This is a biography of American rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, whose actual first name was Marvel.
Inspired by science fiction, Parsons dreamed of constructing a rocket that would travel to the moon. But this was in the 1930s, after his wealthy grandparents had lost their fortune in the Wall Street crash and his privileged upbringing on Orange Grove Avenue ('millionaire's row') in Pasadena had come to an end. And, at the time, when aeroplanes were still in their glamorous infancy, rocketry did not exist outside a handful of amateur eccentrics.
Not being able to afford a university education, Parsons began working in explosives for mining companies. Then he teamed up with schoolfriend Ed Forman, who was an engineer equally lacking in tertiary qualifications, and maths graduate Frank Molina, to persuade CalTech professor Theodore von Karman (an aerodynamicist who had explained the collpase of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge) to let them use CalTech facilities to test rocket motors, although they still had to fund the experiments themselves. They began working with the military who wanted to add jets to help bombers achieve take-off speeds on shorter runways. But they had problems with the powder fuel: there were always cracks between the clumps of powder grain so burning was uneven. After watching workmen laying molten asphalt on a road, Parsons made his breakthrough and turned the powder into tar which could be poured into the rocket engines. The 'Suicide Squad' founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the company Aerojet which still sends rockets into outer space.
Parsons was increasingly interested in magic and became the leader of the Agape Lodge in LA, a group following the Thelema teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley (whose biography Do What Thou Wilt by Lawrence Smith I read recently). Parsons moved the group to a large house on Orange Grove Avenue which he had bought and began performing sex magick ceremonies. According to this book, L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, moved in and stole Parsons's girlfirend (but Parsons, psychologically dominated by Hubbard, put up with it). In the end it all went wrong and Parsons, having lost most of his money in a failed business venture with Hubbard, went back to making explosives. He blew himself up.
This was a brilliantly written book. I loved the way it clothed its story, by telling us the background: LA in the 1920s, a mix of “evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson ... performing exorcisms over the new medium of radio ... while the social campaigner and writer Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (the right to freedom of expression) in public." (Prologue). The core rocketeers, a group of young men, working like dogs and risking their lives for their passion, seem just like the young geeks who founded Google and facebook and Microsoft and the other IT start-ups of the internet revolution, or like rock musicians hoping to be big. And the 'also starring' cast has a host of other names such as Suicide Squad members Apollo Smith whose father had given his sisters the names Diana and Athena, his brothers the names Hermes and Orpheus, and the dog was called Cerberus and Tsien who “was descended from the tenth-century emperor Qian Liu Tsien", science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, E E 'Doc' Smith, L Sprague de Camp and L Ron Hubbard, Jack Cornog who first isolated tritium, and rocket pioneer Robert Goddard who lived in Roswell, New Mexico,
Selected quotes:- “John Whiteside Parsons had gone from being a young genius dead before his time to the most overworked, hackneyed, science fiction cliche of them all." (Prologue)
- “The world is drowning - that is exactly why it will clutch at a straw.” (Ch 6, quoting Crowley)
- “Magic, like science, was an attempt to control events by performing technical acts.” (Ch 6)
- “Bob Cornog remembered stumbling into Parsons’ room one morning to find Hubbard and Betty entwined, ‘like a starfish on a clam’.” (Ch 11)
- “The Parsonage, as it had come to be called, had briefly been an adult playground saturated with philosophical hopes and pungent romanticism, fruit brandies and fencing, bohemians and scientists, poetry and rockets.” (Ch 11)
A fascinating story told by a born storyteller.
First published in the USA by Harcourt in 2005
My paperback edition was issued in the UK by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 2006
