The World Beyond

Matter, Space, and Time

by Ray Cummings

Out of nowhere came the grim, cold, black-clad men, to kidnap three Earth people and carry them to a weird and terrible world where a man could be a giant at will.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories

41 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2009

About the author

Raymond King Cummings. His career resulted in some 750 novels and short stories, using also the pen names Ray King, Gabrielle Cummings, and Gabriel Wilson.

See Wikipedia

Reviews

[Bettie · Rating 1 out of 5]

The World Beyond
Author: Raymond King Cummings
Published: 1942
Language: English
Wordcount: 13,492 / 47 pg

Short Story,
Science Fiction
winter 2012/2013
gutenberg
ebook
adventure

The link:

Out of nowhere came these grim, cold, black-clad men, to kidnap three Earth people and
carry them to a weird and terrible world where a man could be a giant at will.

Lee Anthony crouched and set himself to
resist the attack of the robed men.

Opening: The old woman was dying. There could be no doubt of it now. Surely she would not last through
the night. In the dim quiet bedroom he sat watching her, his young face grim and awed. Pathetic business,
this ending of earthly life, this passing on. In the silence, from the living room downstairs the gay
laughter of the young people at the birthday party came floating up. His birthday—Lee Anthony, twenty-one
years old today. He had thought he would feel very different, becoming—legally—a man. But the only difference now,
was that old Anna Green who had been always so good to him, who had taken care of him almost all his life, now was dying.

Rec by Wanda

So Old Testament preachy for such a short sci-fi entry.
1*

[PSXtreme · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some rather original ideas (some of which were mirrored in the ending of the original "Men in Black (1997)" movie) with some really horrible prose. The writing was extremely amateurish while the science for the pre-NASA era was astounding, thus the 3 star rating. If you are all about the special effects, stay away. For those of you that dig you some old school SF, pick this up at your next opportunity.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining space listening 🎶🔰

Another will written fantasy space opera Sci-Fi adventure thriller short story by Ray Cummings about a number of humans sailing from earth 🌎 to space and try to survive the daily trials of living in outer space. I would recommend this novella to readers of fantasy space adventurers novels 👍🔰. Enjoy the adventure of novels 👍🔰 and books 📚. 2022 Due to health issues I am forced to have Alexa read to me , stay health.

[Audiobook Heaven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, I listened to the audiobook version on YouTube. I will leave the link below so that everyone can enjoy it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sTcN...

[MB Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

A heavy-handed morality story about the evilness of people.

Worlds within worlds seems to be a 'thing' with Cummings. In his most famous work, The Girl in the Golden Atom, the hero gets small and finds love in the world in an atom. In The World Beyond the hero gets big and finds love in a world where our world is atom sized (or thereabouts, I was reading pretty quickly and not paying the strictest attention by then).

The World Beyond was originally published in 1942 in Amazing Stories, 20 years after The Girl in the Golden Atom. The next year, 1943, two issues of Captain America Comics featured a two part story, "Princess of the Atom". Apparently (according to the Ray Cummings Wikipedia article) Cummings wrote this himself, recycling the plot from The Girl in the Golden Atom. Worlds within worlds have been a staple of comics every since I've been reading them. Wonder if this was the first?

I collected a fair number of Cummings novels and shorter works after reading The Girl in the Golden Atom, but I haven't read much of it. I hope firstly that the overall quality is better than this work from the later part of his career, and secondly that he has a wider range of plots.

I am hopeful. Cummings is considered one of "founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre" AND is apparently the original source for of one of my favorite sayings: "Time... is what keeps everything from happening at once" (both quotes from the Wikipedia article). The quote isn't cast quite as I remember it ("Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once") but it's pretty close.

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

I enjoyed chapter 2 "The Flight Into Size and Space" because I thought the author's way of dealing with faster-than-light travel was interesting, but aside from that I am not a fan of this story. I did not like the characters (they were bland, boring and uninteresting), I did not like the world setting, the plot, and the writing was uninspiring (infuriating punctuation with with the overuse of the em dash and 4 dot ellipsis). The story was unnecessarily long, which is surprising for a short story.

"The Flight Into Size and Space" was interesting because instead of trying to travel fast through space, they just kept getting larger until eventually they were larger than the universe and kind of emerged into a larger universe. Kind of like a cosmic marble, -- while that chapter was still boring and entirely too long, for a brief moment it sparked my interest

[Bastiaan Machielse · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nice little time killer. Nice old skool style story.