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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.
Back when I was a kid mad scientists meant chemistry and rockets... Oh how I aspired to be one, little did I know there wasn't that much in store for a geek ^_^
PS-FP.
The books are set in the early 60's before Bhopal, Three Mile Island, and Agent Orange rained on the big Science parade.
When exactly were these good old days. It wasn't so great before. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Thalidomide, rampant use of nasopharyngeal radium for all kinds of bogus reasons.
And back when machinery was accessible, before integrated circuits, when it was possible to take devices apart, understand them and modify them.
Just to nitpick, note that "Bhopal" is correct if you're talking about public reaction to technology, not about any real consequences. It's not as if catastrophic toxic disasters are a new thing, but the attitude towards the cost and benefits involved changed dramatically.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
I don't think that "Kerplop" will have the latest batch of 8-12 yr old boys out doing "science" instead of trying to be wizards, but that's probably because our "post-post-modern" culture is more attuned to angels & witches than it is to the scientific method. I don't blame it on Bhopal, Three Mile Island, or Agent Orange, though. I blame it on LSD, fake mysticism & "I'm OK, You're OK."
/least mystical wizards/ to ever appear throughout history. Now, I think there are all kinds of things wrong with "post-post-modern culture", I'm with you here, but honestly! Hogwarts has more to do with a rational, reasoned approach to problem-solving than most things I've seen lately. Just no mini-subs. ::misses the mini-sub::
Yeah, but the thing you're missing is that Rowling's presented probably the
They also had 12 ounce GLASS bottles of coke back then. That made it a tad harder to get fat by sucking down 6 liters worth of cola in a day.
And if you lived in a huge metro area, you might get up to 6-7 whopping channels of TV, on which the programming was pretty lame. If you lived in the sticks you could still get those 6-7 channels, but only with a huge antenna that likely had the motor burned out 10 years ago requiring someone to go up on the roof and turn it while someone on the ground yelled up to say if it was better or worse.
Candy flavings were still not too good in the 70s, but you learned to love it because the butter/bacon/whatever fat overwhelem the turpentine aromas of an immature artifical flavoring technology.
And don't forget, there was the sweet and poisonous aroma of leaded gas. On bitter cold mornings you could see that evil grey everywhere.
Ah yes, TV sucked, so kids ran amok trying to entertain themselves. Cola was flavored with cane sugar produced by neer slave labor, now its full of corn sugar that doesn't taste so good an is as addictive, if not more, than heroin. And the nation simply believed that vietnam was a fluke, and wasn't a trend of sending troops to rotting cesspools worldwide for no good reason. Drugs were something that only low born gutter scum used, and kids looked forward to when they could be cool and start smoking, drinking, and getting laid. Playboy was "hardcore" porn. The term "fisting" would be unknown to the masses until the 80s, and even not then really.
Now, kids learn even before they enter school that the world is a cesspool, and if they are lucky they'll get enough of an education from these union protected losers "teaching" in school that they'll be able to spell and read well enough that they can get real info off the internet educational sights. And then, if they know the right people, and work like a slave they'll find a more or less dry part of the cesspool to exist in. And all their hard work will go into taxes to support the masses of baby boomers crying for more bread and circuses in their retirement years, and the welfare cesspits breeding subhuman scum who dream of becomming rap stars and crack dealers.
But hey, who wouldn't find motivation in a future like that ?
I love the comment, "[the kids] weren't feeling good about it".
Since when do kids have to feel good the WHOLE DAMN TIME?! This is the sort of ridiculous approach that leads to overprescription of Ritalin and other emotionally-affective medication, and the whole "think of the children" movement.
Why don't we just wrap 'em up in plastic, stick a feeding tube in one end, an elimination tube in the other, and leave 'em to hang for the rest of their lives? (Hey, didn't I see a movie about that?)
I haven't read these books, but I've done my fair share of back yard demolitions. I think that anything that encourages children to do the same (responsibly and from the standpoint of intellectual curiosity) is admirable. Sure you have to show some common sense around dangerous substances, but you're not going to learn any if you're sheltered by adults your whole life.
I think that if kids today are any less adventurous than the kids of the fifties it's because their parents encourage them to be. Of course no father wants his son to be in any danger. My father's solution was to buy me a pair of safety goggles, some work gloves, and sit down with me to demonstrate the correct, safe, responsible way to light a bonfire with a zipline, 10 gallons of gasoline, and a model rocket.
Sure, not every parent will go to that extreme, but how about a middle ground? Start with safety tips and responsibility discussions while playing with sparklers and firecrackers on the 4th of July. Quality time with the kids plus valuable lessons that they can see demonstrated by an authority figure.
