JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (Another entry in the neglected "Strange Things in the Sky" category.)
The story "The Giant Atom" in Startling Stories was pretty striking to me, as it was published in December 19431 and (I thought) was illustrated with what looked like the first milliseconds of a nuclear explosion, except the reality of that event was still more than half a year away. There are a number of prescient atomic bomb stories written in the 50 years or so preceding the real one, and I thought that this one might be an odd, back-door entry to the little sub-genre. So before I got into the story I checked out the author, Malcolm Jameson, and found that the story was re-issued later as "The Atomic Bomb", which ignited curiosity enough to at least start to read it to see if this was indeed an "atom bomb" story written in 1943.
Possible evidence to the contrary, it seems as though this turgidly-written story was indeed about a gigantic blob-like atom. I can't get to the details because the prose covered stuff up like a syrupy metal brick: "Anything that is as small as four or five feet in diameter and weighs five or ten thousand tons is pretty dense, general.”
- Um. Yes. It works out that this 5' sphere would weigh about 3,000 average-sized cars, or 1/4 of the weight of the 887' USS Missouri, something like 11,000 pounds/litre, or 11 pounds (4,983 grams) cm3 . Osium, the densest metal, weighs in at 22 grams cm3. That's quite something. For another perspective, I believe a neutron star would weigh about 4x107 pounds.
- Another way of looking at this, since the idea of the 4,000-lb bomb is introduced here, is via ordnance. The first 1000 plane bombing mission by the RAF occurred May 30, 1942 over Cologne, where the total amount of ordnance dropped equaled about one-third of the weight of the sphere. Cologne received 34,711 tons of ordnance from all Allied bombing missions during the war, about three times the weight of the sphere, doing vast damage and killing 20,000 civilians, or about 1.7 tons of ordnance per death. So. The atom was heavy.
The atom seems to have started out small and grew, though even at the beginning "a large formation of bombers dropping 4,000-pound bombs" had no effect on it. (Note: this was at just about the time when the Brits announced the introduction of a 4,000-pounder into its arsenal--about the largest bomb at the time.)
"Only Steve Bennion, Inventive Genius, and His Lovely Assistant, Kitty Pennell, Stand Between the Earth and Destruction When a Flaming Monster Threatens to Devour and Destroy Civilization!” it says, somewhere, of the "flaming monster" atom. How disappointing.
There's too much going on in this work in too many (128!) pages, and I can't be sure from a five minute browse that I know what the real story is. It does seem as though some sort of giant atom comes to Earth and threatens the planet, somehow, and seems to grow quite a bit from the 4- or 5-foot diameter sphere to something much larger later on. There is some talk of "New Eden" and space ships and lifting the atom into the cargo bay of the space ship "New Hope". As I said I thought that since this story would be re-titled (re-written?) as "The Atomic Bomb" that it had something to do with the bomb, though it seems not to, except for somehow weaponizing a cyclotron. Anyway I can't go any further here because the story just isn't interesting enough, though the cover art opens up some interesting twists of interpretation.
Notes:
1. Startling Stories, December 1943 [vol. 10, no. 2 "Winter Issue"] [New York and Chicago: Better Publications, Inc.]
Text source: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/jamesonm-giantatom/jamesonm-giantatom-00-h.html#chap05
Image source: Parigi Books, where you can purchase the original, at https://www.parigibooks.com/pages/books/27413/malcolm-jameson/the-giant-atom-in-startling-stories-winter-1944
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