Lowe, Professor AM: Adrift in the Stratosphere

[ray gower]

Three friends an a rave manage to steal a balloon. Not just any balloon, but a very special one designed to take its inventor (Professor Lowe) to Mars and face the threat of Martians.
Fortunately the inventor left the flight manual for light reading.

I am not saying this was a bad book. It is. So terrible it becomes good in fact. Armed with that essential bit of knowledge it is hilarious and compulsive read!

Published in 1934, when Wells produced 'Shape of Things to Come', Heinlein and Asimov were scratching a living producing short stories for magazines. Publishers should have known better.

It starts heaping on contrived coincidences, upon contrived coincidences. Just how did Professor Lowe know the Martians were unfriendly? How did he know they would use radon gas for a weapon and have a device to protect the crew from it? Let alone mind bending radio waves and a device for protection from that as well. Plus a bomb to deal with the irritated hosts (Radon of course)

 

[ray gower]

Browsing in search of an answer to the question, I came across a rather alarming discovery.

Professor Low has written and more alarmingly published three other masterpieces of the literary art: Peter Down the Well (1933), Mars Breaks Through (1937) and Satellite in Space (1956). Anybody ever read one of these?

If it comes to that Adrift was still being published well into the sixties, there must have been a paper glut.