Children of the Atom

Wilmar Shiras

ISBN 10: 0974889504 / ISBN 13: 9780974889504

Published by Red Jacket Press May 2004, 2004

About this Item

â She takes pains to see that he is a good boy and that he gets into no mischiefâ Shiras, Wilmar, H. Children of the Atom. Mohegan Lake, New York: Gnome Press [Red Jacket Press]. 2004. 8-1/4â x 5-1/2â . [5], 216, [1]. Decorative slipcase with jacket illustration on front, advertisements for other Gnome Press books on opposite side. Some scuffing to slipcase. Worn corners of DJ, otherwise Fine. Red cloth boards, black lettering of author, title and publisher on spine. Fine. Red Jacket insert card included. A female science fiction author, she began writing stories for her family and submitted the short story, â In Hidingâ , to Astounding Science Fiction that would later become this work. Children of the Atom would also inspire, â The Uncanny X-Menâ $25 Oakland Tribune, Science Fiction & The X-Men, Part 1.

Seller Inventory # 1060662

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Children of the Atom
• Publisher: Red Jacket Press May 2004
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0974889504
• ISBN 13: 9780974889504
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Sci FI

About this title

Synopsis

In the future world of 1972, a group of children, born to workers caught in a nuclear weapons facility explosion, exhibit high intelligence and other gifts. Originally scattered throughout the U.S., they are reunited in an experimental school designed to harness their gifts and protect them from suspicious fellow citizens.

About the Author

Wilmar House Shiras was born in 1908 in Boston, Massachusetts, where she spent her formative years before moving west to attend the University of California at Berkeley. After completing four years of graduate studies in history, she settled in the neighboring city of Oakland with her husband Russell, where they proceeded to raise five children. It was for her family's entertainment that Shiras first began to create stories. In 1948, at the insistence of her small but loyal audience, she submitted the story "In Hiding" to editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s groundbreaking magazine Astounding Science Fiction, which published it in that year's November issue. "In Hiding" proved to be one of those rare works with which readers felt a deep identification, and over the next two years Shiras built on her success with the sequels "Opening Doors" and "New Foundations" (both also published in Astounding Science Fiction). Those three pieces became the first three chapters of Children of the Atom, published by Gnome Press in 1953. Over the decades that followed, this eloquent portrait of gifted children confronting a hostile world proved itself to be an enduring classic. (It has also been credited -- though never officially confirmed -- with providing the inspiration for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's world-famous comic book creation, The Uncanny X-Men.) And although it was to be the only book that Shiras would publish in the genre, Children of the Atom has earned its author an honored place among science fiction's pantheon of creators -- in 2002, the Science Fiction Book Club named it one of the Most Significant Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years. Shiras passed away in 1990.