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The Big Kerplop
This novel isn't really new, although it is for all practical purposes. The author, Bertrand Brinley, had much success with the collections of short stories about the seven boys who dreamed of being scientists one day. The short stories continued to stay in print and even seemed to inspire a hack Disney adaptation, but only rumors about The Big Kerplop circulated on the Internet. When the copies of The Big Kerplop would trade on Ebay, they often closed at prices in the hundreds of dollars. Free markets can't ignore messages like that and the Purple House Press purchased the rights and relaunched the books.
It's easy for a Slashdot reader to understand how the stories could command such affection. The boys in the stories live in the netherworld between capability and responsibility. (Enjoy it if you're still there.) They have ham radio sets, fishing boats, weather balloons, and plenty of other gadgets to put to use in tweaking the noses of their buffoonish elders and only a few chores to get in the way.
The books are set in the early 60's before Bhopal, Three Mile Island, and Agent Orange rained on the big Science parade. Brinley worked for Lockheed and Martin during one of the the most romantic periods in aviation history, save perhaps the early days of the Wright Brothers. The books are infused with a certainty that rational thought guided by the scientific method and salted with a bit of pluck and wit could solve any problem. I think everyone here can agree that the entire club would be open source coders today, although it's not clear if they would embrace the BSD or GPL license. It may not even be stretching things to say that groups who wrote and distributed DeCSS are working through the same themes as the Mad Scientist Club, albeit on a global scale.
The novel is prequel to the collection of short stories that tells the backstory of how the boys found each other and discovered how a firm devotion to scientific principles could be put to work showing up the grownups. As they say on Fark, hilarity ensued many times.
The earlier short stories took up only 20-30 pages apiece, but this novel stretches to more than 200 pages, making it an entirely different animal. The characters are better drawn, the scenes are set with more than a sentence or two, and the plot twists back upon itself a few times. It's a leisurely read that makes the earlier stories seem a bit cartoonish or slapstick. This sophistication is a pleasure for me to read at my technically grownup age, but it may be why the novel didn't gain the same traction as the short stories. The laughs are driven more by character and dialog than by the setting and action. The short stories are basically set pieces, but the novel is more of a study in character. That's good for anyone who grew up loving the books, but it may mean that the current crop of 8-12 year old boys should wait a year or two before diving in.
The length of the novel also gives Brinley more room to flesh out the adults and let them play more than rubes to the Mad Scientists' schemes. The town's politicians are still a bit overstuffed, but Colonel March, the commander of the local Air Force base, is hardly a foil or a nemisis. Constable Billy Dahr, though, is still around to be the goat.
I suppose I should say something about the story. The Club, or at least the early core of what would become the Club, is out fishing on Strawberry Lake when a fleet of B52s flies over. Something makes a big kerplop in the lake and the Club spends the rest of the book saving the day, defying their elders and deploying some cool gadgets and the scientific method. This is a deeper, richer and very satisfying return for the characters.
Some of these tricks could get you some scars I guess but that's not the worst future awaiting a young reader. First, chicks dig scars -- although that theorem lies well outside of the scope of this book. Second, this may be the adult in me, but kids today seem fatter, lazier, and more hogtied than ever before. Yes, these words will haunt me when my children get bigger, but I think that Brinley hits the sweet spot between obedience and irreverence. Forethought and care save the day in these books, not caprice and whim. The characters are neither insolent nor cowed by authority. The important thing to remember is that the scientific method celebrated by the books does not suggest replacing a few candles with a burning pie plate filled with gasoline. At least not without first doing a bit of research on the safest way to ensure all of the energy turns into hot air.
You can purchase The Big Kerplop from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. Peter Wayner is the author of several dangerous and incendiary books like Disappearing Cryptography and Translucent Databases . Don't burn them without standing at a safe distance.
It seems almost obligatory that a review of a book called The Big Kerplop would have to reference Fark?
"Darwin Awards Club" is more like it.
Trolling is a art,
Junior Scientist: Observe as the addition of the oxidizer to the fuel causes an exothermic reaction.
Drunken Redneck: Hey y'all! Watch this! It'll be a hoot!
It's all fun and games until someone gets mutilated... or pregnant.
/. No chance of pregnancy here. Whew!
