Obviously I am a Science Fiction fan. I will be writing about other genres, such as Mysteries, eventually in this blog. But I became a SF reader around the age of 8 and have been hooked ever since.
This is a good thing. Most people have at best a brief fling with SF. They may read a few books as teenagers, and the they ‘grow up’. But some of us, the special ones, don’t lose our taste for it.
I am mainly talking here about written SF. There are some good movies out there and a few TV shows, but most of visual SF is crap. It's here comes the monster, scream, shoot him with your ray gun and kiss the girl. There is little of the depth and thoughtfulness of written SF there on the screen.
The audience, or market, for written SF is different. Yes some of us, some of the time, want mindless entertainment. But a high percentage of SF has more going for it than just a good story. It makes you think.
People who like to think, who want to think are the audience for SF.
That makes it a ghetto. Because 99 percent of the human race does not fall into this category. People who think. They tried it once, it hurt their brains, so they gave it up.
If you believe that people who think are important in this 21st century technological, complicated world, then you might agree with me. About the importance of people who read SF.
I am not the only one who has said this. I remember reading a book, a collection of essays by Isaac Asimov, that was making the same point. Better than I am.
But the point I am actually trying to make is the value of juvenile SF. Because if we are going to have at least some children grow up and be competent to run this world and maybe even make it better, then we need juvenile SF.
That is how they will get hooked into reading SF and that will expand their minds. They will develop that Sense of Wonder that we seem to have lost here in America.
Is juvenile SF being written and is it any good? I know that Charles Sheffield, with some help from Jerry Pournelle, wrote a series of juvenile SF books not too many years ago.
And I have been somewhat absent from current SF for a variety of reasons. Maybe there are Graphic novels or video games that fill the need for good, thought-provoking juvenile SF but I doubt it. My opinion of most SF of that type is that it consists of blowing things up as quick as you can and little else.
I could be wrong. I have started to read SF blogs looking for information on this area but am finding little.
So if I have any actual readers out there I would like to know if there is any juvenile SF recently published.
Maybe I am Chicken Little and the sky isn’t falling.
Anyway, this rant, or editorial will be continued occasionally. But mostly I am going to write about the SF I love.
The series continued with 5 more Lucky Starr books. They are Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury, Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter, and Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn.
All contain the same adventure type stories that appealed to me and I imagine many other young boys of the time. Bigman Jones was a loyal sidekick, the Sirians were clearly evil, and the Council of Science was wisely benevolent.
There were continuing problems with the changing and updating of the solar system as actual exploration continued, but I still can reread them for what they are. Good stories. If the background is outdated, well so is the background of every Agatha Christie novel, every spy novel about the Soviet Union, etc. If they are good stories you can still read John Le Carre and enjoy his novels even if the Soviet Union and the KGB don’t exist anymore. (Probably because in the case of the KGB renaming it doesn’t change it)
Isaac Asimov linked his Robot Stories, the Foundation Series, and the Spacer novels together. All inhabit, more or less, the same humans only universe of his creation. He did it deliberately in his later novels, and to me the connection was always visible. But, I think that these 6 novels inhabit the same universe. Maybe not as clearly, but if you dance around the time frames etc it is a humans only universe and there is antagonism between Earth and the colonies just as in the Spacer novels. He also introduced the positronic brain and robots in The Big Sun of Mercury along with the concept of the Sirians being a society of loners and elitests. Just like the spacers.
Well I think they are all great examples of juvenile SF and have enjoyed re-reading them more than once. Next post will be about another bunch of juveniles that I loved and still do.
David Starr: Space Ranger
Back when I was a boy (I am a bit older now,but as Peter Pan said I’ll Never Grow Up) SF was a boys only club. Or so it seemed. The few of us that were into SF were always boys, and nerdy ones at that. And in my memory, those were the good old days of SF. SF is, or mostly used to be, about that audience- alienated young or teenage boys who just didn’t fit in. The books I read back then have never left my memory and as good as SF is now, and I do enjoy the books that I have read in the years since then, those books hold a special place.
