The Bringer of Jollity

Journey to Jupiter

by Hugh Walters

When we left Chris Godfrey and his chums, a psychotic scientist was threatening the earth with an orbital death ray. The series started out in 1957 as a "realistic" yarn about a boy astronaut; but it seemed to have morphed into a collection of standard-issue space-opera tropes.

This eighth volume (only twelve more to go!) takes the series back to its roots. It's about a group of space-men going into space on a space rocket. Volume nine is going to involve a mission to Mercury. Volume ten will concern a spaceship to Saturn; but this time we are on a journey to Jupiter. Alliterative determinism will require that the Neptune expedition be a marginal failure.

Up to now, the lads have been shot into space for specific reasons -- to investigate possible extraterrestrial artefacts on the Moon; or to counter a terrible grey ooze from Venus -- but this time, they are off on a jaunt to Jupiter because that's the kind of thing chaps like them do.

Where previous volumes have taken us meticulously through the training process, this one cuts right to the chase. Everyone is on their launch couches; the countdown is underway, and the very first line of the book is "Jupiter, here we come!"

Modern screen-writers might call it a "bottle episode": a group of characters stuck in very close proximity, so their personalities can come into sharp focus. But Walters' heroes don't really have personalities. They are just astronauts. Chris is the leader-astronaut. The point of him used to be that he was a young schoolboy, but now he's the boring grown up one. Morrey is the American-astronaut, but Walters no longer remembers to make him say "Gee whiz!" and "Sure!". Serge is the Russian astronaut but he has no discernible Soviet characteristics. Tony is the working-class-good-with-his-hands-chirpy-astronaut. Despite internal chronology placing him in his early twenties, he knows less science than the average eleven year old. But he can whistle really well, which comes in handy when they need to send a message by Morse code.

The four of them are "the closest possible friends". Not only that, but there is also an "an inseparable bond between them". And they are very brave. "Each had given up counting the number of times his life had been saved by one or other of his companions", Walters tells us. And furthermore "Each of them had saved the lives of the others on many occasions". And in case you haven't got the point yet. "Each knew that he would gladly give his own life to save that of a friend."

The book isn't as pious as the previous volumes. But Walters has a very specific moral compass. Heroism always comes down to conscious self-sacrifice. Greater love hath no man, as the fellow said.

Walters is still fairly interested in keeping his internal chronology straight. Morrey mentions that it is eleven or twelve years since he first met Chris. Well: the books have been published annually since 1957, and Morrey first appeared in Operation: Columbus which came out in 1959. There's a six-year story-internal gap between Moonbase One and Expedition Venus (to give Tony a chance to grow up) which places Journey to Jupiter in or about 1971 -- which is indeed eleven or twelve years after 1959.

There is also some suggestion that the author is doing some minimal world-building. Three volumes ago, our heroes discovered the remains of a lost civilisation on Mars. In this volume, a consignment of scientists and archaeologists are on their way to investigate the ruins in more detail. And this is said to be the third expedition: Walters is imagining multiple interplanetary missions each year. The Captain of the Mars mission speaks of a "brotherhood" of astronauts: we are no longer talking about a minuscule number of test-pilots, but a fairly large professional body. The fraternity has an "unwritten law" that "one astronaut should sacrifice all -- even life itself -- to succour another." 

I summarised the plot of volume one (Blast Off At Woomera!) as "Boy goes up in rocket; boy comes down in rocket". Journey to Jupiter establishes a definite formula for the next few books. "Chaps go to to alien planet. Chaps meet with catastrophic disaster. Chaps face certain death. Chaps come back from alien planet."

I don't mean to knock it. Well, I do mean to knock it, but not too hard. Walters is not very good at writing. He can never resist reaching for a cliche. Rockets "raise themselves on deafening tails of fire." Stars look like "countless points of light shining brilliantly against a black velvet backcloth." When our heroes receive a hopeful message from earth it "brings forth peals of laughter" until "tears were coursing down their cheeks." And, of course, people "announce", "muse", "grumble", "laugh" and "point out" things that they could perfectly well have just "said".

He doesn't have much of an imagination. You might think that the point of sending your heroes on a journey to Jupiter is to imagine what Jupiter would look like close up; or else to engage in scientific conjecture about what one might discover if one dived into that stripy atmosphere. But Walters' knowledge of and interest in the planet doesn't extend far beyond the Ladybird Book of the Solar System which the heroes dutifully recite to each other in the opening pages. ("Jupiter takes nearly twelve years to travel round the Sun but it spins round on its axis faster than any other planet.") He seems reluctant to send his heroes into the atmosphere of Jupiter because no-one knows what they would really find there and he doesn't want to be caught making stuff up. No giant floating jelly fish; no sword-wielding skeleton men. The pals end up merely landing on Io. Which turns out to be just like the Moon, only spikier. 

So, the plot amounts to a series of set-backs. And it has to be admitted that what Walters is really genuinely good at putting our heroes in danger and just barely getting them out of it again.

They are now using an Ion Engine, which can exert continuous low level acceleration on the ship and build it it up to very high speeds. The crew haven't been told in advance that this is what is happening, because UNEXA wants to find out what effect near light-speed has on astronauts "without any preconceptions". Chris started out one rung up from being an experimental chimp, and it seems that the boffins still think of the astronauts in those terms. Serge helpfully explains the doppler effect to Tony; but relativity is regarded primarily as an engineering problem. "Someday someone will break through the light barrier, just as many years ago they crashed through the sound barrier." On this trip, they are only going to get up to three million miles per hour, which is still quite fast. As a result, they find that everything on the ship goes blurry because "human eyes were never designed to look at anything travelling at that speed."

"At a rough guess, looking at something across the cabin, it will have moved almost half an inch by the time light from it has reached our eyes."

I only have O level science, but this sounds to me a lot like bollocks: on a level with the idea that if you throw a ball on the plane, it will fly over your head through the back window. The crew have to blindfold themselves to operate the ship, and Chris very nearly makes a joke.

"Think you can call the Cape without looking."

"Do it with my eyes shut!"

But then they run into more serious problems.

Unfortunately the ship does not decelerate as it is supposed to. This means that it will overshoot Jupiter, or else crash into it, quite definitely killing everyone on board. It does not, I am happy to say, turn out that the Boffins on earth forgot to take the gravitational pull of Jupiter into account when they made their calculations. Indeed, it is never made particularly clear what does cause the disaster. 

Fortunately Chris comes up with a brilliant scheme whereby the ship matches orbital velocity with the Jovian Moon Io, and then, when the moon reaches a suitable point in its own orbit, launches themselves back to earth.

Unfortunately Chris spots that even if this scheme works there wouldn't be enough oxygen for the crew to survive the return trip. 

Fortunately, he realises that there would be enough oxygen for three people to survive. So naturally he decides to do his Col. Oates routine again, deliberately marooning himself on Io to give the other three a fighting chance. 

Unfortunately the other three guess what he is doing, and forcibly drag him back onto the rocket, meaning that everyone is quite definitely going to die (again). But at least they will all go together when they go.

Doesn't this go against the code of the brotherhood of astronauts? If space-men have to lay-down their lives for each other, oughtn't other space-men allow them too? And wouldn't there be protocols for this situation? Couldn't they at least have drawn lots, like marooned sailors deciding who is going to be lunch? 

