George Pendle: Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life Of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons
A strange historical specter who helped adapt rocket science from pulpy fantasy to government-funded study, John Parsons lived an unlikely life in an unlikely California setting. Raised in the stately Los Angeles satellite of Pasadena, he came of age in the 1930s alongside Caltech, a prestigious science school where lab-coated characters played at progress while occasionally starting fires and blowing up buildings. It was an era when magazines like Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories Of Super-Science foretold lab experiments yet to happen, and dreams of jet engines seemed no less flighty than tales of marauding aliens.
Strange Angel, George Pendle's biography of Parsons, couldn't have a more compelling backdrop. Pendle labors to sketch the time and place when "prominent astronomer Edwin Hubble could be found dining with the mime Harpo Marx" in a West Coast fantasyland still busy crafting its eccentric persona. In such a context, Parsons was just a precocious boy who liked shooting off rockets, and who saw no reason for his games to stop at his backyard. Along with a few likeminded friends, he convinced the powers of Caltech that rocketry deserved its own serious study, even though, as Pendle writes, the rocket was "seen as little more than a comic prop, a synonym for the absurd and impossible, the equivalent of an intergalactic banana skin."
Under Caltech's unofficial auspices, Parsons and his so-called "Suicide Squad" toiled with explosive powders and aerodynamic equations in an effort to make rockets take off and fly. Around the same time, Parsons began dabbling in black magic: After attending a few strange masses, Parsons joined up with the Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult organization devoted to Aleister Crowley's sexualized rituals and demonic hankerings. He rose up fast, assuming a leadership role that brought him face to face with the likes of Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard, two compatriots who saw no boundaries between the ethereal outer edges of science and magic.
Then Parsons died in a mysterious explosion at his house in Pasadena. By the age of 37, he had made crucial discoveries in the realm of rocket science, and helped found the U.S. government's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Official history, however, left little room for him—a fate that Strange Angel helps correct even through its vague and somewhat dry remembrance. Pendle suffers from a dearth of information about Parsons' life, and never truly susses out the details of his scientific and mystical dealings, but in spite of its shortcomings, Strange Angel works as an engaging treatment of a time when the modern world moved at the same speed as crazed mania.