Very enjoyable but a bit frustrating because of the Roger character. This is simple entertainment and while well drawn, the reader has to go with the ignorance of astronomy of the time - Mars having a breathable atmosphere and high enough temperature to wander around in without environment suits, plus the time space travel with their "rocket" would have taken - and the lack of imagination re. technology. I really would have liked the writer(s) to have tried to come up with futuristic tech. But it is a story and no worse than lots of other s.f. in books and comics from the period.
On the other hand . . . the Wikipedia entry on "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" says the series was loosely based on a novel by Robert A. Heinlein called "Space Cadet" (a novel I've read several times -- it does not use the same character names, however).
Heinlein was a trained engineer and must have known what spectrographic analysis had already said (by the late 1940s) about such things as the atmospheric composition of Mars and of Venus -- but in "Space Cadet" he had his teenage cadets spend considerable time running around on the surface of Venus, which he described as being covered with swamps and a very Earthlike atmosphere. Did he know better? Of course he did -- but like many other science fiction writers of the first half of the 20th Century, he sacrificed "accurate atmospheric chemistry" in favor of "dramatic opportunities." So whoever wrote scripts for the TV episodes, comic books, etc., must have simply been following in Heinlein's footsteps. I have long since grown accustomed to just shrugging off such irregularities as "in this fictional universe or that, from decades ago, an Earthman can run outside and take deep breaths of that fresh Venusian or Martian air."
Actually, you've reminded me of something amusing. I once read a book collecting various short writings (fiction and nonfiction) by Larry Niven, who has a well-earned reputation for writing "hard science fiction." (Meaning that when he's constructing a plot, deciding what his characters will or won't be able to do under certain circumstances, he actually
worries about keeping track of the laws of physics and other awkward little details which some "science fiction writers" prefer to gloss over.)
At one point in the book, Niven reminisced about a time in the 1980s when he and Jerry Pournelle (who has collaborated with him on several bestselling novels over the years) were approached about working on plotting out some ideas for sequels to the original prose novel which had introduced the character of "Buck Rogers" to the world.
Very loosely paraphrased from my imperfect memory, Niven indicated that at one point their joint brainstorming went approximately this way:
"Fans will know that Buck Rogers used to do a lot of traveling to other planets in the solar system -- and could breathe the atmosphere when he got there. Those worlds aren't particularly Earthlike, are they?"
"Well, no,
not now they aren't! But this is only the 20th Century. Remember, Rogers was sound asleep for
500 years before waking up in the 25th Century. A lot can change in that amount of time! What if some practical joker with incredible high-tech resources had spent a few centuries carefully remodeling various bits of our solar system in order to greatly raise the value of those other planets as useful real estate?"
"Say, you just might be on to something! And Rogers was so ignorant of the astronomical facts, as they were already known in the early 20th Century, that he never realized anything was wrong? Having him start to piece it all together could serve as the backbone of a plot for a new novel, all by itself! Let's run with that idea: What else did those high-tech alien visitors do to rearrange things while he snoozing -- aside from terraforming a few planets, of course? And how would Rogers
eventually catch on to the fact that some of the things he described in the first novel should not be taken entirely at face value?"
That's one way to reconcile sharp discrepancies between "Mars and Venus as we see them now," and "Mars and Venus as they are seen by an action hero when he visits them in the distant future"!
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Topic: Week 28 - Tom Corbett, Space Cadet #4 (Read 5070 times)
