Undoubtedly Dr. Eric Lane was a man to be envied. With ordinary luck he might yet look forward to thirty-five years of the keenest pleasure a highly intelligent and healthy man can experience, the discovery of natural laws and their application to the good of his fellow men.Although today was his fortieth birthday he felt not a day over eighteen. He smiled as the thought occurred to him, for it reminded him of his daughter Edith. She was just the age that he felt."We're a pai...

“Father, do go to bed! This is the fifth time I’ve been down since midnight, and I shall not warn you again. You may not need sleep, but I do.” And with a slight raising of the chin, Vera took up her position just inside the door of the electrical laboratory. Alan Cunningham glanced first at Vera, then at the clock, and last at James Ferguson, her incorrigible father. What a pity, he reflected sleepily, that nature had not made Vera a man instead of the whole-souled girl she was. With just...

Our 95th issue has a lot of fun stuff—starting off with a pair of original mysteries by Robert Lopresti and Mindy Quigley (thanks to Acquiring Editors Michael Bracken an Barb Goffman). Also on the mystery side, we have a pair of classic novels by Hulbert Footner R. Austin Freeman, plus a solve-it-yourself puzzler from Hal Charles.On the fantastic side of things, A.R. Morlan has a modern tale of clones, Alfred Coppel has a scientific monster, Seabury Quinn has a weird horror, and Fr...

Seeds of Life is a variation on the Jekyll and Hyde theme. A technical assistant is zapped by radiation in a laboratory and is transformed into genius. Initially, the genius builds incredible devices that make millions of dollars. But the genius goes to the Dark Side and his evil threatens to unleash new horrors on the United States.

John Taine's The Greatest Adventure begins with a tantalizing scientific riddle: Dr. Eric Lane, a brilliant Antarctic explorer and archeologist, is drawn toward evidence that some forgotten intelligence may once have created new forms of life. A bizarre preserved creature, seemingly a living link between birds, reptiles, and fish, arrives via Captain Anderson, who insists it was found freshly dead in the South Polar seas, not unearthed as a fossil. What follows is a story of fierce intelle...

Dr Andrew Crane is a researcher at the Erickson Foundation for Electrical Research in Seattle, aided by "his technical assistant, the stocky Neils Bork". Bork has a drinking problem, and is difficult to deal with, none of which prevents his mysterious physical and mental transformation into a new being, with new abilities and a new name: Miguel De Soto!"His best work shows an admirable imaginative flair. He loved to do things on a grand scale, sometimes conveying his effects with a...

Dive into the imaginative world of John Taine, a master of science fiction whose works have captivated readers for generations. This illustrated collection features some of his most notable novels, including "The Purple Sapphire," "The White Lily," "The Time Stream," and "Seeds of Life," among others. Each story showcases Taine's unique ability to blend scientific concepts with thrilling narratives, exploring the boundaries of human potential and the mysteries of the universe. In "The Purp...

A scientifically-precipitated, out-of-control tale of evolution set in Antarctica—it predates Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness—by a mathematician of note who also wrote science fiction.In The Greatest Adventure, an expedition to Antarctica discovers remnants of an elder race with advanced technology. These ancients had discovered the secret of developing new life-forms . . . but when the mutations threatened to run amok, their creators ento...

In the hallowed, humming chambers of a private New York laboratory, renowned physicist James Ferguson collapses under the assault of a silent, crackling green spark. The eerie discharge, the precise hue of the forbidden nebulium line, leaves him visibly aged and cognitively scrambled. His brilliant daughter Vera, a capable scientist herself, experiences the flash's bizarre, alien intelligence—a feeling of being 'handled' by something arbitrary. With the aid of Alan Cunningham and the fasti...

THEY FOUND A LOST WORLD OF WEIRD MONSTERS. When a sea captain brought a baby dinosaur to the home of a wealthy, brilliant scientist, it triggered off an expedition that well deserves the title of THE GREATEST ADVENTURE. For the trail of that little creature led straight into the unexplored, quake-shaken Antarctic to a lost world overrun with the monsters of an evolution gone wild! In every way a classic of science-fiction, it’s breathtaking story-telling by John Taine in ebook format at la...

Eric Temple Bell in 1924, published The Purple Sapphire, his first novel. Bell adopted the pseudonym of John Taine for all of his fictional work while continuing to write non-fiction under his own name. In the field of mathematics, Bell polynomials and Bell numbers of combinatorics are named in his honour and in 1924 he was awarded the Bocher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis.The Purple Sapphire, published in 1924, revolves around a mad scientistand an ex...

Seeds of Life is a science fiction novel by American writer John Taine (pseudonym of Eric Temple Bell). It was first published in 1951 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 2,991 copies. The novel originally appeared in the magazine Amazing Stories Quarterly in October 1931.The novel concerns the creation of a superman using radiation.