Why send teens into space? They are the ideal astronaut candidates: They are less likely to grasp the inherent risks involved in space travel, so might be less terrified to know they are about to be launched into space by a rocket built by the lowest bidder. Also, if things don’t turn out well, losing a fifteen-year-old in the vast emptiness of space is arguably less costly than losing a seasoned, experienced adult.1
…or so the authorities in some SF settings would argue.
In our real world, space efforts are kneecapped by namby-pamby nanny-state-isms like safety and basic human decency. Not so science fiction creators, who have gleefully jumped on the story potential of TEENS…IN…SPACE.
Consider these five works about space-going teens.
Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein (1949)
Rocket fans Ross Jenkins, Art Mueller, and Maurice Abrams’ space travel ambitions seem doomed by their discovery of a supine body near their model rocket launch facility. Happily, Art’s uncle Don Cargraves is unconscious, not dead, and his condition is no fault of the teens. Rather than ending the teens’ rocket careers, Don recruits them to assist in building a real atomic rocket. As one does.
Despite various misadventures, some more suspicious than others, the team is successful. Since there’s no point in building a rocket one does not plan to use, the rocket ship Galileo sets off for the Moon with the quartet on board. There is one small problem: the saboteurs who plagued the project are waiting for the Americans on the Moon. Galileo may reach Earth’s satellite; it will not be returning.
Blast Off at Woomera by Hugh Walters (1957)
The discovery of domes on the Moon can mean only one thing. The lunar domes are clearly artificial; aliens are very unlikely; some terrestrial nation must have constructed the domes. Perhaps it was communists! It’s up to the Anglo-Australian space program to determine who built the domes and for what purpose.
There is one tiny hitch, which is that the largest rocket on hand is too small to accommodate an adult male. Fortuitously, Chris Godfrey is bright, enthusiastic about rockets, and only four foot eleven inches tall. He’s an ideal candidate for the job. Too bad the security measures intended to protect Godfrey instead make him a target for a determined Red saboteur.
Should Godfrey survive the launch and the subsequent trip to the Moon, he will receive a personal lesson in the fact that “very unlikely” is in no way equal to “impossible.”
Rocket Girls by Housuke Nojiri (1995, English translation 2010 by Joseph Reeder)
Unlike Blast Off at Woomera’s Anglo-Australian space program, the privately funded Solomon Space Center possesses rockets large enough to accommodate a full-sized adult male, at least for as long as it takes the LS-7s to explode in mid-air. The LS-5 rockets are far more reliable. However, LS-5 payloads are much smaller than LS-7. No worries! The SSC has a plan. It involves a radical surgical procedure that will reduce the mass of the remaining astronaut. The astronaut flees.
The SSC then decides to enlist Japanese schoolgirl Yukari Morita. The petite student is ideal. Not only is she small enough to fit into an LS-5 without any amputations, she can be manipulated. She is in the Solomon Islands searching for her long-vanished father. The SSC promises to find her father if she will agree to be the SSC’s first teen astronaut.
It just so happens that the SSC already knows where her dad is. No problem finding him. The problem will be sending her into space and retrieving her alive.
Barbary by Vonda N. McIntyre (1986)
Unlike the previous protagonists, the adults in charge of twelve-year-old Barbary have no intention of using her as a bite-sized experimental subject. She is an orphan; she has a foster father—he’s on research space station Einstein, and she’s being sent to live with him. It’s a fine plan but one that does not take into account Barbary’s adventurous impulses.
Such as smuggling her cat onto the space station. This might be an unexpected burden on the station’s closed-loop life-support system. Bad Barbary! But it all turns out fine when the cat proves to be the means to limiting the station’s unwanted rat population.
Later Barbary manages to entangle herself in a First Contact situation, the outcome of which will have consequences for all humanity.
Voices of a Distant Star, directed by Makoto Shinkai (2002)
School girl-turned-mecha pilot Mikako Nagamine accompanies the rest of her squadron on the spacecraft carrier Lysithea as the Lysithea pursues humanity’s Tarsian enemies into deepest space. Mikako’s friend Noboru Terao remains on Earth. Determined to remain in contact with Noboru, Mikako sends him message after message.
