Beneath dense gray clouds through which no sun shone lay a forgotten
planet. It was a nightmare world of grotesque and terrifying
animal-plant life. Gigantic beetles, spiders, bugs and ants filled the
putrid, musty earth--ready to kill and devour anything in sight.
There were men amidst this horror--men who cringed and ran from the
ravening monsters and huddled in the mushroom forests at night.
Burl was one of these creatures. But one day inspiration hit Burl. He
would find a weapon--he would fight back.
And with this idea the first step was taken in man's most desperate
flight for freedom in this most horrible of all worlds. But it was only
a first step.
About the characters in this book:
This is something of an oddity among fiction stories, because some of
its characters may be met in person if you wish. Down at the nearest
weed-patch or thicket you are quite likely to see a large and unusually
perfect spider-web with a zig-zag silk ribbon woven into its center. Its
engineer is the yellow-banded garden spider (_Epeira Fasciata_) whose
abdomen may be as big as your thumb. I do not name it to impress you,
but to suggest a sort of science-fiction experience.
Take a bit of straw and disturb the web. Don't break the cables. Simply
tap them a bit. The spider will know by the feel of things that you
aren't prey and that it can't eat you. So it will set out frightening
you away. It will run nimbly to the center of the web and shake itself
violently. The whole web will vibrate, so that presently the spider may
be swinging through an arc inches in length, and blurred by the speed of
its swing. You are supposed to be scared. When you are alarmed enough,
the spider will stop.
That spider, very much magnified, is in this book with crickets and
grasshoppers and divers beetles you may not know personally. But this is
not an insect book, but science-fiction. If the habits of the creatures
in it are authentic, it is because they are much more dramatic and
interesting than things one can invent.