II: The Road Less Travelled

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Science fiction is about opening doors and looking at things from new angles. I remember the first line of 2001: A Space Odyssey — “behind every human being there stands three ghosts; that is the ratio in which the dead outnumber the living” — far better than I remember the nonsense about monoliths and mad computers. Many young minds were blown by Phillip K Dick or the Matrix long before they knew that grown-up philosophers worried about the mind/body problem. Even a silly schoolboy writer like Edgar Rice Burroughs could be life-changing; not because his science is good — his science is non-existent — but because he gives you permission to imagine what the world would look like from a completely different perspective.

Sometimes you return to a place, or person or a book you knew a long time ago and say: “Oh: that’s where I learned that particular idea. I thought that it was just what I always believed.”

Or, of course “That’s the moment at which I took the wrong turning.”

First Contact?  is the twelfth book in the children’s science fiction saga which began with Blast Off At Woomera. The books contain a little bit of engineering, a little bit of popular astronomy, a lot of narrow escapes and a light seasoning of muscular Christianity. But they have thus far been largely devoid of anything that could be called “ideas”.

But First Contact? contains the biggest possible idea. The book literally reveals the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. And it isn’t a joke or a punch-line. I am pretty sure that Hugh Walters believed it, and wanted his readers to believe it. And for a decade, at least, from the age of eight to the age of eighteen, I did believe it. I had completely forgotten the source: but I took it for granted.

It’s Holy Blood and Holy Grail for infants. 

It’s Olaf Stapleton for Year 4. 

It’s complete codswallop.

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