Description: Missing Men of Saturn by Phillip Latham, from my father's collection. 1953 The John C. Winston Company, Philadelphia and Toronto; 215 pages, first edition with dust jacket. Some tears and some wear on the dust jacket at the top and bottom of the spine, front cover and back cover. Book square and tight. Please see photos for more on the book condition. ~~~From Goodreads: "We Go Anywhere" was the legend scrawled on the battered hull of the ALBATROSS, one of the worst old tubs in space. To Dale Sutton, the biggest man on campus at the Space Academy, it was a slap in the face to be ordered to such a crate. But his biggest shock came when orders set the ALBATROSS and its two companion ships on a course that let straight to the dreaded planet Saturn. No one had ever come back from Saturn, yet everyone knew the story of Captain Dearborn who had led the first and only expedition to the ringed planet a century earlier. His diary was the record of a steadily losing battle against the unknown as one by one, the little party had vanished.Now, a hundred years later, the superstitious crew of the ALBATROSS found it impossible to rid themselves of the feeling that the same catastrophe that had wiped out the previous expedition would strike again. They had hardly been settled a day in Dearborn's old underground quarters on Titan, Saturn's largest satellite, when their gnawing fears began to materialize. First, the loss of all their guns when the lights suddenly and inexplicably faded, then the disappearance of the first man! But greater and more deadly horrors were yet to panicky moments of groping though ghastly underground caves, the appearance of a face bearing the same twisted features of the illustrious Captain Dearborn, a collision that sends Titan up in a blaze of destruction, and the final landing on Saturn, a planet heaving with volcanos and covered with streams of molten lava.Philip Latham's portrayal of life on a planet about whose conditions few have ventured a guess is a tale guaranteed to make the reader as numb with terror as the men the author writes about.~~Philip Latham was a pen name used by Dr. Robert S. Richardson (1902 – 1981). He could support the suppositions that are the basis of his science fiction novels with accepted scientific theories. For he was an author who was in the business of “watching the stars.” An astronomer at Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories beginning in 1931, he started writing for magazines in the early forties. His work won such wide respect that he also had a college textbook on astronomy to his credit. Movie producers as well as publishers found Dr. Richardson’s experience too good to pass up. He gave technical assistance to a number of studios on pictures such as Destination Moon , and he wrote an article describing his work on the science fiction thriller When Worlds Collide . ~~~ This is one of the many comic books, pulp magazines, paperbacks, and hardcovers I have inherited from my father, who had been collecting from the mid-1940s in Maine until his death in the late 1990s in Los Angeles. I combine orders to save on shipping!
Price: 12 USD
Location: Orono, Maine
End Time: 2025-02-09T21:50:42.000Z
Shipping Cost: 5.38 USD
Product Images
Item Specifics
All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
Binding: Hardcover
Signed: No
Publisher: John C. Winston Company
Subject: Science Fiction
Original/Facsimile: Original
Year Printed: 1953
Language: English
Illustrator: Alex Schomburg
Special Attributes: 1st Edition
Author: Philip Latham (Robert Richardson)
Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
Topic: Action, Adventure