Okay, when I was a kid I remember reading a novel about Boy Scouts who discover a time machine. They spend the bulk of the book travelling between the present and the day before the Johnstown Flood. At one point, one of the characters in the book is knocked unconscious and is thrown on the back of a wagon in 19th Century PA. The copy I had as a kid was hard backed, illustrated, and had no mention of the author’s name anywhere that I could find. (Always suspected that the author was Heinlein, because it read like his stuff, but have seen no evidence of that in any thing he’s mentioned about his own writing.)
The next is a short story which dealt with the inventor of the first FTL ship. In it, he builds the ship, takes off, and lands on another planet. On this planet, a woman he meets shows him a telescope which follows the course of events of the life of the wife he left behind on Earth. He sees one of his business partners taking her out to dinner, and then seducing her, while the inventor is away. The inventor becomes enraged by this, returns to Earth (arriving just miliseconds after he left, thanks to time dilation effects) and kills his business partner.
The third one is about what happens when people figure out how to teleport. In the story a man with the last name “Jaunt” is put into a life threatening situation and somehow manages to teleport himself someplace else. This immediately leads to research on suicide volunteers to try and figure out the mechanism behind it. When they manage to crack it, everyone on Earth learns how to do it, but no one can figure out how to do it in space. One of the characters, a man who has had himself surgically altered to have a number of cybernetic devices implanted in his body, manages to do it. He then becomes a rather wanted man through out the solar system.
The fourth one is, I think, called “The Ambassador.” In it, an expedition to one of Jupiter’s moons discovers that the moon is actually a space ship from another planet. Inside the space ship, they find a statue of someone from the race that built the space ship, which comes to be referred to as “The ambassador.”
The fifth is a series of three books about a man who is a minor noble and does spy type work on the side. He has a French sounding name, IIRC, and in one of the books finds himself in a casino asteroid which is being used for something like organ harvesting (at least I can remember guests being stuck in suspended animation chambers for use later). One of the books opens with a description of what year it is that goes something like, “To the Christians it was the year X,XXX, to the Jews it was XX,XXX, but to everyone else it was the year X,XXX.” I know that the main character of the books wound up being described in an issue of Dragon magazine, as part of an article on converting fictional characters to the D&D universe.
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