Shellbreak

Some edgewear and creasing of spine and covers,as well some age toning, otherwise still a good reading copy. Set in the year 2505, the story takes place in "The City," which exists within something called F-shell, an apparently impenetrable barrier that has stood for over 400 years. The central premise involves a man who awakens in 2505 CE armed with knowledge that helps him to topple a corrupt dictatorship. Society has decayed considerably, and two different political factions are trying to convince the despotic government to take down the shell. The government, meanwhile, travels back in time to retrieve the shell's inventor — a man named Lenoir — to ensure the shell can never be dismantled. Lenoir arrives confused and disoriented, and finds himself caught between the competing groups as he slowly pieces together what is happening, building toward a major twist at the end.J.W. Groves (1910-1970) was a UK author who worked in various occupations over his life. He began publishing science fiction with a story called "The Sphere of Death" in Amazing magazine in October 1931, but his career consisted mainly of sporadic magazine publications for decades until Shellbreak appeared as his first novel in 1968. SFE He followed Shellbreak with a second novel, The Heels of Achilles (1969), which presents a world in which the dead have mysteriously come back to life. Groves died in 1970, the same year the US paperback edition of Shellbreak was published, leaving behind a small but distinctive body of work spanning nearly four decades.