Sci-Friday: Two Early Novels
In my first week participating in Sci-Friday, I wrote about my introductions to the genre (linked below). I left out two novels, which I discovered around fifth grade or so.
The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key
Don’t read even this truncated description if you want to go into this unusually mystic YA novel blind:
At night, Little Jon’s people go out to watch the stars. Mesmerized by a meteor shower, he forgets to watch his step and falls through a moss-covered door to another land: America. He awakes hurt, his memory gone, sure only that he does not belong here.
It has the feel of one of the novels in Madeleine L’Engle’s Kairos universe. Key also wrote the novels that inspired the movies Escape to Witch Mountain and Return to Witch Mountain; I recommend reading them as well for more excellent YA sci-fi, and chasing them with the movies. (Letterboxd links: Escape, Return)
Anna to the Infinite Power by Mildred Ames
The description on Goodreads is a complete spoiler. Let’s just say that Anna, an intelligent but emotionally peculiar preteen, starts seeing her doppelgänger, and then things get even more frightening and eerie.
A version was filmed in 1983, and was quite good. I remember seeing it oddly enough as an After School Special, though I could be totally off on that. It’s on Amazon Prime and Freevee, but advance with caution—the synopsis on Amazon completely spoils it one sentence! And this is a story that should not be spoiled.
My other lists will be longer; I have spent twelve hours watching Mom and Dad’s dogs while my parents move, which translates to a household full of five dogs: my two pit mixes, a dachshund, and two pugs. I love them all, but that’s a great deal of heightened attention and energy. And the pack returns tomorrow. I must sleep now. And I will probably dream of impossibly-star-filled skies over impossibly dense and rich forests, and doppelgängers seen in mirrors and around corners. Or perhaps of Charles Wallace’s dragons. I am convinced A Wind in the Door is the source for the band Imagine Dragons’ name.
Meg’s eyes were too bright. “I wish human beings couldn’t have feelings...”
Charles Wallace hugged her. “I didn’t imagine my dragons, did I?”
As he had intended her to, she gave a watery smile.
Check out the other participants:
If I omitted anyone, please let me know!
It's helpful to remember that the S can be "speculative" ... I'm really expanding my thinking around this genre as I participate in these Fridays.
Excellent. Glad you are participating and enjoying Sci-Fridays! You've got me thinking: a piece about spoilers would be fun, like a handful of works (books, movies, TV) that you can't even describe at all, lest you spoil them. Let me know if that's something you'd like to participate in; maybe I could publish the thing with some quotes from you.
Also: "a household full of five dogs: my two pit mixes, a dachshund, and two pugs"
LOVE LOVE LOVE! But of course, yes, very VERY exhausting.