The Crack of Doom by Robert Cromie

Description

Robert Cromie sent a hero into space before he wrote this, but his finest invention was a basement: a quiet experimenter’s chamber where the end of the world is being assembled with precision and patience. His narrator is an ordinary young man of moderate fame who drifts into the orbit of Herbert Brande, the genius who announces, mid-voyage, that the universe is a mistake.

Brande’s reasoning is never mocked by Cromie, which is what makes the novel so effective. The scientist argues with lucid, remorseless logic that the suffering outweighs the pleasure, and that an arrangement so badly made should be dismissed rather than endured. The rest of the book is the countdown: tests, doubts, the human cost of a theory held to its conclusion, and the terrible question of whether the one man holding the key can be stopped in time. Written long before the power of the atom was real, it reads like a prophecy nobody was clever enough to take seriously.

For students of early science fiction

• One of the very first novels to place the destruction of the world on a laboratory bench.
• A philosophical antagonist argued with unsettling fairness.
• The apocalyptic thriller as a genre, born almost fully armed.

About This DodaBooks Edition

The complete 40 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.