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 second of the linked books is Mission To The Heart Stars. In it the same crew, Jack Loftus et al, are sent on a journey to the center of the galaxy. There exists a federation, The Heart Stars, of advanced and stable civilizations. The Hegemony of Malis consists of million year old civilizations who have been watching Earth, along with other planets.
Earth has 50,000 years to measure up or else. And the Hegemony is ruthless enough and powerful enough to enforce their rules. Mars was being observed when they decided to commit racial suicide and the Hegemony just let them.
But the earth has a hole card, its alliance with the Angels.
Again I have a divided opinion on this novel. The alien civilizations that are in the book are interesting. When this was written the existence of aliens superior to Earthlings in SF stories was rare. John Campbell was not able to enforce his edict against superior aliens everywhere, but many writers followed it anyway.
Blish also seems to come down more on the side of individual liberty being important than in the first book The Star Dwellers. But this is mainly in contrast to the tyrannical political system of the Hegemony. There are still to many things about this future society that make me uneasy.
He also writes in the foreword, and in the novel, about a High Energy Civilization. This was a concept that was prevalent at the time. SF writers who were often fans of Atomic Power would talk about electricity too cheap to meter.
And if we ever get to that state it will change our society drastically. But Blish never foresaw the oil crisis, and the problems that developed with Atomic Energy.
In these books its actually some form of fusion that exists and that potential is still with us. But its been many years in development and seems no closer.
Neither of these books are as good as the first two- Welcome To Mars and The Vanished Jet, but they are worth a read.
Next up, a juvenile by a lesser known writer, and the only thing by him I have read I believe.
Now we come to 3 books by Donald Wollheim. They are not part of a series, but are set, more or less, in the same solar system. The one that was known in the 1950’s and is somewhat similar to the one in Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr series of books.
I have read these three, and there appear to be others such as The Secret of Saturn’s Rays . Some of these were written under the pen name of David Grinnell. I have never read these others.
He also wrote a series of books about Mike Mars which also appear to be juveniles, although again I have not read them.
Donald Wollheim was one of the Golden Age writers. If you consider that age the 1950’s which for me it was. Books written then are ones I like and remember a lot,not just the juveniles. And yes a lot of fans consider the golden age the 1930’s but some of that stuff is too dated for me.
Anyway, Wollheim was an editor, publisher, writer, fan, convention goer, etc. And this first book I will post about is one of my favorite juveniles.
It’s The Secret Of The Martian Moons. To me at the time I first read it, and still upon re-reading it’s a great story. There’s an abandoned civilization on Mars. The Mars of Percival Lowell, with plants and sort of canals and an atmosphere.
But where are the Martians? Their houses are here, and storerooms and evidence of an advanced civilization all sealed in vaults and inaccessible even after a century of trying.
So Earth abandons the Mars Colony as a lost cause, and too expensive. But, Nelson Barr, young hero, and his father and others secretly stay behind.
Because there have been mysterious goings on. They fly to Deimos to set up observation of Mars and wait.
Soon aliens are in evidence,but are they the Martians? Further adventures with them, and the invading Marauders ensue.
One of the better juvenile SF adventure novels in my opinion. I wish I could say the same about the other two, but that will wait for my next posts.
Across A Billion Years
Another favorite book of my is Across A Billion Years by Robert Silverberg. It’s in the junior scientist category but the twist is its about Archaeology, not Space Science, or Engineering like so many of these books.
Tom Rice is our young scientist going out to Higby V on his first dig to find out about The High Ones, a race of beings that flourished more than billion years ago. Most people think they are gone from the galaxy, but are they?
Tom has a Telepathy endowed, paraplegic twin sister and telepathy does play a role in this story.
But its basically a well-done story by someone who can write, as various Nebula and Hugo awards attest.
Tom and the other archaeologists make many exciting discoveries and solve the mystery of The High Ones. This story even has a little romance along the way.
A real good read, and something that apparently is not happening in current SF. The writing of juvenile SF by established authors in the field. As I will show in the posts to come, this used to be the case. If it is not true any more, the field of SF is in trouble.
We need the young readers that are attracted by this sort of story. And as good as the Harry Potter and other fantasy books are, SF is a valuable genre as far as I am concerned, even more so in today’s technologic world. It’s a way of developing interest in science and we definitely need that.
That was a TV show back in 1985 that may have been the first appearance of Courtney Cox. But what I want to write about is the Misfits of Science Fiction.
I have been posting a number of essays about misfits in juvenile SF books. I am going to continue to do that, and also some posts are planned for the general topic of misfits in SF including adults.
But the subject of this post is the idea of SF as the literature of misfits, and the place of misfits in society.
There are many people who would qualify as misfits in the world today. The computer nerd has become a cliché and, incorrectly, I think society has begun to believe that misfits are taking over the world.
