bluegargantua

Hey,

So last night I finished up Tom Swift Jr. and His Outpost in Space. That cover is awesome. What's between it? Not so much.

Oh, wait, the solar batteries that are as light as a feather and could power a car for a year? Awesome. Totally worth building a factory in space to make them.

Also awesome, the outpost is mostly funded by television and radio broadcasters who need a manned telecommunications relay. There's also Swift Enterprises and government money pouring into this, but it's the broadcasters who initiate things. Double awesome is the sticker shock when Tom shows them the bill, but on and 8 to 5 vote, the broadcasters pitch in (and the minority go along rather than just walk out on the project which is what you'd expect to have happen).

The science, when not complete fantasy is actually pretty decent given 1950's knowledge.

Not so awesome:

• Chow is in danger! Nope, he just fell asleep during a space fitness test.
  
• Chow, a middle-aged cook rarely described as "fit", turns out to be qualified for space flight when lots of other potential candidates are turned away. Perhaps they should've fallen asleep.
  
• The FBI is happy to have informant Tom Swift Jr. help out during a bust.
  
• Native people are friendly and eager to help but incredibly superstitious.
  
• Native people who go to America to learn science aren't superstitious but that just makes them smart bad-guys.
  
• So your plan is to take out America's top scientists, but you don't, I dunno, hire some hit-men or something? You just sort of threaten and sabotage, but that's it?
  
• The lever won't work! Give it a good whack! It's working again!
  
• What did that resistor left at the crime scene mean? Flying saucer, what now? These and many other plot points will be mentioned once never to be heard from again!
  

To be fair, if that battery had been a real or realizable thing? It totally would've made up for the not-so-awesome because we'd have energy to spare. But I'm still gonna keep reading these things because they're fun.

later
Tom

Hey,

Finished up two books last night.

First up: The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. As you might guess it's a bit of a mystery novel, but there's a heavy dollop of the fantastic strewn in.

Charles Unwin works for the Agency -- a massive private investigation firm that protects the city. Mr. Unwin is a clerk and he writes up the official reports of the Agency's greatest detective Travis Sivart. But Sivart has driven most of his rouges gallery into hiding or the grave and there's been little to write about. Mr. Unwin even considers quitting his job and leaving the city. But a mysterious woman he spots at the train station stays his hand. Then Charlie gets promoted to Detective. It seems that Sivart has gone missing and his first case is to find him so that Charlie can go back to being a clerk.

The book has a constant under-current of surrealism and really just uses the private eye genre in order to subvert it in lots of pleasant ways. Another fun conceit is that each Detective receives a copy of "The Manual of Detection" -- the Agency guidebook on how to be a detective. Since you, the reader, are holding a book also called "The Manual of Detection", the two items overlap and when a character mentions a chapter or page number in the fictional "Manual of Detection", you can be sure that passages from the referenced page or chapter will be present at that spot in the real "Manual" that you hold. The book was a fun read.

I also plowed through Tom Swift Jr. and His Giant Robot. As you might guess, Tom is building a couple of remote-control robots to do dangerous work in the atomic power plant that his dad is building. Evil scientists attempt to steal the robots.

In this book, we see how Tom basically has private intelligence service at his command. Security at Swift Enterprises is maintained by a small army of investigators. Getting a job there means a detailed background check and you might be rechecked at any time. However, there are certain gaps in their intelligence as we'll see.

Tom tended to actually solve problems in this book and there weren't so many "Crisis! -- oh, wait no." moments like in the last book. The one big fall-down?

Hey, Tom, you're a super-genius. You've just been told that one of the top scientists at the atomic power plant happens to have an identical twin brother who is a mad genius. Said twin brother has just escaped from the asylum and is likely behind the various attacks you've suffered. I wonder where the identical twin brother is hiding out? How could the identical twin brother get close enough to interfere with your experiments out at the plant? The top scientist sure behaved strangely when told of his identical twin brother's escape. Cripes.

But hey, fun times and only a mild bit of racism towards Native Americans and only a little looting of their cultural artifacts. Good times.

later
Tom

Hi,

OK, let's talk about Tom Swift Jr. and His Jetmarine.

So, much like z_gryphon, my library had a bunch (but not complete run of) these books. As you might guess, the stories concerned Tom Swift Jr. -- the son of Tom Swift who had been the star of his own "Scientific Hero" adventure series a generation earlier. Like most YA series books at the time, the Tom Swift books had a series of authors all writing under the pseudonym "Victor Appleton II" (the originals having been "written" by Victor Appleton himself).

I loved these books. I read the heck out of these books. When we went to visit my grandparents in South Dakota, I was thrilled that the local library had a number of volumes that my local library didn't and I got my aunt to check some out for me. Because these books were all about SCIENCE!

No, not science. Not the daily struggle to further our understanding of the universe.

No. SCIENCE!

Robots and spaceships and ray guns and Scientist-Inventor heroes who understand a hundred fields of science and push the boundaries of human knowledge and technology every single day.

I mean, just look at the cover art for this book. It's the second book in the series and it's just finding its way, but check it out -- a submarine with a transparent observation nose on the front. Is it atomic powered? You bet it is! It's powered by Swiftonium, a radioactive element discovered and named by its discoverer Tom Swift Jr! To survive the crushing pressures and prevent detection by sonar, it's coated in Tomasite, a wonder plastic that also happens to be better than lead at absorbing dangerous radiation (such as that produced by the atomic engine)!

This, ladies and gentlemen is SCIENCE! The way it should be.

This is why I always get a little misty-eyed whenever I hear The Future Soon by Jonathan Coulton -- it's pretty much exactly how I thought as a kid thanks largely to the Tom Swift Jr. books.

So, yes, they ruined me for an actual career in science.

And a year or two ago, I picked up a large (though not nearly complete) set of the books and I finally decided to start reading them as my "back-up" book. Something to read before I went to bed. It's YA from the 50's, so the books aren't long and they've got large type so it's not going to interfere too much with my regular reading.

( Inside -- my childhood derailed! )

So, totally disillusioned? Well...I am reading Tom Swift and His Mechanical Robot so perhaps it's morphed into an obsessive quest to find the better stories I remember in my head. I dunno. Young-me still really loves these things and perhaps jaded old MST3K-me is too dummy-head to really get down and enjoy them in the proper spirit. I guess I'm still on-board for the time being because after all, who doesn't want to read about a kid with an Ultrasonic Cycloplane?

later
Tom