The Strange World of Planet X (1957) is a British science fiction horror novel, written by actress Rene Ray, [1] a novelization of her 1956 TV serial of the same name. [2] It is a cautionary tale about science.
The Strange World of Planet X (1957) is a British science fiction horror novel, written by actress Rene Ray, [1] a novelization of her 1956 TV serial of the same name. [2] It is a cautionary tale about science.
The book's plot, like that of the original television serial, is very different from that of the movie adaptation that followed. A pair of scientists experimenting with magnetic fields inadvertently open a pathway from our three-dimensional universe into a fourth dimension. One of the two researchers, Gavin Laird, can only visualize the potential for the power that these experiments may bring him, but the other, his longtime friend and colleague David Graham, is deeply concerned with the dangers posed by such linkages between the dimensions, and the risks entailed by leaving such experiments in the hands of only two men. Laird sees only opportunity in front of him, while Graham is truly frightened about the forces the two may be dealing and tampering with. Laird soon displays a reckless ambition that forces Graham to attempt to sabotage their work in order to slow it down and buy time, hoping to convince his colleague to be more cautious. Caught between them is Laird's wife Fenella, who is only distantly aware of the nature of their work, but is increasingly alarmed over her husband's single-minded obsession with these experiments and also horrified by a cruel, dangerous side of his personality of which she had previously been unaware. Overlapping games of cat-and-mouse, as Laird and Graham each try to thwart the other's efforts ensue, with Laird—the more reckless of the two—almost always having the upper hand, even to the point of conducting lethal experiments on human subjects.
The Outer Limits episode "The Borderland," written by that series' creator Leslie Stevens, may be a better (though wholly accidental), truer exploration of the plot elements addressed in The Strange World Of Planet X than the official film adaptation of the story, dealing as it does with scientists (including a husband-and-wife team) whose experiments with powerful magnetic fields open a pathway to a fourth dimension and views of seemingly alien landscapes. Given the obscurity of the novel outside of the United Kingdom and the fact that the British television version of the story was never seen outside of England, however, it is hardly likely that Stevens was ever aware of The Strange World of Planet X, and the parallels are almost certainly the result of pure coincidence.
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