Book Review: Time and Mr Bass

Book Review: Time and Mr. Bass

Author: Eleanor Cameron

Date: 1967

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly / Little Brown & Company

ISBN: none

Length: 247 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Fred H. Meise

Quote: “They had left Basidium at precisely four in the morning, earth time, as they always did, and it was now six in the morning when the space ship came down on Welsh soil.”

In Eleanor Cameron’s “Mushroom Planet” series, space aliens who seem to have evolved from fungi have settled and lived incognito for many years in damp, cave-riddled, fungus-friendly Wales. “Cameron” is not a Welsh name. It comes from Scotland. My legal name isn’t Welsh either, and nobody seems to have cared to try to find out whether the Jones cousins were related to Welsh or English Joneses. So although I’ve never been sure whether this series is more of a celebration of Welshness or an ethnic slur, neither am I sure whether I have a right to object if it’s a slur. Relatively large heads on relatively small bodies are observed in some Welsh families but this certainly does not indicate that these individuals evolved from fungi. 

What I have a right to observe is that Cameron lived and wrote in Marin County, California, which is also damp and fungus-friendly. She put lots of fun fungus facts into this series.

Maybe I’m just prejudiced about the subgenre of science fiction in which children solve problems beyond the powers of adults. I think this blatant attempt to flatter child readers is more offensive than flattering. Stories where the child is the one small enough to slip through the crack, or pure-minded enough to ride the unicorn, or bored enough to poke about and discover the secret, don’t bother me. Stories where the aliens go to the children first for help, and children too young to drive motorbikes are allowed to drive spaceships, do bother me. I felt that way when I was six years old, and I feel that way still.

The fad for stories like the Mushroom Planet stories, in which the parents of the little space cadets are too clueless even to notice that their kids are having all these wacky adventures, peaked around the time my generation were hearing all about the supposed “generation gap” that kept us from really liking or understanding our parents. Which was absolute rot. Did I, did my brother, did our friends, disagree with our parents? Of course we did. Did most of us plan eventually to leave our parents and marry people closer to our own ages? Of course we did. Did that mean that, while we were single and living with our parents and dependent on our parents for money, we felt “more loyalty” to mere school friends than we felt to our parents? Exactly how stupid did the people propagating this propaganda think we were?

There were some compromise stories, at this period, where the child protagonists might have idiot parents or simply absent parents, but they had normal child-adult relationships with some other older person. I think this was the appeal of Batman and Robin, whose relationship later became suspicious because they weren’t positively defined as relatives, or Speed Racer and Racer X, who were safely identified as brothers. I liked stories where the children had interesting parts, but were able to work as a team with a parent or parent-substitute. Kids weren’t going to be the only ones in the space colony who could solve a simple science or logic problem—duh!—but kids could help their parents, more plausibly than they could be the ones to help aliens...I think, even at age six, I might have been just a tiny bit wary about this notion of kids secretly helping aliens.

Well, some people hate elves and fairies, too, and I enjoyed them. Many people, including SARK (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy), have loved the Mushroom Planet books. Many people are as willing to suspend disbelief in spaceships children can drive as they are in time travel, thought travel, or the idea of a Mushroom Planet. I will say that, if you’re one of those people, this is a high-grade, well-written mix of science, science fiction, and fantasy.  Lots of fun facts about fungi are woven into hilariously unlikely adventures.