tablets to do away with food preparation and eating time, a stun-gun for self-defence
without killing, a fly-anywhere device strapped to the wrist, and a mini-television to
show current world events. Rob is trapped by cannibals and pirates, saves the King of
England and President of France from conspirators, and intervenes in a war between
Turks and Tatars. Having risked his life several times by failing to realise the dangers
caused by his impulsive use of these gadgets, Rob returns them to the Demon and
persuades it to wait until mankind is ready to be trusted with them. Sadly, this
professional, entertaining novel has remained out of print for many years, only re-issued
in a collector’s edition in 1974, as its dated political allusions have made it impossible to
reprint for children as originally published.
These few books demonstrate that there has been no tradition of children’s science
fiction comparable to children’s fantasy. Kipling and Nesbit could no doubt have written
in the genre had they wished: Kipling wrote adult SF, Nesbit, adult supernatural stories;
perhaps they did not find the Vernian yarn a congenial model, and believed that the
Wellsian scientific romance was too pessimistic to import into children’s literature. Since
children willingly accepted magic, there was no need for a pseudo-scientific explanation
for supernatural events—compare Nesbit’s treatment of invisibility in The Enchanted
Castle (1907) with H.G.Wells’s in The Invisible Man (1897).
Thus the juvenile SF published from the late nineteenth century onwards, comparable
in popular appeal to other children’s genres like the historical novel or adventure yarn,
had no market leaders who combined popularity with quality, and whose names are
recalled today. The best authors in the developing SF genre had the sound commercial
sense to write for the widest possible audience: adults and their teenage children; lesser
authors imitated their plots and wrote more directly for youngsters. If Verne, an author
for adults who did not exclude younger readers, is the genre’s Henty, there are no
equivalents to, say, Angela Brazil, Frank Richards or Robert Louis Stevenson.
Jules Verne (1828–1905) rightly takes a pre-eminent place in the early history of
children’s SF. A professional writer, he published over sixty novels, which he described
as ‘Voyages extraordinaires’. The most famous in the SF vein are Journey to the Centre
of the Earth (1863), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Around the Moon (1870), and
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). Speedily translated into English, they
were often abridged for the young, and technical details cut. In their full versions they
display awareness of political issues as well as authenticity in the fields of geography
and practical science.
H.G.Wells (1866–1946), with Verne the co-creator of science fiction, is more obviously
an author for adults and his early SF novels have become classics recommended to
teenagers moving on to adult literature, whatever their genre preferences. These classics
are The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898),
When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, revised as The Sleeper Awakes 1910), and The First Men
in the Moon (1901). With the horror novel The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) he provided
many classic ideas to open up the genre: alien invasion, adventures on other planets,
genetic manipulation, future totalitarianism, and naïve, over-reaching scientists.
Other yarns in the science fiction area which have become popular classics for
teenagers are The Lost World (1912) and The Poison Belt (1913) by Arthur Conan Doyle,
The Scarlet Plague (1914) by Jack London; and most memorably the works of Edgar Rice
TYPES AND GENRES 313