The Crack of Doom

The universe is a mistake – and Herbert Brande means to correct it. Arthur Marcel first meets Brande aboard a transatlantic liner, where the scientist's calm certainty seems merely eccentric. In London, curiosity draws Marcel into the Cui Bono Society, an exclusive circle devoted to Brande's radical experiments. What begins with telepathy, mesmerism, and a strange demonstration of energy soon reveals a far more terrible design.

Brande believes matter itself is the source of suffering. He also believes he can release the immense force hidden inside the atom. As the Society carries its instruments toward a remote island in the Arafura Sea, Marcel must decide whether Brande is a visionary, a madman, or both – and whether one man can prevent a scientific revelation from becoming the end of creation.

First published in 1895, Robert Cromie's The Crack of Doom is a startling early work of atomic-catastrophe fiction – written before the discoveries that transformed modern physics, and better read as a Victorian nightmare of unlimited power than as a prediction of the atomic age.

A carefully restored text. This Squire Press edition restores the novel against the 1895 second edition and reprints Cromie's original preface, returning the book to the form in which Victorian readers first met Brande and his terrible ambition.