Nerves edition by Lester del Rey Mystery Thriller Suspense eBooks
Download As PDF : Nerves edition by Lester del Rey Mystery Thriller Suspense eBooks 
In a nuclear plant in Kimberly, workers are nervous when a congressional committee comes for a surprise inspection. A few minor problems come up during the inspection, but the plant continues to run at full capacity—at least at first.
Half-way through the inspection, one of the converters has a major failure. Jorgenson and his team had been trying to use a new isotope in the giant reactors, but the unstable isotope causes disaster to strike. The reactor walls give out, and Jorgenson is stuck inside.
Jorgenson is the only survivor, and the only person who knows how to stop the reactor from causing a disaster that could wipe out half of the continent, but he is stuck inside the reactor with no way to communicate with anyone. It's a race against time to rescue Jorgenson so that he can save the world from nuclear fallout.
The magazine version of Lester del Rey's frightening novel appeared in 1942, long before Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl. Some see this book as a scarily accurate prediction of later nuclear meltdowns. Del Rey was an important science fiction writer and publisher, but none of his work had greater impact than this early novel.
About the Author
Lester del Rey (1915-1993) was born Leonard Knapp (but this became known only long after his death). After a spotty, abbreviated education and itinerant existence, he headed to New York where he became almost immediately a significant constituent of Astounding and John Campbell's celebrated Golden Age.
Del Rey sold his first story to John Campbell in the first months of Campbell's editorship, and over the next several years he sold him many more, including his female-android story Helen O'Loy (1938), perhaps the first true science fiction romance, and Nerves (1942, novelized in 1956), a brilliant novella of atomic pile disruption, amazingly prescient of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Del Rey's apostolic and profoundly controversial short novel For I Am A Jealous People (1956), positing a malevolent Deity, is also very well known.
Del Rey worked in the Scott Meredith Fee Department in the late 40s, edited science fiction magazines in the early 50s, published some noted juveniles (The Runaway Robot) in the mid-50s, and eventually became the founding editor of Del Rey Books, a fantasy and science fiction imprint under the aegis of Ballantine.
In collaboration with his third wife, Judy-Lynn, del Rey's imprint became the most successful fantasy and science fiction publisher in history. The two of them nurtured fantasy writers like Stephen Donaldson, Anne McCaffrey, and Terry Brooks to bestselling status. In 1991, del Rey was named a Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died only a few months after his retirement from Ballantine.
Nerves edition by Lester del Rey Mystery Thriller Suspense eBooks
It is true that this edition does not show paragraph breaks clearly. However, among the various Kindle books I have read, defects such as two words joined together, inappropriate hyphens in mid-line, and bad scanner/text recognition are fairly common. Kindle editions, for whatever reason, simply do not come up to the high standard of printed editions.This novel itself is a fine, tense, exciting read from the classic age of Science Fiction. It projects an entire future reality (which is now an alternate reality) in which atomic power is used far more than it is today. Since, at one time, atomic bombs were considered for creating (really large) ditches and similar construction projects, this alternate future no doubt seemed possible at the time the novel was written.
Also, at the time this was written, Caucasians (except foreign scientists) were the only ones who would be found working in such an installation, except perhaps on the custodial staff. Note that the women are restricted to Nursing and Office Work (well, Switchboard, at least): all the important jobs were reserved for the men. The rest of the women are at home, taking care of the kids. Welcome to the world of the traditional values of the 50's!
The Japanese character does speak English imperfectly. This is mostly shown by word and word order choice. It is very hard to say whether it is based on a stereotype or whether the author based it on someone he knew. At any rate, referring to it as "sing-song" is probably not a good idea, since "sing-song" is something one hears, not something one reads.
Speaking a foreign language perfectly is very difficult. Most people who speak a foreign language do so with an accent. This can come from having to treat what, in their language, is one sound (phoneme) as two in the foreign language, or from differences in how sentences are constructed and parts of speech connected, or both. Thus, a surprisingly hard part of learning Arabic, for me, was learning to hear the glottal stops. In English, these are ever-present but meaningless; in Arabic (well, Modern Standard Arabic, anyway; I have no idea what the dialects do), they can distinguish different words. So portraying a foreigner as speaking English with an accent is actually realistic. It is, of course, possible to overdo this, but I don't think that is the case here.
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Nerves edition by Lester del Rey Mystery Thriller Suspense eBooks Reviews
Old Doc Ferrell can’t even spend a day off with his wife and son. The National Atomics nuclear facility in Kimberly, Missouri is scheduled to undergo a government inspection and the plant manager, Allan Palmer, needs his chief physician present to handle the suits.
Worse, inspections make the men nervous and nervous men make mistakes.
There was already a bill under review in Congress to move the entire facility to a remote location, away from the dense civilian population that is currently enjoying the inexpensive power generated as a by-product of the plant’s operations. Palmer wants nothing more than to prove the safety of nuclear power. As such, he wants his best people present.
