The Crack of Doom

A brilliant, embittered scientist discovers a way to unleash the atomic energy locked within matter—and threatens to destroy the world unless it bends to his will. A small band races to stop him before his ‘crack of doom’ obliterates everything. Written decades before the atomic age, Cromie’s early science fiction imagines the terrifying power of the atom with startling prescience. A curious and thrilling relic of Victorian scientific romance, it stands among the first novels to grasp the world-ending potential of the science to come.