The catch? Lysithea is able to make one-way superluminal jumps but its communications with Earth are strictly light-speed. Thus, with each step of her journey towards the alien world Agartha and the battles that await there, the time lag becomes greater. Noboru will indeed get his messages… eight years too late for them to matter.
***
Imperiling fictional teens is a proven, popular way to attract teen readers. I am sure that my readers may be able to think of dozens of books or stories I inexplicably overlooked. Comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Although the opportunity cost is larger for young people—all that unrealized potential—than for adults. Perhaps sunk cost + opportunity cost is a constant.
Hmmm…. whattabout “The Cold Equations”?
I know, I know, I just had to throw that out there :D
John Varley’s “Red Thunder” is a loving tribute to Heinlein’s juvenile spacers
I never heard of Barbary. Thanks!
When I saw the title, i assumed you would lead off with Nazis on the Moon!
For even more opportunity cost, there’s The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet- i believe those kids were 9 or 10.
Heinlein is one of the more prolific authors of this genre. How about Podkayne of Mars?
There’s another novel, whose author I can’t remember, but it also involves a young woman who, I think, leaves Mars to attend university or maybe space ranger school — on Earth, I think. She’s treated as a yokel by the natives, but quickly shows that she’s even more capable than they are. The name of the book completely escapes me, but I could swear her name starts with a ‘P’ — but it’s not the aforementioned Podkayne!
Rocket Girls was made into an okay-ish anime series in 2007 that was released on DVD Stateside sub only. As far as I can determine, it’s not available streaming.
4: Pauline Ashwell’s Unwillingly to Earth? Carrie Vaughn’s Martians Abroad?
@@.-@ NomadUK
I don’t know if it’s the one you’re thinking of, but Connie Willis has a novella entitled “D.A.,” about a young woman who is unexpectedly told she has an appointment to the International Space Academy. She’s named Theodora, not Podkayne, but the space station she’s assigned to is the RAH.
Dan Simmons’ sequels to his Hyperion Cantos, Endymion & Rise of Endymion, deserve a mention here too. Not only do they chronicle the adventures of a preteen in space, she’s the prophesied messiah.
Heinlein also had Tunnel in the Sky about teens stranded on a distant planet. Didn’t involve space travel but a similar theme.
Having mentioned “Expendable Meat on the Moon”, I suppose you were highly unlikely to mention “Tunnel in the Sky”, also by Heinlein.
You could probably fill this list just with Heinlein, though the teens are usually accompanied by some sort of adult supervision.
Charles Sheffield took a few tries at writing a Heinlein-style juvenile. None of them were all that great and neither plots nor titles occur to me off the top of my head.
David R. Palmer’s Emergence ends with sending the 11-year-old protagonist up to a Soviet space shuttle to defuse a doomsday bomb. As with Rocket Girls, it’s because she’s the only one who will fit in the tight space.
11: I think you mean the Jupiter series, to which a number of authors contributed. If memory the Internet Science Fiction Database serves, the series was
1 Higher Education (1996) by Jerry Pournelle and Charles Sheffield
2 The Billion Dollar Boy (1997) by Charles Sheffield
3 Putting Up Roots (1997) by Charles Sheffield
4 The Cyborg from Earth (1998) by Charles Sheffield
5 Starswarm (1998) by Jerry Pournelle
6 Outward Bound (1999) by James P. Hogan
They were, uh, not great.
Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti and its sequels are novellas about a teenage Himba girl from Namibia who, in a strange far future in which contact with extraterrestrials is routine, gets admission to a planet-sized galactic university. On the way there, the living starship she’s traveling in is assaulted by jellyfish-like aliens who have a long-running war with the ship’s human operators, and this is only the beginning of Binti’s often calamitous adventures. Highly recommended.