 Initially, Chris is quite cross, but Morrey talks him round:

"Answer me this question. If I'd planned to make you leave me behind, what would you have done?"

Fortunately there is already another spaceship on it's way to Mars (as foreshadowed in the opening chapter) and "Uncle" George is able to persuade the earth-bound boffins to divert the Martian expedition to rescue the Jovian one. So everyone lives to face certain death in the next volume.

Walters does suspense really, really well. I spent the first fifty pages grinning patronisingly at the at the decent-chaps-got-do-what-a-decent-chaps-gotta-do heroics; and the remaining hundred turning the pages fairly quickly because I actually wanted to know what happens next. Sometimes the audience knows the crew are Doomed before the crew does; but sometimes characters know things that they don't vouchsafe to us readers. We are told early on that Chris has made a Terrible Decision; but there are fifty or sixty pages of gathering doom before we find out about the air-situation and his plan to nobly lay down his life. And the final rescue by the Mars ship goes right up to the wire. There's only sixty minutes of oxygen left, and they can't possibly dock the two ships in that time, but the Captain brilliantly realises that the rocket blaster they were going to use to drill holes in the Martian surface could be used as a shuttle to ferry the crew between the two ships. (In a nice bit of continuity, Chris had the idea of using rockets to dig holes a couple of volumes ago.) The astronauts have to sit astride the rocket while it zooms between ships, and  Walters immediately grabs the obvious comparison:

"Then he calmly jumped off it and tethered it to Jupiter 1 just as if it were a horse in a western film."

But fortunately he doesn't milk the metaphor.

"With a cylinder of tapes clasped tightly to him, he jointed Captain Yull on his fiery charger and together they rode across the plains of space..."

I think we could file that last metaphor under "so dreadful it's brilliant", actually.

When Chris first tells his crew that they are quite definitely going to die, everything turns very morbid:

"What would the end be like. If they crashed into the giant planet, it would be swift and merciful. If they shot past an wandered off into space it might be slow and agonizing. There would be a gradual exhaustion of both oxygen and food. One by one they would die. Who would be first and who would be last."

When it looks like the rescue mission is going to fail, the Martian crew think along the same cheerful lines.

"What would their last hours be like when, one after another, they expired through lack of oxygen... The scientist wondered whether, in the same circumstances, they would have had the courage to meet their own end?"

At first the crew are in denial -- obsessing about trivial jobs and engaging in light hearted chit-chat. "It was as if each of the quartet was determined to shut out of his mind for as long as possible the awful thoughts that had come crowding into it." Chris suggests that this isn't healthy, and that if they "accept their fate and discuss it dispassionately" and it indeed "get used to talking about it freely" it would "come to seem natural and lose its terrors." This seems to be relatively good psychology on the author's part, although we could have done with more showing and less telling. I think this how terminally ill patients are encouraged to deal with mortality. Weren't fighter pilots encouraged to assume that they were already dead and enjoy themselves as much as possible in the meantime? There might also be a good message for those of us who are not on doomed spaceships: come to terms with the fact that you are going to die some day and it will be easier to cope with the idea. Chris may be old-fashioned enough to say his prayers; but at no point does he mention Heaven or suggest that his companions ought to make their peace with the Creator.

The big thing, of course, is to not make a fuss. Chris warns them that bad news is on the way "to make sure that they pass their last few days of life in calmness and dignity". They decide to tell the boffins on earth that they have worked out what is going to happen because they know it will be a great relief "if we can let them know we're facing things calmly." So they send a message, reassuring them that "we've talked it over and we've decided to take things calmly." "Uncle" George complements them on the "courage and calmness" with which they've accepted the situation. Later, when Chris decides to sacrifice himself for his crew, his main concern is that they should be "sensible" and that they should "let him make his sacrifice without any painful scenes". Chris's decision, we are told several times was "cold and deliberate": his friends decision to save him was emotional. 

It's admirable that Chris would sacrifice himself to save his crew; but it's also admirable that his crew would save him; even though they are effectively choosing to end their own lives. Suicide seems to be the main way chaps show affection.

Heroes have to be in danger, of course, and they can't always be saving the world from brown streaks. Hugh Walters astronauts are rarely leaping across canyons or sprinting through shark infested waters. But the focus on noble suicide and calmness in the face of death; and questions about who is going to die first and whether it would be better to go out with a bang or suffocate slowly is a heavy trip to lay on a ten-year old.

At risk of dialling the morbidity up to eleven: this book was published in 1965. In August 1964, the British government had hanged two small-time burglars for a stabbing a man during a bungled robbery; the last executions committed in this country. Perhaps "What would be like to know you are going to die and would I be able to face it calmly, sensibly, and without making a scene?" was a question on lot of people's minds.

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Round and Round and Round

"Heard anything about a brown streak across the Welsh coast" asks one Prof Bargh in Chapter 2 of Hugh Walters' Terror by Satellite?

A conference is quickly called. "The truth of the matter was that no one had a clue as to what had caused the mysterious brown streak, and for weeks scientists from Liverpool and other Universities speculated on its origin."

"If Professor Bargh is right" they conclude "There is only one explanation for these brown streaks..."

As the novel proceeds, everything becomes more ominous. In Chapter 11, "observers are watching and waiting for the appearance of the ominous brown streaks" and by Chapter 14 "the brown streaks are growing ominously." The future of civilisation is, apparently, once again, at stake.

Sofa-buddy sometimes refers to the Underwear Theory of English literature. Broadly speaking: if you ignore a plot problem, you can carry on ignoring it; but once you stop ignoring it, you have to take it into account for ever. As long as Mrs Blyton doesn't mention whether the Famous Five change their underwear during their interminable camping holidays the reader doesn't need to worry about it either. Maybe this is the kind of world where no-one sweats or gets dirty. But once one of the characters notices that they are all too smelly to go and replenish their supplies in the local ginger beer emporium, this has to be born in mind. All future exploits have to include laundry trips and bath times. Narrative worms can never be returned to literary cans.

Hugh Walters is fairly interested in the nuts and bolts of space travel. He worries about how uncomfortable multiple G acceleration would be; and points out that astronauts would need to suck water out of toothpaste tubes. On Chris's first missions, which only lasted hours or days, he had tubes of glucose for sustenance: in later books Walters talks about food tubes and  and meat tablets.

The idea of food tablets is a good old science fiction trope. I suppose the idea is that the worst effects of starvation could be staved off with vitamin pills; although presumably you would have to consume a certain amount of bulk and roughage as well? It's a good enough way of signifying "sciencey-ness"; a social activity like eating reduced to the status of a medical procedure. And the idea of tiny little pills being treated as if they were meals is a little bit funny. I recall a skit on Basil Brush in which "dinner" consisted of a brown pill (roast beef) a white pill (potatoes) and a green pill (cabbage). Mr Roy proceeded to spray the pills with an aerosole can. "What's that?" "Gravy." The Very Early Tardis had a food machine that produced mars-bar shaped blocks which contained all the nutrients one needed to survive, but also synthesised the taste of a meal. Ian complains that the eggs in his eggs-and-bacon bar aren't crisp enough. In Scotland, a kind of dry fudge is referred to as "tablet", so possibly "meat tablet" means "candy bar" rather than "pill".

