Shame on us if we can’t do better than this, in producing children’s literature.
How dumb, how gullible, do publishers think children are? And are you comfortable with the idea of a piece of extraterrestrial technology that’s virtually omnipotent and can, and will, give a bunch of kids anything and everything they ask for–instantly?
The more I think about these books, the less I like them. “Egg” the spaceship is presented to us as a machine, but it acts more like a god. And if you think absolute godlike power is a good thing for any children to have, you’re flat-out crazy.
Please! We just have to do better!
Speaking for myself, if God gave me everything I ever asked for, that would be proof He hated me.
I agree, as I read from the reviews, this book is unimpressive. Books involving children as central characters must walk a fine line. It wouldn’t do to have their adventures continually interrupted by chores and the reasonable expectations of their parents.
Stories involving kids usually have a plot device to separate the children from their domestic surroundings. Tom Sawyer ran away from aunt Polly. The Bell Mountain kids ran away, but they were on a mission from God, so they can’t be criticized.
When I was a kid, my parents bought me some books about a pair of boys that solved mysteries (no, not the Hardy Boys). I wish I could remember the names, because they were great books. These boys had a spacious workspace where all of their scientific gear could be housed and their parents seemed to leave them to their devices most of the time. After reading these books, I commandeered my father’s shed and turned it into a club house/laboratory/crime-fighting HQ, but somehow I never solved any actual crimes. That may have been because we lived in a town where crime rarely happened. Had we lived in lesser surroundings, I might have become a famous detective. 🙂
You would have *loved* the Rick Brant books! Billed as “electronic adventures,” actually the plots could go anywhere there was a mystery. Rick and his pal Scotty were teenagers, but Rick’s father was a scientist, head of a crack scientific team, and Rick and Scotty’s adventures usually happened because they were helping Dr. Brant in some way.
I still read and enjoy these. You’ll like ’em if you try ’em.
This sounds like a propaganda book to prepare children to accept Big Data’s vision of computers being smarter than humans. The fly in their ointment is the fact that consciousness precedes creativity, and computers do not have consciousness – only human beings do.
So few people understand that anything a computer does, some human programmed it to do.
Yes, you are right, human. -beep
🙂