I remember reading a book about the first manned rocket to tour the inner system. Communication was to be via twin-telepathy, which is instantaneous, and you don’t have to worry about the Sun or planets causing radio blackouts. Right before launch, one of the twin girls broke her arm, but fortunately, it was the one who was going to stay on Earth, so the launch proceeded.
Unfortunately, the girl on the spacecraft did horribly, and spent most of the trip sick. Their telepathy did save the day, warning the crew of a solar flare early enough that they were able to get into the shielded compartment in time. By the end, the narrator (one of the other members of the crew) decided that girls aren’t up for the rigors of spaceflight.
Naturally, when they finally get back to Earth, we find out that the girls had done a switcharoo so the flight wouldn’t be cancelled, and the one who made the flight was completely untrained. This made the narrator revise his opinion of her up by a lot.
The book was old when I read it, back in the 70s, so my guess is that it’s from the 50s or 60s. Anyone have any idea what the title is?
@13 Though Binti and its sequels are more science fantasy than science fiction; to say more would be spoily.
In Silgerverb’s Revolt on Alpha C (his first book, I believe), a young cadet leaves Earth for — awww, you guessed the star. As a bonus, I’m pretty sure that this is the first book to feature a (very lightly in this case) disguised Harlan Ellison as a character
14: It’s a sequel to Blast Off at Woomera: Spaceship to Saturn.
James Blish wrote an oddly charming YA novel called Welcome to Mars, in which an 18 year old boy literally makes a spaceship in his backyard and flies to Mars. (It may be Blish’s only successful YA novel except maybe for A Life for the Stars, part of Cities in Flight.)
@16 — Yes, Silverberg has admitted that the vertically challenged and rather pugnacious Harl Ellison, from Revolt on Alpha C, was based on his friend Harlan Ellison. He said that a couple further characters in that book are at least named for other friends of his; but that after the book was published he regretted having done so and decided never to do it again.
JDN@6, carbonel@7: It is, indeed, Pauline Ashwell’s Unwillingly to Earth. Cheers!
Orbital Resonance by John Barnes. I remember liking it quite a bit although I don’t think I’ve reread it since it was new. It’s not so much sending teens into space as it is about teens who live there.
@5 Rocket Girls is available for streaming on HiDive. I love the series and books if you ignore the suggested magical elements. It is a fairly hard SF show, primarily because they had JAXA as a consultant. The only flub they had in the anime was the Space Shuttle using it’s main engines to go into a higher orbit… Uh, no?
And let us not forget Tom Swift Jr.! Now there’s a forever 18 year old that goes to space more than once, even travels to Alpha Centauri I do believe.
James van Pelt’s “Minerva Girls” features three teenage girls, about to enter high school, inventing a space drive and using it to fly to the Moon.
It was in the September/October 2020 Analog and will be in my soon to appear Best SF and Fantasy of the Year book.
Mars One by Jonathan Maberry. Our protags are a teen boy and girl whose families have been selected as part of a mars colonization effort.
One grandfather of ’em all is “The Runaway Robot”, by Lester Del Ray, another grandfather of ’em all.
I loved Barbary–thanks for the reminder. I’d like to push Frank Cotrell Boyce’s Cosmic, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Liam, a twelve-year-old boy who looks twice his age, ends up leading a group of preteens on a rocket launch
Came for Binti – and not disappointed to see it.
If you don’t require teens to fly alone, then Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale shows what can happen when a large group of colonists, including Zoe and many other teens, go to through the stars to a new, dangerous planet.
I agree on Binti. Excellent series.
A lot of Heinein’s juveniles are great fun, if dated. Though, Tunnel in the Sky is pretty callous, as this sub-genre seems to go. Teens are essentially dumped on their far planet for “survival training.” You pass if you survive until pickup.
Do You Dream of Terra-Two by Temi Oh is very good.
Ender’s Game? Or was he even a teen yet when he was sent to Battle School?
@12: Yeah, that’s them, though I only read the Sheffield books. They were definitely not great.
