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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.
I was a huge fan of Encyclopedia Brown. Some time in the fourth grade I discovered the Mad Scientists Club when I came across one of the books in a used book store with a cover illustration by Leonard Shortall, the artist who did all the EB illustrations.
There was also a series of kid's mystery type books (along the lines of Encyclopedia Brown) about Hawkeye Collins, a kid who drew pictures of the scenes of crimes, thus spotting the clues and saving the day. It was pretty derivative of EB, but since I also loved drawing at that age they really appealed to me.
And speaking of Encyclopedia Brown and kid's geek adventure stories, one of my favorite books was Secret Agents Four, by Donald J Sobol (who wrote EB.) Ahh nostalgia. Kids these days all want to go to Hogwarts, but when I was a 11 I wanted to open a detective agency in my garage.
General Geekery
Dead on. My kids have more un-common sense than most of the neighbors because they see me do things that work out when I'm careful and see me hopping around on one foot, yelling "Yipes, Youch!, Eiieee!", when I'm not. Recently my 4 year old son decided to try a new climbing stunt on a jungle gym. He recognized that he had exceeded the height he had exerience with. Did that stop him? No! He said, "Daddy, I need a safety team!" Recognizing the relationship between prior experience, challenges and managing the risks of new experience is a major part of effective intelligence. I try never to stop my children, but always to get them to observe, estimate, plan and reflect on how close their estimates were to what happened when they tried.
This famous, or infamous, paperback describes how to safely build, fuel, and fly steel-cased rockets powered by zinc-sulfur mixtures. It's the sort of activity that the teens in Rocket Boys (AKA "October Sky") did.
Brinley doesn't pull punches. Doing things right, by-the-book, requires you to have several square miles of land, and sandbag bunkers for storage, fueling, launching, and observation. There's a big first aid section with instructions on dealing with belly wounds and nasty burns.
Its fascinating but sobering stuff; most readers will realize that they're better off with Estes and Aerotech stuff.
Stefan
I tried several experiments (and I don't even have kids, I just like to do this kind of stuff and I'm either too lazy or stupid to come up with my own stuff) and it's just fun to do... For us geeks, the site includes an argumantation of why a certain device works and how with the laws of physics and all...
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Since those books were written in the beginning of the 20th century, I doubt they were after your time. The "Brain" was a rather smart kid who quickly learned that he could take advantage of the other kids, using all kinds of classic con games to cheat them out of stuff. Apparently based on his real-life brother. A series definitity worth checking out.
I'll take the opportunity to tack Isaac Asimov's _Norby_ series (_Norby the Mixed-Up Robot_, _Norby's Other Secret_, etc. etc.) Yeah, the titles suck, but they were an absolute blast, are woefully out of print, and got me interested in science fiction. I actually noticed them because Boy's Life magazine did a serial comic of one of them.