Jack Williamson 1 hr 37 min read

Following a strange summons into the unexplored heart of Australia, an explorer discovers a hidden valley walled off from the world, home to two warring alien intelligences and their captive humans.

Jack Williamson's 1929 story is a rousing lost-world and first-contact adventure. Vivid, imaginative golden-age pulp. Read it for an early classic by a future Grand Master, compared in its day to Merritt's Moon Pool, a wondrous, perilous tale of alien beings and lost realms hidden in the Australian outback, in lush pulp-romance style.

In its time

Published in 1929, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

1 hr 37 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Frank R. Paul