Hero's Walk Robert Crane Author

It had come--the dreaded bombardment from outer space. The mysterious voices had warned Earth; but ambition and vanity had driven a few powerful men to disregard the warnings. Now Neil Harrison of InterCos (the UN of the future) had to make his way t... Read more

It had come--the dreaded bombardment from outer space. The mysterious voices had warned Earth; but ambition and vanity had driven a few powerful men to disregard the warnings. Now Neil Harrison of InterCos (the UN of the future) had to make his way through the frightening streets of New York to meet the girl who waited for him. During that walk through the frightening bomb-lit dark, the drama of the future world (and of much of today's, too) is revealed in a moving and truly unusual narrative.In the imaginative and intelligent tradition of Childhood's End, this first novel by Robert Crane takes you with overwhelming conviction into a future that you will recognize.Because that future America is simply our world--with all its virtues and defects--carried forward some decades and intensified. It's called InterCos now, not the U.N.; the threat is not from behind the Iron Curtain, but from beyond the stars; but men are behaving the same way. They are heroic and silly; they are visionary and short-sighted; they push the world to the brink of destruction and then fight valiantly to save it.Neil Harrison works for InterCos. On the night of the bombing from outer space, he has a date to meet Libby Hewes. There is no way to telephone her. She will be as worried about him as he is about her. He must go to her. And through the frightening blackout and bombing, he walks.During that walk we see everything that brought the earth to its present state, unfolded in a drama of dimension and high relevance. In the person of Neil Harrison, we all walk forward through the Valley of the Shadow in search of believable hope.About Vintage Science Fiction Pulps:A new revolution was underway at the start of the 1940s in America--a paperback revolution that would change the way publishers would produce and distribute books and the reading public would consume them. In 1939 a new publishing company--Pocket Books--stormed onto the scene with the publication of its first paperbound book. Unlike hardback books, these pulp paperbacks were available in drugstores, newsstands, bus and train stations, and cigar shops. The American public could not get enough of them. The popular pulp genres reflected the tastes of Americans during World War II--mysteries, sleaze, thrillers, and hardboiled detective stories were all the rage.In the early 1950s new pulp fiction subgenres emerged--science fiction, lesbian fiction, juvenile delinquent and sleaze, for instance--that would tantalize readers with gritty, realistic and lurid stories never seen before. Publishers had come to realize that sex sells. In a competitive frenzy for readers, they tossed away their staid and straightforward cover images for alluring covers that frequently featured a sexy woman in some form of undress, along with a suggestive tag line that promised stories of sex and violence within the covers. Before long, vintage pulps with sensational covers had completely taken over the paperback racks and cash registers. To this day, the pulp cover art of these vintage paperback books are just as sought after as the books themselves were sixty years ago.We are excited to make these wonderful pulp fiction stories available in ebook format to new generations of readers, as a new revolution--the ebook revolution--is in full swing. We hope you will enjoy this nostalgic look back at a period in American history when dames were dangerous, tough-guys were deadly, dolls were delicious and spacemen were downright daring! Less