Down to Earth

This is the third book of the trilogy Paul Capon wrote about the planet Antigeos. The first two,The Other Side of the Sun and The Other Half of the Planet, earned their author the reputation of a writer in the true Wells-Verne tradition.

The Cox brothers, who live on a Kentish marsh, pick up Morse messages from Professor Pollenport who had left the Earth five years earlier and is having a spaceship built on Antigeos so that he may return to England. The Professor's expedition had been backed by Lord Sanderlake's Daily Messenger, whose science editor he had been. Rigby and Bryan Cox rush to tell Sanderlake that they have picked up Pollenport but need a powerful transmitter to be able to reply to him, through space, to Antigeos. Sanderlake agrees, hoping to get an exclusive newspaper scoop, but the secret is not kept and unscrupulous financiers begin to gamble on the chance of exploiting planets, as in the past they connived to exploit colonies.

What happens to Professor Pollenport and his spaceship, to the Cox brothers, and to all the other people who become involved in the story, makes this new Antigeon adventure enthralling, highly original, and as wittily told as its predecessors.