Wait, this is
10,000 fire balloons across the country take flight c/o Slashdot. I can't even imagine how many forest fires, UFO sightings, and general mayhem incidents this will cause. I'm going to build mine now. :)
It's because we no longer have to walk 3 miles to school uphill both ways anymore.
sounds like a training manual for geek johnny knoxvilles
C:\earth\humans\del *.m0ronz
How very careless of the /. editors to post an article carrying dangerous references like this without any disclaimer or warnings.
Going by the average mindset of the female-starved crowd here, I thought it best to post a disclaimer, before somebody seriously injures him/herself.
The theorem quoted herein is pure hypothesis. We can and will not confirm the above fact about chicks. Nor are we responsible for any damage to life, limb or property arising out of attempts to prove the same. If you kill yourself, you alone are responsible for it
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
you do not talk about mad scientist club!
It's true. Chicks dig scars. Since scars help you to determine the guys who are more accident prone, they're an ideal way to determine if a guy will make a good choice for a Starter Husband.
You don't want the first one to last TOO long since you'll be making most of your uneducated mistakes with him, so guys with scars are an excellent choice. Plus, they're more likely to die in some tragic, yet totally accidental, way that will be ideal for the huge insurance policies she's no doubt taken out him.
My wife tells the story of how her brother made a flaming balloon once when they were kids. Instead of using a candle, he used a can of Sterno. Well, it turned out that the balloon didn't quite have enough lift to get the can over the wooden fence at the side of their yard, so the balloon tipped the can on its side and dragged along the fence, spilling flaming jelly all over the tinder-dry fence. Their mom came home to find the fire department putting out the fence and yard. Man, that sounds like it was fun.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
Alas, I fear it may already be too late. Can we realistically expect that society will allow "children" to perform dangerous experiments when "[a] Santa Monica elementary school has banned the game of tag, once synonymous with youth and innocence, because they say it creates self-esteem issues among weaker and slower children."
Nothing will boost the self-esteem of slower/weaker children faster than a pie tin full of gasoline.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
As a young teen I remember how excite I was learnign a formula for dry rocket fuel. Basically gun powder.
:-)
I had a blast mixing this stuff and lighting it in my backyard.
One day I decided to raid my chemistry set and adding random chemicals to the mix to see what would happen.
I remember learning how volatile sodium and potassium was so I mixed every chemical I had with these chemicals into the mix. Including NaCl. Damn fun times.
But let me also say because of the exlosion that happened I am very glad I am still here today.
Bet this
2) Bones heal
3) Pain is Temporary
4) Glory lasts forever.
Google will tell you whoe uttered these four Lemmas of BMX/Skater wisdom.
My first parsing of your post went something like this:
So you drew designs on the ground with sugar water... and when you'd attracted enough ants, you broke out the 4.5" Newtonian and neutralized the ants. Viola! Plenty of formic acid! :)
Seriously - your parents sound like mine. Close enough supervision that if you get in over your head, they could bail you out -- but that up until that point, they could trust you, because they also taught you how to not get in over your head. Bravo. (And if you breed, do likewise with your offspring. We've got enough pop stars and lawyers. The world needs scientists, too.)
Are we sure this book is not about plumbing?
They were showing off their scientific writing skills here.
"Dinky Poore and Henry managed to get it out, but that's another story" is, of course, equivalent to "sub-waterfall extraction is trivial and left as an exercise to the reader."
'course, when I was a boy, wheelie bins didn't exist, so we had to trawl around the cheap supermarkets for the really cheap (ie: really thin and light) regular sized bins. Nowadays, 300+litre lightweight garbage bags can be had as cheap as ten for a dollar. Today's kids get it easy. We had to walk five miles to the shop, and carry the bags back on our shoulders, uphill both ways
My brother learned garbage bag hot air ballooning by another means: The Really Cool Science Teacher method. As he tells it, they were shown how to make the balloons, but were instructed that they must fly them tethered, "for safety reasons". The teacher gave them nylon fishing line to tether the balloons with, and showed them how to tie it nice and tight to the centre of the frame, right beside the petrol-soaked rag....
Apparently the Really Cool Teacher even pretended to be surprised when the tether burned through ;-)
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