Science Fiction Book Review: A Thing of the Past by Volsted Gridban AKA John Russell Fearn

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OK, this one's a bit of an oddity. Since I collect old paperback books, especially science fiction books, one way of saving money is by buying job lots via eBay and then selling on the books that I don't want. This book came to me in one such job lot, and I was going to sell it on unread until I saw a video that mentioned both the publisher and the author on YouTube, and that made me curious to read it. First a word about the publisher. During World War 2, there were restrictions on the supply of paper in the United Kingdom. After the war, the paper restrictions were lifted, and this led to the rapid emergence of a lot of new publishing companies, often very low-rent outfits who were known for printing cheap genre paperbacks written by authors who were working for low pay rates. One such publisher was Scion Publications. The author of this book is credited as "Volsted Gridban", but that's actually a house name devised by Scion. For some reason some of these cheap publishers seemed to think it would help sales if their authors went under exotic, vaguely foreign-sounding names. This book was actually written by John Russell Fearn, a very prolific British pulp writer who wrote in several different genres, including SF. He never wrote any classics that I know of, but he was one of those writers who knew how to quickly write entertaining stories that would sell. His work for Scion seems to have sold well, and they signed him up to work for them on an exclusive five-year contract. "A Thing of the Past" was published in 1953, but frankly it reads more like something that would have been published in a pulp magazine twenty years earlier. The hero is Cliff Brooks, a mining engineer who is employed to clear land near London to make way for a new housing estate. Blowing up a cliff unexpectadly opens up a deep fissure into the the ground. Exploring the fissure, Cliff finds a huge underground cave that has a glacier at one end of it, and no indication of how many miles away the far end of the cave is. Inside the glacier, he spots a large egg. He digs out the egg and takes it home to incubate, curious about what kind of creature it will hatch. Don't ask me why he thinks an egg that's been frozen in ice since time immemorial will be viable. Over the space of the next few hours, something else strange happens - pterodactyls start to emerge from the fissure and start roaming arround menacing the population. Scientists theorise that the cave system contains a surviving ecosystem from the Jurrassic era of 80 million years earlier. Plans are made to seal up the fissure, but Cliff is injured when volcanic gasses escape and trigger an eruption, creating an active volcanic crater in the south of England. While Cliff is recuperating, the egg he's got in his garage hatches a baby dinosaur, which his wife treats as a pet. Meanwhile, strange things are happening around London, as people seem to lose their standards and become more aggressive and the crime rate rockets. It's theorised that the volcanic vent that has opened has released a gas that's affecting people negatively, and that this gas is also what has kept the dinosaurs trapped underground alive for millions of years. Cliff designs a manned, underground boring machines while he's recovering, and persuades the company he works for to construct it. Once he's back on his feet, Cliff is joined by his wife and three scientists in an expedition to take the boring machine that he has devised deep underground - initially to explore the Jurassic ecosystem in the cave, but later to follow the volcanic vent down to its source so they can find a way to divert the gas elsewhere. The initial exploration takes them to a cave with jungle and dinosaurs, and then they bore much deeper down, hundreds of miles to a hell-like cave on the outer edge of the Earth's core - a region with a stone platau surrouned by lava lakes, and where they find the volcanic gas vent that they need to divert. Unfortunately, they also damage the borer in the process, making it doubtful that they can return to the surface. So as you can tell from this brief summary, it's definitely no classic. The scientific basis is quite ludicrous, and the characters are either geniuses or stupid depending on what the plot requires of them at the time. But it never gets boring, and there is some tension at the end as they try to improvise a way to repair the borer and return home. I do know that it sold well enough to warrant a sequel, but it's the literary equivalent of a Poverty Row B movie. So I'm not sorry I read it, but I won't be leaving it again. And I know that there are people who collect books by Scion and similar "mushroom" publishers, so off it goes into my pile of books to be listed for sale online shortly. What am I reading next? I'm not sure yet, but probably something a bit more upmarket.