His problem is to stay under cover and survive long enough to implement his plan.

Very quickly, Lucas discovers that he has pitched himself into a world with which he is ill-equipped to cope: the world of secret agents, espionage, kidnapping and murder. They will be forced to dismantle their weapons, and the world will breathe again. Lucas constructs the machine, and then sends plans to prominent scientists and politicians everywhere, giving a deadline on which he will activate it. In a future on the brink of nuclear suicide (Damascus has just been wiped out by a terrorist nuclear bomb), the temptation is irresistible to use his invention as a gun held against the heads of the world’s leaders. He can build a neutron resonator: a device which, once triggered, will detonate every nuclear warhead in the planet. It is 1988, and an obscure scientist, Lucas Hutchman, has made a momentous discovery. Read onlineįirst published in 1971 as Ground Zero Man, this novel was revies by the author and published in 1985 as The Peace Machine. 4 (1974), then retitled as “A Little Night Flying” for “ If - Worlds of ScienceFiction” (August 1974), and also included in “Cosmic Kaleidoscope” (1976). “Terminal Velocity” (1991) contains the same story as “Vertigo” but also includes, as a prologue, an 11-page short story by Bob Shaw that was first published as “Dark Icarus” in Science Fiction Monthly vol. “Vertigo” is vintage Bob Shaw, fast-moving, intelligent and immensely readable.

Unwillingly, Hasson finds himself drawn into the conflict and forced to face his own problems. The violence that has been simmering in the town threatens to erupt and Werry seems powerless to stop it. Worse, the hotel's owner, Buck Morlacher, intends to take the law into his own hands to deal with them. But his Canadian host, police chief Al Werry, has a major problem on his hands in the shape of a towering unfinished hotel, the Chinook, whose upper levels are inaccessible from the ground, and are used as an illegal meeting place by local gangs of flyers. Sent to Canada to recuperate (and to escape the attentions of a local businessman whose son he has put away), Hasson is a broken man, unable to face human company, haunted by nightmares and certain that he will never again put on an anti-gravity harness. But a near-fatal airborne confrontation with a psychopath has left him shattered, both physically and mentally. Airborne delinquents and criminals are practically impossible to control and can be lethal. Virtually all aircraft are grounded, because of the risk of collision with a stray flyer.

Humanity takes to the skies in its millions, with huge resultant problems for governments and police. The invention of a cheap and easy-to-use antigravity harness revolutionises society.

The Ragged Astronauts by Bob Shaw