A few years back I started a re-read through all the Tom Swift Jr books, and after only a couple I noticed that Tom and Bud get knocked out, a lot. I started keeping track, and posting my concussion count, and other thoughts on the books to a thread in the Tom Swift mailing list.
As I went along, my comments started to get more and more in depth, and as I’d hardly written anything about the first books, I then went back and added more comments about the first few books in the series.
I’ve collected all those comments here, editing together some comments that were posted across several messages in the original discussion threads, and adding some more as I went.
The invention of the book is, of course, the Sky Queen, Tom’s enormous Flying Lab. No physical dimensions are actually given for it, but it’s got three decks, and a hanger capable of carrying auxiliary craft: two smaller jets, and a Skeeter helicopter on this trip. I’ve always figured it to be about the size of a 747. The Sky Queen will go on to make an appearance in all but one of the other TS Jr books. (I suspect that the writer of G-Force Inverter read this book, and maybe a sampling of some of the others because his Sky Queen’s performance conforms most closely to the flying lab of this story, without the later enhancements. He even mentioned the audiogyrex anti-acceleration device which gets its only other reference in this book…I thought he’d made it up himself.)
Tom is on the hunt for uranium deposits in a South American country. This hunt is complicated by the deposits being in the territory of some breakaway province of that country. We know that the rebels are bad guys, and the parent country are good guys because…well no reason. We’re just supposed to assume that. (And when they make their appearance the rebels are suitably clichéd bad guy rebels.)
Tom basically just stumbles his way through this adventure, discovering things by luck, and in the end needing to be rescued himself.
Tom gets his first concussion of the series in the first chapter of the first book.
Swift Security Sucks (SSS). Even with their fancy new radar scope to detect intruders, and the electronic locks on the hanger, someone waltzes right into the Toms’ office to root around in it and steal some plans, and people leave vehicles sitting around unattended and unlocked for bad guys to make their escapes in.
The Space Friends: advanced extraterrestrials, who must have been monitoring Earth’s telecommunications, and understanding what they’re picking up well enough to ID the Swifts as the best people on Earth to talk to, and yet the best plan they can come up with to make contact with the Swifts is the equivalent of tossing a rock with a note written in pig Latin on it through their window.
Tom’s rather casual attitude to basic safety procedures is in full swing. He tests whether the bad guy who stole the Skeeter sabotaged it before abandoning it by taking it for a test flight; skips doing a proper preflight check of the Kangaroo Kub before taking it for a test flight, and thereby doesn’t discover that the rudder cables are fouled until he’s in the air; takes passengers along on the Sky Queen’s first test flight; didn’t test how the jet lifters stood up to extended use before that first test flight; didn’t have an alternate landing spot with a long enough runway available if the lifters failed…
Bad guys leave Tom with his pocket tool kit disguised as coloured pencils. One of them even pulls one of the pencils from his pocket, has a look at it, and then puts it back.
No one ever calls the cops when it would be appropriate to call the cops. If the cops get called it’s usually after it’s too late for them to do any good. Tom and Sandy get shot down by an anti aircraft missile, and no one informs the cops for an hour or two. Sandy gets kidnapped and they don’t call the cops until after they’ve found her. Tom and Hank get captured by bad guys, and Bud and Mr Swift track them down using the homing beacon in Tom’s plane, and then they call the cops after they’ve picked up Tom and Hank (who have already escaped because they left Tom’s trick pencils in his pockets, and their guard wandered off to get something to eat) giving the bad guys time to escape.
It isn’t just the bad guys who don’t set guards. Tom uses the Sky Queen to rescue a bunch of people from a plane crash at sea, while suspecting that one of them is a fugitive, but he leaves them all unguarded in the Sky Queen’s lounge while flying them back to shore, letting said fugitive go wandering around the plane long enough to find himself a parachute, and a door he can open and jump out of.
The women in the story are all pretty much useless. At one point Tom is talking about something he’s working on with his mother, and “Mrs. Swift kept nodding and smiling. Tom would never know it, but she did not understand one word of the intricate details he was telling her!” Sandy is supposed to be an expert pilot, but when she stalls a Pigeon Special into a spin when attempting a roll, Tom immediately takes over to recover from the spin, rather than letting her handle it.
The treatment of non European people is often cringeworthy. Chow is ready to speak with the “Injuns” in some pidgin language — even though he’s never been to South America before — and bribe them with trinkets. (At least it’s an improvement over Tom Sr, who’d threaten them with guns, and if that didn’t work, start shooting.)
Clichés abound, including bad buys saying “So! We meet again!” not once, but twice!
The front page description of the book ends with “Each scientific detail of this fascinating story has been carefully checked. Tom Swift’s inventions may be years ahead of the time, just as his father’s were in their time, but they are all plausible and some day you may see them in use” which is a little optimistic, but this story does stick closer to reality than many of the later books, keeping in mind that it was written before a lot of people figured out that it might not be such a good idea to have nuclear powered aircraft flying around.
The 1950s setting leads to things that seem a little strange to the modern reader, with our routine global communications. At one point Tom is told it will take two hours to put through a phone call from South America to Shopton. When I got to the point when Tom is filtering out the jamming noise from their radio reception, I was reminded of the discussion we had here a few years back, with people speculating on how to rewrite the scene to make it more plausible, and I pointed out that Tom was described as using actual 1950s audio analysis equipment in a semi realistic way.
Tom hasn’t yet started wearing his trademark t-shirt all the time. He’s described as having unwound enough after pulling an all night inventing session that he’s undone his shirt collar, and loosened his tie.
Rip Hulse, ace pilot, and super army intelligence officer: in many ways he’s the real hero of this book. Tom even takes Rip’s mini fighter jet along on their jaunt to South America, where Rip gets to take it dogfighting with another jet that attacks the Sky Queen. And then at the end, after Tom has once again stumbled on the enemy, and gotten himself caught, it’s Rip who comes riding in to the rescue with the cavalry.
Bud picks up his first concussion of the series in Chapter 3 of Tom Swift and His Jetmarine. And then another one in chapter 9. (I missed the second one on the first pass through, so Bud’s score goes up a bit.)
Pirates are attacking ships in the Caribbean, and their latest strike has captured Uncle Ned Newton. Fortunately, Tom is nearing completion on his new two man nuclear submarine, the Jetmarine, so he plans to use it to go rescue Uncle Ned.
As Tom rushes to get his submarine ready in time he has to contend with the pirates’ attempts to spy on him. (Not very well. SSS. (Swift Security Sucks.)) Whatever Tom is doing the pirates seem to know about it in advance. Just how they learn about some of Tom’s plans is never explained. Despite this knowledge of Tom’s plans against them, and knowing what Tom knows, they continue to operate as if their own plans were completely secret. (Maybe they are aware of Tom’s complete disregard for notifying any sort of authorities of things that they really should be told.)
Tom figures out where the pirates’ base of operations is in Chapter 8 thanks to the pirates using an ID tchotchke that conveniently has a map showing their base location marked on it. Rather than forwarding this info to the authorities, for them to deal with the pirates, Tom and his father keep it to themselves, and set out on their own, separate, expeditions to Spaniel Island. The pirates know that they are coming, and yet they continue to operate as if their base of operations is still a secret. They first manage to capture Tom Sr from the yacht he’s using to make the journey, and when Tom Jr turns up, they quickly capture him and Bud too, along with the Jetmarine.
Meanwhile, with several of the pirates having been captured thanks to Tom, and the pirates catching multiple Swifts on their way to, and at their ‘secret’ island base, they plan to make one more strike against a ship carrying a fortune in diamonds in its safe before they pull up stakes and move on to a different base, this time using Tom’s Jetmarine instead of their own sub.
At this point, all their plans just fall apart and the pirates are defeated by their own incompetence, rather than anything Tom does. (Though he did manage to get him and Bud out of the cell they’d locked them in, free Mr. Swift and Uncle Ned, and capture the one pirate left on the island to guard them all.) The rest of the pirate gang pretty much just captures itself.
First the pirate raid fails because the pirates have left the Jetmarine’s distorter—the counter Tom had developed to the pirates’ knockout beam—on. On returning to the island the lead pirate in the jet—also stolen from Tom—with the knockout beam forgets to turn it off, or properly secure it, so it manages to swing around and knock him out, causing him to crash. Then the pirates in the returning Jetmarine manage to flood and sink it.
Fortunately the Sky Queen can fly in with Tom Sr’s giant magnet to lift the sub from the bottom, and after a quick drying, everything’s fine with it again.
This book starts piling up the uses of Tomasite. Not only is it good at radiation shielding, subs coated with it are undetectable by active sonar, and it’s bullet proof.
The actual invention of this book is one of my favourites.
I’m a sucker for a submarine story, and the Jetmarine is my favourite Tom Swift submarine. Unlike many that would follow it, the Jetmarine is something that could conceivably—for the most part—be built. Tom Swift and His Jetmarine was written in 1954, the same year that the USS Nautilus was launched. Unlike nuclear powered aircraft, nuclear submarines are a thing which really do exist, and continue to be built to this day. (Though you really do need to have a superpower government’s resources backing you to be able to afford them.)
The idea of having a personal submarine, just the right size to support two passengers, is very attractive. The book text isn’t very specific about just how big it is, but it is small enough to be carried in the Sky Queen’s hanger, or on a truck across regular highways. The size, as depicted in the various illustrations is variable, which is pretty common for the illustrations in a TS book. Sometimes it’s shown that the transparent nose section is big enough for Tom and Bud to stand in it (Such as on the cover, or the internal illustration of the encounter with the giant squid.) On the other hand Bud is shown as barely having room to sit in the nose, in the illustration of them navigating the mined approach to Spaniel Island. But going by the “it can be shipped on a truck” metric, figure on it having an exterior max dimension of about 12 feet wide/tall (any bigger and you start having to use lead and tailing escort vehicles with flashing lights etc, and take precautions about overhead wires, but maybe the rules were laxer in the 50s) so the interior could easily be eight feet wide/tall. Lots of room for two people, with a couple of bunks, a galley, head, etc. Lots of people are driving around in RVs with less space inside.
While a nuclear powered deep sea submersible on the Jetmarine plan wouldn’t really be practical (when you get right down to it, big windows on deep water submarines don’t make much sense) I could envision a more conventionally powered submarine like a Jetmarine for operating in shallow water being quite practical.
They’ve identified the island that the pirates are using as their base of operations in Chapter 8, but does anyone suggest dropping a company of marines on it, or a commando platoon, or maybe some FBI agents? Nope. And as this was written in 1954, while Batista was still firmly in control of Cuba, they didn’t even have the excuse of not wanting to annoy Castro. Instead it’s decided that Tom and Bud will go there in their Jetmarine, and Tom Sr sets out on a friend’s yacht with the same idea.
To throw off the pirates, Tom plans to ship a fake Jetmarine to its launch site by way of a radio controlled truck, with some cops following along to swoop in and capture any pirates who try to take the truck…but when the pirates attack the cops are too far away to get to the truck in time to capture any of them in the time it takes for the pirates to discover that they’ve been fooled, and make their getaway, despite the radio control operator being right there watching and reporting on the whole thing. (And if you’re going to do that sort of thing, why not have an actual driver, and load some cops into the truck to be right there to make the capture if the pirates try anything?)
Despite ample evidence that the pirates know exactly where Tom’s launch site is (including them attempting to steal the Fat Man suits that were shipped separately because Tom forgot to pack them in the Sky Queen) Tom is convinced that his diversion efforts have completely worked.
And speaking of Fat Man suits: these things which are big enough for Tom and Bud to comfortably sit in, protect them from from the ocean pressure a mile down, have neutral buoyancy, and are still light enough for one person to lift and carry them easily. Something with that much air inside it would have to weigh about a ton to be able to sink.
Tom is in a big rush to get to Spaniel Island in the Sea Dart, to beat the enemy submarine there and rescue Uncle Ned, but he takes the time to make a detour into a 4000 foot deep ocean canyon to do a little fishing. And then on the way back up he spots some really dense seaweed, and instead of going around it, he decides to go through it. (I wonder if Tom was one of Captain Janeway’s distant ancestors.)
Tom’s pocket battery powered soldering iron has enough power to melt the metal of an electrified door enough to short circuit it. My dad’s big old foot long plug in soldering iron couldn’t do that. Solder has a rather low (for a metal) melting point. It’s a very rare soldering iron that would get hot enough to melt any metal you’d use to make a door with.
The plot is driven by coincidences. Dansitt comes to Tom’s attention when his careless flying nearly kills Sandy, then he drops one of the spaniel pesos on the runway where Tom can find it. All this happens just after the pirates have captured Uncle Ned. A couple of the pirates come into Gus’s dinner while Chow is filling in for a sick cook, talk about their plans where Chow can overhear them, and then let him see that they’ve got a spaniel peso too.
We have the aforementioned incident with the burglar alarm on the house not actually detecting a burglar.
Then throughout the rest of the book the pirates seem to know exactly what Tom is doing, all the time. They know when and how the Fat Man suits are getting shipped separately to the launch site, and make an attempt to steal them. They know that Tom Sr is on his way to Spaniel Island with a friend on his yacht. They know about Tom Jr’s plans to go there. How they are gaining all this info is never revealed.
Dansitt overflies Swift Enterprises to take pictures of the Jetmarine. (How did he know it would be outside at just that time?) Tom takes off in pursuit, forces Dansitt down in a field, lands and assaults him, and takes a film canister from him.
Then, after Tom learns he got the wrong film, he pursues Dansitt to New York, assaults him again, and takes the right film canister from him.
Good thing for Tom there weren’t any cops around. They would have arrested him.
Tom is aboard his Jetmarine for its first ever pressure test, which is carried out before testing things like the oxygen system (which has serious flaws, among them being a crimp in a single line knocks out the whole thing…and in reality it’s not the lack of oxygen that gets you first, it’s the build up of CO2, and with one person inside something the size of the Jetmarine, that would take hours.) Similar testing procedures are used for the Fat Man suits, but at least they’ve got working air systems.
All this testing takes place without the people inside the devices being tested being able to talk to the people outside.
Tom and Bud each pick up one concussion in Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship. Tom gets whacked on the head with a wrench by a spy he catches in his lab (SSS) and Bud gets knocked out in some turbulence during their rocket launch.
Tom’s after a prize of $100,000 to be the first person to orbit the globe in a space ship. Add another three zeros to that amount, and it might plausibly begin to cover the cost of developing an orbit capable rocket, even using 1950s dollars, and a lot of optimism. (NASA had already spent over a billion dollars when they put John Glenn into orbit, but a lot of that was going into the initial design work for Gemini and Apollo.) Another three zeros and you get into the realm of what the actual real world cost of developing something like the Star Spear would be. (We’re still not quite there, but something like Falcon Heavy with a Dragon capsule, when they were still planning to do powered landings with it, would be starting to get close.)
We hear about several other groups that are competing for the prize, and in something that is a bit of a rarity for a Tom Swift Jr book, most of them are just treated as rivals, rather than enemies. The most serious competition is initially seen to be a group operating out of Australia. We never see them, but Tom is constantly rushing to stay ahead of them.
The real competition is coming from someone who isn’t officially in the race. The mysterious Rotzog. An evil foreign scientist, from no specified country (and claiming to be stateless, but with lots of cash coming from somewhere) who plans to put up a space station from which he will RULE THE WORLD! MWA-HA-HA! (We don’t actually get to see him, but I imagine he’s the evil laughter type.) He sees Tom as the main threat to his plan, and the best source for ideas to steal, so his agents alternate between spying on Tom’s efforts, and trying to sabotage them.
After numerous adventures, getting captured by Rotzog’s agents and escaping, and being delayed by some of Rotzog’s sabotage efforts Tom finally manages to launch into his orbit around the Earth, just minutes ahead of his Australian rivals. After a nearly deadly encounter with a magnetic meteor swarm, and a close encounter with some of the Space Friends, it’s beginning to look like Tom’s got the prize in the bag, when Rotzog shows up with his missile armed spaceship, and tries to blow Tom out of space. Fortunately Tom manages to outfly Rotzog’s ship, and it’s crippled by its using an earlier version of Tom’s fuel kicker (more on that later) the design for which Rotzog stole from Tom. Tom completes his orbit, and lands to the accolades of the crowd, and to collect his $100,000.
This book does a good job of covering some of the issues with launching rockets into space, and a bad job with others.
One of the things the book gets right is the payload fraction for a rocket going into orbit. When Tom is giving Sandy and Phyl their tour of his rocket, he tells them that the actual orbital vehicle is only about two percent of the total rocket’s mass…which is in the right ballpark for what chemical rockets can do.
You can improve your mass fraction by using more energetic rocket fuels to give you a higher exhaust velocity, but there is a limit to just how much energy you can get out of a chemical reaction. Enter the Fuel Kicker. The kicker uses solar power to convert the liquid oxygen in Tom’s fuel tanks into liquid ozone before it’s fed into the rocket’s engine, thus making it more energetic, boosting his exhaust velocity, and letting his rocket have a lower mass fraction. Of course this wouldn’t really work. There isn’t enough solar power available to convert a significant portion of the oxygen to ozone, quickly enough, but Tom’s going to have a bit of a history of getting impossible amounts of energy out of solar power collectors, starting here. (Well he got a bit of a head start in Jetmarine, where he was playing around with solar powered welding.) This is the first of his major inventions to run off solar power, but it certainly won’t be the last.
At one point Tom also points out one of the counterintuitive aspects of orbital dynamics to Bud: going faster makes you slow down. They’re running a little behind schedule, due to their encounter with the meteor swarm, so Bud suggests that they fire their engine to speed up.
“We can go faster all right by turning on the motors for a few seconds,” Tom assured him. “But that won’t solve our problem. If we go any faster, the earth can’t hang on to us and we’ll float up out of our orbit. Then we’ll have that much farther to go.”
(I guess Tom doesn’t suggest slowing down to go faster, which would work, because to collect the prize they have to maintain an altitude of over 1075 miles…which is the altitude for a two hour orbit. That 1075 mile high orbit also puts them right in the lower Van Allen belt, but it hadn’t been discovered yet.)
Tom puts his rocket into a polar orbit, something that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a first orbital flight, since that doesn’t let you take advantage of the earth’s rotational speed. To get a true polar orbit you actually have to cancel out the speed boost you get from launching with the earth’s rotation. I can only imagine it was one of the prize requirements, like the altitude.
One thing that the writer didn’t seem to appreciate is just how freakin’ big space is. Tom and Bud keep looking out their windows expecting to see Rotzog and their Australian rivals. They actually get in radar detection range of the Australians once, and Tom maneuvers his ship to avoid a collision, despite the fact that based on what we’re told of the Australians’ launch time and orbital track they should have been on the opposite side of the planet.
Rotzog also manages to intercept Tom to start firing missiles at him—something that should have been pretty much impossible without knowing Tom’s exact orbit…which no one on the ground could have known because of the jinking around Tom did with the meteor swarm, and other maneuvering he’s been doing. (And magnetic meteor swarms…not really a thing that happens.) Rotzog also would have had to make nearly a 90° plane change maneuver to intercept Tom, given what we know of his launch point, and plane changes are expensive. In Rotzog’s case it would have required a change in velocity of about 9000 m/s.
Speaking of changes in velocity, Tom does that a lot in this book. First there’s the meteor swarm, which pulls him 500 miles higher before he escapes it. We’re not told how much delta-v Tom used to escape the swarm, but after he does that he expends more to return to his lower orbit, which would require a delta-v of about 300 m/s.
Then to make up time, Tom accelerates to 24,000 mph, while using his steering jets to keep in the lower, faster orbit, so that’s another 3600 m/s for the speed boost, and an additional 6 m/s^2 from his steering jets. Tom’s planning to keep this up for 25 minutes or so, so that’s an additional 9000 m/s, but Rotzog shows up first, so we don’t really know how long he kept that up. Instead he accelerates again to 30,000 mph, another 2700 m/s. And then when he gets to the end of his orbit, he decelerates to a stop, without doing any aerobraking, so that’s another 13000 m/s. (Without Rotzog, it would have been 10700 m/s). He then does a powered descent from 200 miles high, including a little hover time to ask for clearance to land. That’s another 2500 m/s
| 300 | m/s | |
| 3600 | m/s | |
| 9000 | m/s | |
| 10700 | m/s | |
| 2500 | m/s | |
| Total: | 26100 | m/s |
|---|
So, if we ignore the Rotzog detour, which has too many unknowns, and much of the messing about with magnetic meteors, and just go with Tom’s plan for the final phase of his orbit, the Star Spear—after already making low earth orbit has 26100 m/s of delta-v available to it. (12900, not counting the landing.)
And in order to intercept Tom, Rotzog’s ship had to have similar capability.
If you want to take a rocket trip to anywhere the first question to ask is “How much delta-v do I need?” Turning it around, you can ask “Where can I go with 12900 m/s of delta-v?”
The Moon.
It takes about 6000 m/s to go from Low Earth Orbit to a landing on the moon, and another 6000 to come back. (That’s if you don’t do any aerobraking. You can get back with a lot less delta-v if you let the earth’s atmosphere slow you down at the end of your return flight.)
And since the Star Spear is a proper rocket that lands on a pillar of fire like Robert A Heinlein intended, it would have no problem landing on the moon.
So what the heck did Tom need the Challenger for?
The robot drones with “landing forcers” that protect Fearing Island. The landing forcer is a device that somehow takes control of intruding aircraft and forces them to land.
Add heat resistance to Tomasite’s properties.
Suspicious intruders arrive on Fearing Island, and Tom hands one of them over to Phil Radnor of the Swift Security Police to be escorted off the island. Four pages later the suspect has knocked out Radnor, and is snooping around in Tom’s lab, and then he knocks out Tom and escapes from the island in one of their own boats.
Multiple saboteurs either infiltrate Tom’s team, or mange to get on and off Fearing Island undetected.
We learn that Tom keeps his log of his lab notes in code. Fine so far, but we also learn that he keeps the code book needed to read and write his notes in the same safe as his log book.
Newspapers print stories based on single sourced rumors.
In order to “secretly” move the various stages of his rocket to Fearing Island, Tom uses the Sky Queen to carry them to Fernwood—the closest town on the mainland—where they are transferred to Navy BARCs to be ferried to the island. Why not just fly them all the way?
The Space Friends. (I’m sorry, but any time they get involved, it’s silly) After Tom has escaped from the magnetic meteor swarm he needs their help to tell him how to get back on course. He’s got his Spacelane Brain telling him what orbit he’s in, and he knows what orbit he wants to be in. That’s the sort of calculation he should be able to do in his head.
The Australian rivals “run out of fuel” and are forced to land somewhere near Bermuda. I’m sorry, but if your rocket has already gone half way around the world, it will keep going the rest of the way without needing any additional fuel.