Obviously, these are children's books, so there cannot be the slightest suggestion of sex, although Whiskers does manage to produce two children off screen. And presumably, blokes who have been in boarding schools and the army don't worry too much about modesty around other blokes, although Chris does step into a different room to try on his space underwear. And we are warned (in volume eight) that vomiting inside a space ship is "not done". But, despite prolonged periods of our heroes being shut up in very small spaces together, we never hear one word about other bodily functions. We are not told if spaceships have a "head", if they have onboard water recycling plants, and certainly nothing about space-potties or space-nappies in their space suits. It isn't even suggested that if you live off space-pills you don't need to go, which wouldn't work but would show that we'd noticed the problem.

Most discussions of space travel regard this subjects as a source of endless fascination. Tom Hanks is asked about it in a Apollo 13, and the engineer has to field a question from school children in Star Trek Enterprise. A recent episode of The Unbelievable Truth (a comedy panel show) required a contestant to give a short talk on the subject of Space Travel, and fully half the jokes were about Zero G turds and depositing urine into space. I assume that a prolonged space voyage would be more like a camping holiday or a music festival: things that would be acutely embarrassing in normal life temporarily cease to matter very much. Walters must be aware of the question, but he doesn't mention it, and doesn't mention that he doesn't mention it.

Now, I am not going to talk about Freud and the return of the repressed. But we all know how difficult it is to not think of a monkey. We all remember how, having resolved not to do so, Basil Fawlty was unable to mention anything apart from the war. Although there exist many hundreds of subjects for erudite conversation there are some men who in the presence of a cripple can speak of nothing but feet. But in Terror by Satellite, the human race is once again going to be wiped out, and it one of our heroes is once again going to do a far far better thing than he has ever done to save it. But this time the threat is not alien ghosts, or grey goo, or non-specific radiation. This time it is an agricultural blight. Great swathes of the earth's farmland are being rendered sterile. And Walters cannot resist repeatedly describing the catastrophe as mysterious ominous brown streaks.

What has happened is this. Last year, in Destination: Mars, we were warned that Hendricks, one of the commanders of UNEXAs main observatory satellite was not a particular nice man. In this volume, it transpires that he is an actual baddie. He has, without anyone on his space-wheel finding out, built a machine which "funnels cosmic rays into a concentrated beam". This is the real cause of the skid-marks: as the satellite orbits, the ray burns a brown girdle round the earth. The soil is rendered permanently infertile, so everyone is going to starve to death very soon indeed. 

Hendricks has a very clear and realistic motivation for this mayhem. 

"Since the dawn of history the world has muddled along under many governments. Only if the whole Earth is united under a single direction can its full possibilities be realised!" 

So, naturally, he is going to blackmail the human race. 

"Either accept my ultimate authority or be destroyed. If they refuse to accept me, I shall not hesitate to destroy the earth!" 

In Blast Of At Woomera the bad guy was definitely a commie and definitely a traitor, but we were told that he had had an unhappy childhood and was well meaning but misguided. But in Terror By Satellite it is a truth universally accepted that a mad scientist in possession of a death ray would want to destroy the world. He does have a nice line in ranting. 

"Miserable creature! Who are you to question my decisions and order? I will not allow such a worthless person to interfere in my great plan!" 

A contemporary review pointed out that a hundred years previously he would probably have been turning old ladies out of their cottages.

One wishes that someone from the UN had pointed out that they were already in the business of getting the different governments to cooperate, and that this had so far resulted in a base on the moon, contact with Martians, and a satellite. Or they could have just told him that he could rule the world if he liked and then carried on as before. As a child, I think I took all this for granted and enjoyed the heroics and the hardware. As a grown up, I can take moderate pleasure from the tropes: supervillain with orbiting death ray, forsooth. But it is a bit of a shame that Walters, who started out wanting to produce educational realistic science fiction with a capital science has shifted so speedily into pulp space opera.

Nothing goes out of date as quickly as the future. One of the delights of Dan Dare is that the Space Fleet is pretty much indistinguishable from the wartime RAF, and that flying cars are quite clearly 1950s flying cars. Star Trek: The Next Generation already feels delightfully retro-1980s. The same thing is true of historical fiction: doubtless the people of a thousand years ago perceived the world differently from us: they lived inside a different cosmology, followed a different morality, and didn't think Talons of Weng Chiang was at all racist. And a clever novelist might convey some of that. But very often we just want to play at knights in armour: characters with pretty much modern attitudes in an historical theme park. 

If my chronology is right, Terror by Satellite takes place around 1970. (It was published in '64 and presumably written in '63: Cape Kennedy is still called Cape Canaveral.) But the central plot device is so much of its time that I am tempted to call it quaint.

Tony Hale is our viewpoint character. Chris Godfrey is a rather distant, important figure who gives important lectures in universities and will come and save the day if only us ordinary folks can get in touch with him. Two years ago Tony tried to sacrifice his life to save the earth from the Venusian goo; last year he helped save the human race from telepathic martian ghosts. But he's reverted to being a schoolboy. A bit naughty, a bit nerdy. His new hobby is....ham radio.

I love it. We've found evidence of at least two sets of aliens, and are currently uncovering their ancient technology; people live on the Moon and in orbit. But putting shortwave transmitters together and playing chess with people in Hong Kong is still the height of geek-chic. Tony's namesake, Tony Hancock, famously took up the same hobby in a 1961 TV episode, and in 1963 perpetual side-kick Rick Jones recruited a collection of American hams to keep tabs on the Incredible Hulk. Tony's best mate, Sidney, is also trying to assemble a radio and obtain a licence, and there is a good-natured rivalry between the two of them. (Tony Hancock's best mate was Sid James; but he didn't appear in the ham radio episode.) But Tony now has a regular job. He is a full-time techie on -- where else? --  Hendricks satellite! He is disappointed that he is going to have to go into space on a space rocket before his radio licence comes through, so he smuggles the equipment on board the satellite.

Walters is a very workmanlike writer. You can see the construction lines, but the whole thing holds together. There needs to be a sympathetic character on the evil scientist's satellite: Tony is the obvious candidate. Chapters alternate between scientists on earth gradually realising what a terrible threat the Brown Stains represent; and Tony, gradually realising that his commanding officer is a maniac. For the threads to come together, Tony has to be able to communicate with Earth: so Walters thinks up the sledgehammer plot device of the smuggled radio. But he spends several chapters foreshadowing the development; telling us about Tony's new hobby and his rivalry with his friend; so the smuggling episode when it comes is very nearly convincing. 

Once again, the book works because it follows a detailed, procedural structure. When Tony realises something is wrong; he has to secretly send a message to Sid and Sid has to get in touch with Chris, who is giving an important lecture and is naturally inclined to think he is being pranked. Once communication is established, they have to communicate in a very sophisticated code that a mad genius would never be able to see through. ("The doctor is sending a first aid party to your town.")

And, once again, heroism means sacrifice. Tony may be a tech nerd, he may be a little naughty, but when the chips are down he does not set his life at a pin's fee. Uncle George (the doctor) is sending Chris (the first aid team) in a rocket to act as a deus ex machina; but Tony knows that Hendrick can zap the space ship so he promises to take the death ray off line. He knows that the death ray is situated in Hedrick's private lab; he knows that he can disengage it by cutting the wire that connects it to the electrical generator; but he also knows that cutting the wire will electrocute him. And so the grim death watch motif returns. 

