Dark Star Safari

Dark Star Safari: Thirteen stories of stories comprising 2 novelettes, and 11short stories of science fiction, fantasy and the paranormal.

Dark Star Safari: When secret agent Space Force Captain Sherry Travers lands on Planet Garthon, behind the enemy Tenduran Empire' borders, and hires a guide to take her to meet the leader of a weapons manufacturing and smuggling operation, her hired guide turns out to be more than she expected.

The Nature of the Beast: You expect the story you're reading to go one way, and unexpectedly it twists. As a writer, I sometimes like to change things around...

Can android parents raise a human child?: In a world recovering from a double asteroid strike, where billions have died, and androids have taken up many human burdens, you may wonder how well an android couple can raise a human child. And what happens when their human daughter comes home from her first semester of college and makes a shocking announcement?

Blue Book Value: You need to buy your daughter her first good, pre-owned spaceship? After checking the net ads, you go to some short, slimy dealer and try to bargain him down in price, right?

Trouble With Cat-alogs: Collier's Planet. Young Cindy MacBain needs to go off the wildlife reserve into town to have her annual physical for school. But taking her pet cat-analog into town is against local laws. What happens when the animal sneaks a ride into town? (This story is a continuation of Adventures in Wildlife Exobiology from my first anthology, A Twist in Time.)

White Feather: Where did the tall tales of Sasquatch originate? Well, let me tell you about Luis White Feather...

Resonant Effect: Awakened from another of those strange dreams caused by the Santa Ana Winds ionizing the air around his trailer, Fred continues working on the whatever-it-is the dreams have been providing him the engineering plans to construct. But what the heck is this thing going to be? And how will it affect Earth?

Ghost of a Chance: Even death won't stop this psychic detective from solving crimes! Join Ronald Horowitz as he gathers a circle of friends to aid in his never-ending quest for justice. Oy...

False Positive: Planet Stratford 5. When Dr. Barbara Walden discovers a false positive in a simple blood test for E. coli, it creates a race against time to find a cure to save the families of Gamma Colony.

Ancient Magic: When Master Orthis, Headmaster of the Ordovician College of Sorcery, attempts to save the College from the fury of a raging volcano, he must first defeat a power-hungry sorceress. Can Orthis survive both a volcano, and a mad sorceress? (This story is a continuation of Too Much Magic from my first anthology, A Twist in Time.)

The Adventure That Never Happened: Dr. Watson describes one of those cases that didn't quite pan out.

Faces in the Doors: Ever notice how you see faces where there are none? In a cloud? In the bark of a tree? In the grain of the wood paneling of your home? Sure, picking out faces is just a survival mechanism built into our species. But did it ever freak you out?

A Passage to Carnalia: The work of a space-freighter captain can be arduous, dangerous, tedious, and sometimes disgusting. But it also offers prestige, and certain perks...

Auteur

Robert Holt is a retired field biologist, having performed biodiversity surveys, and a former science teacher, having taught earth science, biology, chemistry, and physics at the secondary level. Beyond writing science curriculum and providing technical editing for science text books, he is currently working on two more anthologies of speculative fiction, and another novel. Robert's hobbies include nature photography and collecting fossils, rocks and minerals. Although he and his wife presently reside in the State of Washington, his mind is often somewhere out in space...well, after all, his father was from Alpha Centauri...
But that's another story...