Landing a seaplane in essentially 0 visibility, with only dead reckoning to tell them if they’re in the right place, and promptly ripping the bottom out of their plane by running afoul of some fishing nets. (The fishermen were remarkably blasé about losing their nets, too—the nets were insured, but what about the lost catch?—and immediately offer to transport Tom and Bud the 40 miles to their destination.)
Careless storage of hydrofluoric acid on the Sky Queen nearly causes a disaster.
The Star Spear’s final destination is a Naval air base near San Francisco, that’s crowded with spectators come to see the landing.
Tom follows some suspected spies to their base in Quebec, gets captured, Macgyvers an escape, and then reports them to the authorities, giving the bad guys time to abandon their base before the police can show up. He also identifies the location of Rotzog’s base in the Aleutians, but for some reason no one suggests sending anyone to take a look until days later, when someone else reports suspicious activities going on on the island, and it’s too late for anyone to get there before Rotzog launches.
Tom admits that he sucks at naming things: ”I have a harder job naming some of these things than I do figuring them out.”
Tom picks up his third concussion in Tom Swift and His Giant Robot, and the first to take place on that shortcut through the woods between his home and Swift Enterprises.
Tom is working to perfect his Giant Robot (We are told repeated that it’s not just any normal sized robot, it’s a giant robot. Most of Tom’s prototypes in which he tests out the robot’s various subsystems are just regular sized robots, though.) to work inside the reactor containment building at his father’s atomic research station, the Citadel. Rather than having a new invention in the works just as a problem crops up for which his invention is the ideal solution, this book is one of the rarer examples in the series where Tom’s invention is created for a specific purpose, and the plot of the book centers around achieving that purpose.
This time Tom is up against a mad scientist (literally) who is violently opposed to nuclear energy, and his gang of bank robber accomplices. Tom has to battle against the scientist’s attempts to sabotage the Citadel, and his Giant Robot, and the bank robbers who want to steal a robot, because they think it can be turned into the ultimate bank robbing machine.
If the book were written today, it would probably say that Dr. Raymond Turnbull was suffering from PTSD. After a mistake of his nearly killed another researcher, Raymond “snapped” and was institutionalized. But now he’s escaped from the hospital, and he’s coming after the Swifts. His identical twin brother Robert is one of the scientists working at the Citadel. (And it isn’t until nearly the end of the book that it finally occurs to Tom that just maybe Raymond has kidnapped his brother, and taken his place. SSS)
In the end, Tom and his Giant Robot triumph, the Citadel is saved from a disaster that would have been worse than Chernobyl, and Dr. Turnbull is returned to the hospital, where his doctors are hopeful of him making a full recovery.
That shortcut through the woods.
This is the first book in which Sandy and Phyl actually manage to drag Tom and Bud away to a social engagement (where they have a gay time.)
We start to see signs of Bud’s (and Tom’s) rather mean spirited sense of humour. Bud secretly programs the robot Herbert to apparently go berserk when performing at a charity fund raiser to frighten the crowd, and Tom, having discovered what Bud’s done, adds his own programming on top of it to make Bud think the robot really has gone out of control.
We’re only in book 4, and the writers are already having continuity problems.
We are told in this book that Tomasite is a creation of Tom Jr’s, instead of Tom Sr’s.
The Distorter developed in Jetmarine to counter the pirate’s sonic knockout weapon is now a generic anti-anything beam. (Tom also spends some time creating mini versions of it that fit inside a ten gallon hat for him and his father…which then don’t do anything for the rest of the book.)
Not picking up that Raymond has replaced his brother Robert, and various other information leaks throughout the book, though by the end we have learned how most of those leaks were happening. (Between Raymond, and a bug he managed to plant in Tom’s office.)
Bad guys manage to sneak into Swift Enterprises and stow away on planes shipping equipment to the Citadel, and nearly succeed in hijacking those planes.
There is a rare occurrence of the magnetic field burglar alarm picking up someone approaching the Swift home, but this time it’s not someone tying to sneak in. He came up to the front door and rang the bell.
This is the first book in which Sandy and Phyl have significant roles. Aside from the aforementioned date, when not making late dinners for Tom Sandy helps Bud with the bloodhounds when they go searching for Tom after he disappeared on his way to work, and she and Phyl go along on a trip to the Citadel, and they have their own adventure with Bud, while Tom is off doing inventing stuff. We get a very little bit of character development on Phyl, learning that she likes to draw.
We learn a couple of new things about Bud in this book: He’s living with his aunt, since his parents moved to California, and he once came in second in a bird calling contest.
We learn that the Swift’s national network of videophone connections is run through a plugboard in Swift Enterprises, with operators physically making the connections. This seems rather backwards for an advanced technology company like Swift Enterprises. Automatic telephone switching systems first went into use in the 19th century.
Tom’s prototype for a walking robot was named Stan Lee. I did a quick look, and this was written before Stan’s work at Marvel started to bring him to prominence in the comics world, so that’s probably just a coincidence. (Stan had been working in comics since the 40s though, so maybe not.)
Tom’s Giant Robots are guided through pre-programmed actions by punched tapes, which Tom explicitly compares to player piano rolls here. (The Star Spear’s autopilot worked in a similar fashion.) He has developed a library of thousands of tapes from which the right one is selected to perform the needed task. For something not in the library an operator can take direct control, and the robots are responsive enough that operators with no training can make them play tennis, or battle one another.
Tom regularly leaves the cockpit of the Sky Queen completely unattended, letting the autopilot do all the flying without any supervision at all. On the first trip to the Citadel he leaves the cockpit empty for two hours while he hangs out with Bud, Sandy and Phyl in the lounge.
Bud, Sandy and Phyl get stranded on top of Purple Mesa for a day, until Tom comes looking for them in the Sky Queen. There isn’t room to land to pick them up so he just lowers a rope ladder while hovering on the jet lifters. When Bud is the last one up the ladder, there’s no one left holding the bottom so the ladder nearly swings him into the exhaust from the lifters.
Bud, Sandy and Phyl didn’t actually commit any, but if there had been anything significant for them to find on top of Purple Mesa, they would have.
Within a month of escaping from the hospital, Raymond Turnbull has managed to team up with a band of bank robbers, build a flock of robotic crow aircraft with something equivalent to Tom’s Landing Forcer in them, locate and equip a secret underground base in a cave in a mesa near the Citadel, and kidnap and replace his brother.
I’m not a fan of how the robot is generally depicted, especially on the cover. The cover illustration has a menacing robot complete with a mouth full of sharp teeth, that along with the protruding tube eyes makes no sense. In the text the robot is described multiple times as having fine Tomasite mail covering all its joints. This thing’s body looks more like the Wizard of Oz Tinman was the artist’s model.
This is also the iconic “Bud’s shouting about something” cover illustration (He’s shouting in the Jetmarine cover too, but he’s much less prominent in that picture) and both Bud and Tom look like they’re about fourteen in the Giant Robot cover.
Okay, on the first pass through this was the point where I started counting concussions, but I still hadn’t started making detailed notes on the stories.
Bud gets knocked out about half way through Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster. This time he gets thrown from a dogsled into a tree.
The Atomic Earth Blaster is an advanced, nuclear powered, tunnel boring machine that Tom is testing as the story begins. This initial version of the Earth Blaster uses conventional hardened metal alloy cutting heads to grind up dirt and rock, and spit the pulverized spoil out the back end, but soon Tom is going to be making a new version that actually smelts the rock it’s cutting through, breaking it down into oxygen, and other elements, and spewing that out the back end.
The development of the newer Earth Blaster is prompted by Uncle Ned commenting that high grade iron ore is getting harder to find, leading to a rise in the price of steel, which is creating a production bottleneck for Swift Construction, and other companies. Tom decides that the best way to get all the iron they need is to dig directly down into the Earth’s liquid metal core. He figures that the best place to do this is in Antarctica.
The town of Shopton is also facing a bit of a water shortage as the story opens (exacerbated by Tom accidentally tunnelling through the town’s main aqueduct in the first chapter.) Tom uses his mechanical Earth Blaster (the smelting version of the Earth Blaster isn’t suitable for that sort of work because the tunnel it leaves behind tends to be radioactive) to create an aqueduct tunnel allowing the town to bring in more water from a nearby lake. (What about Lake Carlopa? Can’t they use water from it?). This earns him the gratitude of the town, and the ire of the man who owns the construction company that had had the contract to dig the tunnel, before Tom cut him out of the deal by offering to do the job for free. (We aren’t supposed to feel too bad about that, because we’re told that he was a very unscrupulous businessman.)
Tom is so confident he can succeed in tunnelling down to the Earth’s core, that his father and Uncle Ned decide to bet the company to finance the expedition to the South Pole. (But really, this is probably the second cheapest book for Tom Jr, so far. The Sky Queen, Sea Dart and Star Spear all had to have cost much more than the Earth Blasters, and the expedition itself wasn’t that expensive.)
Opposing Tom this time is the Kranjovian spy, Bronich, who—as usual—has no problems penetrating Swift security to steal plans for the Earth Blaster, so he can go down to Antarctica to dig for iron, himself.
And the race is on to see who can be first to tap the vast iron resources of the Earth’s core.
Tom leaves his nuclear powered prototype Earth Blaster just sitting on a truck at the edge of a field, unattended by anyone. Naturally it gets swiped by Kranjovian spies.
Once again the total uselessness of the magnetic field alarm on the Swift house is demonstrated. Bronich manages to get past it, sabotage it, and escape again without getting caught. The alarm does go off, but from what we’re told later of what he overheard, it must have gone off as he was leaving. They never would have noticed that Bronich had sabotaged the alarm if Bud hadn’t turned up sheepishly apologizing for having forgotten his wristwatch alarm neutralizer, before he finds out he hadn’t set off the alarm.
Then Bronich penetrates Swift Enterprises with a totally obvious Trojan Horse of a helicopter pilot pretending to make a forced landing there, and gets away undetected in the same helicopter when the same pilot comes back the next day to collect it. (That Swift security radarscope they put so much stock in is also pretty much useless. Bronich neutralized it, as well.)
Kranjovia (or Kranjov: they aren’t consistant about just what the name of the country is.)
Sandy likes sailing. In this book she’s getting ready to enter her new boat in the Shopton Yacht Club regata, so she needs Tom, Bud and Phyl to come sailing with her so she can practice…and then when they’re in the boat it’s Bud on the tiller, though there was no mention of him joining her for the regata. I suppose Sandy and Phyl could have been practicing handling the sheets, because Tom was busy watching for someone else on the lake.
Getting the address of the club that’s local spy network’s base of operations from a prisoner, Tom tells Captain Rock of the State Police that uniformed police officers showing up there might tip off their quarry, so he, Bud and Harlan Ames should go check the place out. (The police couldn’t send some plain clothes detectives to do the job?) Of course Bronich recognizes Tom as soon as he sees him, and manages to make his getaway before they can get the real police there.
They continue to watch the club without police aid, and detect more spies entering it. They don’t bother calling the police back, but continue to stake the place out themselves until the club closes. Then Tom, Bud and Harlan sneak into the club themselves, trespassing of private property, only to find that these latest spies have somehow evaded them too. Then they call the police back.
“Only a well trained scientist could devise such a thing.” Tom says something like this in every other book, and he’s usually talking about someone beating the Swift Security radarscope or home alarm, again. Bad guys in the Swift universe are probably swapping around mimeographed plans for how to get around various Swift security systems.
Bud is a hothead who deals with annoying people by hitting them. Tom isn’t much better, throwing a punch at Bronich, thereby breaking their “truce” and giving Bronich an excuse to take Tom prisoner.
They throw a going away party for Tom and Bud, with lots of gay decorations in the Swift home. (I’m picturing rainbow flags.)
Tom decides that it might be a good idea to take a couple of dogsled teams with him to Antarctica, so he goes off to Alaska to get some from a friend of his father’s…who just sold a sled team to Bronich. Is Colonel Eagle Friend the only guy in the world selling dog sled teams?
First thing on arriving in Antarctica Tom looks out the Sky Queen’s window and spots a dog sled team below him. He immediately jumps to the conclusion that they are Bronich’s. (No one else in the entire continent might be using dogs?) And with a whole continent to choose from, he and Bronich set up their bases in almost exactly the same place. (And while Tom is specifically said to be operating in a part of Antarctica that is claimed by the US,* Bronich is said to be operating in some other country’s territory, yet they both have no problem locating each other’s bases.)
*Note: The US doesn’t have any territorial claims in Antarctica, nor—as far as I can tell—did they ever. They also don’t recognize anyone else’s claims.
At one point Tom goes along with the zoologist he brought along to observe some Antarctic wildlife. They land their float plane near an iceberg to watch some seals on it, and are charged by…a blue whale.
Why does it matter who gets their hole dug first? I guess with twice the supply, the actual price you could sell your iron for would drop, but being first or second wouldn’t matter much in that regard. Getting the iron out of the ground is just the first step in a much longer chain to actually get it to market.
And since Bronich is explicitly operating in another country’s territory—a country that sends a military force down to put a stop to what he’s doing once they find out about it—it didn’t really matter all that much whether he succeeded or not. (The other country is never named, but the colonel who shows up to collect Bronich at the end has a French name, and France does have an Antarctic territorial claim.)
Those dogs that Tom takes along don’t really get much use. (Tom actually gets more use out of the dog team Bronich brought along.) The one time the dog sleds are described as being used to transport anything, they’ve got a snow mobile breaking trail for them, so why not just use the snowmobile to haul the sleds?
Tom gets captured by Bronich through his usual just walking into the trap method. Then he manages to escape, but we don’t see that happen, the description of the action is following Bud as he goes back to the Swift base camp to round up the rescue party who come charging back to capture the whole Kranjovian base, only to discover that Tom is already gone, with Bronich’s dogsled team. (And then Colonel Jardin shows up to take the Kranjovians into custody.) How Tom makes his escape is never really described.
The rescue party is armed with tear gas bombs and guns “the only weapons ever carried by a Swift expedition.” Well, except for all the guns that are going to be taken along on various future jungle exploits, the guns Tom Sr used to take with him and use with reckless abandon on anyone who didn’t have the right skin colour, and the Sky Queen’s jet lifters which are a formidable weapon in their own right (and get used as such quite often, including in this book.)
This book highlights one of the problems with the Tom Swift Jr series: his perpetual age of 18. It’s August when the book begins, and they strike iron, by my reckoning, on New Years Eve. (They start tunnelling on Dec 26, and hit iron “five days later”.)
Drilling a hole down through the Earth’s crust and mantle to get iron from the Earth’s core. Even if you could hit iron after only going down a couple of hundred miles, as Tom does, there is no way that the shaft you made would stay open behind your drilling machine. (The actual liquid nickel-iron outer core is nearly ten times deeper than Tom went, at 1,800 miles down.) The rock at that depth is hot enough that it’s pretty plastic, and under the enormous pressure at those depths the hole would close right up again.
And even if you had an Earth Blaster, and could dig a tunnel deep enough to hit commercially viable mineral deposits, the whole enterprise would be in violation of current Antarctic Treaty provisions. Article 7 of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty states “Any activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research, shall be prohibited.”
I have my doubts about the economic viability of Tom’s Antarctic Iron Mine. At the time the book was written scrap iron (and that’s essentially what Tom’s got after his iron tapped from the core cools, a big lump of scrap iron) was selling for about $40 a tonne. The largest ships of the time could haul about 50,000 tonnes of cargo. (Ships bigger than that couldn’t go through the Panama Canal, so that was as big as they made them) so a fully loaded ship would carry about $2,000,000 worth. (Of course in the 50s $2,000,000 was a lot of money.) Now, how much would it cost to chop up that big hunk of iron into manageable sized billets, transport them to the Antarctic coast where you’ve built a deep water harbour, and load them into your cargo ship? Of course this harbour won’t be usable for much of the year as it will be completely frozen in.
As of Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space (or maybe that should be His Outpost IN SPAAAACE!) Bud is starting to get a little genre savvy. Tom’s about to walk home on his own, and runs into Bud at the Enterprises gate. Bud’s all “Oh no! That’s too dangerous! I’ll come with you!” And then they both get conked on the head, and knocked out when taking a shortcut through an alley on their way home from the garage where Bud left his car for some maintenance work. They also both get knocked out later in the story when a meteor hits the Outpost while its under construction, so their counts both go up by two…Bud is now batting 1000 for knockouts per book.
Tom is working on developing a new solar battery based on his new sol-alloy metal, which becomes highly energized when exposed to unfiltered sunlight. Rather than shooting rockets up into space to charge his new batteries, he’s planning to build a space station in low earth orbit to manufacture the batteries. While he’s making these plans Tom Sr. is approached by executives from the nation’s major broadcasters about creating a relay satellite in geostationary orbit, 22,300 miles above the Earth. Tom decides to combine both stations into one, and also invites the government to get involved, offering the station as a platform for a space based astronomical observatory.
Opposing Tom is the Quik Battery Corporation, that is trying to get their own solar battery onto the market, and the mysterious “Gorilla”, so named because Tom thinks he looks like an ape. The president of the Quik Battery Corporation isn’t content to try to get his battery to market before Tom can get his production up and running, he also attempts to frame Tom for sabotaging his own research efforts. The Gorilla is really named Stanis Blatka, (of unspecified nationality) who is a member of an international conspiracy whose aim is to wipe out all of the world’s top scientists, except their own (and are remarkably incompetent at it.)
In addition to the Outpost, and his solar batteries, this book sees the premier of the heliplane, a combination helicopter/jet aircraft that is also capable of landing on water.
Someone fires a guided missile at the Sky Queen. The missile is launched from within the U.S., and comes down in the U.S. and the only people who are out looking for the launch and landing sites are the Swifts. In the real world the Air Force and Army would have been all over something like that…heck even the Navy and Coast Guard would be trying to get in on the search. To say nothing of the FBI, State Police, National Guard, Boy Scouts…
Tom gets info on a location that the foreign agents were operating from in San Francisco, and actually hands it over to FBI, who then sit around waiting for Tom to show up so he can come with them when they raid the place.
Harlan Ames and Phil Radnor capture one of the people who has been causing trouble for Tom, and hold him for hours, again waiting for Tom to arrive so he can help them question him. Near as I can tell they just grabbed him off the street, and then took him to a Swift facility where they held him for hours before handing him over to the police. I think that Rhoderman could probably swear out a kidnapping charge against them.
Tom initially describes launching to geostationary orbit as essentially going straight up for twenty-two thousand miles and then turning sideways, but later when he makes his flight in the Star Spear he actually does initially enter LEO (though much higher than he really should have) and then uses a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (though he doesn’t call it that) to get up to 22,300 miles, and then accelerating to geostationary orbital speed, so I’ll give him that one.
After that though…first he nearly collides with an undiscovered “asteroid or moonlet.” The text isn’t really clear on what sort of path it’s taking. Tom and Bud talk about it as if it’s in permanent orbit around the Earth, in the initially planned location for the Outpost, but we’re also told that when they just missed it “it whizzed by at ten miles a second” which is much too fast for it to be in orbit around the Earth at all.
If it was in orbit around Earth, anything of significant size would have been spotted by astronomers centuries ago, not long after they first started using telescopes.
That moonlet does prompt Tom to move his planned location for the Outpost farther west, out over the Pacific Ocean instead of its initially planned location over Ecuador. This new location is actually a better spot for a communication satellite meant to serve all of North and South America, if you want to include Alaska in your coverage.
For some reason Tom wants to completely circle the Earth at geostationary altitude, so he repeats his trick from Rocket Ship of accelerating to 7,000mph above orbital speed, and using his steering jets to keep him at the right altitude, only this time he keeps it up for a full 24 hours. Acceleration due to gravity at an orbital radius of 42,000km = .2 m/s^2. Centripetal acceleration travelling 22,000 kph at that radius = (6,000m/s)^2/42,000,000m = .9m/s^2 so to stay at that altitude the Star Spear had to accelerate continuously at .7m/s^2 for twenty-four hours, for a total of 60km/s delta-v. At least Tom nearly ran out of fuel doing it, just barely having enough left to do his de-orbit burn and returning to the ground using aero braking in the atmosphere, and then gliding to a landing.
Once again the writer forgets (or didn’t care) that space is really, really big. The rocket bringing the last spoke up for the Outpost is overdue, so Tom hops in his spaceship to go looking for it, and promptly finds it.
The economics of manufacturing the solar batteries in space doesn’t really add up. Certainly not doing it in geostationary orbit. Having your manufacturing in space, rather than sending the sol-alloy up in rockets to be irradiated doesn’t really gain you anything, since you have to use rockets to ship up all your raw materials anyway. (Now if Tom had a source of raw material in space—like that moonlet he discovered, and then ignored for the rest of the series, it might make some sense.) Shipping all that stuff up to geostationary orbit is also a lot more expensive than just putting it into LEO.
Tom is worried about the temperature extremes that the Outpost will have to endure, but he greatly exaggerates them, saying that the sun side temperature will go as high as 1,500°F, while the temperature can drop to -458° in the dark. Actual temperature variation on orbiting satellites is more like 250°F to -250°F.
Tom decides to go with a helium/oxygen gas mixture in his station. This is partially to save weight (with how ridiculously over-fuelled his rockets are, and his poorly chosen orbits, he’s suddenly worried about weight?) and to help protect his crew from the bends in decompression accidents (something that helium doesn’t really help that much with.) Helium does have some down sides, besides giving everyone squeaky voices (which this book doesn’t mention.) It’s also a much better conductor of heat than nitrogen, making your temperature control more critical.
We really begin to see the way Tom Swift Jr. treats space solar power as magic in this book. Just a few minutes exposure of sol-alloy to unfiltered sunlight, and it becomes energized enough to make a battery that will last for months, or years, before it is discharged, with a single battery being able to power a car for years.
In reality about 75% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth makes it through the atmosphere down to the ground. There are some advantages to collecting it in space, besides that extra 25%: first, at geostationary altitudes you spend most of your time in daylight, only experiencing “night” for an hour a day at most, and there aren’t any cloudy days, so added all together a solar collector in space can gather about 3 times as much energy each day as one on the ground.
Tom spots a high altitude balloon during one of his early solar battery tests, and flies the Sky Queen to within twenty yards of it to check it out. While he doesn’t actually ram it, as the Quik Battery Corporation president tried to claim, if he had just stuck to accusing Tom of interfering with his experimental balloon, he would have had a valid case.
Tom’s Zero-G chamber—which uses magnetic levitation to train astronaut candidates to handle themselves in zero g—is soundproof, with no way for the people inside to talk with the people outside, but at least it’s got transparent walls so they can use hand signals. Tom also put a hidden ‘safety’ interlock on the off switch, that he didn’t tell anyone about before he went into the chamber to test it. The safety interlock was a good idea—you don’t want to suddenly drop people on their heads by accident, by why hide it? And why not tell his dad who was running the control board during his first test run?
Ames, Radnor, and Mr. Swift find Tom and Bud unconscious in an alleyway, and just pick them up and stick them in their car to drive home.