Tony is brave: "What did it matter that his own life would be blotted out in one blinding blue flash? He'd feel nothing. It would be over in a few milliseconds." 

Tony doesn't tell his friends what he is planning, and he very nearly steals a line from Captain Oates. "I'll be back just as soon as I can." 

Tony performs a short operatic aria before his death scene: "Soon he would go on the errand from which he would never return....Through his mind flashed the various pages of his life's story, a story that was by no means a long one." 

Tony is sad:"He felt too full to speak on what he knew to be his last journey."

Tony has noticed that Hendricks thinks he is God Almighty, but he isn't consciously acting out an allegory. He is less inclined than his mentor to utter silent prayers, and appears to be agnostic about the afterlife. "Would there just be a blinding flash as his saw bit through the insulation and then know nothing more. And after that -- what then?"

And Tony very nearly turns yellow at the end. "I'm a coward" he sobbed "I don't want to die".

But finally "with a moan of anguish" he cuts the wire.

SPOILER: Hendrick had already turned the power off because reasons, so Tony survives. Chris space walks to the space station from the other ship, gains entrance to Hendrick's lab from the outside, knocks him and his allies out with anaesthetic gas, and generally saves the day. Hendricks goes down the "you'll never take me alive copper" route and jumps out of an airlock. Having saved the world, again, Tony returns home to find a letter saying that his application for a radio licence has been turned down. Walters is finding it increasingly hard to resist the bathetic punch line. 

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The Bringer of War

I first read Destination Mars (the sixth of Hugh Walter's boys' science fiction tales) when I was nine or ten. I remember feeling disappointed. Betrayed, even. Which is odd: because in a lot of ways it's the best of the series so far. 

I had read Daddy's book about Martians invading olden days England and dying of chicken pox. I had read the one in the school library about the fat vet flying to the moon on the back of a giant moth. I watched Doctor Who every Saturday. I expected to come out as a Tomorrow Person any day now. I had no issue with fantasy. But we kids knew what was what. We drew strong distinctions between the real and the made-up. Doctors Who and Doolittle are pretend. The whole point of Chris Godfrey was that he lived in the real world. At any rate in a world which might have been real, or a world which would have become real by the time I was a grown up. 

I am vitally interested in the future, said Arthur C Clark, because I plan to spend the rest of my life there. That's why kids in the 70s were interested in space travel. That's why kids today are interested in climate change.

But by the end of this volume, Chris Godfrey is just one more character in a story. A good story. Maybe Walters' best story since Blast Off At Woomera. But the rules of the game have changed. Back into story-land dragons have fled. The knights are no more and the dragons are dead.

Our heroes go to Mars. There is no catastrophe in the offing, no terrible threat to the human race. The boffins decide it is about time someone went off to Mars, so off to Mars someone goes.

Before setting out, Nice Sir George briefs them:

"All things considered, Mars is undoubtedly the most fascinating of all the planets. It is basically similar to the Earth; it is tolerably warm, it has atmosphere and water; and it has vegetation, so that even if it has long since passed the prime of life it is still far from being a dead or dying world. Though it is true to say that we have no proof of intelligent life upon it, it is equally true to say that we have no proof that advanced forms of life do not exist.”

He's quoting a text book. The book is called A Guide To The Planets and it's written by one Patrick Moore, published in 1960. It's not exactly what you would expect the head of the United Exploration Agency to be reading to his leading astronauts in The Future. (I make it 1969). But it is very much what you might expect a furniture salesman and Boy Scout leader to use as a crib when composing his new science fiction epic. And, in fairness, this volume is a lot more interested in space exploration and astronomy than the last one was. But it's not exactly built on cutting edge research. Some of the cast are still talking in terms of  canals.

The first half of the book is largely procedural. They decide to go to Mars in Chapter 2, blast off in Chapter 9 and arrive there in Chapter 12. Hughes' language is not self-consciously juvenile, but he relies on slow, blow by blow descriptions, often of quite trivial events, to draw readers into the story. We hear that there is going to be a Mars shot. Our heroes meet in a cafe and wonder if they are going to be the astronauts. They get a telegram from Nice Uncle George. They wonder what it can be about. They kill time while waiting:

At times they would all go to Morrey’s rooms. The American’s landlady would produce numerous cups of coffee while they talked endlessly about Mars and the possibility of going there. When they walked round to Serge’s quarters the Russian scientist himself would brew the drink. But always they returned to Chris’s lodgings, which he was sharing with Tony, to see if any news had come.

Finally they go to see Uncle George. They worry about what time to set out...

“How much longer?” Tony asked. 

“Forty-five minutes. You know it isn’t any use getting there before time,” Chris pointed out. 

“Uncle George is very precise.” 

“Mustn’t be late, either,” Morrey put in. “I remember getting into very serious trouble with him once when I was two minutes late for an appointment.” 

“We must arrive at noon precisely,” advised Serge, but Chris argued that they ought to reach the building two minutes to zero to allow time to contact Uncle George.

It isn't padding: it's a technique that J.K Rowling and Enid Blyton use very successfully. Describe what is going on and the reader will imagine it is all happening to them. It's a kind of guided day-dreaming: tell, don't show. Walters' characters also share with Rowling's the infuriating habit of "asking", "pointing out", "putting in", "advising" and "arguing" things that they might just as well have "said".

Nice Sir George talks to them about Mars and reads to them from Patrick Moore and finally tells them that they have been chosen for the mission. Tony, presumably embarrassed about all the blubbing last time round, says "Yippee!" Although he is said to be 22, he is still portrayed as a child and will be for the rest of the series. He even dances for joy in his spacesuit on the Martian surface.

Everyone is very relaxed about the interplanetary expedition. It may not be quite like nipping round the corner for a pint of milk, but it's certainly no bigger deal than a jaunt across to the Colonies for a spot of mountain climbing. (Last year, everyone was treating the end of the human race as a really major inconvenience. It's the British way.) That's also part of the appeal for us kids. We want to play at being astronauts: so landing on Mars ought to be more or less the same as building a den in the woods. You get shot through space in a tin can, and as soon as you land you take the lid off and have a jolly good look round. There is no Wellsian sense of the weight of infinite sidereal distances.

But our Hugh can unquestionably spin a good yarn. In Chapter 2, while preparing for their adventures, a Dutch astronaut called, inevitably, Van der Veen, tells Chris that he must not go to Mars and that he will be in terrible danger if he does and that it is vital that they cancel the mission. Having given this warning, he absconds from the base. Walters takes things very slowly:

Excusing himself to his three friends, Chris left the table when breakfast had barely finished. He soon found out that the Dutchman’s room was number 34D. Determined to discover what lay behind his early visitor’s strange actions, Chris strode along to D block. Outside number 34 he stopped and knocked firmly on the door. There was no reply. Again Chris knocked, but without result. Tentatively he tried the door. It was unfastened and he pushed it open. There was no one inside, but the room looked very untidy, as if Van der Veen had hurriedly packed his belongings. Drawers and cupboards were open and mostly empty. Where had the Dutchman gone?

Whiskers and Chris drive around the streets and try to find him. Then they go to the police. When they finally track him down, he tells Chris what is bothering him, and Chris tells Whiskers, and they all go back and tell Sir George. There is just the right amount of drip drip drip to keep you interested.

