Preview by Frank Belknap Long
Preview by Frank Belknap Long is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. Its likely topic is an uncanny film preview that foreshadows extraterrestrial interference and a mass erasure of human memory. A Hollywood publicist, Mr. Scanlon, hosts a special screening for critics, boasting that his star, Stella, embodies “stripped” realism in a meticulously authentic Western. Midway through the preview, the film warps: a tentacled entity appears, the landscape
shifts, Stella grotesquely transforms, and Scanlon abruptly vanishes into nothing. The narration withholds any tidy explanation because, one week later, saucer-borne aliens land and wipe from humanity’s minds the treasured knowledge that could have recorded or explained the incident—leaving the preview’s horrors and Scanlon’s motives lost to oblivion. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78072.html.images | 32 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78072.epub3.images | 269 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78072.epub.images | 267 kB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78072.epub.noimages | 211 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78072.kf8.images | 863 kB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78072.kindle.images | 855 kB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78072.txt.utf-8 | 24 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/78072/pg78072-h.zip | 234 kB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Long, Frank Belknap, 1903-1994 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Emshwiller, Ed, 1925-1990 |
| Title | Preview |
| Original Publication | New York: King-Size Publications, Inc., 1955. |
| Series Title | Produced from Fantastic Universe, January 1956 (Vol. 4, No. 6). |
| Credits | Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Science fiction |
| Subject | Short stories |
| Subject | Motion pictures -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 78072 |
| Release Date | Feb 28, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 5161 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |