Remember Paul Stanton?

Arthur David Beaty flew with the Royal Air Force in World War II and then after the war became a pilot with the British Overseas Airway Corporation. He also became a psychologist, and penned a pioneering study of the human factor in aircraft accidents--titled, with poetic obliquity, The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents (1969).

However, he was perhaps most widely known under the name Paul Stanton, the pseudonym under which he wrote twenty novels, mostly aviation-themed tales, many of which, if not quite classifiable as techno-thrillers, are at the very least recognizable prototypes of the form.

One of these, Cone of Silence, had been inspired by the tragic fate of the British Comet airliner, and became a major motion picture by the same name, Trouble in the Sky, starring Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) and M (Bernard Lee).

The same year Trouble in the Sky hit theaters, Stanton put out another aviation-themed novel, Village of Stars, which also got some attention from the film industry--Alfred Hitchcock buying the rights, but, alas, never making the movie.

Village of Stars is not just a techno-thriller, but specifically a military techno-thriller from well before the field became fashionable--the tale of a British V-bomber crew who find themselves at the heart of a nuclear crisis circa 1960.

You can read my review of the book here.