Aarn Munro
Dust-jacket from the first edition
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| Author | John W. Campbell, Jr. |
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| Illustrator | R. Pailthorpe |
| Cover artist | Betty Wells Halladay |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | The Hadley Publishing Co. |
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Publication date
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1947 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 228 |
| OCLC | 2737057 |
| Followed by | The Incredible Planet |
The Mightiest Machine is a science fiction novel by author John W. Campbell, Jr. The novel was originally serialized in 5 parts in Astounding Stories magazine from December 1934 to April 1935, and was published in book form in 1947 by The Hadley Publishing Co. in an edition of 1,200 copies.
The story is the first to feature Campbell's hero Aarn Munro. This space opera novel concerns the harnessing of energy from the sun and encounters with aliens who turn out not to be truly alien at all. It also touches on the legends of ancient civilizations on earth, Mu in this case, and what may have happened to them.
Astounding reviewer P. Schuyler Miller described the 1947 edition as "perhaps the climax of the super-physics school of science fiction which 'Skylark' Smith had started."Everett F. Bleiler identified the novel as the paradigm of "the Campbell hard space opera," noting its "great quantity of fanciful and ingenious scientific extrapolations, fictional weaknesses, and polarized social simplistics that regard genocide with equanimity."
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