I think there are others out there who feel the same. So I am going to do a series of reviews/ commentaries on the books I was reading from about 1960 to 1970. I never forgot them, and as I got older I started trying to get them back. Using the pre-internet resources of classified ads and book searchers I managed to find a lot of them, and now many of them are available on various sites such as Amazon.
The first one I will talk about may be the first SF book I ever read, I am not sure. It’s “David Starr: Space Ranger” by Paul French, also known as Isaac Asimov.
It was an example of the kind of “Sense Of Wonder” book that brought me and so many others into SF. A young man, orphaned at an early age, so smart that he just is different from everyone else, becomes a hero. Wish fulfillment par excellence. Its also a mystery, besides being a SF novel of adventure, something Isaac did a lot and perhaps my favorite kind of SF since I am a mystery fan also.
David Starr saves Earth from mass poisoning or starvation and meets the alien Martians in caverns beneath the surface of Mars. What more could you want?
This is the first in a series of 6 novels. He becomes Lucky Starr in the next 5, but continues to have adventures with his sidekick Bigman Jones and the Council of Science.
These stories are set in a solar system based on 1950’s astronomy. So, as Isaac Asimov has written, very shortly after they were published space probes went out and changed the solar system forever. There are no Oceans Of Venus for example.
To be perfectly honest, I prefer that solar system to the real one. Since the stars are so far away its unlikely we will get there in my lifetime, or perhaps ever, and the chance of meeting aliens, and having adventures like Lucky in this Solar System is nil.
Ah well, maybe I should just grow up. Or maybe not.
Asimov's Mysteries
What I want to write about today is a somewhat obscure part of Isaac Asimov’s corpus. The
Wendell Urth stories. There were not many of them, 4 altogether. They are collected in Asimov’s Mysteries, although some of them appear elsewhere, and they all were originally in magazine form.
As far as I know, that was it. Did Isaac run out of ideas to write for Wendell? He managed to write dozens of Black Widower stories and Union Club mysteries. Why so few of these? Especially since I think they are great. The character of Wendell Urth is, to my eye, clearly based on himself and one of his best characters.
A somewhat rotund, jovial scientist that has issues with the outdoors. Isaac did not fly and I think had some agoraphobia himself. They are clever puzzle mystery stories, with a science basis. Does anyone know why there were so few? I list the ones I know about below. Are there any others? Where are they collected if so. It would give me a great deal of pleasure to read an unknown Wendell Urth story.
The Singing Bell
The Talking Stone
The Dying Night
The Key
and sort of- The Dust of Death-no Wendell, but the same detective.
One of my favorite writers in SF is Lloyd Biggle. He’s not all that well known, but he wrote a fair number of books, and was part of the golden era of SF in my opinion. He was friends with perhaps my favorite author, Isaac Asimov. He wrote mysteries as well as SF. There is biographical info on him available on-line such as in Wikipedia, but I want to write about his books and short stories, not him. I never met him, but I know his books.
I will have more to say in later posts about his “Dark” books and others but perhaps my favorite book of his is “Monument”. It’s the story of a wandering interstellar prospector named Cern O’Brien who discovers the world of Langri. Langri is a paradise, with benign climate, beautiful beaches, and a indigenous civilization of natives.
Cern realizes the danger Langri is in. Sooner or later somebody else will discover Langri and exploit the potential wealth there for tourism, etc. As his legacy, he leaves the natives The Plan. A non-violent way to fight the exploiters despite the natives lack of resources and the power imbalance between them and the eventual arrival of an exploiter-Billionaire H. Harlow Wembling.
Its a great story, but I think it applies to the real world. We have all seen how advanced cultures have overwhelmed primitive cultures when encountered. Even if not on purpose, though often it was that way.
There still are cultures out there in the world who are being exploited, and as I have ranted about in my other blog-Critical Mass- I think even within advanced society the sheep are exploited by the wolves and sometimes the sheepdogs. This book shows ways to fight back that I find interesting, and potentially useful in the real world.
It is also one of the books that helped to form my opinion about the usefulness of SF to the real world, despite the scorn heaped on it by critics from the literary world.
So, its a great book that can be read simply to enjoy the story. But, as in much good SF, it has more to it. That moves Monument to another level as far as I am concerned.