As part of the astronaut selection process people are put into a depressurization chamber alone where there is no one to help them if something goes wrong, and it takes some time to re-pressurize the chamber. (Fortunately Chow just fell asleep because he’d stayed up late the night before, instead of actually having a problem.)
During his fast orbit of the Earth, Tom doesn’t really pay much attention to his fuel usage, and so doesn’t have enough left to to do a full de-orbit. (Luckily it’s just enough that he manages to get down low enough that he can use aero-braking to finish the job.)
There don’t seem to be any sort of depressurization alarms in the Outpost, at least while it’s under construction. A meteor takes out the end of one of the spokes, and no one notices until some time later, when one of the crewmen doing a damage survey after the collision (they knew something happened because the collision set the whole Outpost spinning) notices that there’s a warning light on the hatch into that spoke. (At least they had the light. He didn’t find out by opening the hatch.) At which point everyone is like “Wow! Lucky it didn’t hit the spoke we were all in!” and then carry on as if nothing had happened.
One of the Gorilla’s assassination attempts on Tom is to send Swift Enterprises a bottle of poison gas, labeled “Oxygen” with a note saying its a free sample from a company that wants Tom’s opinion on the new regulator valve attached to it. This gets delivered right to Tom’s lab.
As described, Tom’s magnetic levitation trick for his Zero-G chamber wouldn’t work. (And if it could work, I think someone would have built one by now.) In order to get the sort of levitation effect you need to simulate zero g, you need a uniform magnetic field, which isn’t easy to create. Simply putting a big electromagnet over top of the chamber won’t do it, as the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, so the bits of your metal suit closest to the magnet are much more strongly attracted to it.
You can get a uniform field inside a coil wrapped around your chamber (basically making a really big solenoid) but I haven’t been able to find any reference to anyone trying Tom’s trick that way.
In the real world people simulate zero g using parabolic flights in aircraft (the infamous Vomit Comets), and working in space using swimming pools. The Zero-G chamber and swimming pool won’t simulate the effects of free fall on your inner ear, so they won’t induce vertigo or motion sickness the way real zero g can.
This book also has another reference to Tom’s amazing anti-G neutralator, first mentioned in Rocket Ship, which if it existed would be able to make something like the Zero-G chamber possible.
The Swifts are apparently running Swift Enterprises, and the Swift Construction company with only one lawyer on their payroll. (And he’s off in Washington when Tom gets sued by the Quik Battery Corporation, so Tom goes to court without legal representation.)
Tom schedules a rocket launch to test out his new sol-alloy for noon, to get the maximum benefit of the noon-day sun, except the whole point of launching the rocket into space is to get above the atmosphere, where the sun is just as bright, all the time.
Tom isn’t sure whether or not long exposure to zero g will be bad for people so he says he designed the Outpost so it can be spun if need be, for artificial gravity, except the design makes no sense for something that’s supposed to be spun, with all the useful working space in the spokes.
Tom is worried about “space sickness” though at the time no one has spent enough time in space to see if any such thing exists. And when it does happen, pretty much the entire construction crew comes down with it at the same time, whether they’ve been in space for weeks, or if they just arrived the day before.
The first “test” Tom Sr. does to figure out what was in that phoney oxygen cylinder Tom received is to sniff the tank.
Tom walks into a totally obvious trap, and apparently left his pencil pocket radio in his other shirt.
Sandy and Phyl are once again mostly relegated to just being dates, but I think this is the first time we actually get a reference to Tom kissing Phyl in a situation where he wasn’t also kissing his sister and mother. Sandy also gets to be all scared when Tom receives yet another death threat.
Sandy and Phyl also show up for a date wearing gay frocks, and later they all go to a gay beach party.
Tom asks Chow to come with him to interview a candidate for his space station project because he has received an anonymous warning that the candidate is an enemy agent, and “time and again, Tom had noticed that Chow had a natural gift for character reading.” Of course over the rest of the series we see that Chow is horrible at reading character, being swindled time and again by various unscrupulous people.
Chow’s character judging skills don’t come into play this time, either, because it turns out that Ken Horton is an old friend of Chow’s from Texas.
More examples of cringeworthy attitudes to non-white people abound in the treatment of the Polynesian Islanders on Loonaui Island. They become absolutely terrified when they see someone walking around in a space suit. Tom keeps a chest full of “trade goods”: trinkets and bright-coloured cloth, that he uses to pay bonuses to the guy he’s got acting as his and Bud’s translator. A bit later we get a Chinese restaurant owner with a very stereotypical Chinese accent. And then we’ve got Pali, who describes himself as “quite civilized after all” because he can speak good English, and “I have a great deal of white blood in me.”
And we made it through Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter without either Tom or Bud being explicitly knocked out, though they are both momentarily stunned when the Ocean Arrow got caught in an underwater landslide.
Tom is working on developing his new nuclear powered (of course) combination helicopter and submarine, the Seacopter. The Swifts are also expecting a rocket to arrive from their Space Friends, shortly, bearing samples of life from the Space Friends’ world, to aid the Swifts in helping the Space Friends learn how to survive Earth’s gravity and atmosphere.
Unfortunately, a rival scientist has stolen the Swift’s space symbol dictionary, and is now talking to the Space Friends himself, pretending to be the Swifts, and jamming their attempts to contact them. He sends the Space Friends instructions to divert the rocket with their life samples to the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Brazil.
The race is on to see who can locate the rocket on the ocean floor first, and recover it. But first Tom has to go looking for the lost city of Atlantis with a couple of oceanographer buddies of his.
Good thing Tom just invented a new flying submarine. It’s not like he couldn’t have done the same thing with a Jetmarine.
Top of the list is the Seacopter, one of the coolest submarines ever, as far as ten year old me was concerned. (I think I preferred the Jetmarine, but my best friend of the time, and fellow Tom Swift Jr reader was definitely in the Seacopter fan club. He wanted us to build one ourselves. Our plans never really got past making drawings.)
Now though, the myriad impracticalities of the Seacopter design kinda take the blush off it.
The idea of a flying submarine is cool (Hey, Irwin Allen thought so, too.) but the requirements of each are tough to combine into one. Submarines, if they’re going to be able to go more than a few feet under water, have to be heavy, ideally about the same overall density as water. Aircraft have to be light. Something like a Seacopter would actually need more downward thrust to submerge, than upward thrust to fly. (Fortunately water is a much denser working fluid than air, so you can get a lot more thrust while moving less of it (by volume.)
There were some good aspects to Tom’s design: the redundancy of with the two compartments, either of which was capable of being detached from the other if anything went wrong was a bit of a new thing, for a Tom Swift Jr invention. At last something that had a failure mode that wasn’t almost instant death to the people using it. (Too bad he didn’t put similar thought into having redundant power supplies for things like emergency lighting and radios.)
Some bits of the design make no sense, though: the whole thing with the tractor treads for moving around on the bottom for one. In a submarine with positive buoyancy that can only stay down by running its rotor all the time, sucking up all the muck and stuff from the ocean bottom and spewing it up into the sea above you.
About the only time I think you’d ever really want to use the tractor treads would be to crawl up out of the water onto a beach, or something like that. I noticed that even Graham Kaye, the illustrator, never showed the Seacopter treads, even though some of the scenes he illustrated were of the Ocean Arrow on the bottom, moving on its treads according to the text.
Another disadvantage of the Seacopter is demonstrated when Tom is exploring the ruins of the undersea city he finds: the turbulence from the rotor blades sets off an undersea landslide that nearly buries the entire Seacopter. Those rotor blades have to be making a lot of noise, too, so there is no way you would ever be able to make a stealthy Seacopter.
Another new invention making an appearance in this book is the Eye-Spy camera. A TV camera that can see through walls. This is presented as a development of a Tom Sr invention (His Television Detector) and seems to be something the Toms are working on together, with each of them taking turns improving on the other’s design. Tom Jr initially demonstrates a black & white version to Bud, and by the end of the book Tom Sr has it working in colour.
Tom Sr has also just developed a new under water metal detector. Just in time to be put to use in the search for the missile.
Swift Security doesn’t actually Suck in this book. Tom Sr has a bit of a lapse, leaving his dictionary out on his desk when he’s getting a visit from someone who he thinks of as a respected fellow scientist. He doesn’t know that Dr Wickliffe has a bit of a history of ethically dubious behaviour.
There also aren’t any failures of the home burglar alarm in this book. It continues to work just fine detecting visitors coming to the front door.
This book’s plot is driven by the Space Friends, so naturally pretty much everything to do with them makes no sense.
First, these advanced aliens—who are watching the Swifts so closely that every time Tom takes a rocket flight they’re warning him about hazards in his path—don’t notice that it’s not the Swifts that they’re talking to, and that the Swifts are being jammed.
And why can’t the Swifts find the source of the jamming? There’s a handwave about the frequencies being used being too difficult to trace, but with the power necessary to do that sort of thing, how hard could it be?
(And with their Swift Enterprises transmitters being jammed, why not try sending from Fearing Island, which they’re using as a base for Seacopter testing, or the Outpost?)
The Space Friends also think it’s a fine idea to send an exploding missile ahead as a signal that the real rocket will be arriving soon. They can’t just tell them what time to expect it? But then I remembered that these are the same beings who thought the best way to make first contact with the Swifts was to throw a big rock at them. To make the signal rocket even sillier, Tom Sr decides that a message they receive about the Space Friends’ rocket being delayed by five days is a fake, because the SFs would never be so imprecise about the time.
In other silliness we have the mayor of Shopton, and the editor of the local paper, panicking on the basis of anonymous phone calls. Then when the rocket explodes over Swift Enteprises, breaking windows for miles around, they act like that was a good thing.
Mrs. Swift doesn’t come off much better than them, being just as prone to panic based on their second hand reporting of the things their anonymous informant is telling them.
The Seacopter sections have backup solar battery power supplies, which run an electric motor that drives a propeller shaft, that’s linked by a chain to a generator to provide emergency power for the rest of the Seacopter’s systems. That has got to be the dumbest Rube Goldberg hookup in all of Tom Swift. (And we learn that solar batteries stop working when they get wet, so naturally Tom puts them in a part of the sub that’s sure to get flooded if he springs any sort of leak.) And all the emergency power is run off that one solar battery.
The Swifts only have one copy of their space symbol dictionary. This despite them often working independently to figure out translations, and Tom Jr getting messages from them every other time he flies off into space. At least Tom Sr acknowledges that it was rather foolish of them not to have a backup, after it gets stolen.
One thing that has come up in earlier books, that I hadn’t commented on before now is the way people get around inside various buildings in the Swift Enterprises campus. Numerous times people are described as driving into buildings, and then their vehicles are moved around inside the buildings by various elevators and conveyor belts, which always struck me as a silly way of doing things.
Someone really should clue Tom in on the concept of incremental testing. His first outing, in an incomplete segment of his Seacopter, is in “really deep water.” He’s 600 feet down when he springs a leak, (and right off the bat finds out that his backup power supply isn’t water proof, but he never bothers to fix that.)
This is despite having that big water tank at Enterprises that he pressure tested the Jetmarine in, and he also tests the rotor section of the Seacopter in it.
This book introduces Art Wiltessa, an Enterprises engineer who does actual engineering. In this book he’s supervising the construction of the Seacopters, building new rotor hubs when Tom tosses last minute design changes at him, and doing other actual engineering type jobs. In future books he’ll be someone that Tom can give a quick pencil sketch of one of his ideas to, and Art will turn it into actual blueprints, and then a finished widget.
Swift Enterprises can build new Seacopters incredibly quickly, for something they’ve only built one of before. Tom decides it might be useful to have a backup (maybe he learned from the stolen dictionary experience) and four days later, it’s been built and tested. (Good thing too, because Tom’s already sunk Seacopter #1.)
Tom also learns that he needs to develop a new metal, stronger and lighter than any yet in existence, for his Seacopter rotor blades after the first set he makes fail in their pressure tank test. One all-nighter in his metallurgy lab, and he’s got it.
Tom is very lucky at finding stuff underwater. His first dive on the Atlantic ridge, and he finds the lost city he’s looking for. The second place he looks is also a sunken temple site. Then once he finally gets around to looking for the rocket (after the detour looking for Atlantis that nearly killed him and his friends, and let Wickliffe get in several days of searching ahead of him) he finds the rocket pretty much right where he first looks for it.
This book, like many of the others in the series, depicts pretty much any slightly exotic animal as a threat. Every shark is a man-eater, and if you go for a swim in the ocean you better take some shark repellant along if you don’t want to be a fish’s dinner, and if you go swimming in a Brazilian river, you’ve got to watch out for the piranhas: they’ll strip you to the bone in seconds.
Even relatively innocuous sea creatures, like manta rays, are seen as potentially deadly threats to nearby swimmers, and to the Seacopter itself.
Sandy and Phyl don’t have much to do in this book. They mainly just go on a blind date with a couple of guys who work for Wickliffe. They agree to the date in an effort to make Tom and Bud jealous, but it quickly becomes apparent to them that the guys wanted to date them so they can very unsubtly question them about what Tom’s been up to lately. Both these guys are described as being in their late twenties, so it’s a little creepy that they’re trying to date a couple of seventeen year old girls. (Even before we find out that they’re in on Wickliffe’s plan to hijack the SF’s rocket.)
Making up for the remarkably concussion free Diving Seacopter, Tom and Bud each get knocked out three times in Tom Swift In the Caves of Nuclear Fire. Once by blows to the head, and twice by explosions.
The book opens with Tom and Bud in his lab, experimenting with the opaque cylinders from the Space Friends’ rocket that was recovered in Diving Seacopter. So far Tom hasn’t found any way to probe inside of them, and in a remarkable bit of restraint for him, he hasn’t yet resorted to just cutting one of them open. (At least no reference is made to them being made of some super-substance that is impervious to all his attempts to physically cut into.)
Tom’s experiments are interrupted by the return of Craig Benson, a Swift Enterprises pilot who disappeared a couple of years previously when his plane crashed in the Belgian Congo. Craig has a tale of being rescued by some tribesmen, being nursed back to health by them, and of a strange “taboo mountain” near their village. There are fissures at the foot of the mountain from which a green glowing gas sometimes issues. Craig had tried to collect a sample, but every container he tried to capture the gas in mysteriously vanished in an intense burst of white light.
Photographs Craig took of the area around the mountain are all fogged, leading the Swifts to suspect that there is some radioactive phenomena going on that is producing this gas, and that Craig has been exposed, but—fortunately for him—later testing shows that he has not received a dangerously high dose. Tom and his father suspect that this gas might contain, or be emitting, antiprotons—something that they have lately become very interested in researching—and these are what are causing the gas to destroy everything it comes in contact with. (This book was written in 1956, and antiprotons were a hot new thing back then, having first been observed in 1955, after Paul Dirac had predicted their existence in 1933.)
Tom starts to plan an expedition to Africa to study the mountain and capture some of the gas. Fortunately he has just the new invention to handle the job, his Terrasphere.
Opposing Tom this time are a couple of men who have trailed Craig from Africa, named Taylor and Cameron. (But Chow soon recognizes ‘Taylor’ as a man named Hoplin who is wanted in Texas for forgery.) These men are determined to stop Tom’s expedition, and will stop at nothing to do so. They steal the Toms’ research notes on antiprotons, kidnap Tom Sr, forge messages from the Congolese authorities denying them permission to enter the country, and once Tom arrives at the taboo mountain resort to other more direct measures to try to chase him off.
But Tom prevails, while having many harrowing adventures In the Caves of Nuclear Fire.
Hoplin and Cameron steal the Toms’ antiproton notes through the simple means of forging a note from Tom Jr to the one other person who has the combination to their office safe telling him to take the notes and deliver them to a man at the gate. How did they know that this one particular person had access to the safe? Who knows? Why did they want the antiproton notes? They didn’t; not really. They apparently were approached by some foreign agent who wanted them to steal the notes for him. How did he know about the notes, or that Hoplin and Cameron might be interested in stealing stuff for him? Again, who knows?
Leading the inventions in this book is possibly the most underwhelming creation of Tom’s career: the Terrasphere. It’s a crane that can lower a sphere with people in it down into big holes in the ground. Possibly the least appropriate use of nuclear power in the Swift universe, too. A couple of Tom’s solar batteries could have run the thing just fine.
The more important invention of the book is Inertite. Tom notices that the rocks lining the fissure that the gas is coming from are immune to the gas’s effects, so he takes some samples, grinds them up, mixes in a little Tomasite, and makes a new paint from it. This paint will go on to have many more applications as the series progresses. If there’s a radiation problem that can’t be solved by Tomasite alone, adding a little Inertite probably will.
The other discovery is Exploron. This is the name that Tom gives to the gas emanating from the fissures in the taboo mountain. It has an atomic weight of 286. “Unknown to the atomic table!” It was unknown in 1956, anyway. 286Nh is the most stable isotope of Nihonium: a synthetic chemical with atomic number 113. It has a half life of about 10 seconds, which is almost forever when compared with other elements that far up the periodic table. It doesn’t emit antiprotons, though.
A single atom of Nihonium was first reported in 1998, but no one was able to duplicate that finding, using that technique. The first confirmed production of Nihonium happened in 2003 and 2004.
With an atomic weight of 286 this stuff also has to be at least 10 times denser than air. (A lot more than that if the gas isn’t monatomic.) It’s not going to be rising up through any fissures out of deep underground caves, unless the caves’ atmosphere is pretty much pure Exploron.
Tom, Bud and Mr. Swift decide to join in the police search for Hoplin and Cameron, by going out and driving around the neighbourhood looking for them. This is how Tom Sr gets kidnapped.
After being kidnapped, Tom Sr accidentally sends out a radio message on his radio wristwatch before it gets broken, that the Swifts triangulate to find out where he is being held. They then inform the police, who surround the place, while Tom, Bud, and George Dilling, the Swift’s radio operator, go in to rescue Tom Sr. They walk into a trap and nearly get blown up, and burned to a crisp.
Tom decides he needs to test how strong the cables holding the Terrasphere are by having the crane swing it around while he’s inside it. Big surprise: he needs stronger cables. (And Tom gets his first concussion of this book.) In the real world, figuring out what sort of cables you need to support a given load is an engineering problem that has been figured out by pretty much every civilization, everywhere, thousands of years ago.
In the final version of the Terrasphere (with the new, stronger cables) the operators in the crane don’t get any warning that cables are snapping (needed to use more Inertite on the joints where the cables were connected to the sphere) until they try to talk with Tom and Co. in the sphere, and don’t get any response (because the first cable to snap also had their communications line running up it.) Any sensible design would have had alarms going off all over the place when that first cable let go.
On their drive around the neighbourhood looking for bad guys, Tom Jr is driving, and operating the spotlight on the car, while Bud and Mr. Swift are just looking out windows. It would have made much more sense for one of the non-drivers to run the light.
After finally collecting some of that gas that seems to dissolve everything that isn’t coated with Inertite, Tom quite blithely loads up those canisters into the Terrasphere with himself and the rest of his crew to take back to the Sky Queen for analysis. I’d want to watch those canisters for a while before I’d trust them near or in anything. (And it might be a good idea to empty one out, after it had been holding some Exploron for a while, and giving it a very thorough examination to see it it had degraded at all.)
Vibrations from the Terrasphere are causing the rock around the rim of the cave to crumble, so Tom designs some new rock anchors to hold it steady. Fine so far, but he tests his new anchors by first driving the Terrasphere as close to the edge as he dared, firing the anchors into the rock, and then trying to drive forward some more. Might have been a very bad day for him if they hadn’t held.
Tom is experimenting firing high energy waves of some sort at that opaque cylinder from the Space Friends’ rocket. After the side effects from this nearly gets him and Bud killed from radiation exposure, he decides that maybe he should have a look at just what the outer layer of the cylinder is made of. (Turns out it’s an Unknown to Earth Science isotope of silicon: 33Si)
After escaping from his kidnappers, rather than finding the first person who can help him, or stopping in at someone’s house to borrow a phone, Mr. Swift essentially sneaks back home on foot, including trying to sneak in the back door of his house. (He knows the area well enough to know that there’s a cave behind a particular farm he can hide in until dark, but he doesn’t seem to consider stopping in at the farmer’s house to ask for help.)
The Terrasphere has an automatic ‘emergency’ power cut-in that activates if you let it just coast to a stop without using the brakes, making it suddenly surge forward again on its own.
The nuclear powered Terrasphere has exhaust pipes (from which water spews when the motor is restarted after the previous item caused Bud to drive it into a pond.)
Chow remembers reading about Hoplin in a newspaper article from Texas, Tom suggests calling the paper to get more information about him but Chow says that won’t work because the offices burned down. No one suggests calling the local library to see if they have archive copies of the paper, or the local police for more information, since the report in the paper was about someone charged with a major felony.
The Sky Queen experiences icing difficulties on their flight to Africa. Before he figures out what’s causing him to lose power Tom has Bud ‘cut in the fuel-pump boosters!’ on their nuclear powered airplane.
That vibration setting up resonances making the rock crumble when they’re driving it around thing, and Tom’s worry that “The tremendous power of the crane of the Terrasphere will cause a great disturbance.” It’s just a crane. It only needs simple, vibration free, electric motors to make it go up and down. Maybe some hydraulic pumps to move the boom arm around. Nothing really high power or vibration heavy about it, anywhere. (And as it was designed from the start for exploring caves, you’d think that keeping any vibration to a minimum would have been one of the top design priorities.)
In the heart of the Caves of Nuclear Fire, there is an underground river whose level rises and falls with the tides, hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean.
This book marks Doc Simpson’s first appearance.
That shortcut through the woods strikes again! No one is hurt this time, but Tom has to jump into the ditch to avoid being run over by the bad guys in a car.
It’s a book written in the 1950s, about an expedition to Africa. That’s enough to say on that subject, other than the badness starts with Chow dressing up in an “African native” costume, including colouring his skin with brown makeup.
Tom is wearing a Batman style utility belt now, with hidden compartments that just happen to have the thing he needs, right this instant. (In this case, miniature fire extinguishing pellets.)
Tom uses a green safelight in his darkroom when developing film…which means he’s using really weird film.
They’re in Africa, so naturally there have to be lions, and Chow has to ride a zebra, except lions and zebras are animals of the grasslands and savannah, and they’re in forest and jungle.
In a very unusual ending for a Tom Swift book, the bad guys are all going to die from radiation poisoning at the end of it. Seems they didn’t know that their secret diamond mine that they were working so hard to chase Tom away from was dug into the side of a radioactive mountain. (You have to wonder what they thought of Tom and all his people wearing their anti-radiation suits any time they went anywhere near the mountain.)
Geological evidence that an underground bed of natural uranium had undergone a sustained fission chain reaction when it got wet was discovered in 1972. The Oklo formations in Gabon were active about 1.7 billion years ago, and aren’t all that far from where Tom’s Caves of Nuclear Fire were located.
