Armageddon 2419 AD: The Seminal Buck Rogers Novel by Philip Francis Nowlan

Armageddon 2419AD: The Seminal Buck Rogers Novel
Philip Francis Nowlan
1962, 1978, Ace Books, New York
0441029396
195p.

This is an edited novel which integrates two original novellas published by Nowlan in the late 1920s in the Amazing Stories magazine. Buck Rogers is a chemical engineer living in the early twentieth century who becomes trapped in an underground cavern which leaves him in a state of suspended animation due to the cold and various gasses (rather dubious, actually!). He awakes in the 25th century to find America in a state of decay - the native Americans hunted by another dominate race, the Hans.

I would love to read this in it's original form, as this edition was changed to suit the 'modern' (1960s) reader. It's like a cross between a hard science fiction novel, boy's own adventure, and war drama. I found some of the science fascinating, such as inertron and the ultron universe, which is similar to matter/antimatter theories.

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