Nerves

In a nuclear plant in Kimberly, workers are nervous when a congressional committee comes for a surprise inspection. A few minor problems come up during the inspection, but the plant continues to run at full capacity—at least at first.

Half-way through the inspection, one of the converters has a major failure. Jorgenson and his team had been trying to use a new isotope in the giant reactors, but the unstable isotope causes disaster to strike. The reactor walls give out, and Jorgenson is stuck inside.

Jorgenson is the only survivor, and the only person who knows how to stop the reactor from causing a disaster that could wipe out half of the continent, but he is stuck inside the reactor with no way to communicate with anyone. It's a race against time to rescue Jorgenson so that he can save the world from nuclear fallout.

The magazine version of Lester del Rey's frightening novel appeared in 1942, long before Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl. Some see this book as a scarily accurate prediction of later nuclear meltdowns. Del Rey was an important science fiction writer and publisher, but none of his work had greater impact than this early novel.

Autorentext

Lester del Rey (1915-1993) was born Leonard Knapp (but this became known only long after his death). After a spotty, abbreviated education and itinerant existence, he headed to New York where he became almost immediately a significant constituent of Astounding and John Campbell's celebrated Golden Age.

Del Rey sold his first story to John Campbell in the first months of Campbell's editorship, and over the next several years he sold him many more, including his female-android story Helen O'Loy (1938), perhaps the first true science fiction romance, and Nerves (1942, novelized in 1956), a brilliant novella of atomic pile disruption, amazingly prescient of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Del Rey's apostolic and profoundly controversial short novel For I Am A Jealous People (1956), positing a malevolent Deity, is also very well known.

Del Rey worked in the Scott Meredith Fee Department in the late 40s, edited science fiction magazines in the early 50s, published some noted juveniles (The Runaway Robot) in the mid-50s, and eventually became the founding editor of Del Rey Books, a fantasy and science fiction imprint under the aegis of Ballantine.

In collaboration with his third wife, Judy-Lynn, del Rey's imprint became the most successful fantasy and science fiction publisher in history. The two of them nurtured fantasy writers like Stephen Donaldson, Anne McCaffrey, and Terry Brooks to bestselling status. In 1991, del Rey was named a Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died only a few months after his retirement from Ballantine.