The Greatest Adventure
By John Taine
1928
First Published
3.36
Average Rating
236
Number of Pages
"A crisp style & soaring imagination!" So writes Robert Silverberg, the award winning author of the Majipoor Chronicles about the sf of John Taine. In this classic 1928 novel of what Silverberg calls "provocative ideas & roaring adventure," a daring young woman flyer joins a band of scientists on a voyage to Antarctica in search of a strange land where evolution runs wild. Before it's over she'll experience peril, make an almost impossible trek across the ice, discover love & share in one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of science. The Greatest Adventure is part of what the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction hails as his "best & most interesting work—a long sequence of mutational [novels] involving rapid & uncontrolled evolution...that helped extend the horizons of sf & is one of [its] outstanding early products." Here there be beasties & dinosaurs, the remains of a civilization whose science once outstripped its wisdom & a deadly new form of life that if released could threaten the world. John Taine (1883-1960) was really California Institute of Technology professor Eric Temple Bell, a renowned mathematical theorist with an interest in all the sciences that lends a solid foundation to the scientific speculations in his novels. But Taine possessed formidable literary talents as well. No wonder Silverberg praises his "crisp style—knack for storytelling & sense of narrative flow [that], combined with his background as a professional scientist to make, him almost uniquely qualified to write excellent science fiction."
Avg Rating
3.36
Number of Ratings
36
5 STARS
14%
4 STARS
22%
3 STARS
53%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads
Author
John Taine
Author · 6 books
Eric Temple Bell (February 7, 1883, Peterhead, Scotland - December 21, 1960, Watsonville, California) was a mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland who lived in the U.S. for most of his life. He published his non-fiction under his given name and his fiction as John Taine.
