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a child’s capacity to believe, a naivete, as well as a love of experimentation. It was this mindset in particular that allowed him to break scientific barriers previously thought to be indestructible.
    Ultimately his insouciance and his otherworldliness would lead to his scientific downfall. The enthusiasms and complications of his private life would overpower him and be ruthlessly exploited by others. He would retreat further into his magic as it became the only world he could control. The man who had done so much to establish the science of rocketry in America would end his life making special effects for Hollywood film companies.
    Nevertheless, his willingness to believe in magic, to be inspired by science fiction, to dare to challenge the scientific establishment, humanizes what has since become a strangely antiseptic and colorless discipline. Like many scientific mavericks, Parsons was discarded by the establishment once he had served his purpose. But in the short time he existed he represented a character that is less and less prevalent in the world of science today: the wide-eyed dreamer, the visionary scientist. In his wish to push the world into the future, he can be seen as the brother of the American pioneer, or his modern-day counterpart, the space explorer of science fiction. His life suggested that it is sometimes by going in the irrational and unknown direction that great leaps forward can be made. Jack Parsons’ story is that of the traveler seeking a brave new world.

1. Paradise
The paradox implausible, the illusion that

must be seen to be believed.
    Â 
—R AY B RADBURY,
Los Angeles Is the Best Place in America
    Â 
    In December 1913 Ruth and Marvel Parsons left the ice and snow of the East for what they hoped would be a new future. Woodrow Wilson had recently been declared the twenty-eighth president, and while all Europe watched the increasing tensions in the Balkans, many Americans were turning their backs on the Old World and looking towards the warm promise of their very own West.
    Ever since gold had been discovered in California in 1848, thousands upon thousands of people had poured towards the Pacific Coast, flooding a state which up until then had had a population of barely 18,000. The alchemical surge of the gold rush brought not just prospectors but their attendants—the thief, the cardsharp, and the minister, the last intent on converting the hordes set free from the laws and moral codes of the East. It was not an easy task. California, declared one Methodist preacher, was “the hardest country in the world in which to get sinners converted”; indeed, “to get a man to look through a lump of gold into eternity” was nigh impossible.
    By 1913 most of the gold had disappeared, but the transmutative effect of the rush survived. The promise of a golden
life
was now the prize. Agriculture had surpassed mining as the state’s biggest industry, and California was transformed into the Garden of America, creating for itself a reputation as a land of orange groves, vineyards, flowers, and sunshine. A health rush succeeded the gold one, as doctors who regularly prescribed a change of climate to deal with a long list of complaints and disorders now suggested California as the ultimate cure. The state would always retain its symbolic connection with that most persuasive of American myths, the pursuit of happiness.
    The young couple now traveling by railroad through the freezing winter had married just the previous year in the bride’s hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. Ruth Virginia Whiteside, the only child of Walter Hunter Whiteside and Carrie Virginia Kendell Whiteside, was twenty-two years old when she married. Doted on by her parents, she had lived a sheltered life, growing up in a wealthy manufacturing family in Chicago. Her father had been hugely successful as the president of the Allis Chalmers farm equipment company before taking over the reins of the