Worlds Spinning Round

Mike Wallingford volunteered for a dangerous assignment, a diplomatic mission beneath the red-hot soil of Venus. Locked alone in a sealed container to reach a tunnel headquarters that is far more that in seems, Mike must brave heat, pressure, radiation and the suspicions of a native clan struggling for survival. Mike's friend Ellen, bewildered by their recent encounter with the reclusive hill people and weakened by a mysterious illness, is devastated by Mike's friend Ellen, bewildered by unexpected action. Neither suspects they are being cleverly manipulated. Back on Earth, a developing plot could leave the Venture project stranded without supplies or a way off the hostile planet.

Mike Wallingford was out of school, out of work and out of place, trapped in a decaying society of the early commercial space age. Thirsty for excitement and an opportunity to escape a crumbling home, Mike takes a chance on a mysterious company and finds himself on a venture stranger and more dangerous than he could possibly have imagined. On this startling Venture Project, even a more qualified person would be hard-pressed to survive.

Bard of Iceland makes available for the first time in any language other than Icelandic an extensive selection of works by Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807-1845), the most important poet of modern Iceland. Jónas was also Iceland's first professionally trained geologist and an active contributor in a number of other scientific fields: geography, botany, zoology, and archaeology. He played a key role as well in Iceland's struggle to gain independence from Denmark. "Descriptive power and fullness of spirit were the hallmarks of his soul," wrote a contemporary admirer. Dick Ringler, one of the premier scholars of Icelandic literature in the world, offers a substantial biography of Jónas, a representative selection of his most important poems, and some of his prose work in science and belles lettres. Ringler also provides extended commentaries and an essay on Icelandic prosody. The poems are translated into English equivalents of their original complex meters in Icelandic and Danish. As a poet Jónas was intimately familiar with his nation's medieval literary inheritance--the sagas and eddas--and also with the groundbreaking work of contemporary German and Danish Romanticism (Chamisso, Heine, Oehlenschläger). A master of poetic form, Jónas not only exploited and enlarged the possibilities of traditional eddic and skaldic meters, but introduced the sonnet, triolet stanza, terza and ottava rima, and blank verse into the Icelandic metrical repertory.

The first thing I come across is a tunnel burrowing through a hill. This tunnel was originally built the proper size, but, after being walled up, there were indications of a general cave-in; so the company had to go to work and build another thick rock-wall inside the other, which leaves barely room for the trains to pass through without touching the sides. It is anything but an inviting path around the hill; but it is far the safer of the two.