I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “That was fast!” But 210 pages of short stories written for young adults and set in fairly large type didn’t take me nearly as long to read as 900 pages of Neal Stephenson set in smaller type. I started yesterday, I finished today.
By the fact that this book is titled The New Adventures of The Mad Scientists’ Club, astute readers will already have deduced that there was a previous book titled The Mad Scientists’ Club, and such readers are, indeed, correct.
I (or rather, my big brother Dwight) had a paperback copy of that book when I was a kid, and I read it several times growing up. The stories, written in the 1960s by Bertrand R. Brinley, involve a group of teenager boys in a small town called Mammoth Falls who fall into adventures through playing pranks, or solving mysteries, using science and technology. For example, one story in the book I just finished involves them creating a faux flying saucer; in another they set out to refurbish a Second World War Japanese mini-sub.
So why am I reading this second book of Mad Scientists’ Club adventures now, when I’m 49, instead of 40 years ago, when they were still brand-new?
Because while at the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver in August, I found the original book and a novel called The Big Kerplop involving the same characters on a table in the Dealer’s Room. It turns out that Purple House Press in Texas has brought out all the books in hardcover. I promptly bought the two I found in Denver, and then ordered the two I didn’t have (The New Adventures and a second novel called The Big Chunk of Ice, which was never published during the author’s lifetime) directly from Purple House.
So how do they hold up after all these years? Not bad, really. Parts of them are terribly dated (the dialogue, for example, you would never get away with in a modern YA novel), but they’re still clever and fun. I’m not sure what a modern kid would make of them, but maybe my daughter will tell me in a couple of years when she’s old enough to read them.
Anyway, I’m pressing on now reading the second novel, The Big Chunk of Ice. I’ll let you know what I think when I finish that one….which, at my current rate, won’t be long!
