Danger in Deep Space

My dad gave me his old copy of this book when I was about eight. I lost track of it over the years, and bought a replacement copy just a couple of years ago. Story was about as good as I remembered it - that is, very good - but I hadn't remembered what a jerk Roger Manning was; wonder if that was consistent through the whole series? I'll definitely be picking up other books in the series if I happen across them.

"Carey Rockwell" is a pseudonym for the unknown authors of the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet books.

It seems quite likely to me that the author of this second book in the series is different than the author of the first. The first has an unusual psychological complexity for its era and genre.

This second book is instead quite clumsily written, with cardboard stereotype characters. The puzzling and complex team dynamic in the first book is lost.

A 1950s young adult science fiction story, Danger In Deep Space is the follow on from Stand By For Mars! featuring Tom Corbett, space cadet.

It's a light space romp where we see two disgraced spacemen attempt to heist a satelitte consisting mainly of copper which is now extremely rare and sought after, the science is, uh, shall we say imaginative even for 1953, yet I felt that didn't really detract from the story.

One thing I did note was like the first novel in the series the prefix of space is added to many words to, well, spacify them. It kind of seems like lazy writing to just throw space infront of a word rather than a proper description or even just leave boots be boots, is there a need for them to be space boots? I already know show more they're in space. Examples of this include space-papers, space-dreams, space-dolls (women), space-happy, space-bums, space-speed and a few others.

Overall though, it's a light and entertaining read. show less

Okay but too much testerone, fisticuff stuff to be SF, even considering was published in early 50s. Read more like some wild west claim jumping way-out-there-with-no-sherriffs type of story. Space cadets needed white hats and the bad guys black hats (and in true 50s fashion had to be a moral lecture). Expected obsolete science but hard to swallow a lot of it like yanking an ore rich asteroid back to earth's orbit to be an extra moon and no one worrying about gravitational impacts on tides and such.

Really fun for an old sci fi story. The British accents for the voice actors was especially fun and they did a good job bringing the story to life.

Better than the first in the series. A fun, if somewhat dated, dated sci-fi read.

eBook; original text from Project Gutenberg; Mobipocket version downloaded from