@22: And since we’ve mentioned Tom Swift, let’s not forget that Rick Brant once went into space, however briefly and unintentionally.
“The Countdown Conspiracy” puts young teens in space for geopolitical reasons. Things happen.
And not quite the original premise of this article, but the reverse: Alexei Panshin’s great coming of age book “Rite of Passage” which has teens landing on a planet from their generation ship!
Barbary is one of the books I regularly give to girls. Another with a similar vibe is Annette Curtis Klause’s Alien Secrets, where a 12(“almost thirteen”!)-year-old girl meets a young alien on a spaceship and contributes to interspecies trust. A series which tweens of all genders enjoy is Sophia McDougall’s Mars Evacuees and Space Hostages–lots of humor and adventure, great characters. I mentioned the first under the post on great opening lines: “When the polar ice advanced as far as Nottingham, my school was closed and I was evacuated to Mars.” Advisory to people who know more physics than I do: apparently McDougall gets the physics of the space elevator wrong. But none of the kid readers I’ve given the books to yet have figured that out.
Stross has teens in space in one of the chapters of “Accelerando” too, as I recall.
@28,
See also Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage.
A good post- two books bought today.
@28: that’s rather unfair; the planet is the graduation exam for a survival class, not the class in itself.
@34: technically it’s not a generation ship, since it has FTL; it’s just where all the privileged people live.
Since we’re mentioning Heinleins one by one: Kip Russell in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is definitely a teen — he goes off to college after coming back from his adventures (although he’s picked up by aliens rather than sent); Starman Jones‘s eponymous lead does leave deliberately, but it’s not clear to me that he’s still a teen; Thorby in Citizen of the Galaxy is referred to by the auctioneer as a boy, but is being pushed toward marriage a year later, after getting a place on a trader and briefly serving in the space navy — I suspect RAH hadn’t bothered to work out his age, although I’ve forgotten whether Thorby’s disappearance is dated.
Arthur C. Clarke, OTOH, wrote only one juvenile, Islands in the Sky, in which the 16yo lead manages to lawyer imprecise language in a contest into a trip to a near-Earth space station — then has a short field trip turn into a loop around the Moon.
A lot of Norton’s work is ambiguous, or at least involves young people who are effectively independent without specifying their ages, but ISTM that the lead in Ice Crown is taken on an exoarcheological expedition because there’s nowhere safe to stow her if the responsible adults don’t take her with.
Many of Cherryh’s characters seem to be in their twenties (or so), and Ari II doesn’t get into space IIRC — but Finity’s End is something of an answer to Citizen of the Galaxy, showing the difficulties of a station-raised 17yo when brought to live on a space trader.
@38: A nitpick—Clarke actually wrote two juveniles, but Dolphin Island has nothing to do with space.
There’s also Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, another story of telepaths communicating from a spaceship to Earth. They start out as twin teens, but thanks to time dilation the spacer only ages a few years while the one on Earth grows old.
I should also mention David Ossman’s Mark Time, Star Detective of the Circum-Solar Federation, and his rocky-jocket sidekick, Bob Bunny, who calls Mark “Mr. Time.”
Nice to see Hugh Walters in there, I read most of the later books of the series as they were published and they worked pretty well for the day.
The Danny Dunn series began with Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint (1956) which took the intrepid boy hero and friends on a tour of the solar system with something not unlike Cavorite. A later book of the series had a SETI / First Contact theme, but I don’t remember enough about it to say if it was any good. To be honest, I preferred their 1963 take on time travel.
And for real masochists there’s the dreaded 1950s-60s Kemlo series by E.C. Elliot, which begins with the premise that children born in space won’t need much protection apart from an occasional “plasgoria pill” instead of breathing air, and goes downhill from there. The hero comes from Space Station K where all of the kids have first names beginning with K and is stupendously silly…
@41 – sorry, the last line was incomplete, it should have said
The hero comes from Space Station K where all of the kids have first names beginning with with K for no readily apparent reason, and the series is full of similar stupendously silly examples of “science” and world-building…
Even at the age of 8, I could see there were flaws in the Kemlo books. And rereading them as an adult the boys’ adventures on their space cycles read like a cycling trip in the British countryside.