It seems that Lovecraftian Horror -- or at least Quatermassian mild alarm -- has invaded the shelves of the junior library. Between Earth and Mars there is a band of radiation, the La Prince belt, which not only cuts off communication with Earth, but also conveniently wipes magnetic tape which passes through it. As the Flying Dutchmen's ship went through the belt he heard, over his radio, Voices. Distinctly Voices with a capital letter. It isn't quite clear if the capital-vee Voices are terrible in themselves, or if the Dutchman has been stricken with Existential Angst because Man Is Not Alone In the Universe. (The first four books were about Lunar incursions by Space Beings, also with capital letters but people in science fiction stories have short memories for this kind of thing.)

Sir George tells Chris to tell the other chaps that he that hath no stomach for the fight is allowed to go home, but they are all jolly resolute in the face of certain etc. etc. etc.

In the first four books, people were shot into space from Australian rocket bases; in book five they were fired to Venus from the Moon, but in this one they travel to an orbiting space-station and pick up what we would now call a Shuttle but Walters thinks of as a Space Plane. The space plane has an Ion drive, which uses much less fuel than a chemical drive and can be kept running for longer, so the ship can accelerate to 500,000 MPH and get to Mars in only two and a half days. The space station is one of those rotating wheels, with fake gravity generated by centrifugal force. (Centrifugal Force still existed at this time: it was repealed a few years later and replaced with Centripetal Acceleration.) I remember enjoying the idea that as you walked through the tube you appeared to be going up hill, but never actually get any higher.

Walters mentions in passing that the man in charge of the satellite, Commander Barnwell, is an all around could egg but "Commander Hendriks, who relieved him at three-monthly intervals, wasn’t nearly such a pleasant chap." The next book in the series will be called Terror By Satellite. I wonder if you can guess the name of the baddie?

 

The book contains a lot of sciency language. At one point, and entirely without provocation, Serge explains what "solar wind" is to Tony. And Walters signals quite heavily when he is relying on authentic real world sources (i.e Mr Patrick Moore) and when he is inventing stuff to make life more exciting. I don't think I necessarily learned anything from the books but I certainly got the impression that I was learning, and that learning was potentially fun. It may have given me the urge to read some hard core text books, like, er, How It Works: The Rocket (Ladybird, 1967).

The main threat turns out not to be the Terrible Voices, although they certainly are Terrible. When our heroes get to Mars, they dig through the red moss that covers the planet (which Walters admits is a bit of a stretch) and find a lump of sandstone which appears to have writing on it. Then they dig a bit further and find another bit. Then they use the plane's engine to blast away some earth to uncover a lot more. Tony finds that "Yippee" doesn't sufficiently express his excitement, and he resorts to even stronger expletives. “Gosh!" he exclaims.

Patrick Moore believes that there could be, or could have been, life on Mars; and Percival Lowell believed there were canals, although it turns out he was the victim of an optical illusion. So Martian archeology is within the realms of Proper Science Fiction: stuff that might be true but probably isn't. I kind of think Walters should have left it at that, like he did with the lunar domes: a mystery without a solution. But the temptation is too great. Once our heroes get back to the ship they encounter ACTUAL MARTIANS.

Hughes' picture of the Solar System is pretty anachronistic. The inner planets are younger and more primitive; the outer ones, older and more developed. Venus is what earth was like millions of years in the past; Mars is what earth will become, millions of years in the future. The asteroid belt is the remains of an even more ancient planet that has come to an end. It is an image which science has long since discarded: but it's a pretty compelling myth. 

Evolution, as we know from the Tomorrow People and Doctor Who, is a pre-programmed process of levelling-up. The Martians have "evolved" to the point at which they no longer need their bodies and are pure intellect; and it is inevitable that this is what will happen to humans in the Far Future.

“Do you mean that, in the distant future we, too, will be like that?” gasped Serge. 

“It is inevitable,” the Martian’s reply came into their minds. “Already you have moved in that direction. Your teeth and hair are disappearing. Your muscles are less strong. At the same time your brain is growing larger and more powerful. Yes, you will follow along the same path as we did, as did those before us, and as will those after you.”

In millions of years, the life forms on Venus will have evolved into humans, and will travel to earth, and find that the humans have turned into disembodied consciousnesses. Olaf Stapelton it may not be, but it did give this particular nine-year old an agreeably spine-tingly sense that space is big and time lasts for a long time.

The Martian Consciousness talks to Tony through his dreams, and gradually communicates with the other members of the crew telepathically. The philosophical conundrums around disembodiment don't trouble anyone in the slightest. We are told that the Martians are minds without bodies and that they do not have physical forms, but the fact that they manifest as balls of light suggests they interact with the material world in some way. (Possibly Hughes thinks that minds are a kind of energy that can theoretically be detached from the brain?) Even so pious a young man as Chris Godfrey doesn't associate these free-floating consciousnesses with souls: religion and science live in different conceptual boxes.

Having progressed beyond the need for material bodies, the Martians don't have technology; but if their world were to be destroyed, they would still cease to exist. “You would not understand if I tried to explain this" says the Martian, helpfully. So, naturally, they want to hitch a lift on the boys' ship and come back to earth, where they would share all their wonderful science with the primitive humans. But there is a catch: "because we are a higher species than Man, we shall control him."

“We shall bring you untold benefits. We shall improve your technology beyond your imagination. We shall change the face of your planet.”

“And, in return, we shall be your slaves,” Morrey thought to himself.

Chris thinks that turning control of the earth over to the Martians is probably a bad idea and refuses to give them a lift, so the Martians take direct possession of the crew's minds. They find Tony the easiest to infiltrate, presumably because he is young, northern, and prone to bursting into tears and shouting "yippee". But Chris, turns out to be immune, because he is the hero and the series is named after him.Which brings us to the scene without which no Hugh Walters novel is complete: the noble act of hari-kari. The only thing that Chris can think of to do is throw open the airlocks, killing everyone on board. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down the lives of his friends to save civilisation as we know it...

Fortunately it doesn't come to this. One of the others bashes him over the head. Everyone else is mind-controlled and the Martians are telepathic so it was not too hard for them to find out what was going on.

Fortunately there is a deus ex machina on hand, although this time Walters doesn't directly blame it on the actual deus. It turns out that the Martians are also terrified of the Terrible Voices and the radiation in the La Prince belt is fatal to them. It's a cop out: but it's the kind of cop out Herbert George himself used, so maybe we can forgive it.

The tale ends on an ironic note. Our heroes have just saved the earth, again, but because of the radiation belt, no-one knows what they have done. But on their return to Earth the first thing which happens is that Whiskers breathlessly tells them the results of a sporting fixture! It feels too much like a Scooby Doo ending: everyone laughs, and the status quo is resumed. The great adventure wasn't that great after all. It is the Original Sin of an ongoing series. For the saga to carry on, not too much can be allowed to happen. Moonbases can replace Woomera and space stations can replace Moonbases, but our heroes can't be psychologically changed by their multiple brushes with certain death. Civilisation can't be changed by almost definitely being wiped out for the third or fourth time. The English one, the Russian one, the American one and the Northern one are the only four people who have ever spoken with non-humans, but in a few months their main preoccupation will be tinkering with amateur radio sets. If UNEXA sends xenoarcheologists to follow up our hero's discoveries, or diplomatics to make peace with the surviving martians, or soldiers to nuke the site from orbit, we never hear about it. 

