Austin Hall 1 hr 11 min read

It begins with a poor boy and a burning glass, and ends with a man who has unlocked a power of opalescence that can level mountains, bore bottomless pits, and kill multitudes at a stroke.

Austin Hall's 1919 story is a rousing first-contact and hard-SF tale of a world-threatening super-science. Vivid, imaginative early SF. Read it for a classic pulp parable of a self-taught genius who masters a terrifying new force, and must race to save the Earth from the Frankenstein power he has unleashed.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 11 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).