Ooh, must read that

Big congrats on the article! I just Instapapered that puppy for later consumption.

Great piece!

Wow, what a bummer it is for young people. But, while I remember reading a lot of science fiction, especially the works of Andre Norton, I don't remember tying it so much to what I thought the world would be like. I guess I wasn't as introspective as this generation appears to be. It's really quite sad.

That said, I did very much enjoy your article. :-)

You're probably right. And that's probably because we didn't think we'd end up destroying the world. Scifi then was more about the wonder.

An enjoyable article; thanks for the link!

I remember reading a number of the Tom Swift Jr. series in elementary school. But I was more a fan of the Rick Brant series, which appeared about the same time: the characters were more lifelike, and the scientific scenes were more convincing—rereading them in adulthood, I got the sense that the author had actually been in a scientific research organization at some time in his life.

From Robert Heinlein's letters, it appears that he originally envisioned Rocket Ship 'Galileo' as the first of a similar series, in which later volumes would have taken his young heroes to Mars, to the asteroids, and then had them go into business. I can't imagine this would have been as good as the books he actually wrote, or as lasting a success, but I kind of regret not having been able to read them back then.

(Curiously, the first Rick Brant novel, The Rocket's Shadow, also featured an atomic-powered moon rocket—more realistically than Heinlein's, an unmanned probe rather than a crewed vessel, though on the other hand it was launched not from the New Mexico desert but from a small island off the coast of New Jersey. Not much worry about radioactive contamination back then!)

I'm going to read it for (1) me and (2) for a possible spot in my lecture on the Millennials in my consumer behavior class. Thanks!