I have a couple of Hugh Walters books on my shelf. Must reread them.
Apparently, my recent re-reading of Pohl’s “Starburst” was prep for this article. Funny how the universe works sometimes. In this story, the kids are born in space and are teens when they arrive back on Earth. J. M. Schealer’s “Zip, Zip” series had actual kids ala Peter Pan but the oldest girl was almost teenage I think. RAH’s “The Rolling Stones” had two teenage twins that tried to start their own space shipping company but because their parents didn’t trust them came along for the ride. Which was a good thing because they almost caused an ecological disaster when they tried to ship Martian flatcats to a predator-free ecology. Tribbles anyone? Then, of course, there’s Flinx, Alan Foster’s eponymous hero who I thought was still a teen. TEENS – IN – SPACE! Indeed.
Would Peter Hamilton ‘s Salvation series count? One strand has teens being trained for space war/species revenge.
@39: quite right — Clarke didn’t make a career of juveniles the way RAH did, but I plain blanked on Dolphin Island.
@41: Did Danny ever get to his teen years? I loved those books, but remember then being in the younger section of the kids’ library; Wikipedia says he’s in 5th grade (i.e., age ~10) in the first book.
Add me to those glad to see Walters mentioned; I think I missed the first one, and in later ones ISTR that Chris got older, but I remember liking them a lot back then.
Re: Rocket Ship Galileo
Fresh Meat on the Moon?
In my day, we called it Nazis on the Moon!
@41 Danny Dunn for the win!!
The UNEXA books are back in print, at least as ebooks.
Coincidentally, I see that the ebook of Barbary is on sale for $1.99 today. I’ll have to pick that up, as it’s one of the few on this list that I’d somehow never run across.
@25) The Runaway Robot is a good catch! It was actually written by Paul Fairman (presumably from an outline by Lester Del Rey.)
The title makes it sound like drafting kids into space, but the examples vary.
What about The Planet Strappers by Raymond Gallun from about 1961? Young people staking out the solar system. They scrounge and even make what they need, then pay for a launch to low orbit, at which point they propel themselves further.
I.came upon a used copy maybe 20 years ago. Not something I knew as a kid.
it’s at Project Gutenberg
Yeah, I read The Planet Strappers a few years ago. Definitely fits the theme. Gallun wasn’t a great writer, but he could be pretty darn good.
There’s a manga called Astra: Lost in Space that was adapted into an anime back in 2019. However, I myself couldn’t make it all the way through. I found the character backstory reveals to possess some of the most cringe-inducing melodramatics, with each new one being more hysterical and obnoxious than the previous one. You might feel differently though.
James Blish’s Welcome to Mars involves a high school student who develops anti-gravity in his parent’s garage and, rather than showing anyone and filing a patent, proceeds to space-proof a packing crate as best he can and go to Mars to prove it works. After a burned out vacuum tube strands him, his almost-but-not-quite girlfriend finds his notes and replicates his stupid stunt. As our James said of the Jupiter series, it is “not great”. I’m half convinced that Blish was actually parodying SF juveniles, since the early bits are equal parts story interspersed with science lesson, becoming gradually more Heinleinian as the story progresses. That’s the only theory that makes the novel even remotely palatable.
In a thread on a slightly earlier post someone mentioned the Revenger Trilogy from Alastair Reynolds. Arguably a YA series, and certainly featuring two teen girls who run away to a (solar) sailing ship in what proves a rather unwise move.
Oh yeah, Dolphin Island! Clearly written before the days of Marineland/Sea World, because it assumes that orcas are untrainable. (Dis-proven by a teen of course!)
David Gerrold’s Heinlein tribute: The Dingilliad books. Jumping Off the Planet (2000), Bouncing Off the Moon (2001), and Leaping to the Stars (2002). Wonderful stuff.
