Fire Past The Future — Charles Eric Maine

KALUIKI... an island-name destined to become a household word, along with the names of eight courageous people--Farrant, Strang, Hoevler, Earl, MacClennon, Youd and the two women, Kay Kinley and Hilde Bartok--if the project could be brought off successfully. It took three days to warm the reactor up to the critical point of Zero Hour. Meanwhile, some strange insanity had been let loose on the security-bound island. How long would it take to kill eight people? How long before some of them panicked or shut themselves uselessly in the safety of a locked room?Farrant was a good man--maybe too good, with his easygoing humor and wry acknowledgment that he was something of a dunderhead among a flock of super-experts. Yet Farrant committed at least one particularly bloody killing--and then couldn't remember that his victim was dead. How many others had he killed? What was the secret locked in his mind--the secret that affected the lives of everybody on the island, and which would eventually uncover the secret of AGNES itself?The tension grew unbearable as the inexorable hours ticked by and the small force of scientists was reduced one by one, until the final explosion revealed an answer not even the scientists had thought of--an answer written in time, and speed, and blood.About Vintage Pulp FictionA 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!