Tom Swift Lives!
Tom Swift Lives! Seriously.
And howzabout ‘The Complete Tom Swift Jr. Home Page‘?
I had most of these books when I was a lad, the hardback versions, not the later paperbacks.
I loved the ’science’ and the adventure, read them all to pieces.
Can’t believe the flashbacks I’m having just researching the links and verifying the info for this post. Wow. Better than Star Trek.
My favourite took place in ‘Ngombia’ in west Africa. It was called “Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway,” a magnetically suspended highway above jungle swamps. That flying machine in the cover picture on that page is actually laying the roadbed in the air; you can see the repeller device in the jungle below.
There were dinosaurs too . Years later, when I heard about mkele mbembe, I wondered which came first…
Then there was “Tom Swift and His Ultrasonic Cycloplane” where they discovered an ancient city inside a volcano and some silly damn thing called ‘rare earths’ as if dirt was rare. Right. Wander over to the Collier’s encyclopaedia and have me a good lookup and by Jeez, wouldja look at that, Rare Earths.
Way better than my sisters’ Nancy Drew books, although I read those too. Hell, I read those encyclopaedias like they were Tom Swift novels.
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‘Tom Swift books‘ google string
January 24th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
I still have all my Tom Swift Jr.’s (though I’m missing #33 and can’t bring myself to spend $200 on eBay for it) and all the original Tom Swift Sr.’s (save about 3 or 4 I never finished hunting down). I haven’t thought about them in years - maybe time to re-read them! I remember thinking, as a kid and teenager, that the pseudo-science was pretty well done - wonder if I’ll still think that now?
January 25th, 2006 at 12:05 am
And don’t forget that a TASER is a Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle! The original ‘TASER’ appeared in the tenth Tom Swift story, published in 1911.
January 25th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Awesome, Korak!
I don’t know how I managed to forget it, but here’s the Blackmask link to the list of the public domain versions of the original Tom Swift (Sr.) stories from the early 2oth century. I didn’t even know about these until the mid 80s, and never saw the text until last year sometime when a search on Blackmask for something else turned them up.
“Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship”. Cool.
I love Blackmask.