There’s no good way to read a book about nuclear holocaust when it comes with a constant mental warning saying “ All of this may be made-up”. Would reading Last Train from Hiroshima skew what I thought I knew about the American nuclear bombardments of Japan? I was frankly reluctant to read Last Train from Hiroshima for the same reasons I don’t usually read older scientific non-fiction: So many things have changed since then that I would be putting bad information in my head. from New Zealand? Tall tales are tall tales –but when they’re supposed to establish credibility for someone writing scientific non-fiction, they upset the presumption of expertise that readers tacitly bestow upon writers of works supposed to inform us about the world. Did he really provide inspiration to Michael Crichton’s dinosaur-cloning technique in Jurassic Park? Is he really a renegade Ph.D. When the Last Train from Hiroshima story exploded, a lot of people started taking scrutinizing Pellegrino’s grandiose claims. There were so many uncanny anecdotes buried in the text, so many dramatic moments, so many convenient coincidences that I asked knowledgeable people at SF conventions whether Pellegrino was entirely legit, and wasn’t entirely reassured by the answers. I won’t try to re-write my reviews: You can go explore my “ Charles Pellegrino” tag to point and laugh at my credulity regarding Pellegrino’s so-called non-fiction.Īs I microwave a bit of crow for public delectation, I will at least acknowledge having had some doubts as to whether Pellegrino’s brand of emotionally-driven scientific non-fiction was entirely truthful. This had led me, through the years, to most of his bibliography, including a number of very enjoyable non-fiction books. Frankly, I ordered the book not because of the controversy, but because I’ve been a Pellegrino fan ever since his 1998 Science Fiction novel Dust. In some sense, my copy of the book had ridden its own Last Train from Amazon: Even today, Pellegrino’s latest remains unavailable from either or amazon.ca, being sold by other vendors at premiums making my purchase look like a savvy investment.īut I’m not the smart one in this story. By the time the book arrived at my house, Pellegrino’s academic credentials had been debunked and the publisher had announced that it was pulling all copies of the book from shelves.

When I ordered The Last Train from Hiroshima from amazon.ca in February 2010, the media frenzy around the book had just started: Allegations about the book’s dubious veracity had started to flare up, with a number of experts identifying a number of mistakes in the narrative.

Dust by Charles Pellegrino