and His Incredible Web Page!

When I was about 8 years old, I discovered Tom Swift. A friend of my dad's was cleaning out his kid's room and carted a box of books over for me to look through. There, among such titles as "We Were There At The Battle of Bataan" and "All About Satellites and Space Ships" was a blue-bound book with the (literally) spine-tingling title of "Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster."

Now here was a book designed to get the blood moving! Tom Swift was a blonde 17-year-old genius, invariably described as "lanky," who with his father ran Swift Enterprises, apparently located on Long Island (home also to the Hardy Boys -- coincidence? I think not). With his stalwart pal Bud Barclay and the seemingly limitless resources of Swift Enterprises, Tom had devised an atom-powered digger in an effort to drill to the earth core and tap the large resevoir of molten iron. Hampered by the efforts of the spy Bronich from the suspiciously Soviet country of Kranjov, and backed by his mother, his sister Sandra and his girlfriend Phyl, Tom finally triumphed and succeeded in creating a giant iron lake at the South Pole.

The intrigues and subtrefuges didn't interest me that much, but the technological aspects knocked me over. It was all so simple! Of course an atomic earth blaster would work! This is America!, as Tom himself was fond of exclaiming. A little ingenuity, a little capital, a little star-spangled luck, and there's nothing we can't do! It was the quintessensial 1965 message for an eight-year-old kid, and I plunged wholeheartedly into the Swift world. I littered the house with stupid-ass ideas of my own, the most memorable being a "hydrotomic skimmer" which bore a striking resemblance to the cap of a Bic pen. As I collected all the past adventures (there were 22 of them by 1965), I became acquainted with all the other marvelous inventions the lanky 17-year-old had dreamed up. Included among these were his Flying Lab (which looked a lot like a 747 in retrospect), his space station, the ultrasonic cycloplane, the electric hydrolung, etc., etc., etc. My favorites were his wonderful Diving Seacopter, which used its rotor to either lift it skyward or hold it underwater, and the repellatron, which as the name implied repelled things. (Place it on the ocean floor, set it for water, and voila!, a mile-wide bubble to live in.) For a kid infused with America's love for science and technology, these books were priceless.

For years, I ate, slept, and talked -- always talked -- Tom Swift. My best friend Peter Gann could never get into them, content to read and reread his Sad Sack comic books. (From the distance of 30 years, I now find the Sad Sacks pretty twisted in a Dadaist kind of way.) A casual acquaintance, Jim Auleb, shared my passion for Swift, and for a painful few months he edged Pete out of my circle.  (His father was an anatomy lecturer at SF State, and a visit to his bohemian house in Rockaway Beach was always a tonic to the clean-room-like way my mom kept our house.)  At the beginning of the seventh grade in 1967, however, he acted as if we had never met, and after a few days of hurt I decided that that was fine with me.

Finally driven to true fandom, I wrote a long letter to Victor Appleton II, author of the Tom Swift stories, in care of Grossett and Dunlop Publishers, New York, 10, New York. Finally, I got a reply.

July 6, 1967

Scott Cook
744 Cordova Court
Pacifica, California

Dear Scott:

When Victor Appleton II was about your age he was a great fan of the original Tom Swift series by Victor Appleton, which told the adventures of Tom Sr. These books did quite a bit to arouse Appleton II's interest in both science and writing. Later he studied engineering, became a script-writer for technical training films, then branched out into radio scripting, fiction and other forms of writing. Eventually, he was lucky enough to be asked to carry on the Tom Swift tradition by undertaking a new series of books about the adventures of Tom Jr.

The author travels a good deal in search of interesting backgrounds for his stories and does his best to keep up on all the latest scientific developments by reading technical publications and talking to scientists.

Mr. Appleton is presently writing THE G-FORCE INVERTER. It will be published early in 1968.

Best regards,

B. J. SMITH
Secretary to Victor Appleton II

It's hard to describe what this letter meant to me. Him! The guy who writes Tom Swift! I was in a daze for weeks, despite the fact that I had never heard of B.J Smith. Later in life, in a freshman English course in college, I was asked to write a page or two on "the most exciting event of my life." I don't know what mundane things my classmates wrote about, but I told of my letter from Victor Appleton II. I got an A, although I'm sure my instructor had no idea what I was talking about.

It was only much later that I found out that Tom Swift Jr. was a continuation of a series of books written in between 1910 and 1940 with the same themes but different technologies: Tom Swift and his electric runabout, his wireless message, his aerial warship. These were written by Victor Appleton, who also wrote the Don Sturdy stories. Victor Appleton II did not exist any more than the first one did. This was a much more crushing blow than finding out that Santa was a fake. Tom Swift was written by a pool of hack writers at G&D, the most disillusioning thing I ever learned.

