The Ranger Boys In Space – Hal Clement Free Audiobook

Written by Hal Clement
Read by Maxwell Glick
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

Goodreads review:

Children’s/YA scifi story originally published in 1956, prior to any human spaceflight. The premise of the story is that adults can’t adjust to zero gravity because they can’t unlearn their fear of falling (I know, I LOLed). The Zero G messes with the inner ears of adults, which causes them to be perpetually motion sick, to the point where they can’t stand even when they return to Earth gravity. So naturally the solution is to send the (orphan) children into space! The reasoning behind this is that small children have no fear of falling because they haven’t learned the rules and consequences of gravity yet, so children and early adolescents are better able to adapt to Zero G because they can still unlearn the rules of gravity (I LOLed again). But naturally no parent would send their beloved child on an experimental spaceflight, hence the orphans. Our heroes, the Ranger Boys, are actually wards of their Uncle Jim, the main adult in the story. But he can overcome his emotional reluctance to send them because he’s a scientist. Their friend Pete, who also tags along, is an adopted child whose parents love him like he was their actual child but are somehow persuaded to send him anyway. The fourth kid on the journey, Tumble, is a kid they caught spying on them who refuses to give them any identifying information about himself, but they take him along because they can’t think of anything better to do with him. Also, the three main kids are fully aware of the risks of spaceflight, but they opt not to tell Tumble so they can get better experiment results out of him since he has no expectations of the risks. (Ethics! What’s that?)

I found it to be an enjoyable (and, at times, unintentionally-amusing) story. It gives an interesting glimpse into the mid-20th-century concerns about spaceflight and what a non-governmental space agency (based out of Niagara Falls) might look like. This definitely sounds like it was meant to be a series-starter with the ending alluding to further adventures (involving “what’s going on in the sun” and “the tunnel of fire” on Mercury!), but sadly it was not to be.

I listened to this on audio, delightfully narrated by Maxwell Glick.