The possibility that such a thing could happen was first proposed by P.K. Kuroda, in a paper published in The Journal of Chemical Physics in 1956—the same year the Caves of Nuclear Fire was written. I have to wonder if Harriet Stratemeyer, or someone else at the syndicate, was aware of Kuroda’s paper, and munged that idea together with the recent antiproton discovery when they were outlining this book.
Antimatter was a pretty new idea when this was written, so I’m not surprised that the writer didn’t really get the implications of just what happens when antimatter and matter annihilate each other.
And the concussion count continues its upward climb through Tom Swift on The Phantom Satellite, with Tom picking up three more, while Bud collects another two.
The world is in a panic as astronomers observe the approach of an asteroid on a collision course. Just as everything seems hopeless and the planet is doomed, the asteroid turns aside and goes into orbit, 50,000 miles above the Earth.
Tom is soon tapped by the American government to lead an expedition to the new satellite, which Bud has dubbed “Little Luna,” and claim it For America! Fortunately Tom’s new atomic rocket, Titan, is nearing completion.
Also in the race to claim Little Luna for themselves are the Brungarians, lead by Streffan Mirov. Just as Tom’s expedition is about to launch, the Brungarians announce that they have already landed on the new satellite, and claimed it for Brungaria. Tom suspects (and it is later confirmed) that the Brungarians are bluffing, and sets out anyway. An examination of Little Luna from orbit shows no sign of a Brungarian landing, so Tom lands, claims it For America! and begins operations to explore the satellite.
They soon find a disguised Brungarian spaceship on the surface of Little Luna, but Tom suspects (and it is later confirmed) that the Brungarians landed after he did, and disguised their ship so they could say “Oh, you just didn’t see us because of our clever camouflage.”
Mirov makes multiple attempts to drive the Swift expedition away from Little Luna, and after they all fail he decides that if he can’t have Little Luna, no one will, and sets up a couple of nuclear bombs that he plans to use to spread radioactive fallout over the whole satellite. Others in his expedition fear that the bombs will destroy Little Luna, with catastrophic results for the whole Earth.
Can Tom find and disarm the bombs before it’s too late? (There are 22 more books in the series, so I guess the answer is “Yes.”)
This book sees Tom’s first use of atomic power in a spacecraft. Given his penchant for nuclear powering just about everything, I was a little surprised that it took him this long.
The idea of nuclear rockets wasn’t unheard of, back when this was being written. Robert Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo, published in 1947, was nuclear powered, and the U.S. was experimenting with nuclear rockets in the 50s. NASA also developed their NERVA nuclear engine during the 60s, hoping to use it to replace the third stage on the Saturn V rocket for later missions setting up bases on the moon, or manned exploration of Mars.
Tom’s Titan is either a three, or four stage rocket (the book gives it different numbers of stages, in different places) with the bottom two or three stages being chemical rockets, and the upper stage being nuclear…so pretty much in line with what NASA hoped to do with the Saturn V. The upper stage is also described as an ion drive, so it is some sort of nuclear powered ion rocket.
Next on the invention list are the Little Idiot computers. (Also named by Bud.) Each of the scientists on the expedition is issued with his own computer, which comes pre-configured to solve problems related to their field of study. Tom Swift Jr. invented the personal computer! Tom gets these computers to be so small by building them using transistors!
The main thing Tom gets wrong with his Little Idiots is that he makes them voice operated. You state your problem by speaking it into a microphone. The computer then gives an answer by printing it out on paper tape. A lot of people back then didn’t appreciate how difficult some of the things people do every day are, while at the same time thinking that quite simple mathematical calculations are hard.
The Little Idiots are also described as being analog computers, which have their uses, but are much less versatile than digital computers. Reprogramming an analog computer generally involves rewiring it in some way. Rather than being general purpose computers, analog computers tend to be purpose built to carry out specific functions. (Which is kinda what Tom is doing, here.)
Next up on the invention table is Tom’s atmosphere generator. Tom wants to be able to walk around on Little Luna without having to use space suits. Luckily, he has just invented a machine for making air… See below for how impractical this would be.
Swift Security doesn’t do that badly in this book, and after the first information leak hits the newspapers, Harlan Ames actually tenders his resignation. Of course Tom just rips it up. (And in this case it wasn’t really a Swift Security cock-up, per se. The bad guys learned the secret launch date by eavesdropping on the Toms’ radio telephone conversation—so I guess you can blame it on them using lousy scramblers on their radios, which is a different sort of security failure.)
After that Swift Security does manage to catch a saboteur, and find his bomb before it goes off, and catch another spy trying to copy the plans for Tom’s atmosphere maker.
On the other hand, Tom decides that they need some extra security on their radio conversations, and proclaims that all the radio conversations between their space ship crews will use a special set of code phrases. He then calls an all hands meeting for all his rocket crews to tell them about the new code, and hands out mimeographed copies of the code to everyone. No wonder the Swifts can’t keep anything secret.
It is, naturally, the Space Friends who are responsible for putting Little Luna into orbit around the Earth. The reason they do so is that they hope that Tom will create an Earth-like atmosphere on it, so they can see if they can live in it (and worry about the pesky gravity thing later, but seeing as they seem to have the gravity thing pretty much licked, given that they’ve enhanced LL’s gravity considerably, that might not be so silly.) Why couldn’t these advanced aliens build a gas tight room, and fill it with 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other stuff? Seems like that would be a lot easier, to me.
There is a magic radioactive cube in a cave on Little Luna, which is apparently powering the artificial gravity. This cube also somehow knows to shoot out beams of something to zap the tentacle things from the Brungarian’s ship that are trying to grab Tom’s friends. Tom takes this cube back to Earth with him to study some more, while thinking that he’ll have to get it back before the gravity quits…with no idea how long the gravity will work without it, or what his experiments on it might do to it, or him. (Last time he tried probing some mysterious Space Friends tech, he nearly fried himself and Bud with incidental radiation it released.)
Tom’s already got his Titan rocket almost completed, and he’s already working on his atmosphere machine when the book begins. What for? (If he was planning to use them for a moon trip, that would make a bit of sense…and maybe doming over a small crater and using the atmosphere machine to fill it with air would make some sense too, but as used in this book, not so much.)
On the subject of Tom’s air making machine:
Little Luna has a diameter of about 30 miles, or 50km. Let’s give it an atmosphere about 1,000 feet thick (There’s enough of it to fly helicopters around in.) Call it 300 meters. Add some magic Intertite to make it stick around at sufficient pressure to have something breathable without needing to actually have that weight of air pressing down everywhere.
Volume of a sphere:
= 4/3 π r3
= 4.2 r3
Volume of Little Luna’s atmosphere:
= 4.2 * 25,3003 - 4.2 * 25,0003
= 6.80e13 - 6.56e13
= 2.4e12 m3
A cubic meter of gas at standard temperature and pressure contains 45 moles of gas. Oxygen makes up about 1/5 of our atmosphere, so a cubic meter of air contains 45/5 or 9 moles of O2, or 288 grams of O2.
So to put a breathable atmosphere on Little Luna, you have to make 2.4e12 * .288 or 6.9e11 kilograms of oxygen, or 690,000,000 tonnes. Tom’s atmosphere machines accomplish this in about half a day.
Tom is also smelting iron ore to get his oxygen. We aren’t told exactly which sort of iron oxide the rocks he’s feeding his machine are, but since pretty much all iron oxides contain more iron than oxygen, by mass, his oxygen making operation is producing enough iron to feed all of the world’s steel mills for a year, every day. It’s probably cheaper and easier to get that iron down to Earth from Little Luna (going down is easy) than it is to ship it from Antarctica, so he just put that operation out of business.
The spreader part of Tom’s atmosphere machine is supported in the air by some sort of ionic levitation, but it’s also got hoses leading to it carrying the oxygen from his atomic smelter…so why not just build a tower to hold it up?
While Kent Rockland, one of the Swift engineers, is working to disarm the bomb planted on the Titan Tom looks at his watch and thinks “Less than twenty seconds to go” like you can trust the bomb setter to have synchronized the bomb’s timer with your watch. (This gets a bit of a redemption later in the book, when Tom looks at his watch and thinks he’s got less than a minute left to disarm an atomic bomb, but then reflects that he only had an estimate for when the bomb would be set off, so he doesn’t really know how much time he has.) Kent also gets bonus points for telling Tom to stop shaking the ladder while he’s working on the bomb, and Tom’s trying to rush up to help him (or given that it’s Tom, take over and do the saving himself.)
The astronomer that they’re taking along on the trip is told at one point that he has to have all his gear packed up and ready to go in three hours. He replies “When you have been stargazing as long as I have, three hours no longer mean a great deal. I think only in terms of light years!” And he can do the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.
To keep from flying around too much in Little Luna’s low gravity (1/20 Earth’s) Tom and his crew wear heavy weighted boots, but they take them off whenever they’re in a hurry to get anywhere, which really makes me wonder why bother at all. (And really, to have enough mass to make much difference in how high they bounce when walking, they’re going to give your feet so much extra momentum they’ll just make walking a lot harder, and make you more likely to fall (slowly) on your face.)
Tom’s mini-tanks that he uses to drive about on Little Luna are impervious to Mirov’s mortar shells and grenades, because they are coated with Tomasite! The shells just bounce off them without exploding! Generally speaking, shells explode on impact. Some might have proximity fuses triggered by magnetic fields, or whatnot, that will detonate when the shell gets close to their target, but those tend to be for specialized uses. Grenades have timed fuses.
Mirov has an argument with one of the scientists in his crew on his spaceship, in front of an open mic, just after Tom has build a descrambler to listen in on the Brungarians’ radio conversations. (It isn’t just the Swifts who use lousy scramblers, it seems.) This is how Tom learns about Mirov’s scheme to set off the nuclear bombs. (And also gets a rundown on how Mirov and the Brungarians have been behind just about every other scheme to interfere with Tom’s expedition.)
There is some concern that the exploding bombs might disturb the moon’s orbit around the Earth, as well as destroying Little Luna. We aren’t told how big the bombs were, so it’s conceivable that they could destroy the asteroid, and that would be very bad news for Earth, but there is no way destroying it could have any noticeable effect on the moon’s orbit.
It seems that Tom can’t go into space without having some sort of meteor difficulty. He had the magnetic meteor swarm in Rocket Ship. The Outpost was hit by a meteor while under construction, and one of his mini tanks takes a hit from a small meteor in this book.
Mirov’s spaceship, which also functions as a flying saucer shaped helicopter, has tentacles with suction cups on the ends of them for snatching up Tom’s personnel. I think they must have come up with the book cover painting first, and told the writer to put a scene like that into the book.
They discover a new light weight super metal—not found on Earth—that they name Lunite. At the time this was written there were no holes left in bottom of the periodic table that might be filled in with some new light weight exotic metal.
And on the last day, Tom’s magic atmosphere machine has one last surprise for us: it starts to rain. Where did all the water come from?
Mr. Swift gets a phone call from a Senator accusing one of the scientists that they are planing to take with them of disloyalty. Bud is suspicious, so he undertakes to investigate the call himself. He very quickly learns that the call was a fake, but rather than handing what he knows over to Harlan Ames, or some other Swift Security person, or the FBI agents who are also on Fearing Island by this point, he gets Tom to help him follow up on his lead, which soon gets both of them knocked unconscious.
Tom takes the Star Spear up to rescue one of the cargo ships that was ferrying equipment up to the Outpost, after it was attacked by Mirov. He warns the crewmen being rescued not to let go of the cable as they transfer across to the Star Spear, or they might be lost in space. Apparently no one has yet thought of the simple precaution of clipping a carabiner onto the rescue line in the Swift universe.
Tom has totally inadequate atmospheric pressure alarms, considering how quickly Little Luna’s air bleeds away whenever the atmosphere makers quit working. In one case, one of his helicopters doesn’t even have time to land before air pressure drops too far for it to keep flying.
Tom and Bud nearly cook in one of their mini tanks, because it has inadequate temperature control (and the hatch jams shut if they get too warm inside.)
Tom’s acceleration couch isn’t strong enough to stand up to full thrust from the nuclear rocket, and breaks. (Another concussion for him.)
Working himself to a state of exhaustion Tom passes out over an open whirling impeller pump, which slices his arm open and he nearly bleeds to death before help gets to him.
The one time the atmosphere pressure alarm does go off, no one bothers to do a quick check to make sure everyone in the crew is accounted for, until Tom tells them to when he radios in, or bothers to go looking for the unaccounted for crewman until Tom gets back to base from fixing the atmosphere maker. (A twenty-five mile off-road trip, probably took at least an hour.)
Tom and his dad start to walk along that little-used road that leads from Swift Enterprises to their home…
This book marks the introduction of the Brungarians as antagonists to Tom.
How not to get good press: A reporter at a press conference asks what Bud considers to be an impertinent question, so Bud literally throws him out of it.
This is another book in which Sandy and Phyl have minimal roles, other than attending gay dinners. There is a bit of a subplot where Sandy starts paying too much attention to Kent Rockland for Bud’s liking, so he brings a date of his own to the final going away party to make Sandy jealous. (And then Kent goes home with Bud’s date.)
Tom brings along a smaller version of his giant robot on his expedition, which he names Robbie. This book came out the same year as Forbidden Planet. Robbie is such an obvious name for a robot I don’t think anyone did any copying, but after 1956, there was only one Robbie the Robot as far as most people were concerned (and it wasn’t Tom’s.)
A couple of the illustration captions have typos in them, in which “Kent” is called “Ken.” Was this a last minute change in the names that was put through after the captions were set, or just something that slipped past the copy editors? (Another copy editing error occurs where 10,000 miles becomes 10,000 feet.)
Little Luna is described as appearing to be the size of a baseball when it goes into orbit around the Earth. Which raises the question “A baseball how far away?” A baseball in the hand looks much bigger than a baseball at the outfield wall.
Little Luna is 50km in diameter and 80,000 km from Earth. A baseball is about 7.5cm in diameter. So how far away would a baseball be, to appear the same size as Little Luna?
50/80,000 = 7.5/x
x = (7.5 * 80,000) / 50 cm
x = 12,000 cm
x = 120 m
Which puts it at the outfield wall, as seen from home plate.
Compared to another well known object in the sky, Little Luna would appear to be about 1/14 the diameter of the moon, as seen from Earth, so not very big, but big enough to show as a sphere, to most people’s unaided eye.
We also hear a news report that Little Luna causing unusually high tides around the world, with one town on the Bay of Fundy being “almost swept away!” which seems unlikely to me. LL’s tidal influence on the Earth should be negligible, about 1/10,000 that of the moon, by my back of the envelope calculation. I’m chalking that report up to the generally poor quality of breaking news reporting.
Little Luna’s orbital altitude of 50,000 miles gives it a radius almost exactly twice that of geostationary orbit, so it’s going to have an orbital period of 1.6 days. It is going to appear to move across the sky from east to west, at about 2/3 the speed of the sun or the moon.
Tom Swift and His Ultrasonic Cycloplane is another concussion free book, at least for Tom, and if Bud got one when he crashed in New Guinea it isn’t mentioned in the text. Chow gets knocked out, though.
The story opens with Tom working on his latest invention, his Ultrasonic Cycloplane, when he gets a call from his cousin, Ed Longstreet, telling him he’s going to be in town soon, with something interesting to show him.
Ed’s interesting artifact is a small statue of unknown origin which is made from holmium, one of the rare earth metals. Consulting with some experts from the Shopton museum reveals that it may be from somewhere in Oceania, and that they would really like to put it on display there, where it is promptly stolen.
Meanwhile a New Guinean gold mine wants to switch over to using Swift Solar Batteries for their power supply, so Bud and Hank Sterling take off in a cargo plane to deliver some. On the way back they radio that they’ve been caught in a storm, and are going down. Their mayday call is cut off in the middle of giving their position.
Tom immediately mounts a rescue mission to go get them, using the Sky Queen to fly to New Guinea. The search area is mostly dense jungle, but in the centre of it are a pair of closely spaced volcanoes which are permanently engulfed in a violent storm. Tom decides that this must be where Bud and Hank have crashed, but the gorge between the mountains is too narrow for the Sky Queen, and the storm is too violent for the Skeeter or Kangaroo Kub so they have to approach the volcanoes on foot…or he can go back to Shopton to get his Cycloplane!
The actual plotting of this story is the weakest one so far. The plot is entirely driven by wildly improbable coincidences (Bud and Hank fly half way around the world, for unrelated reasons, and then crash right on top of the source of the mysterious statue that Cousin Ed showed up with in Chapter 1) and the bad guys keep doing things for absolutely no reason (good or bad) other than to drive the plot along.
Why did they steal the statue from the museum? We’re never told. How did the statue ever end up in the curio shop in San Francisco where Ed found it in the first place? Why was George Hedron hanging around in Shopton shopping for a Pigeon Special, after the statue was stolen, and before Bud and Hank crashed, so he had no reason to think that Tom might go harring off to New Guinea? Why did the bad guys even have a device that would force planes flying nearby those mountains to crash? (And between that, and their knockout ray, they had something they could sell to various world militaries for millions—though to be fair, such devices seem to be a dime a dozen in the Swift world. They probably also could have just staked a legitimate mining claim, and called for investors to finance opening up a new mine, or made a big splash in archaeological circles by announcing their discovery of an ancient civilization, and made lots of money off that too.)
On the other hand there are some good bits to this story. The description of the rescue party’s trek through the jungle is very well done, and incidents from it have stuck with me for the fifty or so years that have passed since I first read them (The mosquito swarm, and the land leeches in particular.) While I’ve been rereading these books I’ve been highlighting passages that I want to comment on in my reviews, and there is a fifty or so page section in the middle of this book that I didn’t make a single “this is silly” mark on, which might be some sort of record. But the incredibly contrived set of circumstance that it took to get to that section kinda spoils it for me.
The levels of casual racism displayed in this book are cringeworthy, as well. Caves of Nuclear Fire had similar problems, but Ultrasonic Cycloplane is worse.
Top of the list is the Cycloplane. It’s powered by an ultrasonic generator, which just seems to be there so that they can have “Ultrasonic” in the title. The Cycloplane generates lift using a pair of rotating cylinders…which wouldn’t really work the way they’re described. You can get lift from a rotating cylinder through the Magnus effect, but to do so you need to have an airflow perpendicular to the axis of rotation.
The Cycloplane has the maneuverability of a helicopter, and can fly at supersonic speed (this aspect of it’s design is never really used.) It can also be driven on the ground like a car. It’s rotating cylinders are driven by an ultrasonic generator (How? We aren’t told.) which is powered by a Solar Battery. It also has a jet engine, that also seems to be powered by that battery, as Tom comments on how it doesn’t need to be refueled.
The second invention is the cybertron—which acts as the Cycloplane’s automatic pilot. Tom has finally got an automatic pilot capable of doing more than keeping a plane flying straight and level, that isn’t run by a punched tape.
And then we have the Resistorizer, a device that Tom pulls totally from his ass after discovering that there seems to be something near the volcanoes that is interfering with how his Cycloplane operates. From one incident in which his Cycloplane loses power Tom deduces that nature of the weapon being used to cause planes to crash, that it also functions as an anti-personel device, but with a simple inverted wave he can cancel out its effects perfectly (except for a lot of waste heat—I do give the writer credit for realizing that the energy of the weapon had to go into doing something.) Tom will find something even better, and less plausible, to do with that energy than just making a lot of heat in the next book.
The only real failure of Swift Security in this book is that when Tom asks for a background check on Hedron, he comes up clean, as a man with a solid reputation as a zoologist, with expertise in New Guinea, so Tom agrees to take him along. It’s not like they could have done a Google search back then to turn up the newspaper reports from San Francisco about him being involved in some sort of shady stock trading.
He orders Sandy not to have anything more to do with Hedron. Sure, it turned out that Hedron was a bad guy, and a twenty-something guy dating a seventeen year old girl is a bit creepy, but it’s not the age difference that bothers Bud. It once again seems that Bud just doesn’t like any guy who pays any attention to Sandy.
The Shopton Museum gets a small statue of unknown origin, or provenance, and it becomes an instant sensation, getting national news coverage.
Tom takes off on a rescue mission to the jungles of New Guinea, and doesn’t pack any sort of jungle survival stuff to take along with him. Once he gets there his rescue party has to improvise things like backpacks, and sleeping bags for their trek through the jungle. Just a couple of books back, Tom had mini-tanks and other such things that that he used on his expedition to the Caves of Nuclear Fire. Why didn’t he bring one of those along with him this time? He didn’t even have a supply of walkie-talkies in the Sky Queen’s gear. He had to make a bunch of them for his rescue team to carry.
With a thousand square miles of jungle to search, Tom decides that the crash site must be in the one place that only the Cycloplane can fly to, without doing even the most cursory of searches of all the other places Bud and Hank might have crashed.
The only reason the Sky Queen can’t get to the proposed crash site is that the gap between the volcanos is too narrow, but no one even suggests “Why don’t we try going around, and taking a look from the other side?”
Tom and Doc Simpson get caught in stereotypical jungle quicksand at one point.
Pretty much all of the slogging through the jungle could have been avoided if they’d just used the Skeeter. Sure, once you got right up close to the mountains the weather became too severe for it, but there was no mention of any harsh weather (other than heat and humidity) all through their jungle trek. (And things like the mosquito swarm require pretty calm air to be a problem.) They could have used the Skeeter to ferry their search party much closer to the mountains and skipped a lot of the jungle trek. (Or even used the Sky Queen’s jet lifters to blast open a landing spot for it close to the entrance into the gorge.)
Given how often the solution to any problem is to give his latest invention a Tomasite coating (in this case to protect the Drumhawk from the bad guys’ electromagnetic ray) you’d think that nothing would leave the Swift Enterprises paint shops without first getting a nice Tomasite topcoat.
The bad guys’ portable knockout ray is powered by a flashlight sized Swift Solar Battery. The Resistorizers are also powered by the same sort of battery. You know what Tom doesn’t have powered by those batteries? His flashlights.
And then once the Drumhawk does get through, finds the crashed plane and lands, there is no more mention of the bad weather that had been keeping all lesser aircraft away. No rain, no high winds, about the only thing said about the weather after that is that the perpetual cloud cover is hampering the efficiency of the natural solar battery that was powering the bad guys’ anti-aircraft defences. No mention is made of why they even had any anti-aircraft defence when the perpetual storm (also unexplained) is doing a pretty good job of keeping aircraft away. Causing planes to crash unnecessarily is just going to bring in more people looking for crashed planes.
Tom discovers the ruins of an ancient civilization and doesn’t instantly react by carrying out random acts of archaeological vandalism (and there is no sign that they had anything to do with the Space Friends, who don’t even get a mention in this book.)
He also doesn’t act like he has an automatic right to start mining the rare earth ore that he finds, and acknowledges that it belongs to the local tribe, and that they should be paid for it. (What form that payment should take, and how much, is left unsaid.)
