By the time more Martians arrive, the humans worship their 'devil' as their hero and savior. A benign Martian visitor, equipped with a flying sled and a food machine, is able to gather many of the survivors together and relaunch civilization over the course of several years.

After the End: 'Dear Devil' takes place after a nuclear and biological holocaust, when humanity is reduced to isolated pockets of survivors.

Blieder was trying to invent a magic trick, but he had no idea what he was doing, and ended up launching a penny through the roof of his house at what later turned out to be many times the speed of light.

Achievements in Ignorance: The Blieder Drive of The Great Explosion was invented in this manner.

He also wrote a large number of short stories, including 'Allamagoosa', which won the first-ever Hugo Award for Best Short Story. Other well-known novels include 1939's Sinister Barrier (updated in 1948), where mankind is secretly owned and controlled by aliens, and the humorous Next of Kin (aka The Space Willies), where a lone misfit captured by aliens conducts psychological warfare on them. His most popular work is the futuristic spy-thriller, Wasp (1957), about a lone spy injected onto a hostile alien planet to cause as much disruption as possible. Eric Frank Russell (1905-1978) was a British Science Fiction author of the mid-twentieth century, though he wrote primarily for an American audience, and filled his work with Americanisms, and was often mistaken for an American by his readers.

Wasp by eric frank russell