Perhaps it was nostalgic folly, but I imagined a revisitation of the science fiction books I’d read as a boy might still be somehow instructive to the increasingly jaded adult I’d become. Would these works, so captivating and inspiring to a seventh grader, hold fast under the harsh glare of twenty more years and thousands of competing pages since read? I picked a remembered favorite, and one rather hard to track down, and hoped for the best.

I can still recall the day I read aloud my book report about James Blish’s Welcome to Mars to Mrs. Blumenthal’s seventh-grade English class. It was December 6, 1988—the day Roy Orbison died. I spoke with great gusto about Dolph Haertel’s historic trip to the Red Planet in his bread-boarded antigravity-driven packing crate — a nod, perhaps, to Blish’s own marvelous city-toting spindizzies — loaded with enough K-rations and bottled oxygen to allow him to survive the overnight journey there and back. Dolph appeared so adult, compared to my own eleven years, and would have had the experience obviously necessary to invent a personal antigravity ship at the advanced age of eighteen. To a boy obsessed with Robinson Crusoe tales, more exciting was the high adventure of Dolph’s stranding on Mars (via faulty vacuum tube); his struggle for survival cloistered from the harsh environment; the eventual introduction of his girlfriend, Nanette—who, pluckily armed with only a sewing kit, had followed using Dolph’s own notes and antigravity prototype. Add in a friendly, primitive cat-man for a Martian Friday and the doomed alien intelligence resting within a crystalline Martian city, awaiting the settlers who would become future Martians, and Blish had achieved perfection. The school principal, inexplicably attending our class that day, seemed convinced by the scientific merit of these ludicrous events as I explained them, a rare triumph of my spotted academic career.

When read today, Welcome to Mars is a cold, dry book, with enriched educational content intended for 1967’s school libraries’ science fiction sections, where it appears to have enjoyed a brief and unremarkable life. Dolph’s flight to Mars is described in loving detail with the scientific facts available before Mariner IV. His course when faced with stranding is the pure, blissful Boy Scout propaganda of self-reliance and adaptability now completely absent from today’s SF. Welcome to Mars 2009 would be thirteen pages long, featuring Dolph’s spectacular crash-landing in his backyard and subsequent hospital trip for a broken collarbone. A cautionary tale for all ages: science is meant for experts, not kids with soldering irons.

The relationship between Dolph and Nanette—two teens marooned alone in a leaky packing crate for over a year—is handled with sexless sterility that makes Beach Party seem a veritable bacchanalia. I was surprised to note Blish’s deft acknowledgement of Nanette’s menses (affected by mischievous Martian moons, you see) rather than ignore the reality altogether. I imagine I blushed at the thought of all of this, at eleven, and skimmed past it (and much of the science), to the fun parts.

When compared with Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Space Suit–Will Travel, it’s hard to remember where the fun parts in Blish’s book were. Heinlein’s future—spacesuits and ships built by familiar corporations like Goodyear, not precocious pubescent faux-engineers—is a rollicking space adventure. The extrapolations are convincing and elegant; quite different from Blish’s attempts, whose joints creak under the sheer weight of exposition. Kip Russell, owner of a used-spacesuit won from a soap-slogan contest, is in the thick of more action during the first thirty pages of Space Suit than exists throughout most of the Blish book, despite Welcome’s aliens, fights for survival, and Nanette and Dolph’s hyper-extended seven-minutes-in-heaven inside the crate. Heinlein’s tone is frothy, likeable; Blish’s plods along, ever the physics class proctor. And yet . . .

Welcome to Mars was the book I treasured and fantasized about months after I read it. It was my mental template of what proper SF should offer a young reader, full of deep emotive qualities that had mysteriously sublimated themselves out of the book by the time I reread it twenty years later. Heinlein was clearly the far better writer of engaging juvenile fiction. Poor James Blish—seminal SF writer and critic, unreasonably ignored by most readers today—justly overshadowed by the top SF writer of his time, never had a chance. Though Welcome is more sensitive and introspective (the scene with the dying alien intelligence still haunted even this hardened adult the second time around), and mercifully lacks the self-satisfied pompousness of Heinlein’s characters, it was no great contest. The classics remain so, despite the stress fractures and pitting of time, and the rest fall clean away.
But you might go home again, as I learned reading the final pages of Blish’s unlamented Welcome to Mars at the advanced age of thirty-one:

He saw a bearded figure, dressed like Nanette and himself in fresh green Space Force fatigues. His expression was hard to read behind all the whiskers, but his gaze was level and probing. Judging by his color and stance . . . he looked lean and competent.
“Anybody you know?” Mrs. Haertel said softly.
“I don’t—” Dolph started to say, and then stopped, for as he spoke, the stranger spoke too. He said exactly the same words.
He was, in fact, only a reflection in the polished metal of the von Braun’s hull. The tall man was Dolph himself.

Seen through the unforgiving lens of adulthood, this scene’s devastating power adopted a fresh meaning, previously hidden to me. The finale no longer exemplified just the inevitable aging we all endure toward experience and maturity—it was also about the unforeseen importance of the roads we take and their unintended effects upon us. Welcome to Mars and its ilk must be appreciated not for how they appear to us today, crude and unwieldy, but for the best qualities, transformative and sublime, that made SF the language expressing both our youth and adult aspirations.

A bibliography of James Blish can be found at Fantastic Fiction.