A Gift from Earth
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who want a free English original as an entry to early science fiction
- People interested in Project Gutenberg and e-book history
- Learners who need short English texts for extensive reading practice
- Nostalgic readers who enjoy mid-twentieth-century SF settings
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer contemporary hard SF or long series
- Readers who need a Chinese translation or bilingual edition
- Readers seeking complex world-building and deep character portrayal
Reading tips
- Read the first few pages to check whether the English difficulty and narrative pace suit you before committing to the whole text.
- Use the Project Gutenberg page for version information and note unfamiliar words and SF concepts as you read.
- Read it as a short unit, finishing one section at a time, to avoid interruptions caused by language barriers.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
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About the author
Manly Banister (1914–1986) was an American science fiction writer and editor active in the mid-20th-century science fiction magazines. Public information on his life and work is limited; the one confirmed work available here is A Gift from Earth, the only title by him in this collection. Judging from that work, his writing reflects the themes and interests common to American science fiction magazines of the period, combining narrative momentum with imagination for the genre readers of the time. As an editor, he took part in the content work of science fiction magazines and was familiar with the production of short stories and serials in that era. Overall, Banister was one of the less prominent but steadily involved writers and editors of the American science fiction Golden Age and the years that followed, and his writing and editorial activity offer a concrete sample of mid-20th-century science fiction magazine culture.
