One of the best known books for children or young adults is A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L’Engle. What is not as well known, is it’s part of a trilogy. The other two books are A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and A Wind In The Door.
These books inhabit the borderline between SF and Fantasy in my opinion. There is speculative science here, often involving tesseracts, but fantasy too. Witches and Unicorns in particular.
But, these books are a great example of a misfit family once again. Although the children are the most misfit, the parents, especially the mother, are former misfits. Maybe even currently since they do not really fit into their rural, backwards community.
Once again we have the theme of misfits becoming heroes. But there is a lot more going on here, especially as regards the battle between good and evil. L’Engle is a great writer of children’s books in my, and many others, opinion, and she surpasses herself in these books.
For even though many consider the books, especially the first, books for girls, I think they are just as good for boys, and for adults.
Many see the battle in A Wrinkle In Time as one between conformity and freedom. Or between authorianism (communism in particular) and freedom and democracy. Also as a parable of the fear of technology and its effects on being human. Of being controlled by our technology.
In the more famous book, which was fairly recently made into a TV movie, Meg and Charles Wallace, along with neighbor/boyfriend Calvin must travel to the stars to save Meg and Charles Wallace’s father who is a prisoner of the dark. An evil force that has taken over many planets in the galaxy and is working its way to control of Earth. They are aided by the witches- Mrs.. Who, Mrs.. Which, and Mrs... Whatsit. Along with other creatures.
This is again a fight between good and evil waged by children. They young ones are the heroes here which is what makes this book so popular. The evil is almost faceless. Just a computer IT that controls a planet. Makes everyone on it conform rigidly. Even the children must all bounce their balls at the same time in the same rhythm .
A Wind In The Door is more about Charles Wallace and his inability to adapt to school, along with his illness which is also a metaphor for the illness in the Galaxy and Earth. Here Meg Charles Wallace and Clavin are aided by a Cherubim in their fight against the Echtroi. I found this book particularly interesting since I remember my own struggles at school. It is very hard to fit in when you are smarter than most every body else and not smart enough, at least at first, to keep them from knowing it.
This ties in so well to my overall theme. Why does society tolerate this sort of behavior towards its best and brightest children. If we are going to progress, even survive as a civilized people in a difficult, complex and dangerous world we need to encourage the smart young ones that are here. They will be the way we survive and prosper. It has always been this way, and yet the majority still will not accept them, and in fact constantly harasses and persecutes them.
The third book A Swiftly Tilting Planet, involves the family in yet another end the world crisis, this time a mad nuclear weapons wielding dictator. And Calvin O'Keefe's mother, not the brightest among us, is one of the keys to the solution. But, as I keep saying. This blog, at the moment anyway, is about misfits. Not the specific books, as much as I love them.
I am speaking from a personal point of view. To one degree or another, I have been through this sort of thing. (Although I have not saved the galaxy recently) Misfits, the smart, talented, and creative are often subjected, especially while young, to this treatment. And they react in various ways. Some get tougher and excel. Some get twisted. Some give up and learn how to hide, to appear normal, and the world is a lesser place for that.
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.
Well, I am slightly amazed. I wrote the previous post about the Diamond In The Window having a vague memory that there was a sequel. Then I decide to look around the internet for info and discover The Hall Family Chronicles. I can’t believe it, a whole series of books with these characters that I never knew about.
So, now I have to get these books. Why I didn’t do this search before I have no idea.
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.
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.
