Absolute Zero

Written by Morgan Robertson

Narrated by Cathy Dobson

Morgan Andrew Robertson (1861-1915) was a popular American author of short stories and novels who claimed to have been the inventor of the periscope.

'Absolute Zero' is a strange supernatural story about two marine artists who are friends and who work in adjoining studios. The younger of the two has been working on a strange painting for some time. It shows an odd scene onboard a ship. The deck is littered with dead bodies...and the centre point of the painting is a huge, barefoot black sailor holding a young man aloft and about to dash him to his death on the icy deck. The artist himself does not know how he came up with the idea for the painting.

But when he shows his canvas to the older artist, this man rummages in his old chest and pulls out an identical picture which he himself painted 50 years earlier. The faces and actions are all exactly the same. The older artist had been on the ship and had painted the terrible scene from memory. But as they seek to understand the story behind this scene, an even stranger chain of events follows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Door Consulting
• Release date: Feb 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781509401468

Morgan Robertson

Morgan Robertson (1861-1915) was an American novelist and short story writer. Born into a seafaring family, Robertson entered the merchant service as a teenager, rising to the rank of first mate by the time of his departure in 1886. With his sailing days behind him, Robertson studied jewelry making and worked in New York City as a diamond setter for 10 years. During this time, he also wrote sea stories and novels, including Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan (1898), a novel with a striking similarity to the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Despite seeing his work published in McClure’s and the Saturday Evening Post, Robertson failed to make a living as a professional writer, leading to a deep dissatisfaction also fueled by the author’s claims to have not received credit for his invention of the submarine periscope. Despite his lack of popular success and critical acclaim, Robertson’s work is thought to have influenced such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Henry De Vere Stacpoole.