"Armageddon 2419 A.D.: The Seminal 'Buck Rogers' Novel" by Philip Francis Nowlan (1888-1940)

Publisher: New York : Ace Books
No other Publication data available

This is an excellent book that has been in my collection for many years, and I've read it a few times. It's one of those books where every time you read it you tease out some new little gem.

The frontispiece of the book reads as follows:

"The relation between this book and the nationally syndicated comic strip Buck Rogers is worth noting. Armageddon 2419 was originally the title of a long novelette that appeared in Amazing Stories in 1928. A sequel, entitle The Airlords of Han, appeared in that magazine a year later. Both works have been integrated to make the book you hold here."

"When the original magazine story appeared it caught the eye of the John Dille Company, a newspaper feature syndicate. They hired the author, Phil Nowlan, to write the continuity of a comic strip based on it. Considering Buck to be a shorter and more marketable name that Anthony, it was under the name Buck Rogers 2429 A.D. that the strip first appeared in newspapers in 1929. Each year the strip's title was updated by one to keep the five hundred years difference, until eventually the strip was stabilized as Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century."

"During th first two years of syndication, the plot of the strip followed the adventures in this book fairly closely, but as time went on new adventures and characters were introduced, until today''s strip bears virtually no resemblance to the novel now reprinted"

"The role of Buck Rogers in the rise and popularization of science-fiction can scarcely be overestimated."

This frontispiece is signed D.A.W. - but there is no indication who this is.

Because this book was originally written in the early part of the 20th Century there is a considerable amount of racism incorporated into the storyline. As unlike the television series in 1979 (starring Gil Gerard, Erin Gray) where the antagonists are extraterrestrials known as Draconians (now there's an original name for you), in the book the antagonists are Mongolians (referred to an Hans), and it is not until the epilogue that you find out that the Hans are the product of interbreeding with a human-like race that arrived on Earth when a small planet or large meteor hit in the interior of Asia.

The nice thing about this storyline is that outside of the fact Rogers was in suspended animation for close to five-hundred years (in a collapsed mine shift), and the introduction of two special elements (inertron and ultron) there is very little to take this story into the realm of the fantastic and unbelievable. So if you can overlook the racism, then you find that the story itself is very well written, and well worth the read.