Talents, Incorporated

Publisher Marketing: Charlatans or Prophets? At best, the tiny Kandarian Air Fleet would fight until its last ship was blown into infinity. At worst, it would be annihilated without a chance. To young Captain Bors, either course was unthinkable. The ruthless Dictator of Mekin had already subjugated twenty-two helpless planets. Now he wanted Kandar's unconditional surrender, or his vastly superior forces would blast it out of existence. It took a lot of guts, and the hope that is frequently born of despair, for a military man like Bors to throw in his lot with TALENTS, INCORPORATED, an untried, unscientific organization. Through peculiar gifts of extra-sensory perception, its personnel could, their leader insisted, out-think and out-guess even the most deadly dictator in the history of mankind. Could it? It just might. And it just might not.... But there was absolutely nothing to lose, and a free world (and a beautiful girl) to win. Captain Bors made his decision, and the loaded die was cast! Murray Leinster was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer who wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. He won both a Hugo Award & a Sideways Award for Alternate History. Contributor Bio:  Leinster, Murray Analog Science Fiction and Fact is an American science fiction magazine. As of 2013, it is the longest running continuously published magazine of that genre. Initially published in 1930 in the United States as Astounding Stories as a pulp magazine, it has undergone several name changes, primarily to Astounding Science-Fiction in 1938, and Analog Science Fact & Fiction in 1960. In November 1992, its logo changed to use the term "Fiction and Fact" rather than "Fact & Fiction." It is in the library of the International Space Station. Spanning three incarnations since 1930, this is perhaps the most influential magazine in the history of the genre. It remains a fixture of the genre today. As Astounding Science-Fiction, a new direction for both the magazine and the genre under editor John W. Campbell was established. His editorship influenced the careers of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and also introduced the Dianetics theories of L. Ron Hubbard in May 1950. Analog frequently publishes new authors, including then-newcomers such as Orson Scott Card and Joe Haldeman in the 1970s, Harry Turtledove, Timothy Zahn, Greg Bear, and Joseph H. Delaney in the 1980s, and Paul Levinson, Michael A. Burstein, and Rajnar Vajra in the 1990s. One of the major publications of what fans and historians call the Golden Age of Science Fiction and afterward, it has published much-reprinted work by such major SF authors as E. E. Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey, HP Lovecraft and many others. This is an excerpt from the article Astounding Stories of Super Science from the Wikipedia free encyclopedia.