"Five Against Venus" 1956 LATHAM, Philip
$350
[214] pp.
LATHAM, Philip
Second Printing
The John C Winston Company
1956
8 3/4" x 6"
Jacket design by Virgil Finlay & endpaper designed by Alex Schomburg
VG/ VG
When Bruce Robinson’s father decided to take the job offered him on the Moon, his space-loving son saw an end to his drab life as an earthbound high-school student. What neither Bruce nor the other three members of the Robinson family could foresee was that within two weeks they’d be the world’s leading experts on life upon the planet Venus.
To more experienced interplanetary travelers than the Robinsons, the actions of the crew of the gleaming Moon-bound space ship, Aurora, would have seemed suspicious. But the crew’s interest in the mysterious government cargo, stowed in the ship’s hold, did not cause the unsuspecting family any serious concern. Not until the captain and his mate abandoned the crippled Aurora, as she lurched through the Venusian mists to a certain crash landing, did the Robinsons awake to their peril.
Philip Latham has written a vivid and detailed novel charged with mystery and suspense about an average American family stranded on the weird and unexplored planet of Venus. Unsure of the planet’s oxygen supply, tortured by ultra-sonic waves emitted by man-size bat-like creatures, faced by carnivorous plants, the Robinsons are the focal point of a novel unsurpassed in the science fiction field for its frightening and powerful reality.
In an electrifying climax, solutions to strange and forbidding paradoxes top a tale of courage and unassuming bravery.
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.