Stand By for Mars!

This book had a huge influence on me. A gift from my mother when I was 8 or 9, it is the earliest book I can remember reading - 50 years ago! - and I became a life-long fan of science fiction. I don’t know what happened to it, most of the books I enjoyed in my youth were “lost”, hopefully passed on......more

This needs some explanation. When I was a child, maybe nine or ten, I found a book one of my brothers owned: THE ROBOT ROCKET, by Carey Rockwell, part of the TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET series. I don't know what they thought of it, but I adored it. It was so cool, with space travel and Martians and Ven......more

Dated? no doubt. Corny? well yes. But Tom Corbett rings the same childhood bells as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, only for space geeks. Yeah, sure, Mars has no water and you can't walk the surface of the planet without a pressure suit, but really, for entertainment purposes, who cares? If I'm readi......more

I finished Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet a couple days ago and loved it, so when I found an entire series based on that premise, I was excited, esp. since I love vintage kids’ books. This was intended for a younger audience than Heinlein’s, say for ten-year-olds rather than thirteen-year-olds. Unfort......more

Stand By For Mars is a TV tie in book from the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet series-- one of the first science fiction TV tie in novels-- written for young adults and released in 1952. It tells the back story of Corbett and the rest of his three man cadet crew (Roger Manning and Astro) arriving at the So......more