There have been headlines and articles in the media to this point. But, while Bill Gates may have been a misfit/ computer nerd he really is just an updated version of the ruthless robber baron type of businessman. He is a “success” by societies definitions. Whether or not he is a real misfit is debatable.
I am not saying that you can’t be a success eventually if you are a misfit. Some people do persevere and get ahead.
But most do not. And that has implications for society and the world. Since, as I have said in early posts, I think it is the misfits that are the reason for progress and change, not the conformist drones or ‘mundanes’ out there.
I remember a book by Isaac Asimov that made this point, I just don’t remember which one of his 500+ books it was. He said that a huge majority of scientists read SF and that was an important indicator of intelligence and scientific prowess in the youth of the world.
I have a related, but different point to make. In one of my other blogs I have been ranting about how society consists of sheep and wolves, etc. and the small group of people, like me, who are not part of the victims or the predators of the world. This group however large or small it is, is important. At least to me since I belong to it. But I think overall it's important.
I am going to explore, here and in my other blogs this idea. That somehow or other this group of people as I have defined them (I still haven’t come up with a good name for them) needs to change its place in society. Maybe by withdrawing from the world in some way.
And maybe, if I ever start writing SF, that’s where I can explore that idea. And maybe even get paid for it? Ah well, dream on.
The Subsea Academy Trilogy : Undersea Quest, Fleet & City
These three books are a somewhat different form of juvenile SF. The hero, Jim Eden isn’t a true misfit, he’s more in the mold of “Young Scientist” like Tom Swift. He’s at the Sub-Sea Academy and gets kicked out on bogus charges, his uncle has disappeared and then even more adventures occur. Jim’s trilogy of adventures are in Undersea Quest, Undersea Fleet, and Undersea City. I actually only read one of these in my youth. I found out it was a trilogy later on and collected and read the other two books.
While these books don’t fit entirely into the theme I have been writing about they do have interesting aspects to them.
First off, they explore the oceans, not space. I think for a lot of sf fans skin-diving, Jacques Cousteau’s adventures, and other aspects of underwater activity became a substitute for going into space. SF authors did that too. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a whole bunch of books on diving both fiction and not.
The other interesting part of this is that the books are written by Frederick Pohl, and Jack Williamson. Two of the giants of early sf. Frederick Pohl (Brooklyn Tech) was everything in sf from writer, fan, editor, member of the futurians, you name it. And Jack Williamson is a writer that has many great books to his credit.
Yet here they are writing juvenile sf. This, perhaps, buttresses my opinion that juvenile sf is one of the core aspects of sf. And current authors still write to that aspect and audience. But one of the problems with current sf is that much of that audience is being lost. To video games, etc. Maybe they are still in the world of sf, but one of my tenets is that there is a big difference between written sf and visual sf.
Something I will go into in a future post.
The Diamond In The Window
This next book is not really SF but Fantasy. Its called The Diamond In The Window by Jane Langdon. It fits in however into the theme of most of the juvenile SF I am writing about. The misfit who triumphs over all. In most cases it’s a boy, but in this case its actually an entire family of misfits.
Eleanor, her brother Edward (Trebor Nosnibor to those in the know) and Aunt Lily. They live in Concord, Massachusetts in an old gothic sort of house and just are not doing well. Uncle Freddy(another member of the family) is bonkers apparently-he talks to the statues of Waldo and Emerson-and Aunt Lily is going to lose the house for back taxes.
But, there is a mystery here. The missing children, the prince who was Aunt Lily’s boyfriend and also disappeared. And there is the Diamond in the Window which is only glass right?
This story weaves a mystery, information about the transcendentalists (Emerson and Thoreau among others) and a battle between good and evil waged by children.
This is the theme of most if not all of this juvenile SF and Fantasy that I am so fond of. Misfits that become heroes. It is the sort of story that appealed to the misfit I was, and still am. And the fact that there is so much of it out there says something about how common misfits are. And perhaps how maybe this society we live in needs to change its treatment of those who don’t conform. Think about it. How many people who have changed the world were weird in some way? And how many conformists have made the world better?
Unfortunately because of how misfits are harassed and shunned some turn into the sort of non-conformists that change the world in evil ways.
Anyway, its one of my favorite books of all time. Maybe my favorite fantasy novel. I have read that Langdon wrote some sort of sequel to it, but I have never found it.
I recommend it highly.
I have been reading since I was taught to by my mother before kindergarten started. But I consider that I became a bookworm when I discovered the NYC Library near my house on Staten Island.
I was 8. Since then, books have been my life. I am now a book dealer, but mostly I just love reading. Especially Science Fiction and Mysteries, but I have eclectic tastes. So, I am going to post about the books and authors I love. My view of them, the Worms Eye View.
