and His
Incredible Web Page!
 When
I was about 8 years old, I discovered Tom Swift. A friend of my dad's was cleaning out his
kid's room and carted a box of books over for me to look through. There, among such titles
as "We Were There At The Battle of Bataan" and "All About Satellites and
Space Ships" was a blue-bound book with the (literally) spine-tingling title of
"Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster."
Now here was a book designed to get the blood
moving! Tom Swift was a blonde 17-year-old genius, invariably described as
"lanky," who with his father ran Swift Enterprises, apparently located on Long
Island (home also to the Hardy Boys -- coincidence? I think not). With his stalwart pal
Bud Barclay and the seemingly limitless resources of Swift Enterprises, Tom had devised an
atom-powered digger in an effort to drill to the earth core and tap the large resevoir of
molten iron. Hampered by the efforts of the spy Bronich from the suspiciously Soviet
country of Kranjov, and backed by his mother, his sister Sandra and his girlfriend
Phyl,
Tom finally triumphed and succeeded in creating a giant iron lake at the South Pole.
The intrigues and subtrefuges didn't interest me that
much, but the technological aspects knocked me over. It was all so simple! Of course
an atomic earth blaster would work! This is America!, as Tom himself was fond of
exclaiming. A little ingenuity, a little capital, a little star-spangled luck, and there's
nothing we can't do! It was the quintessensial 1965 message for an eight-year-old kid, and
I plunged wholeheartedly into the Swift world. I littered the house with stupid-ass ideas
of my own, the most memorable being a "hydrotomic skimmer" which bore a striking
resemblance to the cap of a Bic pen. As I collected all the past adventures (there were 22
of them by 1965), I became acquainted with all the other marvelous inventions the lanky
17-year-old had dreamed up. Included among these were his Flying Lab (which looked a lot
like a 747 in retrospect), his space station, the ultrasonic cycloplane, the electric
hydrolung, etc., etc., etc. My favorites were his wonderful Diving Seacopter, which used
its rotor to either lift it skyward or hold it underwater, and the repellatron, which as
the name implied repelled things. (Place it on the ocean floor, set it for water, and voila!,
a mile-wide bubble to live in.) For a kid infused with America's love for science and
technology, these books were priceless.
For years, I ate, slept, and talked -- always talked --
Tom Swift. My best friend Peter Gann could never get into them, content to read and reread
his Sad Sack comic books. (From the distance of 30 years, I now find the Sad Sacks pretty
twisted in a Dadaist kind of way.) A casual acquaintance, Jim Auleb, shared my passion for
Swift, and for a painful few months he edged Pete out of my circle. (His
father was an anatomy lecturer at SF State, and a visit to his bohemian house in
Rockaway Beach was always a tonic to the clean-room-like way my mom kept our
house.) At the beginning of the
seventh grade in 1967, however, he acted as if we had never met, and after a few days of hurt I
decided that that was fine with me.
Finally driven to true fandom, I wrote a long letter to
Victor Appleton II, author of the Tom Swift stories, in care of Grossett and Dunlop
Publishers, New York, 10, New York. Finally, I got a reply.
July 6, 1967
Scott Cook
744 Cordova Court
Pacifica, California
Dear Scott:
When Victor Appleton II was about your age he was a great
fan of the original Tom Swift series by Victor Appleton, which told the adventures of Tom
Sr. These books did quite a bit to arouse Appleton II's interest in both science and
writing. Later he studied engineering, became a script-writer for technical training
films, then branched out into radio scripting, fiction and other forms of writing.
Eventually, he was lucky enough to be asked to carry on the Tom Swift tradition by
undertaking a new series of books about the adventures of Tom Jr.
The author travels a good deal in search of interesting
backgrounds for his stories and does his best to keep up on all the latest scientific
developments by reading technical publications and talking to scientists.
Mr. Appleton is presently writing THE G-FORCE INVERTER. It
will be published early in 1968.
Best regards,
B. J. SMITH
Secretary to Victor Appleton II
It's hard to describe what this letter meant to me. Him!
The guy who writes Tom Swift! I was in a daze for weeks, despite the fact that I
had never heard of B.J Smith. Later in life, in a freshman English course in college, I
was asked to write a page or two on "the most exciting event of my life." I
don't know what mundane things my classmates wrote about, but I told of my letter from
Victor Appleton II. I got an A, although I'm sure my instructor had no idea what I was
talking about.
It was only much later that I found out that Tom Swift Jr.
was a continuation of a series of books written in between 1910 and 1940 with the same
themes but different technologies: Tom Swift and his electric runabout, his wireless
message, his aerial warship. These were written by Victor Appleton, who also wrote the Don
Sturdy stories. Victor Appleton II did not exist any more than the first one did. This was
a much more crushing blow than finding out that Santa was a fake. Tom Swift was written by
a pool of hack writers at G&D, the most disillusioning thing I ever learned.
