Stand by for Mars! Book

This needs some explanation. When I was a child, maybe nine or ten, I found a book one of my brothers owned: THE ROBOT ROCKET, by Carey Rockwell, part of the TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET series. I don't know what they thought of it, but I adored it. It was so cool, with space travel and Martians and Venusians and trips to other planets and intrigue and excitement and a lot of scientific information. It was great.

Then I lost the book, and forgot about it for a long time. And then last Friday I was talking to my in-laws and family about books in general, and somehow Tom Corbett came up as an example I gave of a children's book really grounded in science. So with the help of the almighty Internet, I found it. And all the others.

STAND BY FOR MARS! is the opener in the series, available courtesy of Project Gutenberg for your Kindles and iBooks apps, and probably online text as well. Free. And for that price, if you love science fiction, especially classic sci-fi, it's worth a look-see. Tom Corbett is a young cadet at the Space Academy, training to become one of the Solar Guard. He meets Astro, a giant Venusian, and becomes friends. Neither of them can stand Roger Manning, a know-it-all smarmy kid who reminded me of Draco Malfoy in looks and temperament. But when they're all assigned to the same corp, they'd better learn to get along--or else flunk out!

Don't get me wrong. This book is rather predictable in plot and simplistic in characterization, and a lot of the science is wrong (jungles on Venus?). However, for its time, it was one of the few series to make the attempt to be as correct in its scientific knowledge as possible, thanks to the consultant Willy Ley, a genuine scientist. Even though it was based on a TV series, at least the one woman in the Solar Guard is taken seriously, and has a brain to go with her stunning good looks. The whole thing just took me back to a much simpler childhood, when you had "rockets", and courses were charted with the help of astrogation tables as well as computers. No black people, of course, but since Tom is described as "curly-headed", I like to imagine him as being of African descent.

Oh, and for whatever reasons, at least once per book the young men "strip to their waists" and work on the motors. Complete with illustrations. Hmm.

Light entertainment at its finest.