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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.
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...
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.
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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.
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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.
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!
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)
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.
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?
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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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
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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
'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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