Fly Me to the Moon

As I type this, a NASA probe with the ungainly name of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is circling our Moon, its mission to map the virtually unknown lunar poles. The lunar survey by the LRO and its piggyback companion, a water-seeking satellite called LCROSS, will provide crucial data for the planned NASA mission to return humans to the Moon by 2020. LRO and LCROSS are looking for suitable places for astronauts not merely to land, but to stay awhile.

This chunky little satellite (which bears more than a passing resemblance to Wall-E) mapping our nearest neighbor in space got me thinking about Moon maps and pre-space age depictions of the Moon, and eventually led me to this lovely thing, drawn by Englishman Thomas Harriott in July 1609. It is having its 400th birthday next month. Think about that, and the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing becomes a little extra special.



So in honor of our celestial cartographers, both mechanical and human, here is a list of some moon-related reads, all predating the Apollo 11 landing. Some of these suggestions are courtesy Patricia Altner’s comprehensive online bibliography of the Moon in science fiction. She was happy to share her recommendations with Glass Salamander.

"My enjoyment of science fiction began such a long time ago that SF was considered to be only of interest to boys! In those olden days the idea of going to the moon was a distant dream. Only science fiction writers could make it seem real. For me the stories of Robert A. Heinlein were the best-- Have Spacesuit Will Travel; The Man Who Sold the Moon; Rocket Ship Galileo --all feature the Moon. Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon is a classic for all ages as is H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon."

Altner also recommends Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke. "Written in 1951, it describes a future very much like the one we live in now." Not intended for kids, she thinks, but right for today's more sophisticated YA reader.

To that list, I'd add these favorites:

Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin: Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. London: Methuen, 1959.



Lofting, Hugh. Doctor Dolittle in the Moon.J.B. Lippincott 1928. For fans of Godzilla and Mothra, this late entry in the Dolittle series of books features the good doctor traveling by a giant lunar moth.



And I might have to find a copy of this gem by William Dixon Bell. The Moon Colony. It apparently features early depictions of terraforming and, as a special bonus, space pirates. I don't know if those are the gentlemen on the giant grasshoppers, but I would love to find out.

The Door in the Hill, Part One

This has always and continues to puzzle me: If I am such an agnostic, why do I like certain stories about angels? And if I am such a good skeptic, why do I love to read and write about Faerie?

This has been on my mind since I recently read Chris Adrian’s “A Tiny Feast” in the New Yorker, in which Oberon and Titania’s stolen human child is dying of leukemia in a pediatric hospital in San Francisco. Adrian does Faerie very well. This is the description of the Faerie procession from the hospital to their home under the hill. The Faeries in the boy’s hospital room have been mostly invisible until their grief reveals their true otherworldly nature as they troop through the antiseptic corridors and down the elevator and outside the hospital, bearing the body of the changeling.

There was no disguise left to cover them. People saw them for what they were, a hundred and two faeries and a dead boy proceeding down the hall with harps and flutes, crowded in the service elevator with fiddles and lutes, marching out of the hospital with drums. Mortals gaped. Dogs barked. Cats danced on their hind feet, and birds followed them by the dozens, hopping along and cocking their heads from side to side. It was early afternoon. The fog was breaking against the side of the hill, leaving Buena Vista Park brilliantly sunny. They passed through the ordinary trees of the park, and then into the extraordinary trees of their own realm, and came to the door in the hill, and passed through that as well.

As it happens, Adrian is a pediatric oncoloist and student of divinity as well as a fantasy novelist, and his story is full of very closely observed medical detail about the running of the hospital and the details of the boy's chemotherapy, while at the same time chock full of spectacularly imagined, and very real, touches of Faerie. My favorite of these is probably the boy's blanket, Beastie, which is alive.

Adrian's story got thinking, immersed as I am currently in various nonfiction science projects, what it is about this kind of thing attracts me (though not so far to the point of dressing in velvet capes and sporting Elvish tattoos at Cons). I am actually pretty allergic to angel and fairy and dragon schlock. But the fact remains I have published five fantasy novels, three of them written while I was working full time as a science editor.

The angel part is easier to explain. When my childhood faith eroded away to agnosticism, the angels remained. My old UCC beliefs are there, somewhere, like my spiritual appendix, but I have reached a point in my trajectory of belief where I can no longer tell people in good conscience that I am keeping them in my prayers. I can look up into the Milky Way, spread across the desert sky in Utah, and feel wonder and awe and mystery, but it falls short of a view of God that can mesh with everything I accept about how life on Earth came to be, or account for the problem of evil. I Just Don’t Know. And I frankly never saw this not-knowing thing coming.

Reconciling my love of science and fantasy, and my double life as a science editor and fantasy writer, has always been harder, for some reason. But I’ve always like my fantasy grounded with close observation of the natural world and the quotidian details: Merlin’s newspaper. I’m thinking here of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin (her changeling story, “The One and the Other,” is terrific and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, E. Nesbit’s “The Deliverers of Their Country,” and Nancy Willard’s essays in The Angel in the Parlor. It’s probably why I care so much more about the contents of Bilbo Baggins’s larder than I do what’s actually being said at the Council of Elrond. I like my fantasy psychologically real and grounded, like fulgerites, those casts of fused sand that lightning sometimes leaves behind in the ground: solid evidence of the ethereal. I like the way Chris Adrian walks me through the ordinary trees of the park, through the extraordinary trees of his realm, until I somehow find myself standing with a hand on the doorknob of a door in a hill, not quite sure how I got there, but glad I came.

