Charley Guilborn is a high school science teacher. He’s fallen in love with Carol, one of his students. Carl however is in love with Eon Hunter, another student. Eon is Charley’s most disturbing pupil. He’s the worst student in the class even though he’s clearly very bright.
One day Charley sets up a simple experiment to demonstrate one of the basic laws of physics. It fails. Which is impossible. It fails over and over again. There’s nothing wrong with the equipment. But it keeps failing.
Eon is a misfit. He knows he doesn’t fit into the world and he talks about crazy stuff like changing the world so he will fit in. He also paints. One day Charley gets to see one of Eon’s paintings. It’s a painting of a nude girl in a fantastic landscape and she’s feeding flowers to a dinosaur. It’s strange but oddly fascinating and disturbing. There’s something else disturbing about it - Carol was clearly the model for the nude girl. That painting will later become very important.
The romantic triangle involving Carol, Eon and Charley doesn’t work out for any of them. Eon leaves school. Charley gives up his teaching post and a few years later he’s working in a top-secret government research project.
It’s a very important project. The Fate of the Free World is at stake. The aim is to build a hydro-lithium nuclear fusion rocket engine. The idea is scientifically impossible but Charley Guilborn thinks he’s found a way to make it work.
He hasn’t seen Carol or Eon for several years but suddenly they show up. Eon delivers a strange warning to Charley. If the hydro-lithium drive works it will trigger an uncontrolled chain reaction that will mean the end of the world. But it doesn’t matter, because the drive won’t work. This disturbs Charley because he knows the drive will work and he doesn’t believe there’s any scientific possibility that will have disastrous consequences. And yet there’s something about Eon that makes him wonder.
There are some very very cool ideas in this novella. I’m not going to risk spoilers by revealing exactly what those ideas entail.
Equally interesting is the psychological-social dimension. It’s all about belief. Belief is a critical factor in this story, in more than one way.
The 50s was a fascinating decade. Under the surface optimism and naïve faith in science there were strange undercurrents. There was the Cold War hysteria, and the juvenile delinquency hysteria. The counter-culture came into being in the 50s. The first faint stirrings of cultism had begun. There was the UFO craze. What’s really interesting is that Jack Williamson was tapping into these undercurrents as early as 1953.
This is a science fiction novella but it certainly pushes the boundaries of the genre. It pushes them quite a long way.
This is a big ideas story but the big ideas are not in any way conventional scientific ideas. Or rather there’s a mixture of scientific and pre-scientific big ideas. A considerable suspension of disbelief is required from the reader but if you don’t mind that it’s a wild ride and there’s a lot to enjoy. Highly recommended and if you like off-the-wall science fiction I’d bump that up to very highly recommended.
This novella has been paired with Berkeley Livingston’s 1948 novel Queen of the Panther World in an Armchair Fiction two-novel paperback edition.
I’ve reviewed other works by Jack Williamson - The Alien Intelligence and The Legion of Space. They’re very early works but they’re worth checking out.
I'm a child of the 1950's. Sputnik went up when I was in 1st grade, so I benefited from the space race science push in the US education effort. It was also the jet age- a new design seemed to be flying every 6 months. This sounds like a good story to track down.
ReplyDeleteI remember the space age. We were all so optimistic!
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