Galactic Empire comprised of 4000 planets (an authoritarian dystopia with "planet wreckers" to keep its subjects under control) to avert a war between the two branches of mankind.