The Fredösphere

The One They Call Lileks has a series devoted to deconstructing the covers of Tom Swift Jr. books.  Being one of those market followers (abeit a mouth-foamingly envious one) I put down that Klemperer biography I was told to read, postponed that James Cain novel, and picked up Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship.

This stuff is pornography.  Let me explain.  A while back some friends came over and we watched some tornado videos.  There is no plot and no character development in these things; they get straight to the action in a very disciplined way.  Hence, my friends called it "weather porn."

Well, our friend Victor Appleton II creates books under similarly disciplined strictures.  He knows his audience -- 10-year-old boys -- and he knows what they want.  They want lots of gadgets and they want a protagonist slightly older than they to play with those gadgets and otherwise fulfill all their fantasies.  Those fantasies do not include sex, of course, so this book is porn only by analogy, but like those tonado videos, the analogy is a close one.

If there's no sex, then what's with the girlfriends?  Tom is dating Phyl, sister of his side-kick Bud.  Bud dates Sandy, sister of Tom.  (Incest certainly has its conveniences.)  Anyway, the girls fly out (Sandy is an expert pilot in her own right) to visit the boys on the island that the Federal Government gave the eighteen-year-old Tom as a location for his spaceport, laboratory, manufacturing facility, plus living quarters for the hundreds of adults who work for him.  (Yes, Tom's role in the organization seems to be a combination of CEO, chief design engineer, test pilot, and head of security.)   The girls get a tour, and then the evening is given over to some relaxation:

Three sets of tennis, with Tom and Phyl the victors, preceded a swim.  Then came dinner and dancing.  Finally it was time for Sandy to pilot her parents and Phyl to Shopton.

"We'll be back to see you take off in the rocket ship," Sandy said as she waved good-by.

"Indeed we will," Phyl called.

And that's it.  I never read Tom Swift growing up but I devoured the Hardy Boys mysteries as fast as I could get my hands on them, and they follow the same formula:  gadgets, authority figures benign and distant, no bed-times or funding shortages, and heroes with an awe-inspiring ability to get adults -- even the police -- to give top priority to carrying out their orders.  (It is a formula that is easily parodied [raunchy humor alert] and lends itself to abuse at the hands of modern crossover franchise cash-cow milking machines.

(Hearafter refered to as M.C.F.C.C.M.M.)

Ten-year-old boys emphatically don't want to hear about girlfriends qua three-dimensional characters.  Thus, Tom and Bud's entire romantic lives are encapsulated in the five sentences I quoted above.  (How I remember squirming with embarassment as I would read similar passages in the Hardy Boys books.)  So why are the boys given girlfriends at all?  It's because any being who fulfills the boyish ideal of super competence and precocious maturity simply must have a girlfriend -- she is a required accessory.  Tom would be unworthy of the reader's unalloyed adulation otherwise.

Phyl's role in Tom's life exactly corresponds to that of Tom's slide rule.  He picks it up and fiddles with it just long enough for us to envy the confident ease with which he handles it, then he puts it down and forgets about it -- and so do we.