| STRANGE ANGEL The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons George Pendle New York: Harcourt, January 2005 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-15-100997-8 | ||||
| ISBN 0-15-100997-X | 350pp. | HC/BWI | $25.00 | |
| Page 36: | "By the time Parsons could read, the pulps had diversified into hundreds of specific genres." |
I'd sure like to know the names of some of those "hundreds of specific genres". Let me guess: Crime stories diversify into genres involving second-story men, kidnappers, mafiosi, hillbilly bootleggers, counterfeiters, and plain old street thugs, with pimps and prostitutes providing the prurient subdivision. Spy novels could be classified by the nationality of the agent protagonist, with additional categories for double agents, femmes fatales in the Mata Hari mold, and G-men who were only posing as traitors to draw out the real ones. (This last group subsumes the James Bond types.) As for SF, the possibilities are endless. Space travel to other planets; space travel which fails to find other planets; conquest of Earth by aliens; conquest of aliens by Earth; adventures in a galaxy teeming with weird-looking aliens; adventures involving human expansion into a previously barren galaxy; the discovery that humanity already fills the galaxy, but Earth had been shunned for some reason; tales of a vital mission (often the defeat of alien attackers) that only a small number of humans with wild talents is able to accomplish; attempts to travel to the stars blocked by aloof, incredibly advanced aliens (or by the laws of physics); interstellar travel facilitated by aloof, incredibly advanced aliens (or by artifacts they left behind, e.g. stargates); dystopian stories of thermonuclear war, or manufactured plagues, or overpopulation; humanity altered by alien intervention (e.g. The Screwfly Solution) or by inanimate forces (e.g. Brain Wave); stories of humanity's far-future transcendence, or ultimate devolution; time travel stories in which the past is irrevocably altered; time travel stories in which it cannot be altered; time travel stories in which alterers and counter-alterers vie in the past to produce their preferred outcome; and etc. and etc.
Pardon me; I guess I got carried away. My point is that I don't believe in Pendle's hundreds of specific pulp genres. |
| Page 36: | "Born in 1882 in Worchester, Massachusetts, Goddard was the son of a bookkeeper and a disinherited merchant's daughter." |
| Goddard's father was half-owner of a machine shop in Boston. He may have kept the books, but he also was known to have a talent with machinery and tools. And while his mother may have been disinherited (Lehmann does not mention this), one side of the family at least supported Goddard in his studies. Further passages, through page 52, seem to indicate that Pendle understood Goddard's entire career poorly. |
| Page 53: | "Goddard had recently gained financial backing for his clandestine rocket..." |
| Clandestine? |
| Page 54: | "...their experiments were well underway." |
| S/B "under way". |
| Page 55: | "...Jeanne remembered how both Parsons and Forman had called Braun by telephone..." |
| S/B "von Braun". Pendle is consistent with this, doing it also for von Kármán. |
| Page 54: | "...their experiments were well underway." |
| S/B "under way". |
| Page 93: | "The more worlds that were found, the more intently the rocket societies operating across the globe sought to reach them." |
| I question the premise. In 1933 there were no valid claims of worlds beyond our solar system. Even if Arthur C. Clarke's mention of a 1942 discovery is accepted, it would have no bearing on this. I have no idea what Pendle means here — maybe stars? |
| Page 94: | "Once Kármán had given the GALCIT rocketeers his blessing..." |
| S/B "von Kármán". |
| Page 129: | "Now at Kármán's instigation Malina traveled to the East Coast..." |
| S/B "von Kármán". |
| Page 129: | "They had hoped that Kármán's influence in Washington, D.C.—he had strong links with the army air corps— would help them gain official (and certain) rather than providential funding. But when Kármán invited a 'big shot' from the army ordnance, the big shot declared that rockets, as far as he was concerned, stood no chance of being used for any military purpose." |
| Again, S/B "von Kármán". I'll add that "army air corps" should be capitalized. And I wonder if this is the same army officer who later told Goddard that the WW2 European campaign would be won by trench mortars rather than rockets. |
| Page 146: | "Macpherson created a flamboyant show business atmosphere..." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "show-business". |
| Page 153: | "Nevertheless, Parsons' scientific learning, his natural aristocratic manner and his wealthy countenance all gave Smith hope..." |
| Parsons had a "wealthy countenance"? His face "looked rich"? It seems an far-fetched conclusion, much like Charles Bronson's character's gibe to a young mobster carrying a machine gun in a viola case: "You look musical." The young man predictably responded with irritation: "You think so?" |
| Page 177: | "He pressed amide black powder mixed with corn starch and ammonium nitrate into the blotting paper-lined rocket, the whole mixture being bound together with Le Page's all-purpose stationery glue." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "the blotting-paper-lined". (Though when his rockets blew up, I wager Parsons often referred to them in terms that might be euphemized as "the blotting paper-lined rocket exploded again!" |
| Page 183: | "The massive quantities of explosives at the test site does not seem to have curbed any of the team's desire to light up [a cigarette]." |
| Number error: S/B either "massive quantities" and "do not seem" or "massive quantity" and "does not seem". |
| Page 188: | "The result was an economic boom which the United States somewhat guiltily, embraced." |
| Missing comma: S/B "the United States, somewhat guiltily, embraced". |
| Page 218: | First line of poem: "I height Don Quixote, I live on Peyote" |
| Spelling: S/B "hight". |
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