Tom picks up two more concussions in Tom Swift and His Deep Sea Hydrodome, and this book brings the introduction of Tom’s greatest invention, the repelatron: the device that makes the Hydrodome, and many more future spinoff inventions possible.
Tom Jr and his dad are out cruising in the Sea Hound, one of his diving seacopters, near the site of the undersea city of gold discovered in Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter when Tom Jr spots something bubbling up out of the sea floor ooze. The bubbles are rising so quickly that Tom and his dad suspect that they might be helium, so they collect a sample, and, indeed, it turns out that they’re right. They immediately start making plans for how to exploit this new “discovery of top scientific importance!” Fortunately Tom has started work on his latest invention, the repelatron, which will allow him to create an undersea bubble in which his workers can set up their helium mine.
Their plans are immediately countered by a sinister foreign power who wants to take the helium for their own nefarious ends. Instead of the Kranjovians, or Brungarians, the bad guys in this book are some unnamed foreign power, with nuclear weapons, and a far flung network of subversive agents working across the U.S. (It was the ’50s, we know who they were referring to.) When Tom finally has his showdown with the leader of this group, the man starts out with an evil laugh (described as “threw back his head and chuckled mirthlessly” but it sounded like “mwa-ha-ha” in my head) before he starts monologuing about his evil plan, giving Tom the time he needs to come up with his plan to foil him. I guess he had the excuse of no one having compiled the Evil Overlord List, yet.
First and foremost is the repelatron, the repulsion ray that got a bit of a start in Ultrasonic Cycloplane and that Tom has been developing since then. If it could actually work, this is a device that would revolutionize pretty much every field of human activity. Among other things it would make the primary use to which they want to put the helium—high altitude balloons as first stages for rockets—completely obsolete. (People have been talking about doing that for decades, but no one has ever really gotten a practical balloon launch system going…and if you ignore the paranoia around it, hydrogen actually works somewhat better for that sort of thing.) Tom even lists making use of repelatrons in spaceships and aircraft as another application for them.
Tom whips up a deep sea well-cap and blowout preventer, overnight, in his machine shop. As the Deepwater Horizon demonstrated so eloquently, that sort of thing isn’t really that easy to do. (At least it’s only helium coming out of the sea floor this time.)
The osmotic air conditioner used to provide breathable air in his hydrodome has gas exchange filters that extract oxygen disolved in seawater, and replace it with CO2. This rather complicated system is used instead of another engineer’s proposal to electrolysise oxygen from water, and use soda-lime to absorb the CO2. Tom thinks the electrolysis method would use too much power. (I think this might be a first for him.) He’s also concerned about “wasting” the hydrogen.
The fatman suits apparently have nothing to indicate when their air systems stop working. (And the designated butt-monkey of this book is Bureau of Mines engineer Bob Anchor, who can’t go under water without something bad happening to him.) The space inside a Fatman is big enough that you should have nearly an hour’s worth of breathable air between a complete failure of your air system, and you passing out from CO2 poisoning.
Tom once again demonstrates that he can’t safely dangle anything from a crane, when the cables holding the vacuum lifter he’s planning to use to recover the warheads stashed off Fearing Island snap, while he and Bud are in a rowboat underneath it.
Tom’s osmotic air conditioner has the drawback that any pollution in the water might result in toxic gases being released into the dome, but despite thinking of this potential problem in advance, and supposedly taking steps to detect, and counteract it, the first time they set up the dome over the helium wells, everyone is soon passing out from toxic gasses released because of pollution in the water, without any sort of warning alarm or anything going off. Rather than fixing the osmotic air conditioner, Tom goes on to invent something that removes any pollutants from the seawater.
My earlier, briefer comments on this book were the first time I used the phrase Swift Security Sucks, and it really does in this book.
First there is the usual problem of them leaking information like a sieve. The bad guys learn of the existence, and the location of the deep sea helium mine almost instantly, and also of the existence of Tom’s repelatron. On Tom’s first trip back to the site of the helium bubbles, he’s already got enemy submarines snooping around the location. (Of course, if you want to go sneaking around underwater, a seacopter is the last vehicle you should be using to do it.)
Enemy subs cruise around Fearing Island completely undetected. First they get close enough to plant nuclear warheads just a little way offshore, then come back to take the warheads away again after Tom discovers them, but before he can pull them out, himself, and another sub is snooping around when he’s making his first underwater repelatron tests.
After being attacked by a man wearing a hood and robe, Tom concludes that it would have been impossible for anyone to have smuggled such things onto, or off the Enterprises premises, but it turns out that the culprit did manage to get a gun past security.
They set up a complex sting operation to catch a spy, involving people making coded signals by telephone when the bad guys show up, requiring Tom, and Swift Security to take several minutes to respond, instead of just setting up direct surveillance on the apartment where the exchange is to take place.
Tom decides that for extra security he’ll carry out his repelatron tests at night, because for some reason loading up planes in the dark is somehow less suspicious than doing it during the day.
The bad guys are keeping a close enough watch on Tom’s activities that they know when he’s going off sailing with Bud, Sandy, and Phyl, and have a plane ready to come try to gas them all.
They also know when he’s flying to Fearing Island from Shopton, and send a robot plane after him to try to blow him up. (And we get a mention of Rip Hulse, the hero of Flying Lab, having taught Tom his evasion techniques.)
Even being two miles under water isn’t enough to keep the bad guys from just walking in undetected to Tom’s Helium City at the end, and taking it over.
After the man who attacked Tom goes nuts, and shoots up a hanger, rather than hand him over to the authorities, Tom, and Enterprises Security take him into custody themselves in the Enterprises infirmary where Doc Simpson sedates him. They continue to hold him apparently without notifying anyone that they have the guy.
This highly dubious example of ethical medical practice leads us to…
After Tom Sr gets thrown around inside the Sea Hound enough to be knocked unconscious, Tom Jr and Doc Simpson just pick him up to move him to a bunk without taking any sort of precautions against exacerbating neck injuries.
Tom, Bud and Bob get the bends, and Doc Simpson treats them with hypothermia. I haven’t been able to find any references to this actually being done, but it’s conceivable that someone might have thought that this might be a viable treatment (lowering the temperature increases the gas solubility, removing the bubbles) but he does it by lowering their body temperatures down to 75°, which would cause cardiac arrest. There have been cases of people being brought back from colder hypothermia, but they’re rare. Really, just putting them in a hyperbaric chamber would be much simpler.
After getting his second concussion in so many weeks, Tom has Bud spring him from the Enterprises infirmary AMA, and even takes over driving the jeep Bud’s using, instead of letting his unconcussed friend do the driving.
A nuclear warhead explodes underwater near Fearing Island, generating an earthquake and tidal wave that inundates the island, but no one really notices that it was a nuclear explosion until sometime later when they find a cache of more warheads.
The bad guys discover that the caches of nuclear weapons that they’ve been leaving off shore of various U.S. naval facilities are being discovered, so they start leaving booby-traps to kill the people who discover them…but all these booby traps have time delays from when they are tripped, to when they go off, allowing Tom to defuse them.
Tom’s repelatron has a strange selectivity to what it repels. Tom says that it will repel pure water, and water that matches the exact chemical composition of the sea water that it has been tuned to, but water with impurities that don’t match what it’s tuned for will be unaffected.
It also manages to repel the water out of Bud’s body, without actually pushing him away.
And then at the end Tom has made a new pocket sized repelatron that repels aluminum, that he’s got in his pocket along with some aluminum disks when the bad guys catch him. Tom manages to slip the disks into the bad guys’s pockets, and use his new repelatron to immobilize them to make his escape. No mention is made that the repelatron is also pushed back from the aluminum. (And just having those disks in their pockets seems to be enough to completely immobilize the bad guys, without them even noticing that it was because of something in their pockets.)
Being pursued by a strange sub, Tom first tries to evade it in the Sea Hound by throttling his speed up to 80 knots. (BTW, the fastest submarine on record, the Soviet K-222, had a top speed of less than 45 knots. The fastest production submarine, the Soviet Alfa, did 40.) That doesn’t work so he tries diving really deep, which also doesn’t work. Finally he actually takes to the air, which is what he should have done in the first place.
Tom’s repelatron elevator, which he constructs for carrying stuff up and down through the ocean to and from his hydrodome controls its buoyancy by shrinking or expanding its bubble. Fine so far, but it seems to do so without any sort of system to maintain a constant air pressure inside it. On the first test they are nearly rammed by one of the bad guy’s subs (Did it just happen to be cruising by at that time, or did Swift Security have another information leak?) Tom flips the repelatron up to full power, causing the elevator to shoot upwards, and giving Tom, Bud and Bob (the designated butt-monkey) the bends. In this case, I don’t think they had been down deep enough, long enough for the bends to be a problem. That sudden decompression would have put them all at risk of experiencing all sorts of other barotrauma, some of it potentially much worse than the bends. In a later test, Tom doesn’t want to rise too quickly when something else goes wrong, to avoid getting the bends again, so he hasn’t fixed that problem.
Tom’s small elevator repelatron has a radius of about 3 meters, for a volume of 4.2 r3 or about 110 cubic meters, so he’s going to need 110 tonnes of ballast to make it go down. It gets worse with the bigger ones. His first experimental dome has a radius of 50 feet, or about 15 meters. that works out to a displacement of about 14,000 tonnes, and he transports it in one trip in the Sky Queen. The AN-225, the largest cargo plane built, can carry 250 tonnes.
The bad guys capture Tom, and once again they don’t bother emptying out his pockets. And this time Tom’s got enough stuff in his pockets with which he engineers his escape, that he must have clanked when he walked.
They also very conveniently tell Tom that their entire submarine crew is off taking over the helium mine, give him a tour of their sub, and even hang their weapons up on a rack, and them move away from them.
The refusal to name the foreign power behind Tom’s troubles gets a bit ridiculous as it goes on, including people showing Tom the remains of a partially burned flag, from which they can identify the country, but still not saying what it is.
We have multiple instances of seacopters sinking after losing power, or just sitting on the bottom of the ocean when powered down.
Sandy gets to show that she is actually a competent pilot this time. When she has trouble controlling her sabotaged Pigeon Special, Tom is all set to rush to her rescue with a hair-brained plan to fly over top of her plane, and lower a ladder to her, but she regains enough control to bring the plane down in a controlled crash.
Other than that, Sandy and Phyl once again just get to wear gay dresses, and take the boys out on a sailing date.
Tom picks up one more concussion in Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon, and Bud makes it through this book concussion free.
As Tom is putting the finishing touches on his new, Repelatron powered spaceship, the Challenger, he receives a message from his Space Friends telling him about a disease that is ravaging their food animals, putting them at risk of starvation if they can’t find a cure. They plan to send a spaceship to Earth containing some sick animals, in the hope that Tom can find a cure for them.
Complicating things for Tom are the Brungarians, who have just stolen one of Tom’s new computers which was specially designed to automatically translate the Space Friends’ messages, so they plan to beat Tom to the alien ark, and capture it for the glory of Brungaria…and maybe use the alien disease to create devastating new bio-weapons.
This book doesn’t really have much in the way of new inventions. Tom is just starting to apply his repelatrons to some of their obvious uses. The repelatron powered Challenger, his repelatron donkey flying platforms for moving people and cargo around, a repelatron used to hold an airplane aloft…
One invention that gets mentioned in passing is the technique Tom used to shrink a twenty ton computer down to a size that could be portable: “Tom figured out an ingenious type of storage system. Literally there are a thousand pieces of wire to the square inch.” So he essentially invented the integrated circuit in 1958…at about the same time as Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments was doing it.
Another invention is Tom’s new super efficient solar power collectors, which brings us to…
Once again, Tom treats solar as some sort of magic power supply. He initially states that there are three hp/ft2 of solar power available, which is off by a factor of about 20. The actual number is 1400W/m2, which works out to 130W/ft2 or 0.17 hp/ft2. (One horsepower is about 740 watts.)
If we give the loaded Challenger a mass of 500 tonnes (about the MTOW of the latest version of a 747) it’s going to need 5 megawatts of power to sustain an acceleration of 1g. And since that would just leave it sitting on the ground, and not going anywhere, let’s double its acceleration to 2gs, when necessary, which would take 10 megawatts of power. (We do learn that it has auxiliary rockets, and backup solar battery power, so it could use those to supplement its initial takeoff acceleration, or give it a bit of a boost, when required, but any competent engineer is going to want to build in some safety margins…oh, wait, this is Tom we’re talking about.)
Using Tom’s 3hp/ft2 number, that’s going to work out to the Challenger needing 12,800 ft2 of solar collectors, working at 100% efficiency. That’s a rectangle 113 ft on a side…which appears to be about four times the area of one of the sides of the Challenger’s central cube, which appears to be about 50-60 feet on a side.
Of course, real world solar collectors aren’t 100% efficient, and even if they were you’d still need 20 times that area. Using actual solar panels you’d need more like 100 times that area to power the Challenger, or a collector 1,000 ft on a side.
Much of the plot of this story is driven by the Space Friends’ food crisis, which really doesn’t make much sense. First it would seem that that the SFs are obligate carnivores, if the loss of their meat animals will lead to them starving to death. (And a technologically advanced civilization could probably come up with the sort of nutritional supplements that would let them get their sustenance from vegetables, which is generally a much more efficient use of resources.)
The Brungarians steal Tom’s portable electronic brain, enabling them to send messages to the SFs, pretending to be the Swifts, and the SFs still can’t seem to tell that messages transmitted from the wrong continent aren’t genuine. (Though in this case, the message they send to the SFs, telling them to put their ark spaceship into orbit around the moon makes more sense than the originally planned orbit around both. Even Tom doesn’t think this was a bad idea.)
We then learn that the SFs’ food animals are miniature versions of prehistoric Earth creatures. One is said to look like a miniature brontosaurus, another like a tyrannosaurus, and a third like a glyptodon—one of many large mammals that our ancestors likely hunted to extinction. What were they expecting the tyrannosaur to eat while it was locked up in their space ark with these herbivores? Was it one of Ken Ham’s vegetarian tyrannosaurs that went with Noah on his ark?
The space ark itself is your basic flying saucer design, and is constructed with a central core area containing the animals in a Space Friend friendly environment (much lower pressure, similar to 20,000 feet, we’re told) with a surrounding corridor that is pressurized to Earth normal conditions allowing Tom and his people to work there without space suits. But there is no door between the two sections, Tom has to cut a hole for his zoologists to get access to the animals to examine and treat them. Nothing is said about dealling with the pressure differential between the two sections. The ark also doesn’t have an airlock, so every time they open the outer door, they’re going to lose all the air in the Earth pressurized areas (and I hope he had a good patch on that hole he cut.)
After a brief examination the zoologists decide that the cattle all have Brucellosis (but they’ll get through somehow…sorry, couldn’t resist…That was a Warren Zevon reference, for you young whipper-snappers) and quickly come up with a treatment plan for them, so I guess the Space Friends haven’t figured out antibiotics or vaccinations, either.
This book doesn’t have many blatant failures of Swift Security, but they still seem to leak information like a sieve. Bud is ferrying the portable version of Tom’s new electronic brain to Fearing Island when he’s attacked. How did the bad guys know? Harlan Ames speculates that they must have x-rayed Bud’s plane to know he had the electronic brain onboard, but how could they do that, and how did they know about it in the first place? To prevent future such x-raying, Tom plans to coat all Swift cargo planes with Tomasite (This must be at least the sixth time Tom’s decided that the fix for a problem is a Tomasite paint job. Why isn’t this standard practice in the SE paint shops already?)
The Brungarians also seem to have full access to the flight plan for Tom and Bud’s first trip up to the Outpost, enabling them to intercept his rocket, and blow it up with missiles. They also know just where to go on Fearing Island when they raid it to steal the electronic brain, after failing to hijack Bud’s plane.
The magnetic field burglar alarm on the Swift house now seems to be common knowledge among the criminal element, and that Swift family and friends have special wrist watches that let them pass through the field without setting off the alarm.
Tom installs a test repelatron in a Pigeon Special in such a way that using it knocks out the plane’s regular engine.
Tom builds his repelatron donkeys without hand rails. He even acknowledges that this might be a problem, but thinks that forgoing them will make loading and unloading easier. After two incidents with people nearly falling off them go by in this book, there are still no hand rails on the repelatron donkeys. Graham Kaye seemed to think that was a very bad design, so his illustrations do give them low guard rails—something you could grab if you needed to, but not high enough to prevent you from falling off without grabbing it first.
One of the donkeys has its repelatron knocked out of alignment, so it nearly dumps Bud. (See, need those hand rails.) I’m assuming that this was on Tom’s prototype, and not one of the copies made by Art Wiltessa, since Art seems to be one of Swift Enterprises competent engineers.
And speaking of repelatron donkeys…Tom does a remote control test flight of his prototype with it outside, and Tom in his lab where he can’t see what it’s doing (or notice that Chow has decided to try to ride the thing while it’s being tested.) When Tom does look, and sees Chow struggling to keep his balance on this thing with no hand rails, high above the watching crowd, Tom thinks it’s hilarious. Would he have kept laughing as Chow plunged to his death? Even Bud didn’t think it was funny.
Tom takes Sandy and Phyl along as passengers in the Challenger’s second ever test flight, after the first flight revealed a few bugs in the repelatron system. Then on the third flight, he adds an unrestrained monkey to the mix (with the girls, and even more passengers) The monkey gets loose in the control room, dashing all over the place, flicking switches, and causing all sorts of havoc.
One of the bottles used to christen the Challenger gets accidentally filled with an explosive chemical, instead of water. (Serves them right, for trying to christen a ship with water.)
Doc Simpson checks the unknown chemical on a piece of broken glass from the exploding bottle by sniffing it.
Tom manages to lock himself inside an airtight compartment on the Challenger, with the air conditioning system turned off. (And how tiny was that compartment? Anything bigger than a coffin is going to have hours worth of breathable air before you pass out, and you’re going to notice all sorts of CO2 poisoning symptoms before that happens.) The air conditioning supposedly shuts off automatically when the door is closed on an empty compartment “to conserve the ship’s oxygen supply” but circulating air through an empty compartment won’t use up any oxygen.
In addition to causing trouble on the test flight, Tom takes Nicky the monkey with him on the moon trip too, where he causes more trouble. (Sandy and Phyl making him his own space suit (with help from Art) doesn’t help. Without the suit they’d have probably kept him caged up, where he would be much less of a hazard.)
When Tom first enters the SFs’ space ark, the door closes behind him, (because the Brungarians were jamming the door opening signal) cutting off his contact with the people outside and he discovers that there’s a breathable atmosphere, so he takes off his space suit. Lucky for him his friends didn’t figure out how to open the door again, or the Brungarians didn’t turn off their jammer, while he was unprotected.
As a joke on Sandy and Phyl, Tom aims a repelatron at where they are sitting on a pair of laboratory stools and then leaves the lab. They sit there for several minutes, not noticing that they’ve got this repulsion beam pushing on them until they try to get up to move.
Throughout the book, the the Brungarians carry out various acts of war and/or piracy against American territory, and American spacecraft, and all that the U.S. does in response is write diplomatic notes. They carry out a chemical weapon attack against Fearing Island, and then invade, and steal valuable property. They attack Tom’s rocket with missiles, and blow it up. Their moon ship fires multiple missiles at the Challenger. All of this hostile action gets no response from the U.S. government.
It seems that all it takes to check out a new pilot on the Challenger is a few minutes of instruction from Tom. That’s all the training either Bud, or Tom Sr. seem to get.
As “proof” that he actually went to the moon, Tom announces that he’s taking a tape recorder along.
It isn’t until Tom has actually begun his moon expedition, and attempts to make a temporary stop at his Outpost that he notices that he designed and built the Challenger without giving any consideration to the idea that he just might want to dock with the Outpost some day, and discovers that it isn’t really equipped to do that, so he has to quickly improvise some docking shock absorbers and boarding ramp to allow the docking to go forward.
Complicating his docking efforts is supposedly the gravitational attraction between the Challenger and the Outpost. Uh…no.
f = G (m1·m2) / r2
G = 6.7×10−11 N·kg–2·m2.
The Challenger has a mass of about 500,000 kg. Let’s give the Outpost 100 times that, making it 50,000,000 kg. That all works out to less than a newton of force acting between them at any sort of docking range. One newton of force will accelerate the Challenger at 1/500 of a millimeter /sec2
And once they do dock, and put across the ramp, they all proceed to walk across it…in free fall. At least until Nicky the monkey gets a bit of a shove because he’s not waddling fast enough and goes flying off into space.
Having arrived at the Outpost, Tom sits around twiddling his thumbs for a few hours waiting for word from the Space Friends that they’ve launched their ark, letting the Brungarians get a head start in their own (also solar powered) space ship to the moon.
At one point Tom decides to hide from the Brungarians in the moon’s shadow. Since the Challenger is solar powered, this requires him to run his auxiliary rockets to hover over the dark side, for hours. Somehow this giant exhaust flame is supposed to be invisible, or what?
And instead of putting all that weight into rocket engines and fuel, why not put a little bit of it into some more banks of solar batteries (since he’s got those too) or something like the Sky Queen’s nuclear reactor which would provide more than enough power to hover over the lunar surface?
The Brungarians manage to grab the Space Friends’ ark first, and try to flee with it into the moon’s shadow. (Hey, if Tom could hide there.) It never occurred to them that their own solar powered spaceship wouldn’t have the power needed to escape from the moon’s gravity if they left the sunlight. Luckily, it now turns out that Tom’s got enough excess power in the Challenger for it to hover using its auxiliary rockets, and enough backup battery power to catch both the Brungarians and the ark with his repelatrons. (This is the first time it gets mentioned that he does have battery backup…after already spending hours hovering.)
Does no one in this book understand how orbits work?
Tom spends hours and hours in this book hovering over the surface of the moon using his repelatrons, and his auxiliary rockets. He flies repelatron donkeys over the lunar surface. You know what he is never described as doing in the book, despite Chow declaring in the third from closing paragraph “You’re still the first earthman to land on the moon.”
He never actually lands on the moon.
The Challenger, as described in the book, is a spaceship capable of visiting all of the inner planets of the solar system. It’s too bad that Tom never goes on to use it as such. He even makes some comments about combining his planned moon trip with a visit to the Space Friends’ satellite around Mars, before the whole sick animals plot springs up, but he never takes it far outside of cis-lunar space.
At about the half way point in this book, one of the astronomers on the Outpost using a Swift spectroscope discovers an unknown substance on the moon. It will take until G-Force Inverter for this discovery to pay off.
Tom does mention that the Challenger has a special meteor repelatron to protect it, and I think that this book is one of the few TS in Space stories that doesn’t have them getting hit by meteors at some point.
Despite having invented an improved autopilot, the Cybertron, for his Ultrasonic Cycloplane, Tom’s space ships in this book, including the Challenger, still have autopilots driven by punched tape.
