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During the 1960s and 1970s, space exploration was everywhere, on the news, in the toys we unwrapped under the Christmas tree, in our favorite tv shows, and in our before-bed reading. Robert Silverberg was one of the deans of juvenile science fiction, presenting us with novel after novel about teenage boys caught up in outlandish outer-space adventures, with intense buddy bonds and girls barely mentioned. Good beyond hope.
I read them long after the publication date, and not in chronological order:
The Lost Race of Mars (1960), from my junior high library: a brother and sister living in a colony on Mars get lost, and are rescued by the Older Martians hiding in caves (because they know what happens to the aboriginal population when colonists arrive?)
Revolt on Alpha C (1955) came from Scholastic Book Club, catalogs that were passed out in class several times a years: you ordered up to five books, and they arrived a few weeks later (my parents disapproved of reading, so I claimed that they were all "for school"): On a colony on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, 20-year old Larry rejects his father's plans for his life and rebels against the Establishment. Groovy, man! The cover art, a boy floating through space upside down, was reminiscent of Will Robinson in the opening credits of Lost in Space.
Left: the modern Will Robinson and his boyfriend
Starman's Quest (1958): Twin brothers buddy-bond in space. The version I checked out of the Rock Island Public Library was generic, line-drawings of the two boys in space suits, with no Martian beefcake statue or muscle-suits.
More after the break
Jan: Saul never touched me! He’s terrified of girls. . .whenever I started getting the least bit biological, he hid behind a stamp album!
Tom: Poor Saul!
Though Silverberg deems heterosexual desire the natural condition of humanity, the very definition of the term “biological,” he includes three team members who lack such desire:
Kelly Watchman, an extremely beautiful android, “didn’t want to, and didn’t even want to want to, and couldn’t even begin to understand” heterosexual practice. I can't either, dude. Some people are gay, and some are asexual.
Sheen Sheen, a hermaphrodite, falls in love only with “his/herself”. An early dig at trans people?
Tom’s handicapped sister Lori “cannot” date boys or fall in love. Wait, the disabled are certainly able to have romantic relationships.
The only “normal” one of the bunch is the girl crazy teenager.
The muscleman on the cover of the 1978 edition of The Gate of Worlds (1967) hints at homoerotic pleasures. It is set in an alternate world where the Renaissance never happened, and the Ottoman Empire conquered all of Europe (Shakespeare wrote his plays in Turkish) A boy from backwater England seeks his fortune in the vast, powerful Aztec Empire, and.......and falls in love...with a girl.
I continued to read Silverberg's novels, but the tone and plots had changed:
The Masks of Time (1968): a time-traveling Messiah who arrives in our world naked. And falls in love.
To Live Again (1969), where if you are rich enough, you can upload your consciousness into a new body. And fall in love.
Shadrach and the Furnace (1976): in a future where Mongolia has taken over the world (again), the personal physician of Emperor Genghis Mao tries to make him immortal -- and falls in love.
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980): On a world where magic exists, Lord Valentine topples a tyrannical government -- and -- well you get the idea.
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Waters on a starry night are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Where is it now, the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?