In a bid to try and recapture some of my youth, I’m trying to track down four stories I read sometime during the 70s, none of which I can remember title or author though I do remember odd parts of them and various story elements, which I’ve listed below. Hopefully someone will recognise something from these scanty recollections.
1. Post apocalyptic story, set in Australia I think. Some unusual Solar radiation had made every creature on the earth go deaf. The story follows a group of survivors. Odd bits I remember are them communicating via radio, using the received signal strength meter to transmit morse, and at the end when one of their dogs has pups they realise that the pups can hear so the radiation has gone and the deafness isn’t passed on to the next generation.
2. Research into low temperature creates a gateway to another dimension, but anyone going into the other world returns insane as they cannot understand anything. A woman trained to cope with bizarre environments manages to go through and return, but refuses to tell anyone about what she sees. She trains her infant son to be able to access the other dimension, and use it to travel – a bit like teleportation. At some point in the novel the other dimension is used as a transport system, but occasionally things go wrong – one group of travellers end up in a universe with negative entropy ( hot things get hotter, cold things get colder ). I think there was also a girl from the other dimension who came into our world.
3. An alien starship has contacted humans, but the contact has been kept secret by powerful political interests ( for some reason the family name of Monk comes to mind here ). First contact was with the crew of a station orbiting the moon, which was later crashed to keep the secret. The son of one of the stations crew doesn’t believe his father died in the crash ( he didn’t – he was saved by the aliens ) and tries to investigate. The crew of the starship are different lifeforms – one looks like a beautiful woman, while the engineer resembles a giant squid ( and is also an expert bioengineer who saves the father after he apparently dies of cancer ).
4. People have colonised the oceans, but are at odds with land based political groups. The sea people use artificial gills to survive underwater and forcefields are used to protect from the pressure. Both groups are trying to discover the secret of interstellar flight, as demonstrated by ‘space butterflies’ or ‘space moths’ discovered in the asteroid belt which apparently teleport themselves to other star systems. One of the sea people is able to follow them, and as proof brings back an old interstellar probe launched decades earlier ( a bit like Voyager ).
1. Post apocalyptic story, set in Australia I think. Some unusual Solar radiation had made every creature on the earth go deaf. The story follows a group of survivors. Odd bits I remember are them communicating via radio, using the received signal strength meter to transmit morse, and at the end when one of their dogs has pups they realise that the pups can hear so the radiation has gone and the deafness isn’t passed on to the next generation.
2. Research into low temperature creates a gateway to another dimension, but anyone going into the other world returns insane as they cannot understand anything. A woman trained to cope with bizarre environments manages to go through and return, but refuses to tell anyone about what she sees. She trains her infant son to be able to access the other dimension, and use it to travel – a bit like teleportation. At some point in the novel the other dimension is used as a transport system, but occasionally things go wrong – one group of travellers end up in a universe with negative entropy ( hot things get hotter, cold things get colder ). I think there was also a girl from the other dimension who came into our world.
3. An alien starship has contacted humans, but the contact has been kept secret by powerful political interests ( for some reason the family name of Monk comes to mind here ). First contact was with the crew of a station orbiting the moon, which was later crashed to keep the secret. The son of one of the stations crew doesn’t believe his father died in the crash ( he didn’t – he was saved by the aliens ) and tries to investigate. The crew of the starship are different lifeforms – one looks like a beautiful woman, while the engineer resembles a giant squid ( and is also an expert bioengineer who saves the father after he apparently dies of cancer ).
4. People have colonised the oceans, but are at odds with land based political groups. The sea people use artificial gills to survive underwater and forcefields are used to protect from the pressure. Both groups are trying to discover the secret of interstellar flight, as demonstrated by ‘space butterflies’ or ‘space moths’ discovered in the asteroid belt which apparently teleport themselves to other star systems. One of the sea people is able to follow them, and as proof brings back an old interstellar probe launched decades earlier ( a bit like Voyager ).
