Introduction to Space Cadets

Hell, yes, I remember Tom Corbett and those beautiful far-flung shores of outer space.

It’ll be difficult for most people reading this book to imagine, but there was a time before television. Fortunately it didn’t last too long; five billion years and out.

My family had the first TV set on our block, on the South Side of Chicago, We got it in 1948 when I was 6 years old, and I can still remember every damned family in our apartment building crowding into our living room to watch the Indians play the Braves in the 1948 World Series—on a 7-inch black-and-white set that weighed about 300 pounds and cost almost as much as my father’s car.

By 1950 everyone had TV sets, which is just as well, because Tom Corbett hit the airwaves in 1950 and I wasn’t about to share him with anyone. I lived and died with the crew of the Polaris. I was heroic like Tom, nasty and backbiting (but eventually a Good Guy when the chips were down) like Roger Manning, and I was certainly more alien than Astro the Venusian. (He looked like a math teacher with a crew cut. Let’s face it: everyone was more alien than Astro.) I didn’t identify with Captain Strong at all. I mean, the man was almost 35, practically in the grave.

Well, I grew up. I discovered Sheckley and Bester and Kuttner and Moore and Heinlein, and eventually I began writing science fiction myself—but I never forgot Tom and the cadets aboard the good ship Polaris.

And then one day I got an e-mail from the LACon IV Committee: Frankie Thomas—Tom Corbett himself!—was going to be the Media Guest of Honor at the 2006 Worldcon, and would I be interested in editing a book of space cadet stories in honor of that event?

Would I? Is the Pope Catholic? Do bears perform their ablutions in the woods?

So I began inviting some of the best writers in the field. And you know what? Anyone remotely my age remembered old Tom and the gang as fondly as I did, and those who were younger resented the fact that they hadn’t seen the show and had to settle for the books and comic strips, which seem to have been imprinted on the inside of their eyelids, given the facts and figures they could rattle off on a second’s notice.

Initially I figured this was going to be a labor of love. Now I know better: it’s 22 labors of love.

Thanks, Tom and Frankie, for inspiring it.