Stand By for Mars!

The dynamics of the team are surprisingly complex, with Roger Manning's pride and scorn proving very difficult for Tom and Astro to deal with.

The book is unusual for a 1952 space drama. Tom, Astro and Roger are put together as a team of three cadets. Typically there would be an enemy outside of the team. Instead, the main mystery and challenge in this book is Roger Manning himself. Tom and Astro struggle to integrate him into their team, struggling to overcome his disinterest and sometimes actively uncooperative behaviour. The team in other words strives mostly against itself. It takes almost the entire narrative arc of the book before we get the reveal of why Roger is driven to behave in this way. Ultimately the team triumphs by show more working together to overcome the challenge of an almost impossible journey, by joining together to strive against nature itself.

The book is also unusual in the Dr. Joan Dale has a role of authority and scientific expertise. Although she shows up rarely, she's clearly in charge of the classification tests, a leading scientist, and a friend and equal of Commander Strong.

"Joan Dale held the distinction of being the first woman ever admitted into the Solar Guard ... Her experiments in atomic fissionables was the subject of a recent scientific symposium held on Mars. Over fifty of the leading scientists of the Solar Alliance had gathered to study her latest theory on hyperdrive, and had unanimously declared her ideas valid. She had been offered the chair as Master of Physics at the [Space] Academy..." (Chapter 3, pp. 30-31)

The series could have gone in an interesting direction building on these characters and ideas, but it dropped all of the complexity and nuance in the next book. show less

Ah early 1950s vintage science fiction where adding space to a word made it futuristic, like spacemen, spacecadets and spaceburgers.

It's quite a fun even if a touch corny read, we meet Tom Corbett who has signed up for spacecadet training. We meet his unit who don't quite gel together and through adversity become a cohesive unit, when facing said adversity some hidden truths about one of the unit members are revealed and naturally once they become a cohesive unit they're able to overcome said adversity.

Might even read the other Tom Corbett spacecadet books now, this was really quite good.

Props to the book for taking a character I hated at first sight and making me like him. I have a huge soft spot for intrepid boy astronaut books, and this is a good example of the genre.

Better than average, if some what too long, boot camp coming of age 50's young adult sci-fi.

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