A James Blish novel from the Fifties. Last read when I was about 19. Turning out to be very different from what I remembered.

The title is the “name” of an alien that communicates by flashing colors on its faceplate. In this case, Violet, Orange, Red.

Pretty much the whole world knows the story of the Hindenberg, the giant German airship that came to a fiery end in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937. But seven years earlier an even deadlier disaster had ended the trouble career of Britain’s R101, at the time the largest rigid airship ever built.

I first learned of the R101 when relatives in England sent me a large plastic model for my 15th birthday. At that time I was not well informed about airships, but my father, who had been 10 years old at the time of the R101 crash, filled me in on many details and participated in the birth of what would become a lifelong fascination.

This book, by an American author, details the history of lighter-than-air vessels, and strips away most of the attached romance. (What airships did best was crash!) There are several harrowing sketches of the dangers of flying these things, and an overall image is built of the driving insanity that propelled their construction until they were finally abandoned. (I learned from this book that it was not the crash of the Hindenberg that finally doomed the big rigids. The Germans were already flying the Graf Zepplin 2. It was WW2 and the proven impracticality of such ships in warfare that ended the grand experiment.)

Recommended.

The printing here is muddy, except for the colors, but enough survives to make a fun read. I’ve acquired a few others of these reprints, including THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE TIME MACHINE, THE INVISIBLE MAN and DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.

Much nostalgia.

Long time since I last dipped into this one. Beyond the tale being told, I find fascinating the structure of the writing. And that almost the whole book is in the form of a spoken narrative, every paragraph beginning with quotation marks. Arthur Conan Doyle did this occasionally.