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Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel Now Online
The nineteenth installment in the Tom Swift adventures, Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel, is now posted in the Tom Swift and His Pocket Library collection. As usual, HTML, PDF, PDA eReader, and plain ASCII text editions suitable for reading off- or online are available. With war raging in Europe, but the United States still on the sidelines, Tom, Mr. Wakefield “bless my detonator” Damon, and the giant Koku are off to Peru, where Tom's mighty blasting powder will come to the aid of the Titus brothers in pushing a railroad tunnel through the formidable obstacle of the Andes. En route to Lima, they make the acquaintance of the curious Professor Swyington Bumper who is off to the Andes to seek the fabled lost city of Pelone. They decide to team up, and before long are involved in danger and intrigue as a competitor seeks to sabotage the tunnel project, inducing its Indian labourers to go on “hit”, as they put it—strike. Anti-human environmentalists may risk cranial detonation when they read how Tom deals with a condor which tries to abduct a baby. On the job site, we meet Tim Sullivan, the Irish foreman, who treats the reader to an abundance of Irish dialect. As this is a Tom Swift book, all ends well and is neatly wrapped up in twenty-five chapters, with Tom heading home and looking forward to new inventions and adventures. With the posting of this book, only six public domain Tom Swift novels remain, so this project, which began in 2004, is heading into the home stretch. When all twenty-five books are complete, I'll go back and update the earlier ones to the production standards (XHTML Strict, Unicode text entities, etc.) of recent postings.Posted at May 26, 2010 14:54