Murray Leinster 1 hr 29 min read

A supervillain menaces New York with a weapon that can freeze the world solid, one thousand degrees below zero.

Murray Leinster's 1919 thriller opens with a strange, musical hum and a killing cold descending on a Coney Island steamer, the first strike of a madman armed with absolute cold. Brisk, colorful early pulp SF from the young 'dean of science fiction,' all mad science and metropolitan peril. Read it for a lively slice of proto-superhero pulp from the genre's formative years.

In its time

Published in 1919, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

1 hr 29 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).