I never could get into the Hardy Boys. Nancy Drew was OK,
but every time I got my hands on one, my mother ran off with it. But Tom Swift was it,
and the height of my reading pleasure was reached in December 1967, when my parents had to
go off to Lake Tahoe for the weekend, and my sister was staying with a friend. I was
eleven years old, and perfectly capable of "holding down the fort" ("Nobody
in, nobody out!"). Just before they left, Mom and Dad handed me a wrapped present.
Three whole new Tom Swift books! His Polar Ray Dynasphere! His 3-D Telejector! His Sonic
Boom Trap! I had this treasure trove to read, and a freezer stuffed with my mom's party
pizzas. I don't think I've been so content since.
Unaccountably, I went crazy a few months later and sold
all my Tom Swift books (all thirty of them, the complete set) for 15 cents each to some
smarmy little kid down the block. To this day, I cannot explain what the hell I was
thinking of. It was like Folger peddling his folios, or Nelson Rockefeller dropping off
some pre-Columbian pottery at Goodwill.
The original Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books are still in
print, but Tom went down the memory hole. There were a few new titles by a different
publisher in the 80s, and Byron Preiss published some new stories in the early 90s. I read
the first four of this series, with titles like "The Cyborg Kickboxer." It was
interesting to see what changes 30 years made in Tom. The stories were more
personality-driven, not so hung up on the technology. Bud and Phyl were renamed with less
retro names, and Swift Enterprises was a more kinder and gentler place, concerned with the
environment rather than atomic earth blasters.
Below is a list of the Tom Swift stories, along with the
original Swifts. The last one I owned was "His G-Force Inverter," and along the
way I have managed to reacquire some 10 or 15 of them. (I'm saving them for when my older
son turns eight.) At one point in my youth, I had this list memorized, and to this day
whenever I see the number "17," I have a subconcious image of the cover of
"Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X." It's amazing what crap gets stuck in
your head.
Tom Swift Jr. (1954 - 1969)
1. Tom Swift and His Flying Lab
2. Tom Swift and His Jetmarine
3. Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship
4. Tom Swift and His Giant Robot
5. Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster
6. Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space
7. Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter
8. Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire
9. Tom Swift on the Phantom Satellite
10. Tom Swift and His Ultrasonic Cycloplane
11. Tom Swift and His Deep-Sea Hydrodome
12. Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon
13. Tom Swift and His Space Solartron
14. Tom Swift and His Electronic Retroscope
15. Tom Swift and His Spectromarine Selector
16. Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts
17. Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X
18. Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung
19. Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar
20. Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober
21. Tom Swift and the Asteroid Pirates
22. Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway
23. Tom Swift and His Aquatomic Tracker
24. Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector
25. Tom Swift and His Polar-Ray Dynasphere
26. Tom Swift and His Sonic Boom Trap
27. Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron
28. Tom Swift and the Mystery Comet
29. Tom Swift and the Captive Planetoid
30. Tom Swift and His G-Force Inverter
31. Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule
32. Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express
33. Tom Swift and the Galaxy Ghosts
Tom Swift Sr. (c. 1910 - 1940)
1. Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle
2. Tom Swift and His Motor Boat
3. Tom Swift and His Airship
4. Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat
5. Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout
6. Tom Swift and His Wireless Message
7. Tom Swift Amoung the Diamond Makers
8. Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice
9. Tom Swift and His Sky Racer
10. Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle
11. Tom Swift In the City of Gold
12. Tom Swift and His Air Glider
13. Tom Swift in Captivity
14. Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera
15. Tom Swift and His Great Search Light
16. Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon
17. Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone
18. Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship
19. Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel
20. Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders
21. Tom Swift and His War Tank
22. Tom Swift and His Air Scout
23. Tom Swift and His Undersea Search
24. Tom Swift Amoung the Fire Fighters
25. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive
26. Tom Swift and His Flying Boat
27. Tom Swift and His Great Oil Gushers
28. Tom Swift and His Chest of Secrets
29. Tom Swift and His Airline Express
30. Tom Swift Circling the Globe
31. Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures
32. Tom Swift and His House on Wheels
33. Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible
34. Tom Swift and His Sky Train
35. Tom Swift and His Giant Magnet
36. Tom Swift and His Television Detector
37. Tom Swift and His Ocean Airport
38. Tom Swift and His Planet Stones
39. Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope
40. Tom Swift and His Magnetic Silence
And finally, a non-canonical work -- a one-act play called
"Tom Swift and his Sexual
Overdrive." It's a scream! (Be sure to hit the "Back" button when
you're done.)
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