For reasons I still don’t understand, science and fantasy are for me both powerful ways of explaining experience and revealing the unseen, and they are daily practices that both rely on the action of my imagination: my ability to see in my mind something I cannot see with my eyes. And maybe I will never explain it to myself any better than that.

(The image is Hume Nisbet's 1908 watercolor, The Fairy Falls.)

The World of John Bellairs

This blog is a bit like a secretary desk into which bills and correspondence have been stuffed willy nilly…because of neglect I keep reaching into an overflowing pigeonhole and pulling stuff out only to go, yikes, I meant to deal with that months ago. Come to think of it, that kind of describes my brain.

Anyway.

One of the topics I see I meant to get to back last fall was the work of John Bellairs. I somehow missed these in my own adolescence, although I did give some to my nephew when he was in grade school (at least partly because of the oh-so-cool Edward Gorey covers). Last fall the Budza, then eight, and I started reading them as part of the evening story ritual, which involves about an hour of reading aloud with me, and telling stories out loud with my husband. So far we’ve read five mysteries about Johnny Dixon: The Chessmen of Doom (1989), The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt (1983), The Eyes of the Killer Robot (1986), The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, and The Curse of the Blue Figurine (1983) as well as one mystery starring Anthony Monday, The Lamp from the Warlock’s Tomb (1988). We aren’t as enamoured by the Lewis Barnavelt ones. For my part, the Dixons are the best, and it’s completely because of the relationship between Johnny and his neighbor and mentor and best friend, Roderick Childermass.

Could anyone invent a character like Professor Childermass now, or a relationship like the one he has with teenaged Johnny? Imagine trying to pitch a novel for this age range (older middle-grade to YA) in which a kind of shy, lonely boy is allowed to go off for the weekend in the company of his somewhat elderly bachelor neighbor, who loves to have Johnny over to his house to play chess and who has hobby baking cakes. Can’t quite see it? It’s why these books are something of a miracle. Childermass throws tantrums. He smokes. He is socially awkward. And he loves Johnny dearly. All the family relationships and friendships are beautifully rendered, but not in a manner that ever gets in the way of the really good shivery gothic storytelling. They are not really mysteries and not really horror, but a category I think of as supernatural and psychological suspense. And no one, in my book, has done it quite as well as Bellairs, with the same humor and humanity. The portraits of flawed adults remind me of Louise Fitzhugh's sequel to Harriet the Spy, The Long Secret, which I think is a better book. It cast quite a spell on me when I was 10 or 11, because it showed adults I recognized from the rather odd hothouse childhood of embassy life in the tropics.

Some of the books remain in print, and can be found new, but this is one of those cases where I really like to find a not too worn copy and give it a home. Bellairs mysteries are something that are easy to find in a used bookstore just about anywhere, and he was prolific enough that you can almost always find one you haven’t read yet, and if you're lucky, two or even three. And the there are more being written all the time as Brad Strickland continues to write about the Bellairs characters. I have yet to read one of the new ones, to judge how well he pulls it off, but my hopes are high.

Bellairs has a fervent following online. A good place to start is www.Bellairsia.com.

Let's Get Lost

I have been leading the creative writing after-school club at my son's elementary school. A talented group of three boys and four girls, 4th through 6th grades. I started them off writing shipwreck diaries, and they are having a great time with the diary format and making maps of their islands and other kinds of undiscovered countries. I told them a little about Alexander Selkirk, the supposed inspiration for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. There doesn't seem to be a good kids' book about Selkirk, and if the information available online is only half true, it's an amazing oversight. I also learned something I think I'd known and forgotten, that "Swiss Family Robinson" isn't about a Swiss family named Robinson at all, but rather "robinson" was a noun describing a genre of adventure novel that became extremely popular the wake of the success of Robinson Crusoe.

At the same time, my third grader has gotten deeply into the Discovery TV series Treasure Quest, about the commercial marine archaeology/salvage company Odyssey Marine Exploration, a commercial shipwreck salvage company. We are all glued to the set watching the ROV Zeus explore various wrecked passenger ships, U-boats, and steamboats. Will they find gold? Low-alpha lead bars worth more than gold? Skeletons?

It prompted my son to ask for a book he's had for a while and never really gotten into, Duncan Cameron's Shipwreck Detective. The book had been a hit with a friend's son who was laid up with a long recuperation, but Budza had never really gotten into it. Now is the perfect time. It's one of those marvels of paper engineering, with lots of bits and pieces to take out and examine, a la The Jolly Postman or Griffin & Sabine, and now used to great success in the Ologies series from Candlewick. This one comes with a removable compass and a blank diving log. When we're done with Shipwreck Detective, I will try him on some of the classic survival in the wildnerness stories. The one I remember reading was Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain, but more recently there had been Gary Paulsen's gripping Hatchet (not for the faint of heart) and Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo. Substitute for "shipwreck" any misadeventure that can leave the hero stranded in a strange place and you have the makings of a good robinson. Or should we start a campaign to call them selkirks?

