Stuart Woodward reviewed Strange Angel by George Pendle
Review of 'Strange Angel' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Wow! If I told you that one of the principal founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a proto sci-fi enthusiast, was involved in an occult sex cult and his lover - actually his wife’s sister - ran off with L. Ron Hubbard along with his money and died in a lab accident in his own home lab with all of this mixed in with a communist cell and the spectre of McCarthyism, would you be interested in reading this book? If so, highly recommended.
This story is set in the pre WWII transitional period where science could still be done in a lab in the basement, in a similar way to the almost amateur way that drugs were developed at the time, by trial and error. Only in this story, it is not drugs but explosive mixtures of untried rocket-fuels.
A really interesting book and it answered one question I …
Wow! If I told you that one of the principal founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a proto sci-fi enthusiast, was involved in an occult sex cult and his lover - actually his wife’s sister - ran off with L. Ron Hubbard along with his money and died in a lab accident in his own home lab with all of this mixed in with a communist cell and the spectre of McCarthyism, would you be interested in reading this book? If so, highly recommended.
This story is set in the pre WWII transitional period where science could still be done in a lab in the basement, in a similar way to the almost amateur way that drugs were developed at the time, by trial and error. Only in this story, it is not drugs but explosive mixtures of untried rocket-fuels.
A really interesting book and it answered one question I had always had, why were rockets developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In short, rocket science in it’s infancy was treated as a kind of dangerous field of study only performed by crackpots. And they were right! The initial rocket “jets” were designed to augment propellors on takeoffs on short runways. The race was on to develop “safe” rockets that didn’t destroy the plane during takeoff.
It is ironic that in the age of McCarthyism, the rocket-engineers who had felt it was their patriotic duty as communist Americans to help to join the war effort to defeat the nazis, were driven out as security risks and were replaced by real nazis from the German rocket-program with whom they had communicated with pre war until the letters from the German rocket-clubs had ceased.
If this was fiction, I would have complained at the cast of unbelievable characters who make an appearance. I definitely want to read this again sometime.
