Breakthrough

When Jimmy Haverill, an assistant lecturer at Hampton University, meets Dr Dumpkenhoffer, Head of the newly-founded Parapsychology Research Department, he is unaware that the meeting is to divert the whole course of his life. Haverill’s involvement in the Doctor’s experiments follows so naturally, so casually that it seems impossible for him to conceive that the matter might have been, in some inexplicable manner, preordained. But as he becomes more deeply involved with the Doctor and with the psychic prodigy Rachel Bernstein, he finds the university becoming ever less substantial and himself “moving about in worlds not realized”, an unwitting focal point of forces beamed into the future from beyond the dawn of history. As those forces threaten to break loose and engulf him, dream metamorphoses into nightmare and the protagonists discover themselves to be the pawns in a game of destiny played out a million years ago.

In its penetrating exploration of the twilit hinterland of E.S.P. and Psi, Breakthrough makes a unique contribution to the literature of Science Fiction, and introduces a writer who has already made his name in more orthodox fields.