Spaceburgers

By the moons of Arcturus! It’s an article about space cadet books! Strap yourself into an acceleration chair, swing your star-scope into position, and prepare to blast off for adventure!!

And, yes, I know that Arcturus is a star and therefore doesn’t have moons.

But who cares? Space cadet novels make up a teeny-tiny mini-sub-genre of science fiction, but loom inappropriately large in the minds of baby-boomers such as myself who were pop-eyed observers of the nascent space age of the 1950s and early 1960s. Oh, space was fun in those days. Sure, it was airless and filled with radiation and really, really big, but what did that matter when you had your sleek nuclear-powered rocket ship that could swoosh you to Titan in a few days? What were the difficulties of space travel when a patrol cruiser like the Polaris could be skippered by a wholesome All-American guy only a few years older than yourself, with the help of his (equally wholesome) teenaged pals?

Of course the silly things were unabashed McCarthy-era American boosterism. The fabulous Patrol brought peace to the solar system and the galaxy beyond; no hint here of Anglo-American imperialism. Oh, no: this was the US-of-A as absolute good guy, even if the US-of-A had been morphed (barely) into the Solar Alliance, protected by the Solar Guard and the Space Patrol.

I was eleven in 1965 and had come down with a nasty case of mononucleosis that had landed me bedridden for two summertime months, an eternity for a little kid. My time was spent reading, mostly, and listening to records. Among the books I polished off were the "Tom Corbett" space cadet books, a series of boy-books put out by Grosset & Dunlap, written by hacks under the pseudonum "Carey Rockwell", much like the the nameless drudges who wrote as "Victor Appleton, Jr." (Tom Swift), "Laura Lee Hope" (The Bobbsey Twins), and "Laura Keene" (Nancy Drew). I didn’t know that the Tom Corbett books were based on an incredibly flimsy TV series from the early 1950s, itself a blatant ripoff of Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novel "Space Cadet" and the Buck Rogers comic strips and movies of the 1930s-40s. The rocket-ship-and-blaster world of the space cadet was new to me, and that’s all that mattered.

So I lived in the Patrol for a while, picking up some basic science along with a lot of nonsense. I loved those books and must have read each novel in the series about ten times each. Not too long ago, I became curious about them and started looking around, and found them rather easily—now public domain, not only are they on Project Gutenberg, but Amazon carries the entire set of seven novels as a 99¢ Kindle book.

A re-reading of the set, forty-plus years after the fact, has been fun, but of course I’ve noticed stuff that slipped right past me as a wide-eyed eleven-year-old.

Sexism and Racism Triumphant

I had not noticed that the Patrol was a closed-door boy’s club. Note the first appearance of the sole woman in the Patrol:

I need say little about the racism except to point out that there are no Asians, blacks, hindus, muslims, etc. Bunch o’ white boys, all vaguely Christian. Hell, I don’t think they even had Jews. And the villains? People with funny, un-American names.

Homoeroticism Unbound

Zut alors, these things are homoerotic. I can’t believe that I never noticed, even at the tender age of eleven. Or maybe I did; after all, I read them practically down to sawdust.

If this were a pornie novel, we would all know what was going to happen next.

Tom, Astro, and Roger seem to spend an inordinate amount of time running around shirtless, in shorts, as they thrust those ramrod-straight rockets of theirs into the sky. The illustrator seems to have picked up on the subliminal message; my my, what a collection of firm buttocks, bulging crotches, and well-muscled thighs. Man, those Space Patrol uniforms were tight.

And then, there are those moments when buff-blond Roger and tall, muscular Astro (originally enemies) make up and become friends, as their eyes shine softly at each other…

Of Alfie Higgins, the super-genius twink who always speaks formally, kinda girlie, but all the guys just love him anyway…

Or when our heroes are obliged to knuckle under the near-sadistic demands of Admiral Bull "Blast-Off" Connell…

Weird Science

Some of the troublesome science is nothing more than a product of the times. Mars is presented as a desert world (fair enough) but flat as a pancake, with canals, and blistering high temperatures. Venus is the obligatory jungle planet, teeming with primitive dinosaur-ish life. Neither is true to our current knowledge, but that’s the 1950s for you.

However, I couldn’t keep from noticing that the books treat leaving a planet’s atmosphere as being synonymous with "escaping from the pull of gravity." Ooops…and this from a series which claims Willy Ley as a scientific advisor. Apparently he didn’t advise very much.

In Short

Stock characters, stock villains, stock situations, stock writing. Hardly anything original about them, but to a bedridden eleven-year-old, they were gateways to another world. Maybe they haven’t aged any better than I have, but I remain grateful to them nonetheless. Somewhere inside me, to this day, there remains an alternate universe of the Solar Guard, the Space Patrol, the Academy, Atom City, and the nuclear patrol cruiser Polaris manned by Tom Corbett as captain, Roger Manning as astrogator, and Astro (no last name) down on the power deck, stripped to the waist and fondling his big, bulging atomic engines.

But one question remains forever and agonizingly unanswered.

And therein lies the mystery. How do you make a spaceburger??