I really wanted to like this book. The Challenger is right up there with the Sky Queen for being one of Tom’s most useful creations. Unlike the Sky Queen, it will go on to be woefully under-utilized in future books.
I was first reading Tom Swift books in the mid sixties, while the Space Race was in full swing. About the time I first read this book, Buzz Aldrin was working out how to really do orbital rendezvous, and do useful work in space. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee showed us that trying to go the moon wasn’t a safe thing to do.
Re-reading it now, I found it somewhat underwhelming.
Tom Swift and His Space Solartron is another concussion free book.
Tom’s major invention in this book is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Special Relativity, in which a particle accelerator is used to create matter, not just increase the mass of particles traveling at high velocity.
Much of the book is a quest for MORE POWER as Tom finds that earthbound power sources are too limited, so he goes into space and super sizes the solar power collection technology he developed to power the Challenger in Race to the Moon. Strangely, while his experiments at the Citadel using its nuclear reactor for his power supply were only able to produce a milligram of oxygen after running for over a day, just hooking up to the regular solar collectors on the Challenger was enough to produce enough oxygen to supply three people, even though the Challenger’s solar collectors were producing a similar amount of power. (See my earlier post about the Challenger, and its power requirements, which I underestimated by a factor of at least 5. The Challenger would need something on the order of 2.5 megawatts of power to sustain a 1g acceleration.)
I don’t know if the writer just got lucky, or if he decided to just once depict the amount of matter you could realistically get if you really did have some way of turning energy into mass, but that first experimental run at the Citadel, where Tom runs his prototype matter maker for 30 hours at a million watts of power, actually does produce about the amount of mass you would expect to get from that much energy. (30 * 3,600 * 1,000,000 / 300,000,0002 = 0.0000012 kg, or .0012 grams) Tom should have been ecstatic that his device worked with the efficiency it did, producing .001 grams of oxygen.
This was the point in my first read-through that I started taking note of such things, but I didn’t included it in main Concussion thread, instead posting my observations under a different subject line.
Swift Enterprises would have been fined into bankruptcy, and Tom and his father would likely have been doing jail time for their repeated gross negligence, and total disregard for taking even the most rudimentary of safety precautions.
A subplot in Space Solartron has a young engineer being harassed by a lawyer who thinks that the Swifts should be sued for covering up the cause of an accident that killed the engineer’s father, a Swift test pilot. (And all the engineer has to do to pay for the lawyer’s services is pass along some confidential info.) As the book went along I couldn’t help thinking that the lawyer might have a point. Even if there was no culpability in the father’s accident, the Swifts don’t have a great safety record. In just this one book we have:
And with Tom Swift and His Electronic Retroscope we’re on a bit of a roll, with two concussion free books in a row.
This book has got two major inventions in it. First is the titular Retroscope, a device that scans eroded rock carvings and reconstructs what the original looked like. The second is the Paraplane, a combination jet aircraft and dirigible, that harkens back to some of Tom Sr’s early aircraft designs.
Throw in some Indiana Jones style archeological vandalism of a Mayan temple in the Yucatan Peninsula (though I suppose that it would be fairer to say that this sort of story was one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones) leading to discovering evidence that some of the Space Friends seemed to have crash landed there 3,000 years ago.
At least Tom Jr’s archeological vandalism isn’t as bad as what his father did in the Underground City of Gold. There are a couple of nods to being careful how they dug stuff up, having an actual Mexican archeologist supervising the site, and taking photographs of artifacts in situ, instead of just tossing everything that looks like it might be worth something into a sack, and carting it back to the U.S.
In Tom Swift and His Spectromarine Selector (or Archeological Vandalism under the Sea) Tom only acquires one new concussion. (You’d think he’d have learned by now that he really shouldn’t take that winding road through the forest between Swift Enterprises and his home.)
In addition to demonstrating that he really shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near any sort of archeological discovery, Tom also demonstrates in this book that he really really shouldn’t be allowed to name things.
The Spectromarine Selector of the title is more commonly referred to as the de-organic-izer in the text, and it has two main components: the selective molecule recombiner (the semoreco, or S-Co) and the locomotor vacuum producer (LVP).
Tom also has a couple of other other new inventions he pulls out of his pockets when the plot requires it: the selectrol filtration pump (SVP) and the countermagnetizer. I think that this book is the first time that he starts using TLAs in place of some of the word salad names he gives to his inventions.
I think that this book also has the highest number of returning inventions of any book so far. In addition to the Sky Queen (is there any book in which it doesn’t make an appearance?) we have Jetmarines, Seacopters, Hydrodomes, and various other applications of the repelatron, the Retroscope, the Damonscope, and the undersea metal detector from Diving Seacopter that was used to look for the Space Friends’ rocket.
Tom also demonstrates his usual cavalier attitude toward safety. The de-organic-izer vents its output directly into the breathing atmosphere of his hydrodome, nearly poisoning everyone in the expedition at one point. Careless operation of the dome nearly floods it, and drowns everyone, careless pointing of the de-organic-izer also sucks a bunch of fish into the dome at one point, and damages the plastic inner dome to the point where potentially deadly shards of plastic rain down on his work crew. At another point a high pressure water pump explodes, nearly killing both Toms, and another man they’re working with.
In Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts Tom picks up one more concussion.
In some ways, I don’t think that the author of this book was even trying to make the “science” even a little bit plausible. Starting with Tom’s gravitex gravity concentrator, which Tom builds while admitting to himself that he doesn’t even understand how gravity works, but he still whips up his gravitex, with its gravitol spheres in one afternoon, and has it work first try.
Then there’s his cosmic ray reactor which uses injusters, and flexatrons to convert cosmic rays into thrust. This book has worse technobabble than an episode of Star Trek: Voyager.
This book also seems to be least connected with the other books in the series. It doesn’t even have a teaser for Tom’s next adventure in the final chapter. There’s a two chapter digression into a sub plot where the Space Friends send the Toms a present that doesn’t connect with the rest of the plot in any way. This seems to have been stuck in just to pad out the story length. (And the “present” is a small pterosaur which arrives with no care and feeding instructions, and promptly dies on them.) During this subplot it’s stated that this is the first contact they’ve had from the Space Friends since Race to the Moon, ignoring that they talked with them in Space Solartron, and Tom Sr. took a ride in one of their spaceships, that took him most of the way to Venus.
The entire raison d’être for the Space Kite and Cosmic Sailor doesn’t hold water, either. Supposedly the goal is to create a spaceship that’s cheaper to operate than rockets, but Tom’s already got the Challenger (which gets brought in to save Tom and Bud when their trial run of the Space Kite goes haywire) and the Cosmic Sailor has atomic rockets to get into space, and land again, which kinda scuttles the “cheaper than rockets” design goal.
Back to the thread topic, then… We’re almost half way through the series, and so far Tom has had a total of fifteen concussions. Bud has been doing much better lately. He hasn’t been conked on the head since Phantom Satellite, and has only had ten concussions.
Bud ends his seven book concussion free streak in the first chapter of Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X, though Tom gets through this book concussion free. Sandy isn’t so lucky, though.
In the questionable names department, this book has the Quakelizer, the device Tom invents to counteract the Brungarian’s earthquake generating machine.
Someone at the syndicate seemed to like the idea of “Earthquake Islands.” This is the second Tom Jr book to have a chapter titled “Earthquake Island,” and of course Tom Sr was once a Castaway on Earthquake Island.
As for the plot… Well the less said about it, the better. I’ve long considered the Space Friends to be the worst idea in the Tom Jr series, and this book is all about them sending some sort of energy being to visit Earth, and then the Toms using it in highly questionable ways.
And how was a sightless, deaf creature supposed to act as a spy, anyway? How was it learning the things it was radioing back to the Toms about the Brungarians activities?
Tom picks up one more concussion in Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung. Once again it happens while taking a shortcut between Enterprises and Shopton. In addition to the concussion, Tom and Bud also get the bends in two different incidents in their diving adventures. They really had no excuse for this, as the first diver decompression tables had been published fifty years before this book was written. (Especially the time Tom gets the bends. That was a case of blatant diver incompetence, and disregard for even the most basic diver safety protocols.)
This book has some interesting stuff in it. The titular Electronic Hydrolung is a device that supplies divers with oxygen drawn directly from seawater, obviating the need for divers to carry bulky tanks. In theory, this is quite doable, with the main obstacle to having real world equivalent is the lack of an adequate power supply to run it. Tom, of course, just uses one of his previously invented solar batteries. Tom “solves” the bends problem by using helium instead of nitrogen in his breathing gas…something that doesn’t actually work, as helium is absorbed even more readily by the diver’s body than nitrogen is. Helium is used in diving gas to avoid the toxic effects of high pressure nitrogen.
Two other inventions compliment the Hydrolung. The first is his ion propulsion system, something else that could work if you had a power supply that could run it. The second is a bit more problematic: an electronic buoyancy control device. If the author had described some sort of vest that contained inflatable gas bladders that the diver could control, I could buy it, but this is just an electronic box with a dial you turn to make you go up or down.
In addition to the Hydrolung, Tom has to contend with Brungarian rebels with a sub that’s invisible to sonar. The author decided to drop one of the magic properties of Tomasite plastic which gave the same property to Tom’s earlier subs that got mentioned multiple times in previous books, and had Tom come up with a new system to accomplish the same thing. Actually, two systems: one to make active sonar pulses seem to just pass right through his subs, and a second to mask the noise of a sub to passive sonar systems by making it sound like regular noisy marine life. (That second one wouldn’t work too well on a Seacopter. There really isn’t much that’s loud enough to mask the noise that rotor must make.)
In the strange names department this book gives us…nothing, really. As I’m writing this, I can’t recall Tom giving a weird name to anything in this book.
Electronic Hydrolung was a special book for me when I was growing up. It was my first Tom Swift book; I first read it when I was seven or eight years old. I think it was probably the first book I read that wasn’t mostly pictures. Ever since then books about diving, and submarines have been among my favorites. By the time I was thirteen or so, Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island became my favorite book, and I ate up his other fiction, and non-fiction with diving and submarine themes.
Tom and Bud each pick up one more concussion in Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar.
This book has the return of Cousin Ed, once again bearing something he just happened to pick up in a shop somewhere, that has bad guys trailing him half way around the world to try to get back. (Hint to bad guys: if you don’t want anyone to know about your secret mine, don’t sell the things you’re digging up to just anyone who wanders in off the street.)
The cover art for this book is a fine example of early 60s automotive design: it looks kinda like a flying Edsel (from the last year, after they dropped the vulva shaped grill.)
The Atomicar of the title doesn’t really have that much to do with the plot. Tom drives around in one a couple of times, but that’s about it. The main invention of the book is the atomic power capsules that Tom invents to power the thing. His prototype seemed to work just fine running off his solar batteries (once he fixed the brakes) so I’m not sure why he bothered. Maybe he was thinking “I’m calling his thing an ‘Atomicar’ so it’s god damn going to be atomic powered!” The main plot involves Tom getting involved in a project to modernize a Middle Eastern country bordering Iran and Afghanistan, called Kabulistan in the book, more or less where Turkmenistan is in the real world. I must say, that in retrospect, it’s a good thing that no one actually went into any of the —stans, with hundreds of mini atomic power capsules (that have a habit of blowing up like mini atomic bombs when tampered with) to modernize them.
This book contains the only example of an actual moustache twirling bad guy that I can think of.
This is the first book in the series to set up a real red herring for the bad guy. Mr. Nurhan Flambo, the head of Pan-Islamic Engineering Associates is introduced as an arrogant SOB, with a shifty assistant who is a bad guy, but it turns out that the assistant really is in this for himself, and the real bad guy is Simon Wayne, the American representative of Europa Fabrik. Flambo just thinks that the Kabulistan development project should be done by a Middle Eastern company, not a bunch of Western infidels, and who can really blame him for that? Later in the book he even becomes helpful, soothing relations between the Swift expedition and some of the tribesmen they upset, and relaying information from those tribesmen about the location of Tom and Bud’s crashed helicopter back to the rest of the expedition.
Tom is also playing around with masers and lasers as communication devices in this book. (That’s why he’s interested in finding the lost ruby mine, he thinks it will help him make better lasers.) I think this was the first time I saw any reference to lasers as anything other than a heat ray weapon. (Though Tom does end up using the laser he built to try to contact the Outpost in Space as a heat ray weapon. I can’t help wondering how he expected to signal the Outpost with a laser from Kabulistan, when it’s on the wrong side of the planet.)
In Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober Tom and Bud each pick up one more concussion. Tom should know by now that he really should avoid that road through the woods near Swift Enterprises.
Tom spends a lot of time in this book developing his anti-inverse square wave transmitter, seemingly forgetting that he spent much of the last book playing around with masers. Masers aren’t the only thing he’s forgotten about. In Race to the Moon, the Challenger had anti-meteor repelatrons, that were also good for deflecting missiles, but Tom first has to dodge a meteor on his first space flight in this book, and then wastes a bunch of time trying to dodge a missile on his second flight, before remembering that he can just push it away with a repelatron. The Toms have also stopped carrying around their secret pen radios, so when they walk into the really obvious trap, they’ve got no way to call for help, leading to them having to make their escape in a flying igloo.
The titular invention of this book is once again incidental to the plot, which mostly involves Tom trying to find out how someone is stealing the plans to all his latest inventions. The other main plot in this book involves Bud getting drafted by NASA to pilot their Venus exploration mission, the building of the spaceship for which went to a rival aerospace company. (One of the few examples in the TSJr books were the rival company isn’t run by “enemies.” They just manage to build a spaceship that fails shortly after launch, so Tom has to go rescue it with the Challenger.)
This is also the first (possibly only) book which contains no reference to the Sky Queen.
Tom picks up another concussion in the first chapter of Tom Swift and the Asteroid Pirates. Rather than it being caused by a bad guy hitting him on the head, this one comes from him essentially tripping over his own feet, and falling and hitting his head.
In this book, rather than already having an invention that just happens to be the thing needed to solve problem of the book, Tom is presented with a problem, and invents something to solve it!
The Black Cobra is attempting to seize Nestria, and he has surrounded it with an anti-matter barrier which blows up all the supply rockets that Tom tries to send to the base to resupply its crew. The Cobra is planning to starve the base into submission, and then just walk in and take it, so Tom has to invent a magnetic deflector that will punch a hole through the barrier big enough for him to fly the Challenger through.
The book specific science is more based in reality than it is in many of the more recent books. The depiction of the effects of anti-matter is closer to reality than what we got in Caves of Nuclear Fire, and Tom’s magnetic deflector is a plausible solution to the problem. He even uses liquid helium to cool it down to super-conductor temperatures to make it work more efficiently. I didn’t really have any “that would never work” moments when dealing with his new invention for this book.
A recent thread has been asking if anyone else at Enterprises ever invents anything, and this book has an invention, that was developed by someone other than Tom! Art Wiltessa, an Enterprises engineer who has had a supporting role in many of the previous books has adapted Tom’s idea for anti-sonar sheathing he developed in Electronic Hydrolung to make an anti-radar sheathing that can be applied to aircraft and space ships.
Tom also makes better use of his space prober in this book than he did in the book named for it. He also seems to have learned his lesson, and gone back to carrying around his pencil radio.
Tom makes it to chapter two of Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway before someone knocks him out with a blow to the head. Bud gets knocked out by poison gas in chapter one. Tom picks up a couple more concussions later in the book, making this the first multi-concussion book for him since Deep Sea Hydrodome. This is book 22 in the series, and Tom has now had 22 concussions, so he is now averaging one concussion per book. Bud picks up a concussion later in the book as well, but he’s lagging far behind Tom for the total count, with only 13.
There isn’t a revolutionary new invention in this book. The Repelatron Skyway is an application of previous inventions, the repelatron, and durafoam. The Graphicopter is new as well, but it’s just a novel form of helicopter. We also get a new use for Tomasite in a fire fighting foam. Is there anything that stuff can’t do…other than the things durastress does?
The most amazing “invention” in the book isn’t Tom’s. It’s the dinosaurs created by Professor Eldreth, leading to Ngombia getting its very own Jurassic Park, decades before Michael Crichton wrote his book.
While there is nothing spectacularly novel about the Graphicopter, I do remember it as being one of my favorite Tom Swift inventions to draw, when I was 10. Maybe it’s because I could imagine someone actually being able to build one. The Jetmarine was another favorite, possibly for the same reason.
Like in Ultrasonic Cycloplane, Tom’s excursion to the jungle has a zoologist attach himself to the expedition, and he quickly becomes a suspect when things start going wrong, but I kept thinking “Nah, this has to be a red herring. They can’t be pulling the same trick again.” But they were, and the other guy set up as a suspect turns out to be a good guy. Like in Triphibian Atomicar, the ring leader of the bad guys turns out to be a white man who’s been exploiting Ngombia’s natives and resources for his personal gain, and sees Tom’s skyway as a threat to him being able to continue doing so.
As for the Skyway itself, I’d make a few design changes. As the bad guys demonstrated repeatedly, the ground based repelatrons were much too susceptible to sabotage. It would be better to apply the technique Tom used to span the swamp to the whole Skyway. Attach the repelatrons to the Skyway, and use them to repel the ground. I’d also put real physical guard rails on the thing. I don’t think you’d find many people willing to drive across a 200 foot high bridge when they can’t see anything keeping them from going over the edge. And if anything goes wrong with the repelatron guard rails no one on the Skyway will be able to see that their protection from falling off has gone away.
Tom makes it nearly 1/3 of the way through Tom Swift and His Aquatomic Tracker before someone knocks him out with a blow to the back of his head.
Aquatomic Tracker is another book that I remembered almost nothing about the plot of, before this re-read. I did remember the transatlantic Hydrolung journey that made up the first few chapters, and the encounter with the electro-trawler, and the guyot, but I drew a complete blank for the rest of the book. The main plot involves a Bondesque villain: a mega-rich bad guy who isn’t just happy with the art works he can buy, no, he has to steal priceless art treasures by sinking ships, and then towing them away with his own nuclear submarine to loot in another location at his leisure.
The invention of the book is the Aquatomic Tracker: a device for following an underwater trail. Tom hasn’t trotted out so many acronyms when describing an invention since his Spectromarine Selector. (Maybe spending so much time under water does something to his brain.) The AT is made up of a Repelo-spectrograph (RSG), Coincidence Analyzer (CO-AN), Trail Constructor (TC) and the Compound Trace Synthesizer (CTS).
This is a rare book in which Sandy gets to do something useful. Mostly she’s just in the books to be threatened, frightened, or to drag Tom and Bud out of his lab for a date, but in this book after Tom gets kidnapped in London, it’s Sandy who comes up with a plan for Scotland Yard to find him. (Okay, in reality her plan most likely wouldn’t have worked, and would have made things worse for Tom, but in the book everyone thought it was a great idea, and it worked perfectly.)
During the Atlantic crossing I was initially struck by this line: “Tom took the opportunity to check their position on his automatic navigator, which had been miniaturized around an advanced nuclear gyroscope.” My initial reaction was “There Tom goes again, nuclearizing everyday things that don’t need to be nuclear,” but before I spouted off about it in my review I figured I’d do a quick Google, and was surprised to learn that nuclear gyroscopes are a real thing that really are used in inertial navigation systems, with early versions being built back in the 1950s. For a bit of history on atomic gyroscopes see Advances in Atomic Gyroscopes: A View from Inertial Navigation Applications so, kudos to “Victor” for that one.
This was the most troublesome set of illustrations to get reasonably cleaned up. Among other things, there was about a half inch gap in the middle of each of the two page illustrations, and unlike many of the illustrations in other books, that gap included important bits of what was being shown, such as Tom’s entire right arm and fist, and much of his left hand in Fig9...and I suck at drawing hands. Tom’s right fist is a flipped and scaled down version of Bud’s left.
In addition to the half inch gap, it was also pretty much impossible to get a decent picture of the Tracker control panel in Fig8, so I ended up recreating the whole thing in Corel Draw.
Tom makes it almost half way through Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector before he gets knocked out, and Bud follows a couple of chapters later.
This is another book where the main invention really isn’t all that relevant to resolving the plot. Yes, Tom uses his 3-D camera to record one of his adversaries confessing to framing him for stealing his 3-D tv system, and attempting to blackmail him, and he outfits his robot probes to the Green Orb with 3-D cameras too, but neither case was something that couldn’t have been done just as well with regular video cameras.
Then we have the Green Orb. It is apparently a living asteroid that moves around from star to star, soaking up some rays from one sun before moving on to the next. It is incredibly sensitive to any sort of electromagnetic radiation, so it gets upset when Tom starts pointing his space probers at it, and rather than asking nicely for him to please stop doing that, it involves itself with various plots against him. It can also receive and understand human telecommunication signals pretty well, but it’s best efforts to talk back to us involve it inducing electrical signals in the brains of a few select individuals who are sensitive to that sort of thing.
We also have another case of a band of bad guys carrying around incriminating insignia to identify themselves. First we had the pirate gang in Jetmarine, with their spaniel coins, and then the Black Cobra gang from Asteroid Pirates. I suppose that Group Q had the excuse of being a re-branded Black Cobra operation, so he was just following his old M.O. And at the end he’s reported as dead again when his escape sub supposedly sank. But they don’t have a body, again, so why does anyone think that he actually is dead this time? At least the Black Cobra’s ID tchotchkes don’t have the location of his secret base marked on them, like those spaniel pesos did.
In Tom Swift and His Polar-Ray Dynasphere Tom and Bud pick up two more concussions, each. First Tom gets hit upside his head with a stick, then Bud falls off an elephant, and then they both get knocked out in an explosion.
This is another book in which the bad guy gang have an identifying token, which they carelessly leave lying around for our heroes to pick up. This time it’s a Kali pin that gets left lying on a store counter by a clerk where it catches Bud’s eye, and the store owner sells it to him as a present for Sandy. Rather than deciding that the rest of their gang would probably be smart enough to figure out that the blonde American girl wearing one of their pins probably isn’t a member, the bad guys reveal its significance by promptly stealing it from her.
Tom’s main invention of the book is the Polar-Ray Dynasphere. A device that uses electromagnetic fields to selectively focus different sorts of electromagnet radiation. Tom uses this device in a couple of ways. First he builds the Dyna Ranger, a spaceship designed to recover a probe that got stuck in orbit around Mars. The Dynasphere can focus a beam that will essentially turn anything it hits into an ion thruster that will accelerate it toward the source of the beam. The Dyna Ranger then uses repelatrons and magnetic grapples to catch whatever it’s reeled in. After recovering the Mars probe, Tom plans to hand the Dyna Ranger over to the government as a general space junk collection ship. Tom, of course, doesn’t seem to notice that in the time it took him to build and test the Dyna Ranger, and use it to retrieve the Mars probe, he could have made a dozen round trips to Mars in the Challenger.
