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Bantam Books, 1977 Frederik Pohl Was Yue Wang Team 2B Before The Universe Frederik Pohl. & C.M. Kornbluth New York: Bantam Books, 1977 Frederik Pohl was one of the early members of The Futurian Society of New York in the 1930s, Cyril Kornbluth, a bright fellow from the farthest north part of Manhattan joined later around 1938. Pohl became editor of two profession science fiction magazines called Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. Both of the magazines were low-budget projects that the magazines were sold for a dime and fifty cents. Pohl often needed to find cheap talents for stories to fill the blank pages. The Futurian Society was the first place where Pohl could seek help. Before The Universe is one of the Futurian collaborations by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. Furthermore, the two names have appeared on many other science fiction books. The book compiled with eight individual science fiction stories. One of the stores called Mars-Tube is about an expedition team on Mars from earth after a half century interplanetary war that Mars was eventually defeated and the entire Martian population was annihilated. The story began with the three members of the expedition team, Ray Stanton, Annamarie Hudgins, and Ogden Josey a roentgenologist encountered a Mars robot on an underground train, that the robot blocked them from exiting the train at a certain stop, which arose their curiosity. The three in the next day exited the train at a near by stop and walked back to the stop where they were blocked from exiting the train. At the suspicious train stop, the three expeditors encountered some spider-like robots and were attacked by those robots. Luckily, the train tunnel was build with some kind of electron magnetic material that tracked those robots, and they could future explore the tunnel. In the end they found a missing United States Navy Kernal from fifty years ago in a highly radioactive cave. The Kernal was one of the early expeditors on Mars before the war, who had his ship crashed on Mars and lost contact with earth. The Kernal somehow managed to live in that highly radio active cave for fifty years, but was mentally ill. The Kernal captured the three expeditors and was trying to make Annamarie, the female member of the expedition team, the queen on Mars, but would not return earth with them. After a fight, the kernel died with a heard failure, then the team returned earth with the general’s body. The background of the story is in the underground of the planet Mars, where the entire society is in the underground and built with high technologies, such as electron-magnetic-like train tunnels connecting the entire underground world. There are floating, noiseless, supper high speed trains operated by computers, and a robot in each of the train cars. The technology in the book were very important that even after all the Martian were annihilated, everything was still functioning properly. In our real world, we have seen something that sound really close to the technology described in the story, even though these technologies did not exist at the time the story was written. For example, we have sent people to Mars long time ago, and recently SpaceX successfully landed back on earth after sending satellites to the space, which is a huge breakthrough. Other than spaceships, Maglev Trains in some cities are quite and fast, just like the train in the story, except that we still need human operator, and it’s still not hundred present safe. .
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