Slashdot Mirror
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 that all the reviews that come to Slashdot are good. I'm sure people read books that they end up not liking. If you could let us know about them, we could avoid reading them.
I was just mentioning the 'geek' books which have fallen out of print, or out of favor, in the children's section at libraries. Seems maybe a few of these are being retrofitted and re-released.
For a while, Disney boosted Phil Nye the Science Guy, and there was a competing concept hitting TV at the same time, but these are science magazine formats. Many kids need more inspiration, often from personable fiction scenarios like these books offered.
[
I always wondered if they ever got that minisub out from inside that cave behind the waterfall. Arguably the largest-scale escapade in the books, especially considering how they got it in the first place, for about three dollars. Since they were going to use it to explore the bottom of the lake, maybe it plays a part in this book?
Anyway, these books were an inspiration for many early experiments involving batteries, wires, nails, motors, and light bulbs. I am sure they helped convert me from taking things apart, to wondering how things are put together.
...
And it did inspire me to try and build a hot air powered manned UFO.
The candle powered chinese lantern prank sounds kind of neat, except that if kids try to emulate it they run a real risk of starting serious fires, if their balloon comes down in dry grass or brush with the candle still lit.
As an aside: In WW2 the Japanese used high altitude baloons launched into the jetstream carrying an incendiary payload, which were expected to drift across the pacific and start forest fires across North America when they landed. A captured example sits on display in the Ottawa War museum.
My rights don't need management.
I meant Bill Nye, not 'Phil Nye,' discovered from his appearances on "Almost Live" in Seattle.
[
Wait, this is /. No chance of pregnancy here. Whew!
Dammit! Why didn't I know this 10 years ago when I got my GF pregnant. I could've just joined Slashdot and saved a bunch of time and money.
Oh wait, when was Slashdot started?
I worry about today's kids. How are they going to develop good instincts for self-preservation if they don't try some risky things? I grew up watching my elders work on big, dangerous machines in the shop, and working with big, dangerous animals in the corals. By watching, I learned what they respected, and learned a whole bunch of things to *not* do, like stupid handling of gasoline. So anyway, when I did my own risky stunts, personal safety (self-preservation) was part of the equation. (Elder: "Who took the welding hood??") How do today's kids learn that when we all have CRT-tans and it's a rare neighbor who has a welder, instead of a rare neighbor without one. Kids need to have the scope to do "experiments". But... kids need to internalize some important lessons first, in a safe way. How do we do that? My solution is to try to do as many projects with them as possible, role model safety, and keep the band-aids handy. I think of my townie cousins: Me: "Watch out! Electric fence." Him: "Really? Cool! OW! OW!! OW!!! Shit! Jeezus!" I don't want my daughter to be like that.
I understand the reviewer's concerns, and largely agree with them. 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."
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
They were a great read and I still chuckle thinking about them now. Speaking as someone who tried to make their own napalm (and nearly set fire to my Dad's garage) I totally approved of their adventures!
I think the best sign of how good these books are is that when I was a kid I wished the Mad Scientists Club was real and I could be a member....
It took Rowling a whole lot more than 200 pages to tell the latest Potter story & she already had the characters & setting in place.
Methinks I need to revisit the Mad Scientists Club of my youth...
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. <sigh> 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."
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
I had this teacher in the 3rd grade that used to read books from the "Encyclopedia Brown" and "The Great Brain" series to us. I enjoyed them so much that I nagged my parents to take me to the library so I could read the rest of the series. Growing up, these were some of my favorite books, and along with my favorite TV show "MacGyver" I had plenty of intelligent role models. When I read these books again as an adult, they do seem a bit corny, and in retrospect, there were a lot of inconsistencies with MacGyver (and some very preachy politics) but I can't help but think the authors' hearts were in the right place at least. Characters that rely on their wits and cunning to defeat their foes has always seemed far more interesting to me then the ones that just pull out a gun or a pipe wrench when adversity arises.
Who's to say how much exposure to these characters and stories shaped the way that I look at the world? Maybe I would have been the same without them, but I can't help but thinking that you are what you eat intellectually. I'm not making a case for games and TV poisoning the youth of the world, rather I think that teaching children to actually think about things may be one of the best lessons you can give, and one of the ways to do this, is show some examples of characters that do use thier brains.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Damn this is great! The Mad Scientist's Club was one of the best books I read as a kid.
I bought it through school and never regretted it.
One of the things I didn't know about the author is that he was one of the American officers to negotiate with the North Koreans, who were, and are, about the most obnoxious, lying, vicious chicken-shit bastards ever to be brought to the table. THAT must have shaken his faith in humanity.
He ALSO, in The Big Kerplop, (which was on a USENET book group some months ago) answered a question we had debated fiercely among the jr NCOs when I was in the Canadian Militia, which is 'How best to get a section across an open road?'
Turns out the best way is all at once in a rush as Henry Mulligan points out, it only gives them one chance to spot you.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
I vividly remember such a fake flying saucer incident that occurred in the SF Bay Area when I was a kid in the late 1960's.
A spectacular UFO story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle one day. Hundreds of people had spotted a small, glowing cylindrical spaceship floating slowly out over the bay. It was described as being about 9 feet long by 3 feet in diameter, like a large water heater. A drawing by an eyewitness even showed a small humanoid figure reclining at the controls inside.
The very next day there was a followup article in the Chronicle, in which a bunch of students admitted they had launched dozens of small balloons, made from dry cleaner bags and drinking straws and powered by birthday candles. What struck me was the certainty of the eyewitness reports and the details they gave of the size and nature of the craft and its pilot.
There was no "competing concept". What there was was Beakman, who did interesting projects and had a great sense of humor.
Then came along Bill Nye with the weight of Disney behind him, which outmarketed Beakman with a watered down science show with little real value, so bland that it made no impact on kids.
Bill Nye was the bastard that killed off any real interest in science because it pushed out all other forms of kid-oriented science media with bland watered down science of little significance.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley