Friday 7 August 2009

The Mohole Mystery by Hugh Walters

Review #10 looking back at the old and largely forgotten science-fiction series Chris Godfrey of UNEXA.
After Chris had explored every planet in the solar system out to Saturn, we got a change of pace in the bizarrely titled The Mohole Mystery (pub 1968). To this day I have no idea what a Mohole is and I resisted the urge to google it as I'm quite happy to stay ignorant.

After travelling a billion miles on his trip to Saturn, for this adventure Chris took the novel route of going five miles in the opposite direction. Apparently, a big hole has been uncovered beneath Dudley, Tony's home, and unless the reason why it's there can be discovered, it’s possible Dudley could fall down it and disappear. It seems this hole was discovered a long time ago and nobody saw this as a problem, but for the want of anything better to do scientists drop Serge Smyslov down the hole to see what happens.

Not surprisingly, Serge goes ouch when he hits the bottom and then is trapped in his Soviet-designed broken mohole exploring capsule. This looks like a job for small astronaut Chris Godfrey. Chris climbs into his British-designed mohole exploring capsule with big cushions on the bottom, drops down the hole and rescues his chum, again. They have a few tricky moments when they get attacked by weird egg creatures that explode into dust if you touch them that live in big holes beneath Dudley, but they still get out.

Next week the series has its biggest disappointment.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mohole is shorthand for the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, which is the boundary between the Earth's crust and the mantle. It is where the pressure waves from earthquakes start to travel at a different speed, indicating a change of composition.