In her current job as a writer and editor at Klutz, a publisher of children's books, Pat has been working with a team of model builders to develop a book about rubber-powered flying machines and a set of rubber-powered airplanes that will be included in the book. Paul has been working with the team and advising on physics along the way.Some might dismiss a discussion of rubber-band-powered planes as childish, but we are confident that fantasy and science fiction readers are much smarter than that. After all, most of us have probably heard our favorite reading material dismissed as childish.Of course, science fiction writers have examined the importance of toys. In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym for collaborations by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), a box of toys from the future drastically change the thinking patterns of the children who find them, leading the kids to find a path to somewhere Euclidean geometry won't take you.Though we can't claim that playing with rubber-powered planes has led us to find a path to another dimension, it has caused us to realize (yet again) that thinking about little things (like rubber-band-powered toys) leads to thinking about big ideas (which all science fiction readers like to do).
