The Vanguard of Venus

1928 was a peculiar year to imagine the end of the world. Landell Bartlett, writing with the anxious energy of pre-Depression America, gave us Stanley Murdock: a geologist whose survey of New Mexico caves uncovers something far more dangerous than mineral deposits. The Venusians have been here for millennia, biding their time beneath the desert, and they have chosen 1931 as the year humanity learns what lies beneath the surface of its own planet. Murdock is kidnapped into their labyrinthine world, forced to grapple not only with advanced technology that makes human science look primitive, but with the cold logic of beings who view cities as fuel for their expansion. His captivity becomes a crash course in interstellar terror, punctuated by cryptic warnings about which metropolises will burn and when. The novel crackles with period unease: an America still drunk on its own progress, suddenly confronted with the possibility that progress is exactly what drew the predators to the door. Bartlett refuses easy resolution. Murdock surfaces with his terrible knowledge, but the final pages drip with the horrible possibility that no one will believe him, that the bombs will fall on schedule, that the future belongs to whoever emerges from the ground first.