Tom’s other use for the Dyna Ranger is to use it to focus the heat from the sun onto a poisonous lake in Vishnapur—a small country in the Himalayan Mountains, north of India—in order to boil it away so he can clean up the plants growing in the lakebed that are making it toxic. Tom says he can focus 500 watts of IR per square centimeter onto the lake, which works out to 5 megawatts per square meter, or 5 terawatts per square kilometer. This is about 20,000 times more than the insolation received per unit area on the surface of the Earth, so he’s going to have to focus the sunlight from an area at least 20,000 times the area of the lake to do it. (And he says he’s only focusing the IR, which makes up a tiny fraction of the incoming sunlight, so his lens is going to have to be a lot bigger than that, and hey, point it at something other than a lake and he’s made a honking great flying death ray for the government! Who says the Swifts don’t make weapons systems?) Tom also hand waves off concerns about the huge toxic cloud he’s going to make by boiling off the lake water.
This book has a pretty high incidence of returning inventions. Tom puts on a couple of 3-D Telejector shows, one for the Vishapurans, and another as an “apology” to the Brungarians, when he accidentally snags one of their satellites when testing out his probe retrieval tech. (”I’m sorry I caught your satellite because it failed to launch into its proper orbit, and wandered into my test area. I put it back where it was supposed to be.”) Tom also makes use of a Seacopter, Hydrolung and Fat Man suits, and his Spectromarine Selector in the lake cleanup operation.
In the “What’s Tom Sr doing?” department, this time he’s experimenting with bionics! This is nearly a decade before Martin Caidin used the word in Cyborg (which got turned into The Six Million Dollar Man.) Nothing is said about just what sort of bionics he’s working on, so we don’t know if he was using it as a portmanteau of biology and electronics, as Caidin did, or in its older meaning of machines that mimic biological systems.
Strictly speaking, Tom Swift and His Sonic Boom Trap doesn’t have Tom getting hit over the head, but he does get knocked out by the bad guy’s sonic weapon, which probably scrambled his brain at least as much, so I’m counting it.
With this book, Tom has now visited every continent on Earth. A significant portion of the plot takes place in Australia.
Once again, a problem crops up just after Tom has invented just the thing needed to solve it. The main invention of the book, the Silentenna, is based on an idea that’s been around for a long time: cancelling out sound by using another sound which is 180 degrees out of phase. Arthur C. Clarke used the same principle in his first of the Tales from the White Hart, “Silence, Please”, first published in 1950, and while it wouldn’t really work as a sound suppression system working over a wide area, it can be used to suppress sound at a specific place, which is what noise cancelling headphones do. The idea must have had extra appeal to the Tom Swift writers, as it uses his favorite “180 degrees out of phase” trick that seems to crop up in a lot of his inventions.
I’ve described previous villains from TS books as being “Bondesque”, but this time it’s more like he’s up against Dr. Evil. This guy has created a weapon system that he could sell to the U.S. Army for billions, and the best idea he can come with to monetize the thing is attack American cities with it, unless the government promises to pay him TEN MILLION DOLLARS! Dun! Dun! Dun! And of course when Tom confronts him in the final chapter, he spends several pages monologuing about his brilliant plan, and confessing how he has been behind all the mishaps that had befallen Tom up to this point.
Earlier in the book there is a secondary villain who strokes his moustache while gloating over how Tom has fallen into his cleaver trap. For a little bit I was a little miffed that Tom had been especially foolish, walking into the bad guy’s clutches virtually alone. But it turned out that in this case him walking up to the guy’s front door and knocking, with only one Australian cop as backup, was a diversion to allow troops from the Royal Australian Air Force to surround the place, and swoop in to capture all his minions.
And then in the final chapter, Tom and Bud walk into the bad guy’s lair all alone…
I have also noticed while reading this series that the Sky Queen has been getting faster. She was initially described as flying at “a thousand miles an hour” which is about Mach 1.3. In this book the Sky Queen is cruising at Mach 3, and doing Mach 4 when Tom is really in a hurry.
Tom picks up one more concussion in Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron.
This is another book whose plot is driven by the Space Friends, and one of their long ago expeditions to Earth, this time to a lost civilization in the Pacific Ocean, that may be linked to the supposed lost continent of Lemuria, and the people who carved the stone statues on Easter Island. This ancient expedition left a cache of information behind which is now buried deep beneath the ocean floor, and the Space Friends want it back.
There is also a rival group of space beings, calling themselves the Space Legion who want the cache, and offer threats and enticements of advanced weaponry to the Swifts if they’ll give the cache to them, rather than the Space Friends. The Swifts aren’t interested, but the Kranjovians are, so they’re along for the ride, attempting to steal the cache from Tom after he’s recovered it.
The invention of the book is the Geotron, an underground (and sea) mole vehicle which uses repelatrons (naturally) to open up a passage for it through even the strongest rock, which then closes up behind it after the Geotron has passed through. Cool in concept, but like so many of Tom’s inventions, it couldn’t possibly work as described in the real world (even if we had repelatrons.) Pushing that much rock aside would take terrific amounts of energy, which would be dissipated by heating the rock surrounding the Geotron, and cooking all aboard it.
Tom also gets involved in a side plot to create a deep sea aquarium. Fortunately he just happens to be experimenting with making super strong glass when the request for help to make the aquarium comes in.
Something that stood out for me in this book is that Tom and Bud are not very nice people. Bud is a pretty classic bully, who is constantly resorting to threats of violence, and violence itself, to get his way with anyone outside his in-group of friends who has any sort of disagreement with him. He, and Tom, are continually harassing Chow with a series of mean spirited practical jokes. The treatment of Chow in these stories in some ways reminds me of Charlie, from Flowers for Algernon, who is constantly the butt of jokes from his “friends” and laughs along, but once he gets his intelligence enhanced realizes that all his “friends” have been laughing at him, not laughing with him. Bud is constantly playing jokes on Chow, and then he and Tom laugh at him, until Chow realizes that he has been made the butt of a joke again, and starts laughing along too.
This mean spiritedness of Tom and Bud is brought into focus by an incident that happens when they are testing the Mark I Geotron. They pop out of the ground in a park in front of a bunch of elderly bird watchers, realize they’ve been seen, and quickly retreat back underground. Later they are listening to a radio news report about the bird watchers reporting the incident to the police, which includes the information that three of the women had been frightened so badly that they needed medical treatment, and Tom and Bud think the whole thing is hilarious. How hard would they have laughed if one of the women had had a heart attack and died?
An early incident in the book has Tom and Bud being taken prisoner by a group of men on Easter Island, and for once, the people who capture them actually search them, and take away everything they’ve got in their pockets, including Tom’s pencil radio. I think that’s the first time anyone has ever done that. Tom has forgotten to take it along with him in the past, or for plot reasons decided not to use it after he’s been taken prisoner, but this is the first time that anyone ever took it away from him. (And they didn’t even know there was anything special about it. They just took the entirely reasonable precaution of emptying out their prisoner’s pockets.)
And Tom Sr is still experimenting with bionics. Swift Enterprises even has a Bionics Department. I keep expecting someone to go running by at 60mph.
Tom gets knocked out in the first chapter of Tom Swift and the Mystery Comet.
Strange UFOs are appearing around the Earth, colourful craft flying about in intricate patterns. At the same time Tom is preparing for an expedition to rendezvous with a comet. He’s developed a remote sampling device that he plans to use to take samples of the comet’s nucleus. This plan is complicated by the Brungarians, who are claiming to have created an artificial comet. Pretty much everyone thinks that this is just propaganda, and they’re just planning to take credit for the next comet to come along, but the State Department doesn’t want to upset anyone, so they put a hold on Tom’s comet probe, just as Tom Sr has discovered a new comet approaching the sun.
Tom has his usual cavalier attitude toward basic safety procedures in this book. First he aims his Telesampler at a random bit of dirt without checking first what’s under it, and hits a buried power cable, blowing out the power to an entire nearby town. He goes on firing it around without really looking where it’s aimed and accidentally finds a child who had recently disappeared on a rock hunting expedition, by sampling his sack of collected rocks. I shudder to think what might have happened if he’d been aimed a foot or two to the left. Then during a demonstration of the device for the press, he accidentally chops the top off a building under construction in Shopton. Okay that last one was partially because the Telesampler had been sabotaged, but Tom was still firing a device made to punch holes through things at a populated target. Any miss-calibration of his aim could have had him punching holes through people.
Bud continues to be a thoroughly unpleasant person. In addition to his ongoing harassment of Chow, he says that Tom should have reacted to an obnoxious teenager in Shopton by punching him. And he demonstrates later in the book that that wasn’t just talk. While they are having lunch in a student tavern in Heidelberg, one of the students approaches Sandy, and politely asks if she would care to dance. Bud instantly takes offense and announces that Sandy’s dancing with him. (She wasn’t actually dancing with anyone at the time.) The student points out that who Sandy dances with should be up to Sandy; Bud gets more incensed, and tries to shove the guy aside; the student resists getting shoved, so Bud punches him. This leads into a rather farcical duel, which thanks to quick thinking on Sandy’s part is fought with rubber swords.
We have more archeological vandalism, this time in a “secret” “hidden” mediaeval alchemical laboratory. (Though you have to wonder how it was that no one ever found the place before considering that it had a great big Mercury symbol pointing to the entrance.) They start out by saying that they mustn’t touch any of the ancient books and manuscripts, because they are so fragile from age that they might fall apart from any sort of handling. Then something comes up making them want to leave in a hurry, so they toss a bunch of the books into a sack to cart away with them.
As of this book the Sky Queen has been updated so that it has repelatron lifters, and may be marginally faster, cruising at Mach 4, and going a bit quicker when they’re in a hurry.
Security at Swift Enterprises continues to suck. First it’s penetrated by a high school student who has the run of the place for a couple of days, playing a series of pranks on Tom and Bud. Then when doing a background check on a visiting famous comet expert they don’t even bother checking a photograph of the expert in question to see if the guy who showed up was who he claimed to be.
We also have a new bunch of aliens who have been in communication with the Earth in the past, and are renewing their contact now, to warn us that the approaching comet is highly radioactive, and will destroy all life on Earth when the planet sweeps through its tail. There are multiple problems with this scenario. First they’re using a language that they learned from mediaeval alchemists, who wouldn’t even have had a concept of what radioactivity was. The second is that there isn’t enough matter in a comet’s tail to deliver a lethal dose of anything as the Earth swept through it.
Tom makes it all the way through Tom Swift and the Captive Planetoid without picking up any new concussions, and Bud makes it to the end of Chapter 17 before he gets knocked out.
This book has a few intertwining plots. In one, Tom is working on his new Duratherm Wing, a spacecraft re-entry system, based on creating an inflatable wing with durabouy plastic which will act as a heat shield during re-entry, and then allow the craft to glide to a controlled landing. A complimentary system also provides the spacecraft with an emergency airbag, in case it can’t actually make a safe landing on a runway. Tom has also developed a version of the second system as a crash protection device for aircraft.
Another subplot has Tom involved in a project to send an expedition off on a multi year voyage around the sun on a planetoid.
There is another plot involving a gang of raiders who attacked a new U.S. government spaceport in the first chapter, and are trying to sabotage Tom’s planetoid project. They have also managed to move the planetoid Petronius into orbit around the Earth. Unfortunately, it turns out that they haven’t put it into a stable orbit, and it’s soon going to come crashing down on Buffalo, unless Tom can supersize his Duratherm Wing, and bring it down to a safe landing in Utah.
Before going on to discuss some of the other issues in this book, I feel I must address Jonathan K. Cooper’s criticism of the cover illustration, from his Complete Tom Swift Jr Homepage,
The cover of this book is, at first glance one of the better ones in the series. It depicts Tom Swift working away at a large control board controlling — well, just what he’s doing is not apparent, but it looks important and exciting.
After reading the book, however, I realized that the cover made absolutely no sense. There’s Tom, inside his Challenger (no, that isn’t the laboratory in the Great Salt Lake desert — see the picture on page 163 and compare), on some lonely asteroid. That purple object has to be Planetoid Pete — but what is it doing out in space, landing on a planet? Moreover, Pete is 1km wide — and yet the Duratherm Wing (which, inexplicably, is above — not underneath — the planetoid) seems to be many times its size. And what are those bright colors coming off the top of the Wing?
It just doesn’t make any sense.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with him on just about every point. He is right that it is one of the better covers in the series, but he’s wrong about just about everything else. This cover is a very accurate rendition of the landing of Pete in Utah, as described in the book.
Tom is depicted in the Utah control bunker in this image, controlling Pete’s landing. Any mismatch between this, and the internal illustration is irrelevant. They are different artist’s interpretation of the same setting, shown from different angles, at different times. Tom is not on the Challenger in this picture; for one thing, whenever a cover illustration shows Tom on the Challenger, he’s usually wearing a space suit (See Race to the Moon, Space Solartron, and Asteroid Pirates.) They are not in space; the sky on the view screen is black because the landing took place at night. Pete, it’s wing, and the mountain of foam are all being illuminated by powerful floodlights.
Pete started out a kilometer across, but it had a stony crust which we are told is several hundred feet thick, most of which was burned away during entry into the atmosphere, leaving its sapphire core with a diameter of 1,000 feet or so to be landed by the wing. The deployment of the wing itself is described as “A glittering silver-white sheath billowed out above the flame-wrapped planetoid…as the vast Duratherm Wing took form. Arrow-shaped and four thousand feet long, it was rooted to Petronius by a thick mount.” [emphasis mine] Which is pretty much exactly what we see on the cover. Those bright colours coming off the top of the wing are flames.
Okay, now that I’ve got that out of my system, on to what’s in the book.
We have more blatant safety violations. Tom leaves a hypersonic wind tunnel unattended for a while, with its door open, and when he comes back, he just shuts the door, and fires up the tunnel without bothering to check whether anyone has wandered inside. A bit later he decides he has to fly his first test of his Duratherm Wing himself, rather than do a remote controlled test, just because a competitor has been bad mouthing him, and he thinks a remote controlled test would show he lacks confidence in his invention.
We have more bad guy branding. This time with a planet and lightning bolt symbol that glows in the dark on their uniforms during their nighttime raid. They also wear it as a tattoo, and have it emblazoned on their spaceship so everyone will know who they are. I kept wondering if the Black Cobra was behind this bunch, too. Our bad guys also have a penchant for baroque assassination plots, using things like horseflies infected with bubonic plague (which even in the bad old days wasn’t 100% fatal, and by the 1960s was quite treatable with antibiotics) acid spraying devices, and a trick camera that fires frickin’ laser beams.
Bud displays a Sean Penn like attitude toward the photographer, knocking his camera away, and then punching him. Retroactively justified by the camera turning out to be booby trapped, but Bud didn’t know that when he hit the guy, and neither did the photographer.
Another subplot has Eldorado Airlines deciding to outfit their planes with Tom’s crash protection system. The evening after the first devices are fitted to the first three planes, one of those planes crashes, but the passengers and crew all survive thanks to their foam airbag, and Tom is immediately hailed as a hero. In reality, if an airplane crashed in the evening after a new, largely untested, piece of hardware had been added to it in the morning, crash investigators would be taking a very good look at that new piece of hardware, and press speculation about it being the cause of the crash would have been rampant.
And speaking of press speculation…I’ve noticed that the press in Tom Swift’s world make organizations like Breitbart, and Buzzfeed look like bastions of journalistic integrity. All it ever takes to get a newspaper to print just about anything is one anonymous source calling them up and telling them a story.
There’s some silliness with centrifugal forces on the planetoid Bartonia. Apparently it’s spinning fast enough to give a significant amount of outward “gravity” when they are inside it, but not enough for anyone to notice while they’re on the outside of it. People also walk up and down tunnels hanging from the ceiling with their magnetic boots, and not noticing that that is what they are doing, until something happens to make their boots lose their grip, and they “fall up.”
There are a lot of problems with the Pete’s Decaying Orbit subplot. The author did some hand waving to dismiss them, but really, it would have been much simpler to boost Pete up into a higher, stable orbit (or right out of its orbit around the Earth) than what Tom had to go through to land the thing. The Challenger is also described as taking a Hohmann Transfer trajectory when returning to Earth from Bartonia, which is wrong on many levels. Hohmann Transfers are minimum energy orbits where the spacecraft coasts all the way between its initial acceleration to put it onto its trajectory, and arriving at its destination. Among other things, they tend to be very slow, and there is no way any ship capable of constant acceleration, like the Challenger, would use one.
Tom Swift and His G-Force Inverter is a concussion free book, so Tom has dropped below averaging one concussion per book. Other than that it is a bit of a mess, from beginning to end.
It starts out with Tom and Bud exploring on the night side of the moon. Bud spots some “moon snakes” approaching them, and the boys panic, and start shooting at them with their ray guns. (Ray guns? Why the heck are they carrying ray guns? Tom Jr has always been reluctant to carry guns, only doing so for protection from animals on his previous jungle adventures, and then only using them as a last resort.) Then the sun rises, and they see that the snakes were really just some strange gas. Good thing that they weren’t the Space Friends, finally making in person contact.
Tom collects a sample of the gas, and quickly learns that it has anti-gravity properties when heated. Tom collects some more of the gas, which he has christened “serptilium,” and the Challenger blasts off from the moon using its auxiliary rockets, to save battery power. (Um, the sun rose a few pages back, what happened to the Challenger’s solar power collectors?) As they’re approaching Earth’s atmosphere, they are nearly rammed by a drone rocket from their rival company (that we’ve never heard of before, even though it’s also based in Shopton) Kincaid Cosmoprises.
Swift Enterprises has been approached to put in a bid for building a new high speed train, with Cosmoprises as their primary rival. Once again Tom is up against a rival company that can’t compete on the merits of their design. Kincaid spends the rest of the book spying on Tom to steal his designs—while complaining loudly to all concerned that it’s Tom who’s stealing from him—and trying to sabotage Tom’s design, and blatantly and obviously committing multiple felonies at every turn, many of which Tom doesn’t even seem to bother reporting to the authorities.
At one point, someone takes a pot shot at Tom and Bud in the Drumhawk with a freaking anti-aircraft gun, and Tom doesn’t seem to report it to anyone.
(Oh yeah, the cycloplane is back in this book. I think Tom gets more use out of it in this book than he did in its own book.)
In the harassment of Chow department, Tom and Bud slip some of the serptilium into the batter for some pancakes Chow is making, causing them to fly away when they’re being cooked. Good thing they flew off, because Tom hasn’t done any sort of toxicological testing on the serptilium.
Sandy and Phyl get to be a little bit useful in this book, being invited along on a couple of side trips to Africa. The first time they’re invited it’s because Chow has just left for a bit of a holiday, and Tom needs someone to cook for him, but Chow gets back just before they leave, and they still get to come. Sandy saves the day when the Sky Queen is invaded by driver ants, and she knows where her dad stashed some of his new Swifticide bug killer on the plane. “‘A new pest destroyer,’ she explained to Tom. ‘It works on the atomic principle by disintegrating the insect molecules. And it’s completely harmless to humans.’” Of course humans and bugs are made up of pretty much all the same molecules, just arranged a bit differently, so that wouldn’t really work.
And speaking of the Sky Queen, she’s gone through a bit of a downgrade from the previous few books. She’s back to using jet lifters, and flying at about half the speed she had been. She does get to set a new altitude record, though, reaching 400,000 feet at one point.
At one point a plane lands on Fearing Island, and Tom, suspecting a spy might be hiding in a secret compartment aboard it, arranges to bluff him out of hiding by putting on a bit of a show with Bud to make the hidden spy think that the plane is on fire, so he’ll come out on his own. They do this without bothering to get some of the base security people to surround the plane first, so when it turns out that there are two people hiding aboard the plane they manage to temporarily overpower Tom and Bud and one of them gets completely away. (Since Fearing Island is littered with unattended motor scooters, and speed boats that anyone can use without needing any fiddlely keys, or anything like that.)
The quality of the prose in this book is a step down from previous books, too. (And I don’t think it’s just from me coming back to TSJr off reading Seveneves.) At one point I felt myself channeling Inigo Montoya. “You keep using that word [censor]. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” The word they wanted was “sensor”.
A couple of other things:
In Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule, Tom gets knocked out once, and Bud gets knocked out at least 3 times.
This book is a worse mess than G-Force Inverter, which is a shame, because it has the germs of some good stuff in it. It might have been an exciting tale of first contact with an aquatic alien species, but that gets turned into rather trite side plot, with the aliens becoming a bunch of dei ex bubbles while the main plot is a rather silly chase after a whale that’s got a macguffin attached to a harpoon stuck in it, that the Brungarians are also after. Pretty much everything about the whale plot is silly, from the way the macguffin got attached to it, through to its resolution.
The titular invention of the book is Tom’s new modular underwater submarine/laboratory. It’s not a bad idea, as a concept, but the execution of it leaves something to be desired, with it having some glaring design defects. One of them is that all the modules are attached to the main core using electromagnets, so when the core suffers a power failure, all the modules fall off.
The Dyna-4 is constructed from Tomasite, which has now become super strong, and nearly indestructible, which is a property it never had before. Tom’s go to super strong plastic in the past has been Durastress. We are never told how it’s propelled through the water, but it is atomic powered, and it does have repelatrons.
Tom also seems to have forgotten about his hydrolung. There are several instances of him and Bud going diving with what appears to be fairly conventional scuba equipment. It’s never described much beyond being diving equipment, but at one point they have to cut a dive short because they’ve reached the end of their air supply.
Through his various run ins with the Brungarians, they drop depth charges on him, threaten to torpedo him, fire on him multiple times with an underwater flamethrower, and commit multiple other acts of piracy, or war, and when Tom locates their island base, he doesn’t call in the Navy to come deal with them, because that might cause an International Incident. The exact location of this island is never given, but all the action is said to be happening in and around the Marianas Trench, which was pretty solidly U.S. territory at the time. Tom, and the FBI, don’t have any problems with invading Canada though, with their little expedition to Newfoundland to rescue the kidnapped Tom Sr. They don’t seem to let any Canadian authorities know what they’re up to until after they’ve completed their rescue. (And we have another instance of the kidnappers not bothering to empty the kidnappee’s pockets. Tom Sr still has his pencil radio when Tom shows up to rescue him.)
The first time Tom and Bud get knocked out is when the Brungarians drop depth charges on them in the Sea Hound, also knocking out its power and causing it to sink. (Despite one of the Seacopter’s main features being that it takes power to submerge. Without power, it should have bobbed right to the surface.)
Tom also can’t pass up any cave he comes across. In the first at-sea test of the Dyna-4’s main module he spots a cave off Fearing Island that he thinks it will fit into, so he goes in, bumps a rock outcrop which activates the Insta Rock gun (a device that instantly makes rock precipitate out of seawater) and nearly entombs him and Bud before he can turn it off. It turns out that a Brungarian saboteur had arranged for it to go off with the slightest jolt. Why he bothered with that bit of sabotage is a bit of a mystery to me. If it had gone off at any other time, it would have just been a minor inconvenience. He couldn’t have known Tom would bump into something when nosing around in a cave. (But then again, maybe he knew that Tom just can’t pass up any cave he finds.)
