Hmmm. Not really a review; just a few comments.

Bought the (e)book by accident (misplaced click), but at the price I decided to keep and read it.

Hadn't read this one before, and it's been decades since I last read something by Nourse. Three closely-related stories, here; set in January of 1979, May of 2001 (I think; the hint's ambiguous), and sometime in 2006 ("five years later"). The middle one's a novella; it's flanked by shorts. Most of the main characters are in all three. I assume they were originally published in one of the pulps.

The story's last page is a gimmick, and includes a detail that suggests a slight revision that isn't reflected in the copyright.

The book reads a lot like very early Heinlein. I've seen Nourse described as a "late Golden Age of SF" author, which seems a stretch both in time and impact, but I suppose I could defend the description if I had to because of the Heinlein similarities. I'd probably call him a pulp writer, m'self; since I spent the 60s reading the pulps, that's not a slam.

It's an interesting story about intersecting parallel universes, and mostly-accidental conflicts between them. The main issue driving the story is one universe using another as a shortcut route between Earth and other places. Complications ensue. The characters are mostly pretty thin, though well-defined; a couple are well-drawn. One of the well-drawn characters is a bit of an asshole, which seems odd. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2971062.html

This was the first novel by the mid-twentieth century sf writer Alan E. Nourse, published in two parts in 1951, the year he turned 23. I must admit that I was pretty impressed. It's a story in two halves, set twenty years apart, in the near future (of 1951), about the effects of a machine that enables access to parallel dimensions in which things lurk which may or may not be hostile to humanity. Where a lot of writers of this era would make McEvoy the heroic inventor of the machine, Nourse instead shows him as so narrowly focussed as to miss the dangers he has unleashed, and instead the heroes are the two people who are able to travel between the dimensions unharmed - the teenage Gail in the first half, and her young son Robert in the second half. I won't pretend it's great literature, but the conceptualisation of what might lurk in the other dimensions and what they might think of us was very original, and although the setup did not go much more than 100 miles from New York, it was well enough realised. ( )

In some ways this reminds me of Asimov's later The Gods Themselves, as it involves people trying to manipulate for their own advantage a universe they do not fully understand, with dangerous consequences. It also strikes me as a parable for today (though written much earlier) --what if the XL pipeline ran through the fourth dimension? In this story, earth is running out of vital resources (iron ore, steel, uranium) -- ample quantities of all these exist on other planets,but the shipping costs are prohibitive, so scientists are trying to develop a matter transmitter. It turns out that it is transmitting through another universe, previously discovered during low temperature experiments. Back then, all the men sent into it died or went mad; one young woman survived but refused to talk. By the time of the transmatter experiments, her son has grown up with the ability to shift universes at will. This permits him to negotiate an arrangement with the other universe to shift goods through it, but later problems develop with the transmission system and he has to negotiate again. ( )

My first science fiction book. ( )