I'm a real science fiction fan, and BEYOND HERCULES told me from the start that I was in for marvellous entertainment.

A space-faring race of beetle-like beings decides that nobody is going to know the secret of antigravity but them, and they create a weapon to destroy any other race developing this technology. The weapon picks up a trace of antigrav a long way off - on Earth, in fact.

Duke Wainwright is already unpopular with the neighbours. The young scientist tinkers with all sorts of stuff in his garage, and they're sure that he's going to blow them all up some day. Well, he comes close. A hole a mile deep in the concrete floor has to be hastily concealed from the cops. He needs somewhere to work without endangering anyone... maybe that old mine outside Sedona where he used to play as a kid.

Speaking of kids, the neighbours persuaded the parents of seventeen-year-old Angie Sgambelli, an Italian-American, to stop her hanging around with Duke - he was older than her and he brought hot girls home. So Angie goes off to train with the Russian Space Program, now that America doesn't have one any more. Duke thinks wistfully of his bright sidekick and records his work as if speaking to her. Then Duke learns that not only the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station, but all the communication and weather satellites in orbit, have been jolted by some unknown force, which he suspects is antigravity produced by his experiments. What next?

BEYOND HERCULES is written by native Texan Paul Bussard, who had a thirty-year aerospace career before moving to communications and makes good use of those skills in his writing. Anyone who has enjoyed the film Contact will like the sequence with two lady astronomers intercepting and decoding a signal from off the Earth, while analysing the atmosphere of planetary moons. Here and there are technical passages but anyone finding these tough going can skip a page and pick up the lively action. Some mildly strong language is the only issue for young adult readers, so while BEYOND HERCULES isn't a YA book I would say any SF fan from mid-teens could enjoy the read. The writing style is easy to read and well-informed, while we get to know and admire many great characters, including a cosmonaut, those pesky beetles and that alien-built weapon.