Nerves

Extract: I bought this book from a used paperback vendor at Orycon 2014 for a buck. I thought I'd try another novel by del Rey after my less than satisfying experience with "Pstalemate" last year. "Nerves" is about an atomic products manufacturing plant disaster, originally written as a novella in 1942, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was expanded into a short novel in '56, and then republished around the time of the Three Mile Island accident. I thought it would be a fun romp of disaster porn, a la the book "The Prometheus Crisis" or the film "The China Syndrome". Instead, it makes me consider the idea that del Rey was a better publisher and promoter of science fiction than a writer of it...