I never could get into the Hardy Boys. Nancy Drew was OK, but every time I got my hands on one, my mother ran off with it. But Tom Swift was it, and the height of my reading pleasure was reached in December 1967, when my parents had to go off to Lake Tahoe for the weekend, and my sister was staying with a friend. I was eleven years old, and perfectly capable of "holding down the fort" ("Nobody in, nobody out!"). Just before they left, Mom and Dad handed me a wrapped present. Three whole new Tom Swift books! His Polar Ray Dynasphere! His 3-D Telejector! His Sonic Boom Trap! I had this treasure trove to read, and a freezer stuffed with my mom's party pizzas. I don't think I've been so content since.

Unaccountably, I went crazy a few months later and sold all my Tom Swift books (all thirty of them, the complete set) for 15 cents each to some smarmy little kid down the block. To this day, I cannot explain what the hell I was thinking of. It was like Folger peddling his folios, or Nelson Rockefeller dropping off some pre-Columbian pottery at Goodwill.

The original Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books are still in print, but Tom went down the memory hole. There were a few new titles by a different publisher in the 80s, and Byron Preiss published some new stories in the early 90s. I read the first four of this series, with titles like "The Cyborg Kickboxer." It was interesting to see what changes 30 years made in Tom. The stories were more personality-driven, not so hung up on the technology. Bud and Phyl were renamed with less retro names, and Swift Enterprises was a more kinder and gentler place, concerned with the environment rather than atomic earth blasters.

Below is a list of the Tom Swift stories, along with the original Swifts. The last one I owned was "His G-Force Inverter," and along the way I have managed to reacquire some 10 or 15 of them. (I'm saving them for when my older son turns eight.) At one point in my youth, I had this list memorized, and to this day whenever I see the number "17," I have a subconcious image of the cover of "Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X." It's amazing what crap gets stuck in your head.

Tom Swift Jr. (1954 - 1969)
1. Tom Swift and His Flying Lab
2. Tom Swift and His Jetmarine
3. Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship
4. Tom Swift and His Giant Robot
5. Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster
6. Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space
7. Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter
8. Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire
9. Tom Swift on the Phantom Satellite
10. Tom Swift and His Ultrasonic Cycloplane
11. Tom Swift and His Deep-Sea Hydrodome
12. Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon
13. Tom Swift and His Space Solartron
14. Tom Swift and His Electronic Retroscope
15. Tom Swift and His Spectromarine Selector
16. Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts
17. Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X
18. Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung
19. Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar
20. Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober
21. Tom Swift and the Asteroid Pirates
22. Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway
23. Tom Swift and His Aquatomic Tracker
24. Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector
25. Tom Swift and His Polar-Ray Dynasphere
26. Tom Swift and His Sonic Boom Trap
27. Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron
28. Tom Swift and the Mystery Comet
29. Tom Swift and the Captive Planetoid
30. Tom Swift and His G-Force Inverter
31. Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule
32. Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express
33. Tom Swift and the Galaxy Ghosts

Tom Swift Sr. (c. 1910 - 1940)
1. Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle
2. Tom Swift and His Motor Boat
3. Tom Swift and His Airship
4. Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat
5. Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout
6. Tom Swift and His Wireless Message
7. Tom Swift Amoung the Diamond Makers
8. Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice
9. Tom Swift and His Sky Racer
10. Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle
11. Tom Swift In the City of Gold
12. Tom Swift and His Air Glider
13. Tom Swift in Captivity
14. Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera
15. Tom Swift and His Great Search Light
16. Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon
17. Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone
18. Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship
19. Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel
20. Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders
21. Tom Swift and His War Tank
22. Tom Swift and His Air Scout
23. Tom Swift and His Undersea Search
24. Tom Swift Amoung the Fire Fighters
25. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive
26. Tom Swift and His Flying Boat
27. Tom Swift and His Great Oil Gushers
28. Tom Swift and His Chest of Secrets
29. Tom Swift and His Airline Express
30. Tom Swift Circling the Globe
31. Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures
32. Tom Swift and His House on Wheels
33. Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible
34. Tom Swift and His Sky Train
35. Tom Swift and His Giant Magnet
36. Tom Swift and His Television Detector
37. Tom Swift and His Ocean Airport
38. Tom Swift and His Planet Stones
39. Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope
40. Tom Swift and His Magnetic Silence

And finally, a non-canonical work -- a one-act play called "Tom Swift and his Sexual Overdrive." It's a scream! (Be sure to hit the "Back" button when you're done.)

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This page last updated April 11, 2009