New Title Spotlight: The Diploids

Gateway is delighted to welcome Katherine MacLean to the list!  Best known for her short stories of the 1950s, her first published story was ‘Defense Mechanism’, which appeared in Astounding in October 1949, and is included in The Diploids. Over the decades MacLean has continued to write whilst being employed in a wide variety of jobs – as book reviewer, economic graphanalyst, editor, EKG technician, food analyst, laboratory technician in penicillin research, nurse’s aide, office manager and payroll bookkeeper, photographer and pollster, to name a few.

Our first Katherine MacLean eBook is collection The Diploids, which contains  stories from the first five years of her career:

* The Diploids
* Defense Mechanism
* The Pyramid in the Desert
* The Snowball Effect
* Incommunicado
* Feedback
* Games
* Pictures Don’t Lie

Through Katherine MacLean’s artistry and imagination you’ll soar through space, you’ll touch the stars, you’ll bask in the glow of other suns . . . and you will be one with . . .

– The long-legged lawyer who suspected that he was a Martian
– The boy who became all he characters in his make-believe games
– The sewing-circle ladies who took over the world
– The alien spacemen adrift in a raindrop
– The woman who discovered the terrible secret of immortality

There are other stories in this remarkable collection, but merely to describe them might give away their plots, and that is a dastardly crime punishable by indefinite exile on mysterious, fog-shrouded Planet X!

Welcome to the Gateway, Katherine MacLean!