a gap of over thirty years until Hunter retired and a new market appeared for the books,
whereupon several more Branestawm collections were published. In these short stories
the Professor usually invents a machine to solve a problem, and the machine goes
wrong, resulting in chaos.
A precursor of British juvenile SF in the 1950s was Professor A.M.Low’s Adrift in the
Stratosphere (1937), with its near-earth plot and emphasis on problem-solving; its
preposterous story and lucky escapes also render it unintentionally quite amusing.
It seems that the first SF comic strip was ‘Le roi de la lune’, published in the early
nineteenth century by Jean-Claude Pellerin (reproduced in Gifford 1984: 12). It is a
moral tale about naughty children being taken to the Moon for punishment to fit the
crime: a cross between The Water-Babies and Dante’s Inferno! In the twentieth century,
once comics had developed into adventure stories told in pictures, and were no longer
‘funny’ nor indeed ‘comic’, the potential for depicting SF’s impossible scenarios was
relished by artists, writers and readers. Apart from comic book versions of SF novels
such as The Invisible Man, there were two main types of SF story: the space opera; and
the super-hero tale. The latter, in monthly comic book form, has been the most popular
comic book type in the USA for decades. Because of the indiscriminate distribution of
comic strips in newspapers and comic books in shops, SF comics have generally been
aimed at a universal audience of juveniles and adults, until the graphic novel became
commercially viable in the 1980s.
High points in the SF comic strip were ‘Buck Rogers in the 25th Century’, which
began in 1929 as a daily strip, and then became a Sunday page. An American air-force
pilot is transported five hundred years into the future, makes friends with female soldier
Wilma Deering, who becomes his regular companion, and has typical space-opera
adventures. A serial film (1939), TV serials, and a modern film (1979) followed. Other
important strips were ‘Brick Bradford’ (from 1933), who uses a Time Top to travel to the
past and future, and ‘Flash Gordon’ (from 1934) which went on to radio and other spin
offs, including a film (1980). Gordon’s girlfriend is always Dale Arden, and his arch-
enemy is Ming the Merciless of the planet Mongo. Superman (from 1938) is, of course,
the most famous. SF has continued to flourish in comics, and the worldwide influence
of Superman, Dan Dare and the Marvel Comics Group superheroes like Spider-Man, the
Incredible Hulk, and the X-Men cannot be underestimated.
As we move into the 1940s, it is obvious that children’s SF has made no contribution
to the body of ‘classic’ children’s literature. Only writers familiar with the conventions of
the genre would have had the knowledge and motivation to write good juvenile SF, such
as the writers of adult SF published in J.W. Campbell’s Astounding magazine. Campbell
was an intellectual who constantly challenged his stable of writers with new ideas, and
it was one of his men, Robert Heinlein, who took juvenile SF in hand with Rocketship
Galileo in 1947. Crudely plotted in its snap solutions to chapter-end cliff-hangers, and
its happy ending, it remains a brilliant transformation of the Tom Swift ‘can-do’ plots,
with fresh colloquial dialogue, varied and exciting episodes, and factual but lucid
technical details. From 1947 to 1958, Heinlein published one juvenile a year.
Heinlein’s basic plot is the initiation of a teenage male into his adult career as space
pioneer, colonist or politician, and the books share a common background with some of
his adult fiction—the unrolling colonisation of space. He intended not only to entertain
316 SCIENCE FICTION