New Book of the Week: Zero Minus X

It has been claimed that between the years of 1958 and 1964, Lionel Fanthorpe was the most prolific genre author alive, writing under a bewildering array of pseudonyms and house names, and producing a book per week for the now-defunct Badger Books. One such house name – occasionally used by John Glasby and Tom W Wade – was Karl Zeigreid, under which, Fanthorpe produced such melodramatic pulp adventures as … ZERO MINUS X!

Man is an intelligent mammal. His intelligence lies in his brain. In mammals the tissues of the central nervous system are irreplaceable. The human brain contains something like 100,000,000,000,000 neurons, but 100,000 are destroyed on average each day of a man’s life. Cosmic rays and general internal and external radioactivity account for most of this destruction.

Hunger and Gradey decided on an illegal experiment. They brought up a small group of children in a strange artificial setting where there was practically no radiation. The setting was improved. The environment grew more shielded as generations passed. At last the Thinkers exploded into a world that had not dreamed of their existence. The world was facing other complications at the moment. An alien had appeared from the other side of the cosmos!

Humanity was faced with two potentially deadly enemies; could they be turned against each other, or was one a secret friend?

Do not read too much Lionel Fanthorpe at one go, your brains will turn to guacamole and drip out of your ears

Neil Gaiman