Marty is a bright boy who lives in the Bubble colony on the Moon. He becomes friends with Steve, a prankster and iconoclast who convinces him one day to take an unoccupied crawler out on the Moon's surface to explore first station. Once there they find a journal of one of the first explorers. One that details a sighting of a plant. The boys go off in search of it, and fall through the surface, into the cavern of a giant Plant. Can they get back home?This book heavily weighed on me as a child. I found it again thanks to the "What's the Name of that Book?" community here, and reading it again if anything made me appreciate it the more. The writing is Christopher's usual mix of precision and economy, and the world is unusual and powerful. The Bubble is lonely, sterile, economical to a fault, and just existing there seems to grip it's inhabitants in a powerful depression. He really manages to make you feel what living on the Moon might actually feel like, and how the isolation over time wears down on you. But the world of the Plant is entirely different. Warm, langourous, with just a hint of the cozy horror awaiting them. A very cerebral one, for a children's book. That section is shorter than I remember, but that memory: being trapped inside the airless moon, waking up each "day" to find it harder and harder to think, and worrying you'll never escape, or even want to-that really did a number on me as a kid.As an adult, you see a little more into it. A reviewer mentioned a subtext of LSD, but what I was struck by was how much it felt like a contrast between atheism, and religious belief. The rational, quiet despair of life on the barren moon, how Marty "lost" a friend who had to go back to earth, how they rebelled and fell into the world of the Plant, how the Plant landed on the Moon, and how It affected them. Little touches, too: the Swinburne poem, and how the first fruit they ate was an apple. The reader almost always reads intent into any work, but as an adult I wonder if he might have been loading us kids with a little existential despair.That aside, this was a very strong book that haunted my mind for 30 years. I'm glad to have found it again, and it's a very worthy five stars.
I love John Christopher's Death of Grass, I love the interesting creative TV brain of Bryan Fuller, Fuller taking a John Christopher novel and turning it in to a TV movie for SyFy seemed like a match made in heaven (apart from it being for SyFY of course), the movie was High Moon and the novel was this cute little Puffin I've had on my shelf for the last few years. The movie turned out to be horrible, the book not so much.First off, It's important to know that Lotus Caves is a 60s YA science fantasy novel, quite far removed from the dramatic social commentary of Death of Grass. It's the adventures of a couple of bored teenaged boys on a dreary moon base where fun is essentially outlawed and at times reads like a mix between Enid Blyton and an acid trip.Christopher covers the effects of growing up on the moonbase, the isolation and the boredom, the learning about life but not be able to experience it until you're sent back to Earth. It's a horrible image of the future that he conjures but it's softened because it's for children, designed to encourage adventure rather than existential misery. He even touches on the depression that living on the moon can cause for adults who grew up on Earth, space sickness and suicides, a mother that no longer smiles. This is the stuff that elevates the book above just another kids book. Where were the adults handing out science fiction for the 10+ age group when I was younger? I feel certain I would have read far more if the 60s weren't clearly seen as off limits in the Hertfordshire school system of the late 80s.As it was meant to be thought of by the author and the publisher, I can only recommend it for YA readers who crave innocence and clarity in their novels as opposed to battle hardened, soul weary literary adults.
What do You think about The Lotus Caves (1969)?
A not-atypical late 60s sci-fi novel aimed at early adolescents. Two mid-21st century residents of a moon colony steal a "crawler", go exploring outside their dome and stumble upon on huge carbon-based lifeform ecosystem under the moon's surface. A series of almost magical caverns prove to be a unified Gaia-like plant with the intelligence and the will to turn its dependents into worshippers.As with much science fiction, the technological advances are noticeably uneven - the moon has been colonized but communication bandwidth remains too limited and expensive to allow "visiophone" calls back to Earth more than once a month; nothing decays on the moon because there are no bacteria, apparently even on and in the humans etc.Not unusually for such books, our heroes reject totalitarian mind control and return to their somewhat bland lives.I dug this out of the closet - its publication date plus a Puffin "not for sale in US" edition means it almost certainly dates to a 1971 trip to London with my father; he spent his mornings researching at the British Library while I perused the Elgin Marbles, read books like this and was laughed at by drunks on the street for my "mod" striped trousers and paisley shirts - a few years too late for the heyday of Carnaby Street. Additionally, we were just a few months after Decimal Day and the posting of all prices in old and new currency stuck with me.
—Bob
I bought this book used because it had a really cool cover. Not the edition shown above--WAY COOLER.At the time I purchased it, I didn't realize it was for young audiences. I thought it looked like something inspired by psychedelic drugs. It was published in 1969, so that was a fair guess.I really enjoyed reading this. It took me back to my childhood, when I would read more or less disposable sci-fi, fantasy and adventure stories and didn't give any thought to meaning or originality. Not to say this book has no meaning or no originality. But it's fairly artless, and more enjoyable for the almost alien prose-style of 1960s British YA fiction. This is a book I'd want my kids to read if I had some.
—G. Brown
The author of the "Tripods Trilogy" was one of my favorite authors as a kid. This book is not as gripping as the others, but manages to tell a decent narrative about a future world on the moon. Adolescents (and Ayn Rand fans) will probably find weight to the central question of personal responsibility: two friends start a runaway caper that turns serious, when they get trapped by a benevolent dictator in the form of a Plant. It could be a veiled story about LSD, but the subtext is too flat to go there critically.For the most part, the book is dated (high schoolers won't really resonate, alas, with the references to Homer, Shakespeare, and the great Symphonies) and lacks enough conflict to raise more than an eyebrow. At 215 pages, it's a quick read, and mildly entertaining.WHY I READ THIS BOOK: Wanting something easy to read during Bumbershoot, I wanted to read a Young Adult novel; specifically the second book of the Tripods Triology. But I'm missing that one on my shelf, so picked up this instead. I read it a bunch of times as a kid, and got it at a used book store some years ago. Luckily I had forgotten most of the plot points.
—Bob Redmond
