The Pygmy Planet

Larry Manahan is a frustrated advertising agent with six feet of lean, hard muscle and zero adventures to show for it. All he wants is a slice of real life instead of the monotonous grind of fifty dollars a week. Then the phone rings. It's Agnes Sterling, a girl from his past now working for the reclusive Dr. Travis Whiting, and she's terrified. Larry rushes to their isolated laboratory only to discover the impossible: a miniature planet, barely larger than a snow globe, where an entire civilization exists in miniature. But this isn't a gentle world of Lilliputian wonder. It's a nightmare of mechanical creatures, silicon-based monstrosities that have enslaved the planet's human population. And they're worshipping an ancient steam hammer as a god. When Dr. Whiting is captured, Larry makes a desperate choice: he shrinks himself down and enters the Pygmy Planet to save the woman he loves. What follows is a breathless adventure through strange lands, past ancient ruins, and into the heart of a civilization that sacrifices its own to appease their mechanical overlords. Written in 1932, this is pulp SF at its finest: inventive, fast-paced, and utterly unafraid of big ideas about technology, evolution, and what it means to be human.