Preface
Eric Flint
The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet series was one of the major science fiction landmarks in the period of young adult publication that spanned the late 1940s and early 1950s. To this day, that period is considered by many—I’m one of them—to be the Golden Age of young adult science fiction.
That was the era of Robert A. Heinlein’s many YA novels, beginning with Rocket Ship Galileo in 1947 and continuing on through Have Spacesuit, Will Travel in 1958. It was also the period in which Andre Norton wrote some of her classic adventure novels aimed largely at a young audience: Star Man's Son, 2250 A.D. in 1952, Star Rangers in 1953 and Star Guard in 1955.
The Tom Corbett series was unusual in that it began as a television series, not as a literary one. The novels and comic books came afterward. The series was created by Joseph Greene in 1945, and was originally intended to be a radio show. Greene was a prolific author of novels, comic strips, radio scripts, and was one of the pioneers of television. The radio show was never produced, but over the next several years Greene reworked the idea several times until it finally came into existence in 1950 as a television series produced by Rockhill Studios. Robert Heinlein’s popular young adult novel Space Cadet had been published in 1948, and Rockhill licensed the “Space Cadet” name from Heinlein.
The TV series began in October of 1950 and would run for five seasons. The first comic strip was published on September 9, 1951, written by Paul S. Newman and illustrated by Ray Bailey. The first novel, Stand By For Mars! was published in 1952 by Grosset & Dunlap.
The author’s name was “Carey Rockwell,” but to this day few people know who he or she was—assuming any of them are still alive. That was almost seventy years ago, after all. It is quite possible that “Carey Rockwell” was a collective pseudonym used by more than one author.
I never saw the TV show because I was only three years old when it was launched and by the time I was five years old, I was living in France. I didn’t return to the United States until 1958, three years after the TV series had ended. I would have been somewhere around eleven or twelve years old when I first ran across the Corbett books. That was the same period in the late 1950s when I began reading Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton.
No one including me is ever going to claim that the Tom Corbett novels are as good as Robert Heinlein’s or Andre Norton’s young adult novels of that era. Still, they’re an awful lot of fun, and since all the comics and all but one of the novels (The Robot Rocket) are now in the public domain, I decided to publish them after discussing the project with the artist Laura Givens, who has done many of the cover illustrations for Ring of Fire Press. Laura thought it would be fun to refurbish those old comic books, so we decided to produce the novels with one of the comics as an addition to each volume.
When I re-read Stand By For Mars in preparation for the project, I was struck by two things. First, I still found them a pleasure to read. Secondly . . .
I hadn’t read them in decades—quite a few decades, at that. When you live through all those years, one day at a time, you often forget (or at least half-forget) just how much has changed since then.
The science in these science fiction novels is . . . erratic. Some of that is simply due to the ignorance of the time. In the early 1950s, it was perfectly reasonable to think Venus was probably a watery planet and that Marx had some kind of waterways, whether or not they were “canals” created by intelligent beings.
Some of it, though, is the sort of odd jumble produced by exuberance that is none-too-well-restrained by scientific caution. So you get spaceships which have hyperdrives capable of traversing interstellar—even inter-galactic—distances, but which move about the Solar System using rocket drives. Ships whose pilots can turn on artificial gravity by pushing a button, but do most everything else manually with nary a computer to be found anywhere.
Then there are the social norms and customs. As was typical for that era, the characters who appear are almost exclusively male and seem to have no race at all—which means, of course, that by default they are all presumed to be white.
In fairness, the one prominent female character in the series, Dr. Joan Dale, is very accomplished. Here is her professional description in Stand By For Mars!:
Joan Dale held the distinction of being the first woman ever admitted into the Solar Guard, in a capacity other than administrative work. Her experiments in atomic fissionables was the subject of a recent scientific symposium held on Mars. Over fifty of the leading scientists of the Solar Alliance had gathered to study her latest theory on hyperdrive, and had unanimously declared her ideas valid. She had been offered the chair as Master of Physics at the Academy as a result, giving her access to the finest laboratory in the tri-planet society.
But when she first appears in the novel, the following ensues:
Exactly one hour and ten minutes later, promptly at seven o'clock, the three members of Unit 42-D stood at attention in front of Dr. Joan Dale, along with the rest of the green-clad cadets.
When the catcalls and wolf whistles had died away, Dr. Dale, pretty, trim, and dressed in the gold and black uniform of the Solar Guard, held up her hand and motioned for the cadets to sit down.
"My answer to your--" she paused, smiled and continued, "your enthusiastic welcome is simply--thank you. But we'll have no further repetitions. This is Space Academy--not a primary school!"
When I read that, I burst out laughing. My days as a teenager were in the early and mid-60s, and even by then customs had changed enough that no boy in any of my high school classes would have dared to whistle admiringly at a female schoolteacher, much less once they reached college. In fact, I based the character of the formidable schoolteacher Melissa Mailey in my novel 1632 on an actual schoolteacher I had in 1961 and 1962 named Priscilla Mailley.
Whenever you confront the social behavior and attitudes of a bygone era, you can either be angered or amused. Some things are genuine outrages and should be viewed as such. There is nothing amusing about the “Cornerstone” speech by the Confederacy’s vice-president Alexander Stephens, or the Dred Scott decision, or the legality of wife-beating in all states of the Union in the mid-nineteenth century.
Other things . . . not so much. I’ve been guided in this by the attitudes of my mother, who came of age in an era where she couldn’t sign a contract or open a bank account without her husband’s permission. By the time she was middle-aged she was a confirmed feminist. I won’t say “hardbitten” because that just wasn’t in my mother’s character. She was a girl from a small town in West Virginia and had a very practical attitude toward life. She’d reserve her outrage for things that really mattered to her, and would just laugh or shake her head at most anything else. “Life’s hard enough as it is,” she once said to me, “without making it worse by being indignant all the time about everything.”
That’s the spirit in which I read these books which I first encountered as a youngster. I enjoyed them at the time, and I still do. I hope you will also.