Explorers into infinity

About this book

"Explorers into infinity" by Ray Cummings is a science fiction novel written in the early 20th century. It imagines a nested, boundless cosmos where size and time are relative and traversable, following postal officer Frank Elgon and the Gryce family as they build a transformable craft to journey across space, time, and scale. After Brett Gryce glimpses through a new “myrdoscope” a terrified girl in a larger realm menaced by dwarfs and a giant, he and his brother Martt set out to reach and help her. Part scientific romance and part cosmic adventure, it weds bold speculation to intimate peril.

The opening of the novel frames a companion idea to The Girl in the Golden Atom, proposing infinite smallness and largeness and the interdependence of matter, space, time, and motion. Frank visits Dr. Gryce and his children—Brett, the twins Martynn (Martt) and Francine—who reveal the myrdoscope and Brett’s vision of a motionless‑seeming tableau: a beautiful girl by opalescent water, two gnomes climbing her sandal, and a looming giant, all “frozen” only because their time flows far faster than Earth’s. Gryce unveils a milk‑white cube vehicle that can alter size, position, and time rate; model tests send one into the past, another into infinitesimal smallness, and a third nearly wrecks the garden when it balloons out of control before they stop it—proof of the power’s danger. After outfitting the craft, Brett and Martt depart; their father and Frannie keep an aural beacon sweeping space and keep vigil until, after anxious weeks, the ship returns and the brothers begin recounting their flight past the planets, a near‑miss with an asteroid, and their first growth phase that multiplies their effective velocity and transforms the starfield before them.