Will I be able to coax Budza to scuba lessons at our local dive shop? He will need to learn to swim, first. I the meantime, we can enjoy the deep vicariously. Or build our own ROV.

If exploring by ROV floats your own boat, don't miss the following blogs:
Karen Romano Young's fabulous ocean science blog, Bubble and Squeak
The "live dive" blog over at National Geographic's Shipwreck Central
The maritime archaeology blog at from the Underwater Blogger at the Museum of Underwater Archaeology

Birdsong and Books

I am listening to a radio broadcast of Messiaen’s birdsongs set to music, and thinking of working at the Hampshire Typothetae in Northampton, Massachusetts, round about 1980. It reminded me of listening to the Morning Pro Musica radio broadcasts of the late, great Robert J. Lurtsema, which always began with a very long recording of natural birdsong. I remember listening to Robert J’s best gravelly baritone introducing Ravi Shankar ragas while snow fell outside the printing studio and we all (printmaker Barry Moser, poet Chase Twitchell, master printer Harold McGrath) drank coffee and played Pitch. Magical company and magical times for a 19-year-old Smith College sophomore. I mostly distributed type (de-composed the type and put it away), swept the floors, and made coffee --and felt very, very lucky to be there.

Moser was working then finishing his Pennyroyal Press edition of Alice in Wonderland and beginning work on Moby Dick. I was interning at the Typothetae one or twice a week, as I recall, and working for Ruth Mortimer in the Smith College Rare Book room. All those rare books and letterpress arcana worked their way in to the books of my Spellkey fantasies, especially the final book The Books of the Keepers.

Time Lords

Has anyone else noticed some parallels between the Old Ones in Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising sequence and the Time Lords of the Doctor Who universe? The connection came to me listening to the audiobook of Silver on the Tree with the Budza. I could quite happily listen to Alex Jennings read the phone book.

My friends keep telling me I need an Intervention for my Doctor Who problem, which is really not a Doctor Who problem but a David Tennant problem. It's keeping me off the streets, true, but also keeping me away from other things I could and should be doing. But it feeds the Muse.

But in a completely different way than the Cooper does. I sink into her stories like a stone, always marveling at the command of language, the perfect pitch, the perfect marriage of closely observed family life on the one hand, and mind-boggling magical cosmology on the other. No one does supernatural scary quite like Susan Cooper, except possibly the late, great Martin Booth.

The Old Man in the Corner

This might not seem to have much to do with children's literature, except that I am always interested in finding mysteries digestible by the newish reader that don't necessarily feature amateur teen detectives (fine as those junior detectives are--I'll be posting soon about John Bellairs). I'm thinking here of books suitable for boys and girls, which a young mystery addict is ready to dip into the adult mystery canon--the tantalizing books in the adult section of the public library with either Sherlock Holmes in profile or a skull on the spine, to signal that murderous mayhem is inside. A fourth grader who starts with "The Speckled Band" or "The Hound of the Baskervilles" may find enough thrills to be motivated to work her or his way through some of the challenging vocabulary of some of the other stories, or even the novellas.

But after that, what other books from the adult section work for kids--holding their interest, accessible enough in terms of plot and dialogue, and appropriate in their presentation of adult themes? The modern day mystery is a PG-13 or R rated experprise. Will the safer G and PG mysteries of the first 50 years of the 20th century yield some gems that can be enjoyed by the middle grade reader?

By the time I was ten, I was borrowing my father's paperback editions of Agatha Christie. The two I still own are The Labors of Hecrules (1947) and The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960), now in print as Hercule Poirot's Christmas. This was around 1971, were living in Southeast Asia at the time, and my father would be on the balcony or the veranda, on a chaise lounge, in Bermuda shorts, with a drink going in an old fashioned glass, reading another mystery or possibly a spy novel by John Le Carre. Every now and then I get out the yellowed, battered paperbacks and enjoy them again. I also keep in the bedside table one or the other of the two volume complete Sherlock Holmes.

So I've downloaded from Librivox Baroness Orczy's The Old Man in the Corner, about the unnamed protangonist of the title, who relates the solutions to unsolved crimes to the young female journalist he meets in a teashop. These are probably too challenging for Budza (going on nine) but I bet they would be great for the 11 year old mystery enthusiast. I am just into the second story of the collection, but they rely heavily on all the turns of plot that have since become mystery tropes, but that Orczy, author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, originated. The Old Man in the Corner is widely considered to the first armchair detective, and while he has a very low index in the swashbuckle department, the puzzles themselves are intricate and devious.

There is a huge collection of old mysteries over at Project Gaslight--mysteries written between 1800 (!) and 1909. Probably the more stilted sytle, leisurely pacing, and Victorian vocabulary will take careful parental vetting to find stories that will grab and hold the young reader, but I think the effort will be well rewarded.