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I think everyone here can agree that the entire club would be open source coders today...
I can see it now: "Hey gang, let's write a PERL script to figure out what landed in the lake!"
So, the contention is that there is no longer any need for chemists or physicists or anything other than programmers in order to explore science? Either that or all open source code monkeys are also accomplished in the other fields.
Methinks you take the uberness of your geekiness too seriously.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
>
> How did it go?
"Nearly set fire to his Dad's garage". I'd say he did pretty well!
(I grew up on these stories too. My folks gave 'em to me. My folks also supervized me - I now realize they were close enough to intervene if I screwed up, but from far enough away that, at the time, I didn't think they were watching. Good on them, I say. Techniques like that turned me on to science, which turned me on to computers, which turned into a fantastic career and hobby. But I do miss the homebrew fireworks. Dad, thanks for that 1950s-era book of chemistry experiments... and for bringing back some of the chemicals they stopped putting in chemistry sets. ;-)
(Side note: Today's chemistry sets are even worse. I think "dissolve sugar" and "mix vinegar and baking soda, look at foam" are about all that's left. How the hell are you supposed to get an 8-year-old interested in science with that?!?! Fer chrissakes, you don't have to give 'em thermite, but at least let 'em detect the friggin' humidity with cobalt chloride!)
I love the comment, "[the kids] weren't feeling good about it".
No shit.
Whatever happened to feeling good about yourself because you accomplished something, not because conditions were set up from the beginning to guarantee your success?
You know, I never felt that good after playing kickball in elementary. Then again, a lot of my peers that felt great after kickball didn't feel so good once they got their math tests back. So god damn what? Should we have eliminated the competition from the kickball games, and not actually corrected the math tests?
No, damnit. You don't eliminate the possibilty of success and failure; you find out what the kid is good at so they can feel good about that, and you help them get better at what they aren't good at so they can feel good about that, too.
Learning how to cope with failure and the idea that you aren't going to be great (or even competent) at everything you do is a crucial thing for kids to learn before they turn ten, much less enter the real world.
Oh yeah, and my friends and I would play versions of tag that allowed for you to be smarter by having strategicly placed "safe" spots, and the smartest yet slowest of us could be infuriatingly hard to catch. Are the adults too stupid to think of this kind of thing? Yes.
The enemies of Democracy are
I was a little surprised that no one has mentioned the Alvin Fernald series by Clifford B. Hicks (TWO of which were made into Disney versions, years apart.) Wonderful "boy inventions," funny situations and scary climaxes. Probably contemporaneous with the Brinley books. They had a lot of good messages for kids too. "Superweasel" dealt with pollution (imagine climbing the smokestack of the nearest big corporate polluter to plug it with a tarpaulin!) I showed it to my fifth grade teacher in 1978 and he promptly spent a few weeks reading it aloud to the entire class, and we did a school wide environmental awareness project based on it.
Alvin's Secret Code deals with cryptography. Hicks is careful to mention the dark side of war and not overly romanticise the subject: "Spying is a dirty business," the retired cryptographer tells Alvin in response to Alvin's awe over his experiences.
The rest of the Alvin Fernald series maintains a high degree of quality with these and other themes.
The Danny Dunn series was great. My favorite, "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" deals with his friend Professor Bullfinch's new computer. Danny programs the computer to do his homework and later feels guilty about cheating. But the professor points out that Danny's efforts to program the computer are proof in themselves that he has learned the concepts just as thoroughly, if not more so, than if he'd done things "by hand."
Then there's the "Henry Reed" series by Keith Robertson. Foreign service brat Henry has lived abroad his whole life, and comes to Grover's Corner, New Jersey (no Red Lectroids here, it's Grover's Corner, not Grover's Mill) to spend summers with his uncle and aunt, and neighbor Margaret Glass. Lots of great kid gadget tinkering, and a launch of a silage-bag helium balloon with a timed pigeon release experiment that goes wrong when Henry's beagle, Agony, jumps into the gondola. In another scene, Henry and Margaret try "dowsing" or "water witching," improvise a drill from a wagon axle, and strike oil!
These books are excellent inspirers of fantasy play for children of all ages. A kid who reads these kinds of things should learn above all that with a healthy interest in the world around one, it is possible never to be bored. They're also an important source of scientifically-minded literary heroes for young readers working their way up to Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.
What I got out of this period in my reading life: just because your playmates look at you funny when you invent something or discuss science doesn't mean that you're the only person who could conceive of doing science as a kid.
"Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world." -- R. P. Feynman, on A. S. Eddington