Saturday 20 May 2017

Juvenile SF

Heinlein, Asimov, Blish and Anderson wrote juvenile sf, Anderson less than the others:

one Time Patrol installment;
three Technic History stories;
"Escape the Morning" (see here, here, here and here);
Vault of The Ages.

I mention this because I am rereading James Blish's The Star Dwellers, which is Heinleinian in:

its insistence that education should not be painless and that car drivers should know calculus;
its pairing of a teenage cadet with an older mentor;
its presentation of a private company exploiting space and also of a Secretary for Space coping with potential interstellar crises -

- and I wish that our crises were interstellar, not just Terrestrial.

7 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Anderson's "The Season Of Forgiveness" might have been meant as juvenile SF, but it never SEEMED like that to me. True, the POV character was a boy, but he was not in the least childish.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
The three Technic History stories that I had in mind were "How To Be Ethnic...," "Wingless" and "Rescue on Avalon."
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Oops! I thought of "Wingless" and "Rescue on Avalon" but not "How To Be Ethnic..." That last story also didn't SEEM "juvenile" to me.

Sean

Anonymous said...

Kaor, Paul!

I don't recall any Time Patrol installment that I would call a juvenile, although some are written at a less sophisticated level than others. Could you be thinking of a non-Patrol time travel story (I forget the title) where an American boy visiting relatives in Spain accidentally turns on a time machine and finds himself several hundred thousand years in the past? As I recall, he uses fire or a fire-hardened spear to drive off a lion, and that's how his remote ancestors learn to use fire.

Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Nicholas,
I meant "The Year of the Ransom."
The story you mention is "The Little Monmster."
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Nicholas and Paul!

Nicholas and Paul: Paul beat me to mentioning "The Little Monster." (Smiles) And it was "Gibraltar Falls" which seemed the most juvenile "like" of the Time Patrol stories. The POV character is a very young, still somewhat diffident recent recruit to the Patrol.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Surely "The Year of the Ransom" even more so?
Paul.