The Blind Spot

The Blind Spot is a science fiction novel by Homer Eon Flint and Austin Hall, originally serialised in Argosy All Story Weekly in 1921 and published in book form in 1951. The novel is one of the major works of the early American pulp magazine science fiction tradition that flourished in the early twentieth century before the rise of the dedicated science fiction magazines in the late 1920s.

Flint, who lived from 1888 to 1924, was an American pulp magazine writer who produced substantial science fiction and adventure stories in the years just before his early death at thirty five in a car accident. Austin Hall, who lived from 1880 to 1933, was his frequent collaborator and was producing similar pulp magazine fiction during the same period. The Blind Spot was their most substantial collaboration and has been one of the more enduring works from the pulp magazine science fiction era before the establishment of the genre as a recognised category.

The novel involves a mysterious phenomenon called the Blind Spot, a kind of opening between dimensions or worlds that has been discovered by a philosophy professor named Dr Holcomb at the University of California. The opening creates substantial complications when various people including the professor become drawn into the alternative dimension on the other side of the opening, and the novel works through the substantial plot complications that develop across the substantial length of the narrative.

The novel was widely admired in the early American science fiction community when the genre was establishing itself as a recognised category in the 1930s. H P Lovecraft singled out The Blind Spot as one of the most substantial works of the early American pulp science fiction tradition, and the novel was reprinted in book form in 1951 partly in response to the substantial continuing interest from the science fiction community.

Modern readers approaching The Blind Spot will encounter the substantial conventions of early American pulp magazine fiction, including the substantial use of romantic and dramatic narrative elements alongside the speculative material, the various assumptions of early twentieth century American popular culture that the genre incorporated, and the substantial length and plot complication that the magazine serialisation format encouraged. The book runs to several hundred pages and is substantial reading.

The book is essential reading for historians of early American science fiction and for readers interested in the prehistory of the modern science fiction genre. It pairs naturally with the work of other early pulp science fiction writers including Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Merritt, and the substantial broader pulp magazine literature of the period.