Captives in Space - the Second Dig Allen Space Explorer Adventure

I went into this book a bit tentative, as I finished the first book with a bit of ambivalence.  It wasn't that great, but it wasn't that bad either.  As such, I was not sure what to expect from this second Dig Allen Space Explorer Adventure.  However, I was pleasantly surprised to find I enjoyed this story far more than I did the first.  Sure, it has some very unbelievable elements, and the interior illustrations are by a different artist than the first book - but it definitely has a faster paced, more action-oriented story with just a hint of a mystery, and thus, it kept my attention from beginning to end.  I also notice the tagline above the title actually reads "A Dig Allen Space Explorer Adventure" rather than the generic "A Science Fiction Adventure" on the cover of the first book.  It's nice to see the series is identified by its main character now.

 

Captives in Space takes place just six month since the events retold in the first book (p. 12). Dig Allen and his two friends, Ken and Jim Barry, are now full-fledged Space Explorers with their very own spaceship, the Starover.  As fate would have it, as the boys take the ship out on its first space flight after spending time on Earth studying intensely (p. 12), they come across a space wreck.  They try to hail a fleeing escape vessel, but the other ship flies off without any response.  The boys keep hearing voices coming from the wrecked ship, but when they board it, they find no one aboard.  They can't make any sense out of it, especially when they come across some crates of mechanical toys that appear to function just as real sized vehicles would.  After a harrowing escapade removing the engine portion of the ship before it explodes, taking them all with it, the boys manage to two the wreckage back to Mars to report it to the Space Guards and let them handle it.  But the mystery is only beginning...

 

Author Joseph Greene (who is not given any credit whatsoever on the cover to the book) manages to create a rather interesting plot for this second adventure.  The boys, while on Mars, meet up with Old Dorkas once again (that old space pirate from the first book), and he gives them some hints regarding the so-called "toys" they discovered on that abandoned ship.  They quickly find out the ship was not quite as abandoned as they thought; instead, there was two small aliens, no more than six or seven inches in height, hiding on board.  Despite a language barrier, the boys manage to befriend the aliens and quickly figure out the humans who took off from the wreckage were actually pirates, who had kidnapped not just these two aliens, but 28 other of their species for nefarious reasons!  Dig, Ken, and Jim are determined to help find those other aliens and return them to their home planet (which is a mystery as well, since they cannot speak the language of these small creatures!).  Along the way, they are aided by a disreputable space trader who ultimately betrays them, and are very nearly sent rocketing into the sun to meet certain death!

 

Now, while this is a science fiction adventure (with emphasis on the "fiction" part!), Greene does throw in some actual facts.  When trying to figure out where the aliens are from, the boys posit the idea that they might hail from another star system, such as Alpha Centauri. "...that's four and a half years away if you travel with the speed of light," Dig says (p. 69).  This is pretty accurate, as that system is located approximately 4.37 light-years away from our own.  Of course, in the real world, we do not have technology to travel at the speed of light, so with current technology, it would take over 100,000 years to reach that system!  Later, there is reference to Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, and Dig comments, "Mercury's year is equal to 88 days on Earth" (p. 124), which is accurate; however, Dig also says, "The Mercury day is just as long" (p. 124), which is not accurate, since Mercury rotates on its axis very slowly, taking 59 of our Earth days just to complete one full rotation.  I suppose you can't get every fact right!

 

There are plenty of fictional "facts" within the story, such as the breathable air on both Mars and Mercury, and the fact that Mercury has plant light growing on the equator between the hot and cold sides of the planet (and the fact that these little aliens are indigenous to Mercury!).  One thing that did strike me as funny is the Barry brothers' father inventing a computer called the "Langivac" (p. 69) that can translate languages.  My first reaction was, "yeah, right, like that could ever work" - then I stopped and remembered that we have phones with apps now that will translate language as someone is speaking it!  So, I suppose these fictional ideas from 60 years ago aren't quite so fictional any more (I mean, the video calls from the Jetsons, the flip-communicators from Star Trek, and who knows how many other sci-fi gadgets that people thought were futuristic back in the day are now common-place in the world today!). 

 

The interior art is provided in this book by Herb Mott (1923 - 2017), who in the early days of his career provided pen and ink drawings for a number of pulp magazines.  He is probably best known for his cover paintings that graced the covers of Railroad Magazine (painting 52 covers from 1949 to 1954).  Alongside his painted illustrations for men's magazines in the 1950s, he illustrated various books for Grosset & Dunlap. He also did the internal illustrations for The Three Investigators no. 28, The Mystery of the Deadly Double.  This is the only book in the series illustrated by Mott.  The illustrations begin with a purplish color, but as the book progresses, the illustrations turn more of a reddish color.  It is assumed Mott also provided the cover art, which depicts a scene from the opening adventure, where they work to rescue the wreckage of the space ship.

 

Interesting enough, the back of the book features a display of various series published by Golden Press, listing a couple of new titles in the Kathy Martin and Dig Allen series, which are not pictured.  Since there are far less titles on this back advertisement than there are on the back of the first book (which merely has lists and no pictures), I am guessing my copy of the first book is a later printing (since it lists all of the Dig Allen books), while this one is an early printing (since it only lists to itself).

 

This book definitely amped up my interest in the series, and I now find myself looking forward to book 3.

 

RATING:  8 large, rough log cabins out of 10 for a fun-filled romp through space, with planet-hopping, language-learning, and dire emergencies that only three teenage Space Explorers could possibly work their way out of!