I’m not sure there is a difference between it being within the class or required for graduation. In either case they dump them into an environment without aid and they must live or die on their own abilities; and they are teens.
Telzey Amberdon is definitely a teenager in her early stories, although she grew up a bit as the series progressed.
@43) & others – Even at the age of 9 or 10 I realised that the basic premise of the “Kemlo” books – children born in space stations able to live in vacuum – was ludicrous. That didn’t stop me from reading several of the books and enjoying them as kids’ adventure pulp. I picked up one second-hand a few years back, but have never been able to make myself read it – I know that it would be rubbish.
I also read quite a few of Hugh Walters’ novels about Chris Godfrey and his comrades – they were quite common in Australian public libraries in the 1960s-70s. There’s obviously a lot of nostalgia out there for them, as old copies go for ludicrous prices. However, Gollancz has recently reissued many of them as ebooks and I’m tempted to reread a couple – I suspect they’d hold up a lot better than “Kemlo”!
@14 – that’s Hugh Walters again! Mission to Mercury, I think… Walters was one of my gateway drugs into SF, and I was really pleased when the UNEXA books were reissued in electronic format (if only so I could finally read The Domes of Pico and Terror by Satellite, which the local library never had in.)
I read one of the “Kemlo” books, but even as an uncritical pre-teen, I wasn’t inspired to seek out any more….
@15 Nnedi Okorafor has, it seems to me, never cared much for drawing a hard science fiction/fantasy demarcation line.
Anybody else not seeing any new articles on the home page for the past two days? Most recent post I can see is the horse one from Monday.
@64
Sounds like Tor parent Macmillan got hit with a ransomware attack. They may have been left unable to post anything new.
New articles are posting, but commenting on them is turned off
Aw but comments are fun!
@28 and @59, Re: Tunnel in the Sky, the ‘exam’ part of the survival class was time limited, but something went wrong with the retrieval, stranding the protagonist and others until contact could be re-established. Yes, the teens were exposed to danger, but they were not deliberately stranded as part of their survival course.
@28/@59: In addition the instructor was standing by and flunked a student before they went through the gate for being blatantly unprepared.
Oh–one more from me, or rather two more. I’d like to push Ann Mason’s lovely books, The Dancing Meteorite and The Stolen Law. Sixteen-year-old Kira is living on a space station. Her parents have been killed on an exploratory mission. Kira is a natural with planet-based environments, like her parents before her. She is intuitive and emotional and feels very much out of place on the station. Mysteries ensue. I have a review of The Stolen Law up on Amazon, and I truly wish they would reprint this book with a better cover. It’s really a good story.
Oh, another. The Dig Allen series by Joseph Greene (best known as the creator of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet). It’s another series with teen boys gallivanting around the solar system. I got the first one, The Forgotten Star, from Scholastic in the early 70s, but never tracked down any of the others. From my memories of it, it’s probably somewhere between Tom Swift/Danny Dunn and Heinlein, maybe even a little closer to the latter.
@68/@69: both good points; I remember another student being flunked because he was too prepared — he came with a spacesuit, where the class had been told they could bring modern gear (e.g., lightweight parkas) but that they were going to some place where pre-tech Earth people could survive.
I don’t know whether RAH was aware of Outward Bound or when exactly it started a program for teens (I knew someone who had been through it by 1967), but ISTM the whole point of the final was to give the teens confidence that their exercises and book learning were enough to survive on, e.g. so they could lead colonizing expeditions as adults (as shown in the epilogue). It wasn’t intended to be simply a measure of worth, as in Rite of Passage or Starship Troopers (both of which assumed there would be fatalities).
The absolute antithesis to this: J.G Ballard’s Thirteen To Centaurus.
See also “Apollo’s Outcasts” by Allen Steele. Set in the late 21st century, during a US political crisis, the protagonist and five other teens, whose parents are in hot water with the new administration, are sent for their own safety (that is, to avoid being hostages) to an international lunar colony. There, the protagonist and his best friend join other teens in working for “Lunar Search and Rescue”, a sort of lunar EMS, otherwise called “Rangers.” However, they find themselves eventually drafted into an ad hoc military force when the new US president decides to launch an invasion of the colony.
