From the cover: 1999 - America Writhed in the vice-like grip of her merciless conquerors. The enemy had a brilliantly conceived, seemingly foolproof weapon for domination. Every month the entire population had to report for a booster shot against a terrible plaque—without it death was instantaneous. But one group of courageous men and women guessed the enemy's most closely guarded secret—a secret that could be turned into a weapon for freedom. Slowly but relentlessly they were devising a plan of revolt so daring that it defied belief—a plan that included the establishment of the first space station on the planet Mars.
Author
Gerald Allan Sohl Sr. (December 2, 1913 - November 4, 2002) was a scriptwriter for The Twilight Zone (as a ghostwriter for Charles Beaumont), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, Star Trek and other shows . He also wrote novels, feature film scripts, and the nonfiction works Underhanded Chess and Underhanded Bridge in 1973. His 1955 Point Ultimate is a piece of Cold War invasion literature: in 1999, a faraway future history at the time of writing, the US lies under a cruel Soviet occupation, reinforced by a deadly artificial disease which makes conquered Americans dependent on the conquerors for the injections which keep them alive. But a dashing Illinois farm boy breaks out in revolt, killing a degenerate soviet governor and his "Commie" American collaborators. Eventually, he becomes a leading member of a very formidable resistance organization which is capable of breaking at will into the occupiers' security headquarters and springing prisoners out, and which had already established a clandestine space program under the Soviets' noses and established a sizeable colony on Mars. In the far more low-key The Time Dissolver (1957) Sohl tells the story of a man and a woman who wake up one morning to find that, inexplicably, they had lost all memory of the past eleven years including any memory of how they ever came to meet and become married to each other, and who embark on a quest to find what happened and to trace back these eleven lost years. Aside from the science fiction aspects, the book captures the atmosphere of late 1950s America.