Tom discovers another cave when drilling for core samples in the Marianas Trench. This cave is part of a volcanic vent of some sort, and is full of superheated steam, and has a pool of boiling brine at the bottom of it. We are never told how deep they are, but we can be pretty sure that everything is under pretty high pressure, so that steam, and boiling brine, is going to be really hot, but Tom just wades into the pool in his Fat Man suit, without ever considering that the Fat Men were never designed to deal with heat, and nearly kills himself, and Bud nearly dies rescuing him.
Then Tom discovers another cave that’s too small for the Dyna-4, or any of its main lab modules, but luckily he also has a one man mini-lab module that will fit, so Bud gets into it, Tom drops him into the cave, and leaves him there, telling him he’ll be back in a couple of hours to pick him up. I was completely unsurprised for Bud and the mini-lab to have vanished when Tom gets back.
Tom’s cavalier attitude toward basic safety procedures is also on full display with his Repelaflame defence against the Brungarian’s underwater flamethrower. The engineer he’s had building the thing thinks it needs more testing, but Tom doesn’t think that’s really necessary. Then a technician by the safety control panel accidentally bumps the wrong switch, and sets himself on fire, at which point the engineer is like “See. It needs more work.”
Other silly stuff:
The bad guys in this book are your really stereotypical bad guys, who among other things are always announcing what their attack is going to be, before launching it. “I’m going to shoot you with torpedoes!” “I’m going to shoot you with my new secret weapon!” “I’m going to use my secret weapon again, since I missed the last time!” Then, after capturing Tom and Bud they leave them tied up in a room without so much as a guard on the door, allowing them to escape. And then they let Tom and Bud listen in as they tell each other all about their fiendishly clever plots.
And floating in and out of all this we’ve got the aliens, who have come to Earth to mine the ocean bottom for some elements that are in short supply on their own world. (At least they didn’t come here for our water.) They’re mainly looking for manganese and titanium. There are a couple of misunderstandings in Tom’s initial encounters with them, but once those are straightened out (thanks to the aliens speaking a version of the Space Friends language, so Tom can figure out how to talk with them pretty quickly) Tom establishes friendly relations with them. They then float in and out of the plot, turning up at just the right times to help Tom out in his latest encounter with the Brungarians. If they had dumped the whale plot, and expanded the aliens plot, this could have been a good book.
And in what may be a personal idiosyncrasy of mine, whenever I read the name of the main control room of the Dyna-4 “Comm-Con”, my brain processed it as “Comic-Con”, and I had to stop and do a reset.
Tom gets knocked out twice in Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express, bringing him back up over averaging one concussion per book. With one book to go, he could end the series with a perfect one concussion per book. Bud also gets knocked out once.
The plot of this book is more coherent than the previous couple of entries in the series, with most of the events of the book tying in to the main plot, rather than feeling like a bunch of random incidents were added in to pad out the page count.
Tom is building a new spaceship, which has named the Cosmotron. It’s a bigger, faster, modular ship (so in a way, it’s a Dyna-4, IN SPACE). Tom’s main purpose for this ship is to take it on a grand tour of the solar system, so in addition to an improved version of the solar power collectors he used for the Challenger, it’s got a nuclear power capsule, that Tom calls a Supratomic Cell, so it will be able to operate far from the sun. (Of course, if you ripped out the Challenger’s auxiliary rockets, and their fuel tanks, you’d probably free up enough space to put a Supratomic Cell on it…or even just install a reactor like the one Tom’s had powering the Sky Queen all this time.)
While the Cosmotron is under construction the government asks Tom to check out some strange weather phenomena taking place over the Arctic Ocean, and reports of aliens on an island off the northern coast of Scotland (since Tom is the alien contact specialist.)
Tom is suspicious of the reports of aliens, and soon learns that they are indeed a hoax, perpetrated by VIPER (the Very Important Party of Extraterrestrial Rulers, yeah, definitely a case of coming up with the name first, and then trying to find a phrase to acronymize into it.) VIPER plans to put a death ray into orbit, with which they will Rule The World, Mwa-ha-ha! They also have plans to sabotage Tom’s Cosmotron on its first test flight, which they succeed at, allowing them to steal it after Tom is forced to abandon it before it crashes into the ocean.
(I must say, once again, that security at Swift Enterprises truly sucks. Even after they find out that spies are getting in and out, and increase their security precautions, VIPER saboteurs more than once waltz in and out of Swift facilities with ease.)
Tom has also been working on his X-raser, and upgraded version of his Telesampler from Mystery Comet. This version uses an X-ray laser to drill even deeper holes for sampling (among other things) and Tom acknowledges that in the wrong hands, it makes a potent weapon. So when VIPER steals his Cosmotron, they also get the X-raser.
So the race is on. Can Tom build his Cosmotron II, along with his new anti-x-raser, the Repela-raser, before VIPER can get the Cosmotron I fixed, and use it to launch their death ray satellite? (And still fit in the time for his grand tour of the solar system?)
And now for the silly stuff…
Early in the book Tom tells Bud how the Cosmotron has something called Non-Contam, which will prevent it from contaminating the environments of any planets it may land on. Nothing about how this is supposed to work, but at least the author is addressing something that is a real concern in planetary exploration. Then later in the book we learn about the super secret project that Tom Sr has been working on: he’s been breeding plants to grow on other planets, so part of Tom’s mission is to deliberately contaminate Mars, Venus and Jupiter with Earth life. (And while it’s conceivable that you might be able to get something to grow on Mars, the idea that any Earth plants might grow on Venus or Jupiter, even based on 1969 notions of what these planets were like, is a bit silly. Previous Tom Swift Jr books have even commented about just how hellish conditions on the surface of Venus are, going back to Cosmic Astronauts.)
The writer of the book doesn’t seem to care how long it takes to travel anywhere, and not just in space. Tom sets out from Fearing Island in his Jetmarine, and arrives in the Arctic Ocean near Spitsbergen that evening. That’s a journey of 4,000 miles in about 8 hours. In other words Tom was going about 500 mph, in a submarine. He then does the 1,000 miles from Spitsbergen to Scotland in “a few hours” and crosses back across the Atlantic to Fearing Island in an afternoon.
It gets worse during Tom’s grand tour of the solar system. It doesn’t seem to matter how far he has to go, it takes Tom a day to do it. Earth to Mars: a day. Mars to Jupiter: a day. Jupiter to Saturn: a day, and so on out to Pluto, visiting a planet a day. And then the time to get from Pluto back to crossing Earth’s orbit on the way to Venus: a couple of days. So he does his grand tour of the solar system in a little over a week.
The Cosmotron is, of course, capable of fantastic acceleration because it is outfitted with Tom’s Anti-G Neutrolater. Tom has had this device since Rocketship, but this book seems to be the first time that one of the writers has figured out that any device which can cancel out g forces from acceleration, can also be used to create artificial gravity when you’re not accelerating. (It should also be capable of creating zero g on Earth’s surface.) In reality any such device would be as world changing as repelatrons. (In fact, it would kinda make repelatrons redundant.)
The Cosmotron’s outer hull is built from a fantastically strong Atomeron alloy, which this book incorrectly attributes to discoveries made in New Guinea during Cycloplane. It was actually based on discoveries made near the underwater city of gold in Spectromarine Selector. The hull is strong enough to survive hitting a small asteroid while crossing the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (At the speed they must have been going to make that trip in a day, the force of any impact should have been like setting off a nuclear weapon against the hull.) The Cosmotron escapes with just a dent, and a small crack, which it takes them three days to notice, and then they have to rush to patch it before methane from Neptune’s atmosphere can leak in, and mix with oxygen that got into the space between the hulls because of some other damage from the impact, and cause an explosion. Here’s a suggestion: just don’t go into Neptune’s atmosphere until after you’ve patched the hole.
Back during Outpost in Space we are told that Chow is a shrewd judge of character, so much so that Tom brings him in to get a second opinion on someone he’s considering hiring to work on the Outpost. Ever since then we’ve seen Chow get swindled, conned and bamboozled a least half a dozen times. In Dyna-4 Capsule he gets lured off guard duty on the Seacopter by a guy with a line only slightly more sophisticated than “Hey, buddy. You wanna buy the Brooklyn Bridge?” In this book he gets conned into serving drugged food to the crew working overtime to build the Cosmotron II, by yet another VIPER agent to penetrate Swift security.
(And in the harassment of Chow department, Tom and Bud nearly kill him when they buzz the car he’s driving with the Atomic Crab—a space rescue drone—frightening Chow so he drives off the road, and nearly over a cliff.)
No reason is ever given for why Tom is in such a hurry to make his tour of the solar system. He’s in such a rush that he does it before he has his final confrontation with VIPER, while knowing that they’re just days away from putting their death ray into orbit. There isn’t even some rival outfit that he’s in a race against to get the bragging rights for who did it first. And it’s such a whirlwind tour that bragging rights is about all he gets out of it. There’s maybe two pages on the Mars flyby (mostly on launching Tom Sr’s Mars garden on a near collision course with Phobos); half a page on Jupiter: big, bands of colourful clouds, Ganymede is a big moon, and there are a bunch more of them; two paragraphs on Saturn: spectacular rings, Titan has an atmosphere; two sentences on Uranus: greenish, rotates on its side; Neptune has methane in its atmosphere; and Pluto is distant and mysterious. Once they arrive at Venus we again get a bit more description, mostly about how they didn’t really know much of anything about what was below the upper cloud layers, other than it was really, really hot down there (and yet Tom Sr thought his specially bred plants could survive in that environment, that he knows almost nothing about.)
VIPER is another caricature of a Bond villain outfit. They’ve got the name, the over the top scheme to rule the world, and the silly way of disguising their operation. They put their development lab on an isolated Scottish island, and frighten off the locals with fake aliens. It would have made more sense, and been much better security, to rent some office/workshop space in Glasgow, hang a “MacDonald Research” sign on the door, and tell anyone who asks that they’re developing some new communication satellite, or something like that.
In Tom Swift and The Galaxy Ghosts, Tom gets knocked out once by electrocution, and once by gas, but he doesn’t pick up any new concussions, so he ends out the series with 33 concussions over 33 books, for an overall concussion rate of 1.0000 concussions per book. Bud ends the series with a total of 21 concussions, or a rate of 0.6364 concussions per book.
There is some debate among Tom Swift Jr fans as to whether this book, or Dyna-4 Capsule is the worst Tom Swift Jr book, and I while there are parts of Dyna-4 that are pretty dire, I’ve got to conclude that Galaxy Ghosts is the worst book.
The book starts with an urgent report coming in from the Outpost in Space about sighting “ghosts” out at Saturn, so Toms Jr, Sr, and Bud fly to Fearing Island to catch a rocket ship up to the Outpost to see for themselves. (Rocket ship? That’s kind of retro for Tom, but then the launch is described as “a deafening roar and the ground vibrated as the myriad of repelatrons lifted the mammoth craft from its pad.” which is really mixing up your launch modes.) All through this mad race to get up to the Outpost, so they can get a look at the strange ghosts that it has discovered I kept wondering “Why didn’t they just walk over to the Enterprises observatory, and use its Space Prober, or have the imagery from the Outpost transmitted down to them using some of that TV equipment they’ve got up there?”
Arriving at the Outpost we’re introduced to the “Comet Catcher” a Tomasite net that’s supposed to protect the Outpost from meteors, that also involves repelatrons (and we get the second description in two pages of how repelatrons are supposed to work.) I guess the old fashioned meteor deflection repelatrons weren’t good enough.
On the Outpost, the Toms get their first look at the ghosts on Mimas, one of the moons of Saturn, glowing, pulsating clouds of something that Tom Sr declares to be Unknown to Science, and Tom Jr dubs “Photo-Essence”, or P-E for short.
Bud happens to look out the window and sees a giant meteor approaching! The Comet Catcher fails to catch it, and it bounces off the station. Inspecting the damage, Tom discovers that the meteor bent a metal brace, and that was somehow the cause of the Comet Catcher failing…so it failed because of damage done to it by a meteor it failed to catch? No matter, Tom can fix it with an electronic crowbar, and just in time, because now there’s a strange spaceship hurtling toward the station!
And all that’s just the first chapter…19 more to go.
I started out writing up everything that was wrong with this book, more or less in the order events happened, and I wasn’t even a third of the way through it before this review had grown to be the longest one I’d written so far, so now I’m going back to the beginning and just summing up all the problems. I could go on much longer, but by this point I’ve used up more time writing this review than it took to read the book…
There are two main subplots to this book. The first is the Galaxy Ghosts: strange beings from the Andromeda galaxy who are now planet hopping their way across the solar system toward the Earth. First sighted on the moons of Saturn, they move inward to Jupiter, Mars and eventually the Moon. These beings are intensely radioactive, and if they come to Earth they will kill all life on the planet. They’ve already killed some of the Space Friends out by Uranus.
The second plot involves a frozen mastodon carcass that has been found high on a mountain in Chile. The Chilean government has sold it to a California university, and they want the Swifts to recover it from its mountain top, and move it to California.
So Tom bounces back and forth between these two projects. One is to stop an imminent existential threat to all life on Earth, and the other is to move some frozen meat. (And it’s the frozen meat plot that takes up most of the pages of the book.)
Tom’s got two main inventions in this book. His Transmittaton (which is a Star Trek style transporter) and his Racodio (a Star Trek style Universal Translator) He also accidentally discovers that his Transmittaton can double as a matter replicator.
There are plot developments that only make sense if the people involved have access to time machines. There is the above mentioned meteor that damages the meteor defence system, before it hits the meteor defence system. That strange spaceship hurtling toward the station at the end of Chapter 1 is Brungarian, and they’re faking an emergency so they can get onto the station to steal all the info that Tom’s collected on the P-E, so they can use its radiation to make a new super weapon, though at the time they had to have initiated their little act of space piracy all anyone knew was “Hey, there’s something strange going on out around Saturn.” And everyone knows that there’s this magnificently preserved mastodon on top of a Chilean mountain, with 14 foot tusks, and so on, that U.S. wants to buy, and the Brungarians want to steal, but it’s only been seen by one Chilean Indian, who hasn’t told anyone exactly where it is, but everyone also seems to know that if the Brungarians get to it first, their ham handed methods of extracting it from the ice will cause an avalanche that will destroy the Indian village at the base of the mountain.
So what else is wrong with this book? Let me count the ways.
Since Tom knew that a spy overheard his travel plans to go to Chile he comes up with a cunning plan. A couple of Swift engineers who resemble him and Bud fly down to Chile for the Brungarians to follow, while Tom and Bud cleverly use commercial airline flights to go to…Chile. (What was the point of the decoys, then?) He then makes a clandestine rendezvous with the decoys in a Santiago park, to tell them to keep being decoys, but the Brungarian spies who had fallen for the decoys up to this point spot him, which blows that operation.
Tom makes a couple of trips in his Cosmotron Express “rocket ship” looking for the ghosts. (No reference is made to him actually having two Cosmotrons, at this point.) The first one takes place while the ghosts are at Mars, but he can’t find any when he gets there (but does collect more radioactive meteor samples) so he takes a quick loop out around Pluto to look some more. It isn’t explicitly stated how long this took, but it seems to all take place in an afternoon, or so.
On his second Cosmotron flight (after topping up its fuel tanks) Tom again takes it out to Mars, where he finds a mass of ghosts gathered in the planet’s shadow. He and Bud get into one of its life caps (hey they remembered the life caps) for a closer look, but the ghosts’ radiation somehow makes the life cap’s repelatrons stop working, and nearly fries them before he tells them with his Racodio to stop, and the ghosts fly off. Seeking out the ghosts in another life cap, Tom and Bud fly it all the way out to Saturn and back without finding any.
Tom’s plan to move the mastodon is to use his Transmittaton. Unfortunately this plan is put on hold by the Brungarians stealing the plans for the Transmittaton receiver that Tom had sent to the destination university, so they can’t have it ready on time. He has a backup plan of using his x-raser to cut the mastodon out of the ice, and then slinging it below the Sky Queen and flying it to California. He can’t just stick it in the Sky Queen’s hanger because its full of submarines. For some reason it’s hauling both the Sea Dart Jetmarine, and a Seacopter around. (Take out the Seacopter and fly it back home, and you’d have lots of room for a mastodon on ice.)
Throughout all of Tom’s encounters with the Brungarians in Chile, with them stealing, kidnapping, and nearly destroying Indian villages, Tom never calls for the cops, or the Chilean army, to come help until after it’s too late for them to do any good. Alvarez, the Indian who found the mastodon, gets kidnapped, and Tom and Bud blunder around half of Chile looking for him, once asking a police officer for directions for how to get to a specific place, with Tom being temporarily captured by the Brungarians himself, but they never ask for the police to help in the search. Brungarian agents by the dozen seem to be traipsing around the mountain looking for the mastodon (and frightening the Indians off) but Tom never once suggests that the Chileans might want to consider putting a few platoons of their soldiers into the area to control the Brungarians, and protect their frozen asset. Brungarian spies with the stolen ghost are on their way to the airport, to fly away with it, with Tom and Bud in pursuit, but they never bother to call the Chilean authorities to tell them not to let the Brungarians take off.
The Brungarians aren’t very bright, either. There is the usual bad guy monologuing about their clever plots where Tom and Bud can overhear them (or to Tom and Bud’s faces after they’ve been caught) and on two occasions the Brungarians don’t bother to empty Tom’s pockets after they’ve caught him, leaving him with a penknife to cut his and Bud’s ropes, and a pencil radio to call for help the first time, and his sonar pencil (like the radio, but for underwater use) the second time.
The first time Tom and Bud are caught, the two lead Brungarians have an argument over who gets to kill them, to be sure it’s done right. They settle on one of them doing the killing while the other watches, so they can both be sure. And then their plot to kill them: drag them out onto the pampas, and abandon them there, tied up, for the vultures to eat without bothering to actually kill them first, or hanging around until after the vultures have done their job. Which allows for Tom and Bud to cut themselves loose, and call for help with Tom’s pencil radio.
The second time they’re caught the Brungarians fall for the old “have dad pretend to be sick” ploy (they caught Tom Sr first) in order for him to be left alone with only one guard on the Brungarian submarine, where he can overpower his guard and turn the Brungarian’s underwater vortex weapon against them. Tom’s been using his sonar pencil to secretly communicate with the Seacopter that has been stealthily following them (and “stealth” is a word that should not be associated with Seacopters) and coordinating his plan to take back the mastodoncicle using the Transmittaton.
The resolution of the Ghost plot begins with Tom using his Transmittaton to capture one. The ghost is initially not happy, but Tom explains, using his Racodio, how the ghosts will kill all life on Earth if they come here, and the captured ghost agrees to take the message back to its friends so they’ll leave Earth alone. But then the Brungarians show up before Tom can send the ghost back, and take it, sealed up in a tiny Tomasite box, and run all around Chile with it for a couple of days, while Tom and Bud chase them, eventually ending up in Tierra del Fuego, where they finally manage to release the ghost from its box, and they all breath a sigh of relief, knowing the ghosts are going to leave now. I think I might have been a little worried about how that ghost was going to feel after they way it had been treated, and if it would bother passing on the message, or if it might be thinking “Screw that planet! Let it burn!”
One of Tom’s early Transmittaton experiments is an attempt to transport a bonfire, set on Fearing Island, into his Swift Enterprises lab. That goes about as you’d expect. Fortunately Bud is quick with the fire extinguisher, so he doesn’t burn down the entire building.
Bud is getting sick of eating mushrooms (from the accidental matter replicator incident) so he makes up a plan to frighten Chow. This one actually backfires on him, as he only manages to frighten the horses that he and Tom are riding at the time, and they nearly get tossed over a cliff before expert horseman Chow can save them.
The Brungarian’s sabotaged grapplers on the Sky Queen drop the ice block containing the mastodon into the Pacific Ocean, where it promptly sinks into water cold enough that it doesn’t melt right away. Ice floats. Especially fresh water ice dropped into salt water. The density of a mastodon, embedded in ice, is going to be pretty much the same as the density of the ice itself, so there is no way it would add enough weight to make it sink. But now, hey it’s a good thing we’ve got those submarines stashed in the Sky Queen’s hanger.
Tom notices that the ghosts only seem to come out at night. Wow. Isn’t it convenient that these ghosts operating across multiple different planets set their schedule by when it happens to be night time in Tom’s time zone. For his next book, Tom Swift in the Race to the Sun, Tom will make his solar expedition at night, to avoid the heat.
| Book | Tom | Bud | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Flying Lab | 1 | 0 | ||
| 2 Jetmarine | 0 | 2 | ||
| 3 Rocket Ship | 1 | 1 | ||
| 4 Giant Robot | 1 | 0 | ||
| 5 Atomic Earth Blaster | 0 | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| 6 Outpost in Space | 2 | 2 | ||
| 7 Diving Seacopter | 0 | 0 | ||
| 8 Caves of Nuclear Fire | 3 | 3 | ||
| 9 Phantom Satellite | 3 | 2 | ||
| 10 Ultrasonic Cycloplane | 0 | 11 | 0 | 11 |
| 11 Deep Sea Hydrodome | 2 | 0 | ||
| 12 Race to the Moon | 1 | 0 | ||
| 13 Space Solartron | 0 | 0 | ||
| 14 Electronic Retroscope | 0 | 0 | ||
| 15 Spectromarine Selector | 1 | 15 | 0 | 11 |
| 16 Cosmic Astronauts | 1 | 0 | ||
| 17 Visitor from Planet X | 0 | 1 | ||
| 18 Electronic Hydrolung | 1 | 0 | ||
| 19 Triphibian Atomicar | 1 | 1 | ||
| 20 Megascope Space Prober | 1 | 19 | 1 | 14 |
| 21 Asteroid Pirates | 1 | 0 | ||
| 22 Repelatron Skyway | 3 | 1 | ||
| 23 Aquatomic Tracker | 1 | 0 | ||
| 24 3-D Telejector | 1 | 1 | ||
| 25 Polar-Ray Dynasphere | 2 | 27 | 2 | 18 |
| 26 Sonic Boom Trap | 1 | 0 | ||
| 27 Subocean Geotron | 1 | 0 | ||
| 28 Mystery Comet | 1 | 0 | ||
| 29 Captive Planetoid | 0 | 1 | ||
| 30 G-Force Inverter | 0 | 30 | 0 | 19 |
| 31 Dyna-4 Capsule | 1 | 3 | ||
| 32 Cosmotron Express | 2 | 1 | ||
| 33 Galaxy Ghosts | 0 | 0 | ||
| Totals | 33 | 23 |