Giving up his day off, Ferrell enters the plant to find minor injuries already in progress, adroitly handled by the nursing staff. However, during the inspection, an accident occurs that leaves one man badly burned.
To make matters worse, a routine testing of one of the converter chambers by chief scientist Mal Jorgenson uncovers the presence of highly volatile and deadly “Isotope R”, otherwise known as Mahler’s Isotope. Jorgenson sounds the alarm, but not before becoming trapped inside the converter chamber, his armored Tomlin suit his only protection against the fatal radiation.
Palmer orders a rescue mission to retrieve Jorgenson, the only man in the plant who knows the best method to stop Mahler’s Isotope from destroying not only everything in a fifty-mile radius, but perhaps the entire eastern United States!
After a massive and dangerous effort by several of the plant’s crew (aka “atomjacks”), Jorgenson is pulled from the wreckage of the converter chamber and brought to the Infirmary where a heart massage is the only way to keep him from certain death, but when his heart fails to respond, Doc Ferrell and his team must turn to an unorthodox—and untested—solution.
Stories from the golden and transitional ages of speculative and science fiction have always been my absolute favorites. Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Ellison, Heinlein, Niven, the list goes on. Over the past two years or more, I’ve made a deliberate effort to expand my knowledge by including such writers as Philip José Farmer, Joe Haldeman, and Lester Del Rey, founder of Del Rey Publishing.
While I enjoyed The Best of Lester Del Rey anthology, I think it’s fair to say that NERVES is not one of his best works. Fortunately, it’s a short novel at only 153 pages. Sentence structure was occasionally awkward, character development non-existent, and I’m not entirely confident that Del Rey had a full grasp of the true nature of radiation exposure and it’s effects on the human body, although I will give him credit for an engaging description of the rescue and cleanup work after the accidents. I was a bit perplexed that there was only one expert on Mahler's Isotope in the entire facility. I suppose having another would have invalidated the entire plot.
Overall, I’d recommend skipping this one, but I will absolutely read more from Lester Del Rey.
The version of this book is poorly formatted with no paragraph breaks or indents. Not that it's really worth a read anymore.
I read this as a kid and remember liking it. I have grown up since then. It not so much a book to read now as entertainment, however it demonstrates the American mid-century attitude towards the environment, atomic power and minorities unintentionally.
A nuclear disaster is averted by dumping all the waste into rivers and swamps. Everyone is Caucasian except for the "little Japanese" physicist who speaks in comic book sing song. The book is filled with the hopes and dreams of a true "atomic" fuel and medicine. This was written back in the days when engineers and the military thought it might be possible to fuel planes with nuclear reactors.
In a post-Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima world this book stands out as an example of where culture was more than sixty years ago. If that interests you then it might be worth it. If not, take a pass.
I bought this for my son I had read it years ago. It's a fairly short but very strong story. Picture 3 mile island or Chernobyl times 100. For being written at the dawn of the "Atomic Age" Lester Del Rey nailed it. A keep you on the edge of your seat "what if" story. Some of the material is dated for todays reader but I really enjoyed it.
It is true that this edition does not show paragraph breaks clearly. However, among the various books I have read, defects such as two words joined together, inappropriate hyphens in mid-line, and bad scanner/text recognition are fairly common. editions, for whatever reason, simply do not come up to the high standard of printed editions.
This novel itself is a fine, tense, exciting read from the classic age of Science Fiction. It projects an entire future reality (which is now an alternate reality) in which atomic power is used far more than it is today. Since, at one time, atomic bombs were considered for creating (really large) ditches and similar construction projects, this alternate future no doubt seemed possible at the time the novel was written.
Also, at the time this was written, Caucasians (except foreign scientists) were the only ones who would be found working in such an installation, except perhaps on the custodial staff. Note that the women are restricted to Nursing and Office Work (well, Switchboard, at least) all the important jobs were reserved for the men. The rest of the women are at home, taking care of the kids. Welcome to the world of the traditional values of the 50's!
The Japanese character does speak English imperfectly. This is mostly shown by word and word order choice. It is very hard to say whether it is based on a stereotype or whether the author based it on someone he knew. At any rate, referring to it as "sing-song" is probably not a good idea, since "sing-song" is something one hears, not something one reads.
Speaking a foreign language perfectly is very difficult. Most people who speak a foreign language do so with an accent. This can come from having to treat what, in their language, is one sound (phoneme) as two in the foreign language, or from differences in how sentences are constructed and parts of speech connected, or both. Thus, a surprisingly hard part of learning Arabic, for me, was learning to hear the glottal stops. In English, these are ever-present but meaningless; in Arabic (well, Modern Standard Arabic, anyway; I have no idea what the dialects do), they can distinguish different words. So portraying a foreigner as speaking English with an accent is actually realistic. It is, of course, possible to overdo this, but I don't think that is the case here.
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