For two hundred and seventy years America had been totally cut off from
the rest of the world by an impenetrable wall of raging atomic fury.
To the frightened countries of the Old World, what had once been the
greatest of all powers was now the most fearful of all mysteries.
No man ached to know what lay behind that frightful barrier more than
Emmett O'Hara, restless air-sentinel of the International Patrol--whose
American ancestors had been stranded in Britain the day the Atom
Curtain was raised.
Then, on December 20, in the year 2230, while on routine patrol, O'Hara
did the impossible. He broke through the barrier--and lived! But the
full story of O'Hara's discoveries and adventures in Atomic America is
so utterly breath-taking that readers are sure to rate it a classic of
modern science-fiction.
* * * * *
Nick Boddie Williams says he hit on the idea of writing _THE ATOM
CURTAIN_ "while debating with an editorial writer what might possibly
happen to nations behind the Iron Curtain, and how much more likely
all of it would be to happen if the Curtain were Atomic, rather than
Iron. It's about the same line of thinking that led Doyle to write
_The Lost World_, or any number of men to dwell upon cut-off places.
But of course I couldn't write about Eurasia, for I've never been
there. It was written at the time we were debating the setting up of a
fixed line far out from our shores (the Taft plan, the Hoover idea),
which became, a little luridly, the approximate line of my Atomic
Curtain. A good many philosophical ideas got mixed up in what was
essentially an adventure story, but I can't be accused of following any
one line, except perhaps Darwin's." Williams, who works on the _Los
Angeles Times_, considers himself a newspaperman rather than a writer.
Nevertheless he has had stories published in _Colliers_, _Saturday
Evening Post_, _Woman's Home Companion_, and others.