The Space Eagle: Operation Doomsday

By Grace

One day, a few months ago, I found one of my little brother’s books (entitled The Space Eagle: Operation Doomsday) laying around. Since I had just been telling my siblings about my ability to speed-read, I boasted to Patience that I could read it in one hour. She said she didn’t think so, but she could read it in two hours, which I took the liberty of doubting. We decided to both try and see if we could prove it — and for the record, I managed it in fifty-five minutes, and Patience still hasn’t finished it.

But what really struck me as I read was the difference between this book — a pretty typical example of 1960s teenage literature — and our modern teenager stories. Sure this book was corny — the main character is a young man who is pretty much perfect, who can turn his hand to anything from skiing to soldiering to piloting. His sister is a scientific genius who helps run his multi-billion dollar industry. The president of the United States is a personal friend (and his father’s college roommate), who asks him to perform daring missions for the asked by the SIA (Spatial Intelligence Agency). And he has to defeat a deranged genius ten times more diabolical than Hitler.

Nevertheless, there’s a purity and a good, clean quality to the book that is not often found these days. The hero is noble, dutiful, strong and patriotic, and loves his mother and sister and shows it. What’s more, we often find Paul praying in the midst of danger, and reflecting that everything he and his family has is due to “the grace of God and the freedom of his beloved country.” The book may be silly, but at least there are no girls falling in love with vampires, young boys training to be wizards, or children from broken homes yelling at their parents. It’s not a perfect book, or even all that great, still on the whole I think I prefer it to modern literature.

Now why can’t somebody write books that are well done and clean?

Somebody ought to.