I’ve been a fan of Paul Malmont since the day I saw The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril in the bookstore. Any writer who told a story including the creators of Doc Savage and The Shadow and tell it in a pulp-like story deserves wider recognition. I enjoyed his second book, Jack London in Paradise, but not quite as much as the first book. So, when I heard that Malmont was writing a sequel to The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril about Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov fighting Nazis in WW-II, I started eagerly waiting for The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. What’s amazing is that a lot of the story that Malmont tells in the book is true. So, let’s go into the unknown with some astounding, amazing folks.

In World War II, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp worked together at the Philadelphia Naval Yard(picture as proof). The grouping was put together by legendary science fiction editor John Campbell. Around the same time, Cambell asked writer Cleve Cartmill to write a story about a futuristic super bomb. Cartmill, who was friends with Asimov (and even communicated with Asimov at the Philadelphia Naval Yards) did some research in scientific journals and wrote a story called Deadline. It wasn’t a particularly good story, but it did catch the attention of the Counter Intelligence Corps. They were aware of the Manhattan Project and the Heinlein led Philadelphia group and started investigating everyone involved. The Army Intelligence file details were talked about earlier this year by Robert Silverberg (part 1, part 2).  Also in the same group was a female chemist known as Virginia Gerstenfeld. Around the same time, L. Ron Hubbard had his boat command taken away when he bombed Mexico after chasing a U-Boat that no one else saw. Also the Philadelphia Naval Yards was the scene of the alleged Philadelphia Experiment.

So we have a real life mysterious experiment set in the same time and place as a number of science fiction writers were grouped together working during a war. Malmont has taken all these activities and the relationships between the writers (especially the de Camp/Hubbard issues with the Harold Shea stories) and woven a mystery concerning Nikolai Tesla’s final weapon. The story covers all these activities as well as old ground in the Edison/Tesla feuds and some old friends from the first book in a fun romp. We get a lot of personal interactions between the characters (including more information on Asimov’s sex life than I personally wanted to know).

Along the way we run into various other people who were related to science fiction, the army or WW-II weaponry including Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Jimmy Stewart, Tom Slick, Hugh Cave, Jack Parsons, John Campbell and Hugo Gernsback. The story is almost incidental to the fun of seeing all these characters interacting and realizing that (although the story is fake) all these people were really in the same place at the same time. We deal with their love lives and the realization from several characters that the pulp ere was dying. Not because people didn’t like it, but because people loved it. Hubbard, Heinlein and Campbell were all writing for money, while newer writers such as Asimov and Bradbury were writing because they truly loved the stories. There is a wonderful anecdote (which is probably based on the truth) about the competition between two fan groups in trying to establish a convention.

Overall, the story is good (but not great), but this is more of an ode to authors and we love than a plot filled story to be read. You can feel the affection that Malmont has for the people and the places and the story. The book isn’t for people who are looking for classic science fiction, but is for people who love classic science fiction. Highly recommended.