Inter-Galactic Playground
One of the issues that arose at discussions I participated in or listened to at science fiction conventions in 2001 was that we could not remember the names of many of the people we had read as children.
The above quote is taken from the introduction to The Inter-Galactic Playground, by Farah Mendlesohn. And, to be clear, the 'people' here are those who wrote science fiction for children. Elsewhere in the introduction Mendlesohn notes that people have no trouble naming writers of adult science fiction they read as children, nor of writers of fantasy books for children. It is, it appears, just science fiction that suffers from this lacuna.
It certainly rings true with my own experience. I remember reading Asimov and Clarke, Heinlein and Bradbury, Wyndham and Wells, and all manner of Star Wars novels, but I couldn't name any of the writers for children that I had read as a child.
The only exception to this void I had was a vague, half-formed memory of a book I'd read either at the very tail end of the '80s, or the very start of the '90s - So between 15 to 20 years ago. Title? No memory of that at all. Author? Not an inkling. So what do I remember of it.
I remember it was about a family travelling in space. I remember they landed on a planet where the city was abandoned and it ruins. I remember out in the snowy wastes they found the alien natives. I seem to remember they were kind of rabbit-type creatures. And I remember a scene where a character is told to clear his mind of all things, to do so by imagining a candle and blowing it out.
For a long time, this has bugged me. Because it's the only children's science fiction book I remember anything of. Because, possibly, this was where I first entered science fiction. Because all these years I've not been able to shake it from my mind.
Every so often I'd think about posting to one of those "Identify this book" things you find on internet forums, but I've never done so. Largely because I read back at what I remember of and think "No-one could identify a book from that. It's impossible!"
The more the years went by, the more I resigned myself to never knowing what the book was (just as I've resigned myself to never knowing what the series of books they used at school to teach us to read were, of which I remember perhaps two pages at most). Until I reached page 102 of The Inter-Galactic Playground.
As I keep saying, early sf for children and teens was on an outward trajectory. Protagonists grew up and left home. Home fulfilled one of two roles. In on role, the protagonist took the excellent example of home into space and applied it to his or her dealings with the universe. You can see this in Heinlein's Space Cadet, Monica Hughes in The Keeper of the Isis Light (1980), or Brian Earnshaw's Dragonfall 5 (1972).
It's a throwaway reference at best, indeed, after checking the index, the only time in the entire book that Dragonfall 5 is mentioned. But… alarm bells went off all over my head the moment I read that. Could it be? Is it possible? Could this really be it?
Immediately I threw the book down and went straight to the internet, where I searched the library catalogue for Dragonfall 5. I wasn't terribly confident of finding anything, as the book could be anywhere up to 30 years old now and thus surely no longer in stock. Indeed, I expected a big blank.
My expectations were surpassed, in a fashion. A catalogue entry was found for Dragonfall 5 and the Empty Planet, though the only copy hasn't been seen since 1990. It's one of those entries that should probably have been purged years ago but has slipped through the cracks. Nonetheless, it was enough to give me hope that I was on the right lines. Yet also, slightly discouraging. It suggested, and the Google search following confirmed, that Dragonfall 5 is a series of books.
So the search continues, as now I must work out which one in the series might be the one I'm thinking of. And, indeed, if I perhaps read any of the others too. I don't know the answers to either of those questions yet, but for the first time, I feel I'm actually on the way to finally solving this mystery that's bothered me all these years. I just have to track down the books in the series and read them until I find the right one.
I realise that this perhaps isn't the most objective way of viewing a book, but for me, this alone has made it worth reading.
The above quote is taken from the introduction to The Inter-Galactic Playground, by Farah Mendlesohn. And, to be clear, the 'people' here are those who wrote science fiction for children. Elsewhere in the introduction Mendlesohn notes that people have no trouble naming writers of adult science fiction they read as children, nor of writers of fantasy books for children. It is, it appears, just science fiction that suffers from this lacuna.
It certainly rings true with my own experience. I remember reading Asimov and Clarke, Heinlein and Bradbury, Wyndham and Wells, and all manner of Star Wars novels, but I couldn't name any of the writers for children that I had read as a child.
The only exception to this void I had was a vague, half-formed memory of a book I'd read either at the very tail end of the '80s, or the very start of the '90s - So between 15 to 20 years ago. Title? No memory of that at all. Author? Not an inkling. So what do I remember of it.
I remember it was about a family travelling in space. I remember they landed on a planet where the city was abandoned and it ruins. I remember out in the snowy wastes they found the alien natives. I seem to remember they were kind of rabbit-type creatures. And I remember a scene where a character is told to clear his mind of all things, to do so by imagining a candle and blowing it out.
For a long time, this has bugged me. Because it's the only children's science fiction book I remember anything of. Because, possibly, this was where I first entered science fiction. Because all these years I've not been able to shake it from my mind.
Every so often I'd think about posting to one of those "Identify this book" things you find on internet forums, but I've never done so. Largely because I read back at what I remember of and think "No-one could identify a book from that. It's impossible!"
The more the years went by, the more I resigned myself to never knowing what the book was (just as I've resigned myself to never knowing what the series of books they used at school to teach us to read were, of which I remember perhaps two pages at most). Until I reached page 102 of The Inter-Galactic Playground.
As I keep saying, early sf for children and teens was on an outward trajectory. Protagonists grew up and left home. Home fulfilled one of two roles. In on role, the protagonist took the excellent example of home into space and applied it to his or her dealings with the universe. You can see this in Heinlein's Space Cadet, Monica Hughes in The Keeper of the Isis Light (1980), or Brian Earnshaw's Dragonfall 5 (1972).
It's a throwaway reference at best, indeed, after checking the index, the only time in the entire book that Dragonfall 5 is mentioned. But… alarm bells went off all over my head the moment I read that. Could it be? Is it possible? Could this really be it?
Immediately I threw the book down and went straight to the internet, where I searched the library catalogue for Dragonfall 5. I wasn't terribly confident of finding anything, as the book could be anywhere up to 30 years old now and thus surely no longer in stock. Indeed, I expected a big blank.
My expectations were surpassed, in a fashion. A catalogue entry was found for Dragonfall 5 and the Empty Planet, though the only copy hasn't been seen since 1990. It's one of those entries that should probably have been purged years ago but has slipped through the cracks. Nonetheless, it was enough to give me hope that I was on the right lines. Yet also, slightly discouraging. It suggested, and the Google search following confirmed, that Dragonfall 5 is a series of books.
So the search continues, as now I must work out which one in the series might be the one I'm thinking of. And, indeed, if I perhaps read any of the others too. I don't know the answers to either of those questions yet, but for the first time, I feel I'm actually on the way to finally solving this mystery that's bothered me all these years. I just have to track down the books in the series and read them until I find the right one.
I realise that this perhaps isn't the most objective way of viewing a book, but for me, this alone has made it worth reading.