Strange Angel

The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

George Pendle

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780547545363
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Now a CBS All Access series: "A riveting tale of rocketry, the occult, and boom-and-bust 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles" ( Booklist ). The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city's occult scene. Fueled by childhood dreams of space flight, Parsons was a leader of the motley band of enthusiastic young men who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a cornerstone of the American space program. But Parsons's wild imagination also led him into a world of incantations and orgiastic rituals—if he could make rocketry a reality, why not black magic? George Pendle re-creates the world of John Parsons in this dazzling portrait of prewar superstition, cold war paranoia, and futuristic possibility. Peopled with such formidable real-life figures as Howard Hughes, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert Heinlein, Strange Angel explores the unruly consequences of genius. The basis for a new miniseries created by Mark Heyman and produced by Ridley Scott, this biography "vividly tells the story of a mysterious and forgotten man who embodied the contradictions of his time... when science fiction crashed into science fact.... [It] would make a compelling work of fiction if it weren't so astonishingly true" ( Publishers Weekly ).

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• 1. Paradise
• 2. Moon Child
• 3. Erudition
• 4. The Suicide Squad
• 5. Fraternity
• 6. The Mass
• 7. Brave New World
• PHOTOGRAPHS
• 8. Zenith
• 9. Degrees of Freedom
• 10. A New Dawn
• 11. Rock Bottom
• 12. Into the Abyss
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Source Notes
• Index
• About the Author