So. A good yarn. But still: Martians. Glowy mind controlly telepathic Martians who want to CONQUER THE EARTH. It's a lot to believe. It's the wrong kind of belief. I somehow don't want Chris who fell off the ladder at sports day and was too shy to say his prayers out loud to be saving the world from malevolent floaty glow worms. And the aliens are one dimensional even by comic-book standards. It doesn't feel right for the sorts of characters who drink tea and bicker about chocolate rations to encounter aliens who want to enslave humans because dammit, Jim, that's what aliens in science fiction stories do. (I suppose in the immediate aftermath of empire, Superior Races becoming masters of Inferior Races wasn't a point anyone wanted to press too hard?)

I wonder if Walters had read The Silver Locusts? Ray Bradbury's world of infinite mid-western summer vacations could hardly be further removed from Walters' second class carriages and early closing days. But ghostly martians who manifest as glowing balls of light can hardly fail to put you in mind of the Martian Chronicles. But there are plenty of other place that the idea of a dying planet could have come from. H.G Wells' Martians are brains (not minds) that have evolved to the point at which their tripods and other tools are practically spare bodies.

But here's a thing.

This book was published in December 1963. In that exact same month, a schoolgirl named Susan Foreman failed to spot that the radiation dedicator has shifted to Danger, and she, her grandfather, and two teachers, stepped out onto the surface of a Dead Planet...

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The Bringer of Peace

When a bad thing happens to an English public school boy, he isn't supposed to cry. But if he does cry, a bigger boy will put his hand on his shoulders and tell him to buck up because it's not the end of the world.

Expedition: Venus is the fifth of Hugh Walters' science fiction series. A bad thing happens. It literally is the end of the world. And all the ex-schoolboys try very hard not to cry.

Six years have passed since the events of Moonbase One. Tony, the spunky freckle-faced 14 year old school-boy introduced in the last volume is now a spunky freckle-faced 20 years old space mechanic. Little Chris Godfrey is now Christopher Godfrey the famous physicist. The British Space Exploration Agency has been succeeded by Unexa, the Universal Exploration Agency, but Nice Uncle George is still in charge. (Nasty Sir Leo has snuffed it between volumes, which is a bit of a shame: every good schoolboy needs a harsh-but-fair headmaster to kick against.) The United Nations, rather charmingly, is still referred to as the U.N.O.

By my calculations, the year is 1968. (The book came out in '62.) We've arrived in The Future. There is a base on the Moon; regular unmanned space probes, and disagreement in the U.N.O about whether to map the moon in more detail or strike out the planets. Chris and his two pals -- the Russian One and the American One -- are now said to have been into space dozens of times. 

There's a plot. 

One of the probes has come back from Venus ("our twin planet") and botched quarantine, with the result that a scary grey goo is advancing across the earth, wiping out everything in its path. For the second time in ten years, civilisation is going to come to an end, although everyone treats the prospect of human extinction with a very British sang froid. It is absolutely taken for granted that the government can and should censor the press and the general populace are kept in the dark about what is going on.

The boffins reason that if Venus isn't entirely covered by Grey Ooze, then something fairly common in the Venusian atmosphere must be killing it. So in triple quick time our four heroes are despatched to Lunarville, and thence to Venus, to get samples and hopefully save the world. They are joined by a fifth team member named Pierre who, it will not amaze readers to discover, is French. (Whiskers, the nice retired RAF man who appears in every volume as light relief, briefly encounters an old friend called Jock, who says things like "Have ye heard where the mould has reached, Sir?" You may perhaps be able to guess his nationality.) Pierre is a bit of plot machinery: they need a super-competent biologist to process the Venusian soil samples and work out which one is the antidote to the Grey Goo. He isn't destined to become a regular member of the Famous Five. 

We don't get much sense of what a moon-base looks like, or what it would feel like to live on one. Morrey (the American one) improbably takes a bath on his arrival, and is slightly surprised that the water will be filtered and reused. (Toilet facilities are still not mentioned.) The Venus rocket catches fire during the planning stage, but everyone works really hard and the launch goes ahead. They refer to the rocket as Phoenix from then on, which is quite cute.

Walters can do nuts and bolts details, but he can't do sense of wonder. He cares that our heroes are given new khaki fatigues before going out to the Sahara to have a look at the Grey Goo first hand, and that poor Whiskers clothes get creased up before he tries them on. But the actual first manned trip to an alien planet feels rather perfunctory. We are told that the Phoenix can accelerate to half a million miles per hour, but that this won't actually feel any different to travelling at thousandth of that speed, and therefore the trip only takes a couple of days. We are told that messages from earth take four minutes to get to Venus, but our heroes don't really feel a long way from home: it's more like a diving expedition with a very long tube back to the mother ship.

The plan is to skirt the Venusian atmosphere and pick up samples for Frenchie to analyse, but when this doesn't work they briefly land on the surface. There is some speculation about whether the surface would be land, water, desert, rock or dust? "Or was it even a dense tropical jungle as some folks had suggested?" In the event, it feels as if they have landed "inside a bowl of cotton wool", but they sensibly don't open the doors, and it is too dark to see the surface of the planet on what is quaintly described as a "television set". When the ship seems to be sinking, they blast off in a hurry. Quite tense, but quite an anti-climax. Fortunately, Frenchie has got the sample he needs, and is already at work on an antidote. 

It's on the way home that Walters' standard plot formula -- I am slightly tempted to say his pathology -- kicks in. All the lads are in terrible danger. All the lads are going to experience quite a lot of physical pain. All the lads are quite definitely going to die horribly. And the important question is -- will they get through it without crying? 

Just before blast off, Tony notices an itch on his hand. Then he notices it again. Then he goes down to the engine room and refuses to come out. Chris is jolly cross, and even uses the word "mutiny". Is Tony still at heart the naughty oik from the lower class school? 

Astute readers realise what has happened. While helping Frenchie in the lab and asking intelligent questions for the benefit of readers, Tony has been infected by the Grey Goo and he's gone into the hold and put on a space suit in order to die quietly without out infecting the rest of the crew. He doesn't directly say "I'm going out and I may be gone some time" but he might as well have done.

The scene in which Chris follows him down to the engine room and realise what has happened is the only really dramatic moment in the book: 

As soon as he was clear, Chris went over to the suit-clad figure which they had strapped to a couch. Anxiously Chris bent over to undo the fastenings of the helmet. Then he sprang back with a cry of horror that startled all the others. They looked at their leader in surprise. He looked pale—as if he had seen a ghost. Then he seemed to pull himself together and bent over Tony again. Yes, he was not mistaken. Through the front-piece of the mechanic’s helmet he could see his face inside. It was covered with grey mould.

Fortunately, Frenchie has already created a potential Grey Good Antidote out of the Venusian samples. So, there is nothing to do but use Tony as a guinea-pig. The rest of the crew don't put their own suits on before taking his off. Because if the antidote works, it won't matter if they get infected. And if it doesn't work, it won't matter either. When asked at a press conference whether the Famous Five will come back to earth without an antidote, nice Uncle George says "Well there wouldn't be much point, would there?") 

It works, of course. Tony looses his composure, but Chris is jolly decent about it.  

An immense surge of relief welled up inside him, and the next moment he was weeping like a baby.

