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  • Boys’ Books, Boys’ Dreams, and the Mystique of Flight
  • Aaron Alcorn (bio)
Boys’ Books, Boys’ Dreams, and the Mystique of Flight. By Fred Erisman . Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2006. Pp. xx+346. $29.95.

Historically, boys' series books have had an uneasy existence. Though they were easily dismissed by contemporary critics as sensational and formulaic, these were the very qualities that contributed to the popularity of the books with young readers. The scholarly significance of series books has also been cast to the margins, with a handful of specialists producing studies of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and addressing issues of authorship and attribution. While a few historians of technology have looked to some works (Tom Swift and the Motor Boys, for example) for popular expressions of technological enthusiasm, Fred Erisman contends these scholars have done little but acknowledge their existence. Series books remain, in his words, the "outcast orphans of serious literature and the starveling stepchildren of American technological history" (p. xi). Erisman's work suggests we take this genre more seriously, and Boys' Books, Boys' Dreams, and the Mystique of Flight firmly positions juvenile series fiction as a key conduit for delivering ideas and details about technological development.

Erisman focuses on aviation series books published between 1910 and 1950. Aviation series made up half of the "boys' series books with a technological emphasis" (p. xi) produced during these years, and this time frame allows Erisman to place them against the backdrop of the development of aviation. Boys' series books generally coalesced around physically fit and technologically proficient heroes, and Erisman is a deft guide through a genre filled with far too similar plots and stock title characters with names like Ted Scott, Rex Lee, and Bill Bruce. Central characters frequently discussed aviation terms, flight principles, and methods of airplane construction, and Erisman contends this became a way for authors to add not only a veneer of realism over fantastic adventure stories, but also to transfer technological knowledge to young readers.

Erisman painstakingly retraces the origins of series' technical discussions to their original sources in Aviation, Aero Digest, and elsewhere, and uncovers series writers' frequent pilfering—and even plagiarizing—of contemporary [End Page 899] technical reporting. Unattributed borrowing, he argues, filtered contemporary interpretations about the importance of aviation and the latest technical developments to the young. Before the 1950s, when realistic reporting gave way to the speculative whims of science fiction, Erisman argues that cheaply printed and widely available series fiction became important forms of entertainment and information about the modern technological world. This is a provocative—and convincing—thesis.

For all of its many strengths, a few key areas of this book beg for deeper analysis. Erisman acknowledges the importance of pilots as masculine icons, but gender (and race) operates far more pervasively than his book allows. In the Tom Swift series, for example, supporting characters such as the widowed housekeeper Mrs. Baggert and the elderly African-American handyman Eradicate Sampson reinforce the racialized and masculinized technological landscape around the title character. Tom Swift, of course, cannot properly be called an aviation series, yet it outsold all others and set the conventions for the technologically inspired juvenile series fiction that followed, including the books Erisman discusses. One would therefore suspect that gender and race functioned similarly in boys' books about airplanes. Issues of difference extend to the places where title characters traveled, for regardless of whether plots had fictionalized aviators mapping new air routes or delivering mail, freight, or passengers to faroff destinations, heroes routinely traipsed the globe (and particularly South America) in search of fame, fortune, and adventure. This raises crucial questions about empire, imperialism, and the presentation of American technological might to young readers—all essential issues for conveying a more complete understanding of the messages sent through these books.

Erisman clearly demonstrates that series books aimed to inspire and empower young male readers through technical introductions to such matters as instrumentation or the basics of pitch, roll, and yaw. But authors' attempts to empower readers relied heavily on stereotypical portrayals of women, African Americans, and "native" populations. While series fiction cast technological power as the route to adventure and treasure, its role in...

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