Dr. Franklin’s Island was mostly about a mad scientist kidnapping teens and using ‘transgenics’ to turn them into fish-teens and bird-teens and psychic eavesdropper snake-teens, but I think theoretically his long term plan was to send them into space.
I read through all 75 comments and realized that NO ONE had any willingness to mention Donald A. Wollheim’s juveniles!
There was a whole series of novels involving Mike Mars, all with that name in the title. I have never read these so I don’t know whether they were any good or not. However, The Secret of the Ninth Planet involves a young man sent into space to help stop an evil plot to make the sun go nova. I read this as a young boy and still have fond memories of it. He has two similar (earlier) juveniles, The Secret of Saturn’s Rings and The Mystery of the Martian Moons, both of which I believe fit in this category.
@75: Send them into space with that lot? I want to say why?
@76: ” An evil plot to make the sun go nova”, it hardly needs an adjective. I suppose there are novas and supernovas. Both are environmentally unsound.
@77- I think the theory was that he was adapting them for life on a specific other planet. He turned the viewpoint character into a kind of giant manta ray, and another into a sort of humanoid avian, and gave them the ability to communicate telepathically (through, you know, transgenics). But it’s been a while since I read it.
@69
I do remember though, that in the class before the exam, when it was explained that the kids would have to choose their own equipment list, that they would have to carry it all themselves, and be ready for any variety of environments without being told WHICH, one teen protested that the exam wasn’t fair, that they were not being told whether they would materialize, say, in a vacuum, or in the middle of the ocean, and that the demands of needing to pack both a spacesuit and a raft – and all the diverse equipment necessary for surviving either environment – was impossible. The instructor replied that the teens would NOT be transported to a place without a breathable atmosphere, and if they were landed in water, it would be within swimmable distance of shore.
The questioning teen had elicited VITAL information that the entire class needed to know. BUT then the instructor FLUNKS him then and there for daring to protest that the exam wasn’t fair when the UNIVERSE wasn’t, harrumph harrumph, you young pantywaist (that implication, anyway). And there and then I decided the instructor was an unredeemable douche, and I was casting a side-eye at the author too, which I never did take off him no matter how much his juveniles entertained me.
“The Orbital Children” (Chikyūgai Shōnen Shōjo), released in January 2022, is a recent anime series that really merits mention. I was truly gobsmacked at how well-done and, well, adult the SF in this series is. I’m fairly sure this is still available on Netflix.
@79: I looked at that passage in the book; the instructor thinks students should assume that the teachers aren’t trying to kill them – so the students should assume the test is fair, they just shouldn’t say so, I guess.
Space Winners by Gordon R Dickson.
Rocket From Infinity by Lester del Rey
Raiders From The Rings by Alan E Nourse
@76 I read one or two of Wollheim’s Mike Mars juveniles; a friend had them. If I’m remembering accurately after fifty-some years, the premise was that there was a sort of shadow Mercury/Gemini space program involving 18 year olds, who did the the adventurous stuff in secret while the old guys in their 30s got the publicity.
Sylvia Engdahl’s Enchantress from the Stars is another great teen-in-space novel, from the alternating perspectives of a youg stowaway on her father’s interstellar anthropological mission, an Imperial soldier on the “primitive” planet where they land, and a young woodcutter who she (natch) falls for.
And we mustn’t forget W.E. Johns’ Kings of Space, Return to Mars, Now to the Stars, To Outer Space, The Edge of Beyond, The Death Rays of Ardilla, To Worlds Unknown, and The Quest for the Perfect Planet – all involved a battle-hardened RAF veteran pilot and his teenaged son, who is going to marry a Martian girl one day, according to my memory …
adding dom testa’s six-book series “the galahad archives.”
Asimov’s Nemesis involved a teen in space, and was written when he seemed to have been trying to include more characterization and female POVs in his fiction.