"Sorry" Tony gasped between sobs.

"Think nothing of it, old chap" Chris said. "This will do you a world of good."

Naturally, everyone is jolly pleased that civilisation has been saved:

"Sorry, I couldn't swallow it at first" the Director went on "but I can now confess we'd all given up hope here. It--takes some getting used to when you learn that the world isn't going to end after all."

Chris goes all pious on us:

"The World can be saved" was all the biologist said.

Chris, as leader of the expedition, put his hands together in an attitude of prayer

"Thank God" he said simply.

They race home aboard the phoenix, custodian of the secret phial that can save the human race. But it suddenly occurs to them that they used too much fuel blasting off from Venus and have got no way of slowing down. They are once again quite definitely all going to die. They nobly work out a way of sending the antidote down to earth in a canister before they crash, and even more nobly make the parachute out of the covering of their acceleration couches. So the process of slowing down is going to really hurt. But they grit their teeth and take it like a man. Hughes is in the habit of describing the training process for space travel as "torture" and the description of deceleration goes more than usually over the top:

Without proper support they found the terrific pressure excruciating. It was almost as much as they could do to remain in control of their reeling senses. Yet they all wanted the agony to continue as long as possible....

Miraculously, the welcome torture continued, but it must end at any moment now...

But like schoolboys outside the headmasters office, they try extra hard not to cry:  

Tony couldn't trust himself to speak. He found it increasingly hard to choke back the sobs that kept rising in his throat. He wasn't going to break down in front of the others. He'd keep a stiff upper lip even if it killed him to do it. 

The send the life saving canister towards the earth and prepare to quite definitely die. But of course Nice Uncle George hasn't really given up on them. He sends up one of the special space tugs which is used to retrieve obsolete satellites and space junk to slow down the fast moving ship. It's a long shot but it works. Our five heroes are once again not dead. Tony disgraces himself, but the others all take it like men. The prose turns a brighter shade of purple.

The tears were gushing from Tony's eyes and floating round the cabin like little balls of silver, so great was the mechanics relief at the news. No young man wants to die if he can help it.

Chris and the others were just as deeply affected, but somehow managed to maintain their self control.

The book ends with Sir George comforting Tony in hospital -- and promising he's going to go into space again. Because naturally when a chap has spent 48 hours contracting plague, committing suicide to save his friends and being subjected to torture for the salvation of the human race, the one thing he needs is reassurance that he's going to do it all again in the next volume.

Sir George and Hugh Walters have spotted the same problem. Chris Godfrey, pint sized space-monkey, was an excellent viewpoint character. Christopher Godfrey, seasoned space traveller and Cambridge academic, not so much. So Tony Hale, spunky chocolate-nicking mechanic is going to take over his position as series lead. Provided he can get the hang of the rule that boys don't cry.  

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Yesterday's Gone

No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

Salman Rushdie

So: let's talk about the Tomorrow People.

I look at it with the eye of love: I fear I am going to make it sound a lot more interesting than it ever was. I issue the same warning that I did when writing about Hugh Walters. If you don't already know and love the show, for god's sake don't go away and watch it on my say-so.

It's shockingly badly acted; some of the social attitudes make on feel a little queasy; and the sets and aliens are genuinely made out of tin foil and crepe paper.

So: what was it? 

It was a science fiction serial, shown after school on Monday evenings, on ITV, the less snooty of the two UK TV channels.

It was about four children, three boys and a girl, between the ages of twelve and seventeen. They had special telepathic powers which they kept secret from the rest of the world. They had a secret hide-out, full of scientific equipment, and a friendly voice-of-god computer. They kept the earth safe from space aliens and irresponsible time-travellers.

It was very British: indeed, very London-centric. The fortress of solitude is accessed via a disused Tube station near Tower Bridge. Commercial TV was regionalised in those days, and the Tomorrow People was made by the London franchise. The Thames Television ident, showing the Houses of Parliament and a cockney street cry is enough to set people of a certain age off on a Proustian reverie. It's as much a part of the Tomorrow People as the Twentieth Century Fox Fanfare is part of Star Wars: blessings on BritBox for leaving it intact.

The core premise is that every child is a latent Tomorrow Person. The first episode begins with the viewpoint character, a schoolboy named Steven, manifesting his psi-powers for the first time. It's an unpleasant, traumatic process. The other three characters (Kenny, Carol, and John: introduced in reverse order of seniority) are said to have been through it themselves. John says that it is harder for girls, which Carol takes exception to. They call the process Breaking Out, which is very much the kind of thing you might do after Tuning In and Turning On.

And there is the whole joy of the programme. So far there are only four Tomorrow People. But there will be others. Andrew Rilstone from Miss Bugden's class is not likely to be bitten by a radioactive spider or caught in a gamma bomb explosion. But it is only a matter of time before he Breaks Out.

It feels like we are jumping on board a narrative that is already well under way. There have been Break Out stories in the past, and doubtless there will be more Break Out stories in the future. John talks about what it was like to Break Out alone, with no-one to help him. It is possible that I didn't realise, in 1973, that I was watching the very first episode of a brand new programme: for all I knew I was coming in part way through a show that Magpie Children had been watching for years. I was well aware that there had been Doctors Who before Jon Pertwee and Assistants before Jo.

The format of the Tomorrow People encodes the idea of "emergence", much as the format of Doctor Who incapsulates the idea of "constant change". The first episode of the first season begins with Steven Breaking Out and joining a group which already exists; the final episode ends with a Space Policeman telling them that they need to be on the look out for other telepaths. "It will be good when there are more of us" says Steven.

"More of you lot?" says cockney human confident Ginge "I don't think we could stand it" and they all laugh. Every story ends with everyone laughing at something which is not particularly funny. The Tomorrow People is quite like Scooby Doo in that respect.

Season Two does indeed begin with a new Tomorrow Person emerging. I don't know if it was planned that way from the beginning, or if a new character, Elizabeth, had to be created when Sammie Winmill (Carol) and Stephen Salmon (Kenny) are let go, presumably because they are not very good at acting. Kenny was black and Carol was a girl so the new character, Elizabeth, is a black girl. This is never a plot point: Scotsmen wear kilts and working class people say “gor blimey” but the series is pretty good, for its time, at being inclusive and colour blind.

But whether foreseen or not, it creates a pattern, a kind of regularity. A new school year, a new pair of shoes, a new pencil case, a new season of the Tomorrow People, a new Break Out. We are witnessing a process; a process which will end when the old human race (you) becomes obsolete and the Tomorrow People (us) take over.

It could easily have been sinister: I don't know if any of the remakes or the fan-fic ever made it sinister.

I don't think the series ever really identifies Breaking Out with the onset of puberty. Kenny is said to have powered-up when he was very young; certainly before his twelfth birthday. It would have been quite odd to construct a series in which children are the only hope for the human race, and then make it a plot point that they only get to do cool stuff once they turn into grown ups.

And at a thematic level -- even if it doesn't always make perfect narrative sense -- the conflict between The Young and The Old is what the Tomorrow People is about. "The Generation Gap" had ceased to be a social problem and become a cliche: in the 1970s, everyone took it for granted that kids and adults spoke a different language and didn't understand each other. Carol tells Steven that "we" are going to take over, stop wars, and put the world in order. "Us children?" says Steven.

