The voice from space

So you think you’re original?

            Depending of what you are up to, originality may be something to aspire to but how likely do you think it is that an idea or concept is truly new? Not very, is the obvious answer. I had the pleasure of discovering this quite recently. And it really was a pleasure. I am not being sarcastic.

            What on Earth am I on about?

            Well... having written a set of short stories involving a bumbling Professor/inventor that seeks inspiration from science, I was curious to find out to what extent this part of the literary landscape had been explored before. I won’t go into stuff I was already aware of, as I want to focus on what I discovered in the process. After some googling and random internet browsing (truly professional “research”!) I stumbled on a series of kids books by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. The hero of these books, which were written in the 1950s-60s, is a boy called Danny Dunn. Danny is very keen on science, and he is fortunate enough to live with the very clever Professor Bullfinch. The Professor is a great inventor (uh, where have I heard that before?) that comes up with all sorts of schemes, usually leading to Danny and his two friends Joe and Irene having some kind of madcap adventure. There are, I believe, 15 Danny Dunn books in total, all now out of print. When I first saw the list of titles I was astonished. My own short stories had covered about half of the themes! Yes, some were obvious (like time travel) but nevertheless.

            Naturally, I ordered a couple of second hand Danny Dunn adventures. They arrived, I have read three so far and I am now a fan. This is great stuff. Why? Surely the world has moved on in the past 50 years and anything that was modern in those long gone days is boring old nonsense now? Well... in a sense yes, but good storytelling still has the power to keep your attention. There is another side to it, as well. Science may have moved on, but this does not mean that the actual ideas have changed much and sometimes there are funny and unexpected connections.

            Let me give you an example.

            In the story “The voice from space” Danny and his friends travel to England to use the fictitious Grendel radio telescope to listen to signals from intelligent life in outer space. (This is a theme I have been thinking about, but I haven’t managed to find the right angle yet.) The story is clearly inspired by the early days of what eventually became the SETI programme.

            I am not going to spoil the story by telling you what happens, but I would recommend the book to anyone that is keen on radio astronomy and needs to find some suitable reading material to corrupt their kids. Instead, I want to make an observation. The Danny Dunn book was written in 1967. It came out just a few months before... guess what? A young PhD student named Jocelyn Bell found some odd periodic signals in data from... What? A radio telescope. Initially the new objects were referred to as LGM (Little Green Men) but soon so many of them were found that they needed a proper scientific name. They became known as pulsars, and we now know that they are the remnants of dead stars. These are fascinating objects, and if we want to understand how they work we need to push the boundaries of known physics. I find this seriously cool.

            Anyway, I can’t help wondering if Danny Dunn would have had a different slant to his adventure if Nature’s own Little Green Men had been discovered just a couple of months earlier...