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Before Clifford Hicks started his famous Alvin Fernald series, he began his juvenile novel writing in 1959 with a space adventure: First Boy on the Moon. Mike McRoberts’ father, Major McRoberts, is an astronaut scheduled to fly first to the Space Station and then to fly to and land on the moon for the first time. Through some accidental adventures, Mike ends up being the first boy on the moon! The story is warm and amusing and teaches some good facts about the Moon and space travel in general, lessons that are still valid today. This book is written at the upper elementary to middle school reading levels.
The author Clifford Hicks was a US Marine in World War II, earning a Silver Star for bravery in battle. He wrote for, and eventually became Editor-in-Chief of, the magazine Popular Mechanics, a magazine of new technology and old-fashioned ingenuity that I devoured when I was a boy. Around 1960, Hicks branched out into writing for upper elementary through middle school children. He is best remembered for his brilliant Alvin Fernald series.
It is always fun to examine the predictions of older science fiction books to see how correct or incorrect they have turned out to be. It is interesting that science fiction books written before the Mercury era, including First Boy on the Moon, always assumed that an orbiting Space Station would come before an attempt at landing on the moon. The real history was just the opposite- the Apollo moon landings came well before the establishment of the International Space Station. In another prediction, Hicks has US space travel under the auspices of an entity called the US Space Force, which did not exist in 1959. However, in 2019, a branch of the US military came into existence, with the exact same name! I wonder if then-President Trump and some Air Force generals had long ago read First Boy on the Moon!