Books : The Power

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Author name: Frank M. Robinson

: The Power
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Used Price: $4.15
Third Party New Price: $9.99






Type of bind: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Tor Books
Manufacturer: Tor Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 224
Printing Date: February 29, 2000
Publishing house: Tor Books
Sale Popularity Level: 1752099
Studio: Tor Books



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Editor's Notes and Comments:

Product Description:
The Power is a science fiction classic from the 1950s. After the book's initial publication, it was produced as a TV special starring Theodore Bikel and later as a George Pal film starring George Hamilton and Suzanne Pleshette. It is the tale of a mutant superman in hiding and the terrifying search to find him.


Amazon.com Review:
Apart from the wonderful and almost purely science fiction The Dark Beyond the Stars, Frank M. Robinson's novels tend toward various subgenres of the thriller--such as techno (The Glass Inferno), espionage (Death of a Marionette), and anthropological (Waiting)--albeit with significant science fiction elements.

The Power is a science fiction thriller about a malevolent superhuman, a mutant masquerading as normal man. In this guise, the superman penetrates a secret committee convened to test the limits of human endurance--and therefore keeps tabs on the government's efforts to find those like him. One of the committee members begins to get an inkling that something isn't quite as it should be, setting off a paranoid and paranormal cat-and-mouse game with all the players wondering who to trust--for here, what you see is most definitely not what you get. Several innocents die, and the novel ends on a chilling note with a previously sympathetic character shedding his humanity with as little regret as a snake sheds its skin.

This was Robinson's very first novel, written in his late twenties and very first published in 1956, now updated and rereleased. If the reader can ignore the jarring inconsistencies which result from the superficial rewrite--characters calling each other Mac but having fought in the Gulf War, women acting like '50s molls but with birthdates in the '60s--then this is not a bad example of its kind. It is focused, fast-moving, and armed with just enough wish-fulfillment to please all those who dream of the day the world will recognize their obvious superiority. --Luc Duplessis



Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Not The Power I Remember
I read this book, as a teenager, a number of years back and was so impressed that I remembered it all these years. Unfortunately, after reading the book a second time, I am less impressed. The premise of the book is still excellent, that of a person with mental abilities so advanced that they can control people's minds and mentally move inanimate objects. In short, an anomaly, a jump in evolution so advanced that he or she looks upon humanity as a person might look upon their pet dog. This superman is worried about being discovered and begins to kill those he suspects may be on to him.

To my dismay, after reading The Power again, after several intervening years, I find there are things about the story that just don't mesh. The book that I always thought was perfect has blemishes. This is surprising because the book was even made into a 1968 TV movie starring George Hamilton and Suzanne Pleshett.

The Power is still an interesting book worth reading, attested by the rating others have given the book but the book that I once considered a sure fire 5 star is now, in my opinion, a low 4 star book.


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - A Vintage Sci-Fi
Frank Robinson's book is vintage sci-fi. Like so many other classics it reads much like a mystery with the reader eager to find out the "whodunit." Adam Hart controlled the mind and body of John Olson in their high school days. Olson seemed a terrific athlete when it suited Hart. Years later when Olson was about to give away Hart's secret... Power..., Hart again took control of Olson and... made him die. This was not the very first time that Hart made people die. And to keep the Power secret, Tanner was next.


Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - interesting thriller
I just finished rereading "The Power". Robinson apparently updated the text very slightly to set it in the 90's instead of the 50's. I haven't read the book in at least 25 years, so I can't recall all of the details, but it seems that he also cleaned up a couple of minor plot points. Overall the book is still quite good, but I think that he should have left it in the 50's, since that was its natural era.

The basic idea behind the plot is that a university gets a Navy contract to identify the factors that result in survival in battle (or other harsh conditions). They develop a questionaire, the people on the committee take it anonymously to "test the test", and one of the test scores is off the charts, but no one will admit to it. And then people start dying...

This is a very 50's idea at its core. This was the heyday of tests like the 16PF, which purported to be able to uncover people that were thieves (for instance). The idea was that you could write a test that included a lot of questions whose significance you barely understood yourself, give it to a big group of people that had a different "levels" of whatever trait you were looking for (measured independently -- that is, they survived desperate circumstances through something other than complete luck), and you'd apply statistical methods to construct the scoring formula that would be able to magically identify and quantify that trait. This is a great idea for use in a sci-fi thriller, so never mind that it didn't work very well. The only problem with pushing the book into the 90's is that this plot device needs some gee-whizzing to be contemporary, and that didn't change in the update. So my advice is to set it mentally in the 50's so that it's okay for the hero to travel by train, and ignore the references to the Vietnam and Gulf wars (which are glancing, at most).


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