The X-Men were the children of the atom; hippies were sometimes called the flower children. In 1973 "children" was still a magic word, representing wisdom and innocence and purity and a kind of enlightenment.

It's different from incantatory use of the word "boy" in 1950s American comics, where to be a man-child was to have a special quality of carefree abandon, rough and tumble violence, licensed naughtiness. And its very different from the quintessential English comics in which "kids" are anarchic rule-breakers who have to be literally beaten into submission by the adult world. The Beatles wrote nostalgically about the shopping streets and parks of their childhoods (a whole ten years ago), while evoking Alice in Wonderland and playground rhymes; the ghost of A.A Milne hangs over the Incredible String Band. We are sometimes inclined to look at old children's TV -- Bagpuss and the Clangers and the Magic Roundabout and Crystal Tips and Alistair and say (if we are kind) that they have a hippy vibe, and (if we are less kind) that the makers must have been smoking something. 

But what we now call psychedelia was simply part of the mainstream culture. Everyone was a little childish. Pastel shades and bright colours and giant symbols of flowers and anthropomorphised animals have always been part of the stock in trade of children's illustrations. In the retro future of the early 1970s, they had crossed over into your granny's wallpaper and John Craven's shirts. 

Tony Blair launched his 2005 election campaign from a school, with a choir singing a secular hymn that began "We are the children of tomorrow...". Some wag pointed out that it would have been more accurate to say that they were the children of today, and the grown ups of tomorrow, and, presumably, the babies of yesterday.

People of tomorrow is really just a convoluted way of spelling the world "child". The series is about potential; a thing which has not yet happened. Homo Superior are not called The Tomorrow Children 

Earth is a regarded as a minor backwater by the Galactic Federation. There is something quite exciting about this idea: the smallness of the Earth emphasises the bigness of space. The Galactic Federation treats us as a "closed world": respectable aliens are not allowed to communicate with planets where there aren't any telepaths. But they are permitted to talk to the Tomorrow People. From the Galactic point of view, these four kids are the only humans. When Steven Breaks Out, he joins the Tomorrow People; when the Earth Breaks Out, it joins the Federation. To be a kid is to be a member of an exclusive club with a secret den. You may get yelled at by policemen and scowled at by beefeaters but the adult world is literally irrelevant. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.

In The Medusa Strain (story two) we time travel into a future in which practically everyone is a Tomorrow Person. John, Carol, Steven and Kenny are mysterious historical figures; members of the Underground before telepaths declared themselves openly. But the only Tomorrow Person we actually encounter is Peter, a more than usually whiney kid. He's a kind of apprentice Time Lord and we are told that only  -- telepaths -- are taken on as trainees for this important job. Admittedly, in the Vanishing Earth (story three) the Galactic Policemen who sorts everything out a bit too quickly in the final episode is old and serious and played by Kevin Stoney. But that seems to spoil the metaphor: a grown up who is not a Sap.

Had I been writing it, I might have turned the Tomorrow People into Logans Run and said that your powers go away on your Thirtieth Birthday. Or that you cease to be Homo Superior if you show the slightest interest in lipstick, nylons or invitations. Or perhaps I would have allowed the heroes to run away to a never never land where they never grow up. Which, I suppose, is exactly what Carol and Kenny do. 

Gavin Burrows is currently comparing and contrasting the series with Stan Lee's X-Men. There is enough similarity between the two that Mark Miller called the first Ultimate X-Men Graphic novel The Tomorrow People.

The X-Men are also called Homo Superior. But they are MUTANTS. They are young people who developed super-powers because of all the RADIATION in the atmosphere. The Tomorrow People are not MUTANTS: they are simply the next inevitable, stage of evolution. 

 "The development of man hasn't just suddenly stopped" explains Carol "It's going on all the time. But in the last hundred everything has speeded up. The world has changed beyond recognition, and human beings have changed with it". When he talk about the pace of change accelerating between, say, 1870 and 1970 we can only be talking about technology and culture. Steam trains and women’s suffrage automatically give rise to psychic teenagers. Evolution is a metaphor for social change.

The Tomorrow People call everyone else "Saps". It is meant to be short for Homo Sapiens. Homo Sapiens is a perfectly cromulent bit of scientific jargon, distinguishing modern humans from ancestors such as Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus. I knew all about dinosaurs although my school was still relatively reticent about teaching evolution. But "Homo Sapiens" was a sci-fi word, a TV word, a Tomorrow People word. To me it will always have connotations of stupid, obsolete, boring and dull. It means Straight and Mundane and most particularly Muggle. There is an unexplored element of class snobbery here; even of racism. The Tomorrow People are better than the Saps because of what they are. Carol, Steven and John all speak BBC English: Kenny, admittedly, has a rather cute, Artful-Dodger style cockney accent. But the human bad guys are uniformly lower-class. The fairground barker who is in league with the alien conman in the Vanishing Earth sound like Del-Boy. Ginge and Lefty, the bike riding henchmen in the first story who become allies for the rest of the season, talk entirely in stage cockney aphorisms. ("Don't come the old fuzz bit with me mat, all I done was chat up a bird.") Alien bad guys, on the other hand, talk posh.

The Tomorrow People all have the same powers as each other. (The X-Men go in for a kind of genetic lottery which can result in growing wings, turning into a block of ice or shooting death rays from your eyes.) On one occasion their power set is described as the Three Ts, which is presumably meant to recall the old joke about the 3 R being Reading, Riting and Rithmatic. Telepathy, Teleportation and Telekinesis would have been fun powers to have. I wonder how many idle minutes I spent staring out of the windows of maths classrooms wishing I could Jaunt to the swimming pool or use TK to make all the pencils fall out of the cupboard as the teacher walks past? But the Tomorrow People rarely have much fun with their abilities.

Telepathy is a way of keeping in touch: a useful plot device when the characters are split up between, London, Clacton and an alien space ship in the far future; but quite a handicap for a writer trying to produce tension and jeopardy. Before Episode One is over, Jedikiah has strapped something called a Silencer to Steven's forehead to switch off his TP. The Medusa in the second story is a size changing alien psychic watchdog that removes the telepathic powers of anyone near it. 

Teleportation is mainly a way to get our heroes in and out of locations without the need for any tedious transitions. It's always called Jaunting, which the novel acknowledges is lifted from Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. There are a couple of scenes in Episode Two where the biker henchmen try to run our heroes down, and are left looking very silly and very wet when they teleport out of the way at the right moment. 

The first episode flirts with the idea that Kenny-the-youngest is the only one with Telekinesis. Carol tells him off for moving objects with his mind for fun, and warns him not to do it in school. It is briefly implied that he also has some sort of Psychometry and other “special gifts”. This would have been a good narrative idea, since it would have justified putting the character who is most consistently coded as a "kid" in jeopardy. But Kenny's uniqueness is forgotten by the end of the first story. His special power turns out to be being left in the Lab when the others go on adventures; and to be written out at the end of the first season.

The cast of Rentaghost have a great deal more fun disappearing and reappearing in unlikely and surprising places than the Tomorrow People do. The first episode ends with a stooge being taken to hospital because he's got a birdcage teleported onto his head. Being dead is quite a lot like being a Tomorrow Person, come to think of it: it gets you some new friends and some cool powers, but you have to keep it a secret from the silly still-alive people. The Medusa is not a great deal more convincing than the pantomime horse.

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