The Crack of Doom

Robert Cromie imagined something startling for 1895: a scientist who has learned to unlock the energy bound inside the atom, and who means to use it to wipe out a world he considers beyond saving. Arthur Marcel meets the coldly brilliant Herbert Brande aboard ship, is drawn into his secret society, and grows uneasy as the group’s true aim comes clear, even while he falls for Brande’s sister Natalie. The novel is remembered as an early and eerily prescient vision of atomic destruction, decades before physicists made such fears real. Part scientific romance and part race against a doomsday plot, it moves with genuine tension. This free PDF and EPUB edition revives a landmark of early science fiction.