Customer Reviews

Tom Swift In the Caves of Nuclear Fire (The New Tom Swift Jr. Adventures #8)

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When I was in late elementary school, a friend of mine introduced me to the Tom Swift Jr. series and once I read the first one I was hooked. I was yelled at several times by the teacher for reading his book when we were supposed to be doing other things. Once I had borrowed all the issues my friend had, I then went to the area libraries devouring all the books they had in the series. The adventures of super young inventor Tom Swift Jr. don't contain all that much in the way of accurate science, but they do turn young people on to science and technology.
In this book Tom, Bud, Chow and a few others of the Swift group journey to what was then the Belgian Congo to investigate the strange emissions from a mountain. The gas is extremely corrosive, so the first task is to find a container that can hold it. There is the obligatory criminal opposition and in this case it includes a native tribe armed with spears. While the action is formulaic and there is of course the necessary ---ite mineral, reading this book was a fond look back at the days when all I wanted to be was a scientist and inventor. Many others will feel the same way, some like me ended up in scientific and technical fields. While that was not a certainty, it is clear that more ended up in science than would have if they had not read the adventures of Tom Swift Jr.

This is a blanket review of the second five (books six through ten) Tom Swift, Jr. books: _Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space_ (1955), _Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter_ (1956), _Tom Swift in The Caves of Nuclear Fire_ (1956), _Tom Swift on the Phantom Satellite_ (1956), and _Tom Swift and His Ultrasonic Cycloplane_ (1957). All of the stories are credited to the house name of "Victor Appleton II". All of them were written by James Duncan Lawrence except for _Nuclear Fire_, which was written by Tom Mulvey. All of the illustrations are by Graham Kaye, who illustrated the first five books. For my money, Kaye was one of the best artists to ever illustrate Stratemeyer syndicate books.

As before, these Tom Swift, Jr. books are archtypical edisonades written to formula in a somewhat homogenized style. But there is a bit of a difference. In the first five books, the emphasis is all on Tom's inventions. But two titles in this batch focus on unusual settings: _In the Caves of Nuclear Fire_ and _On the Phantom Satellite_. Note that the titles do not contain the phrase "and His". Let us take a look at these places.

The caves of nuclear fire are African caverns that contain a glowing gas of antiprotons that disintegrates most matter that it touches. Fortunately, the walls of the caverns are lined with a substance impervious to antimatter. When I was a boy, I had no problems imagining myself going with Tom under the sea or into outer space. But I gave serious thought about whether I would lower myself in a bathysphere down a cave full of antimatter. Especially when its cables began to snap...

The phantom satellite is an asteroid launched towards the Earth by Tom's space friends from Planet X. It changes course and begins to orbit the Earth at a distance of about 50,000 miles, becoming in effect a second Moon. Needless to say, there is a space race to the satellite and many adventures on it and in it.

The main inventions in _Nuclear Fire_ and _Phantom Satellite_-- the bathysphere and the atmosphere wheels-- are intended to aid with survival on these settings. But in _The Outpost in Space_, the main invention is also the setting for much of the novel, and the story makes the most of it. There are some good undersea sequences in _Diving Seacopter_, including the discovery of a lost city of gold.

The settings are all good fun. And yet, our engagement with these settings is mainly through thrill-a-minute action sequences: the ride in the bathysphere, an underwater landslide, an encounter with a manta ray, the trapping of a tracter in an alien ash pit, the exploration of a cavern filled with alien paintings, and the like. I have read these books looking for a glimmer of dazzling or poetic description to provide a bit of magic to the setting. Description is sparse; and when it is present, it is very prosaic. There was nothing worth quoting.

I will close with a couple of notes on the endings of these books. Usually, the formula was to cose the book with a quick announcement of the upcoming book in the series: "Little did Tom and his friends know it, but soon they would be involved in adventures to be known as..." But _Ultrasonic Cycloplane_ announced the upcoming book as _The Undersea Mountain Mystery_ instead of the _Diving Seacopter_. And in _Nuclear Fire_, the announcement is made by Bud Barclay in a line of _dialogue_. Bud was not usually blessed with the gift of precognition!

In my unreluctant years, I was passionate about these books. I loved them, every one. I am a little bit saddened that I cannot read them that way any more.