Ah, old SF....

[flick]

I’m re-reading the Heinlein Juveniles, and it’s very interesting which bits make me splutter at the implausibility and which just make me go “ah, old SF...".

Going to the Moon in a home-welded ship and meeting Nazis there? Human-safe atmosphere on Venus? Canals and Martians on Mars? Making enough oxygen for three or four people with a couple of dozen rhubarb plants? Sure!

But ruins of cities on the moon? The asteroid belt being the remains of a destroys planet? Ludicrously short radiation-decay-to-safe times? Oh, come on!

(I do wonder why rhubarb, though.)

Comments

[damerell]

I read a Jack Williamson where the survivors of a sunken transport (trapped in an air bubble belowdecks) kludge up a bicycle dynamo arrangement so they can drive lightbulbs (they are, conveniently, trapped in a bit of the cargo hold with all the things they might want) so they can grow plants for oxygen and food. If you don't believe in thermodynamics, it doesn't exist...

[flick]

Oh, that's marvellous!

[damerell]

I'm an idiot, it's James White, The Watch Below, 1966 - not Williamson at all.

It is quite a fun slim volume otherwise, like The Martian but without the science and with a bit of a daft wrinkle at the end where their grandchildren (once everyone on the original wreck is dead and the water level is starting to rise and the supply of bulbs run out and generally they are doomed) are just what we need to talk to the aliens with their peculiar mindset, which seems to be in there only to make it into a science fiction novel.

I'm not really selling it, but I did enjoy it. Being White, he avoids using conflict as a plot device (I know this is odd to say when they're on a transport sunk in the war, but that happens on page 1 and then everyone cooperates), and it is from back when a novel didn't have to be two inches thick so the catastrophe happens, they panic, they solve their problems, they settle down for the long haul, we see their descendants try and cope with doom, wrinkle, the end. There aren't an extra 256 pages of padding.