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A review by morgandhu
Children of the Atom by Wilmar H. Shiras
3.0
Wilmar Shiras' Children of the Atom is in many ways a classic 1950s sf "thoughtpiece" novel. There's a great deal of dialogue, not a lot of action, and it is unashamedly didactic. Even so, I enjoyed it very much, for reasons which may be somewhat idiosyncratic.
The plot of the novel is quite simple. School psychologist Peter Welles is called in to talk to a young teenager, Tim, who seems to be completely ordinary in every way - but his teacher senses that something is not quite as it seems and is worried about him. Welles quickly discovers that Tim is in fact a super-intelligent and very lonely child pretending to be normal - that this is in fact his survival strategy, but what he needs most is friendship and real intellectual stimulation. Having learned that Tim, an orphan raised by his grandparents, was born shortly after his parents were exposed to high levels of radiation in an explosion in a nuclear weapons plant, Welles reasons that there are others like Tim, and the two set out to find them.
Not al the children have been as lucky in finding ways to avoid drawing attention to themselves - the first child they find, Elsie, is a patient in a mental hospital - nor have all the children grown up as well-adjusted - one child, Fred, displays a serious lack of empathy and emotional affect, having devoted himself entirely to intellectual development. These issues, however, are addressed with relative ease once Welles manages to bring all the children he can find together in one community under the guidance of several well-chosen adults unthreatened by the extreme abilities of these "Children of the atom."
Late in the story, the children and their community are threatened by a rabble-rousing preacher who has heard some of the details about the children and launches a pogrom against these "malevolent mutants" - but the mob that attacks the school is quieted when they see Tim, a boy that many of them have known in their community as the classmate of their children and the boy who delivered their evening paper for some years. They also recognise Pete Welles, the kindly school psychologist and another of the adults, who was a local teacher. This incident brings the children to a realisation that the only way to avoid future threats is to integrate themselves into the larger community, which they decide to do by attending "normal" school but continuing to live in their own community until they can go out into the world as adults.
Several things struck me about this novel. First, the powerful "cult of psychology" that was such a key element of middle class culture in the 1950s, and how the novel could never have been constructed as it was without this. Second, the focus on Jungian rather than Freudian psychology - rather a departure from the norm, although it's possible that Shiras did not want to have to deal with Freud's theories of psychosexual development in astory dealing with young teens. Since I personally prefer Jung to Freud, this was part of what I enjoyed about the novel - seeing the children apply Jung's thinking about the anima/animus and the four basic personality functions to their own development as balanced human beings.
I was also struck by the resolution and its belief that if the different among us become integrated into the overall community, that difference will cease to be seen as threatening or evil. It reminded me of the frequently cited finding that one of the key factors in acceptance of marriage equality is knowing someone who is gay.
The thing that made this story so very real and resonant for me, however, is that to a les extreme degree, This was one big part of my life story. I know that IQ tests are inherently flawed in many ways, but the fact that I topped out of the Stanford-Binet superior adult battery of tests at age eight is an indication that there was something not quite normal about me as a child. I knew it, the adults around me knew it, and above all,the other kids knew it - and they were none too pleasant about it. My social development was awkward and delayed, to say the least. I ran a real risk of becoming all intellect and nothing else, because my mind was what made me important enough to adults that they protected me from the other children.
And then I and a few others like me were saved, quite literally, by a group of educational psychologists who were trying to figure out how to teach the gifted child, and picked eight of us who tested the highest in our grade in the whole city to be their guinea pigs. It only lasted a few years, but the wide-open curriculum, the total acceptance, support and emotional guidance of the adults looking over us (there was little need to teach, just to let us loose in libraries, museums, laboratories, and make sure we didn't accidentally harm anything) and the utter bliss of being able to play as a child with other children in ways that were true both to our developing social natures and our advanced intellectual accomplishments - these things are a large part of what made me the at least somewhat well-adjusted person I am today, and helped me learn to move comfortably in the midst of people who had once tortured me for being different.
I saw a lot of myself, magnified by the lens of science fiction, in Wilmar Shiras' Children of the Atom.
The plot of the novel is quite simple. School psychologist Peter Welles is called in to talk to a young teenager, Tim, who seems to be completely ordinary in every way - but his teacher senses that something is not quite as it seems and is worried about him. Welles quickly discovers that Tim is in fact a super-intelligent and very lonely child pretending to be normal - that this is in fact his survival strategy, but what he needs most is friendship and real intellectual stimulation. Having learned that Tim, an orphan raised by his grandparents, was born shortly after his parents were exposed to high levels of radiation in an explosion in a nuclear weapons plant, Welles reasons that there are others like Tim, and the two set out to find them.
Not al the children have been as lucky in finding ways to avoid drawing attention to themselves - the first child they find, Elsie, is a patient in a mental hospital - nor have all the children grown up as well-adjusted - one child, Fred, displays a serious lack of empathy and emotional affect, having devoted himself entirely to intellectual development. These issues, however, are addressed with relative ease once Welles manages to bring all the children he can find together in one community under the guidance of several well-chosen adults unthreatened by the extreme abilities of these "Children of the atom."
Late in the story, the children and their community are threatened by a rabble-rousing preacher who has heard some of the details about the children and launches a pogrom against these "malevolent mutants" - but the mob that attacks the school is quieted when they see Tim, a boy that many of them have known in their community as the classmate of their children and the boy who delivered their evening paper for some years. They also recognise Pete Welles, the kindly school psychologist and another of the adults, who was a local teacher. This incident brings the children to a realisation that the only way to avoid future threats is to integrate themselves into the larger community, which they decide to do by attending "normal" school but continuing to live in their own community until they can go out into the world as adults.
Several things struck me about this novel. First, the powerful "cult of psychology" that was such a key element of middle class culture in the 1950s, and how the novel could never have been constructed as it was without this. Second, the focus on Jungian rather than Freudian psychology - rather a departure from the norm, although it's possible that Shiras did not want to have to deal with Freud's theories of psychosexual development in astory dealing with young teens. Since I personally prefer Jung to Freud, this was part of what I enjoyed about the novel - seeing the children apply Jung's thinking about the anima/animus and the four basic personality functions to their own development as balanced human beings.
I was also struck by the resolution and its belief that if the different among us become integrated into the overall community, that difference will cease to be seen as threatening or evil. It reminded me of the frequently cited finding that one of the key factors in acceptance of marriage equality is knowing someone who is gay.
The thing that made this story so very real and resonant for me, however, is that to a les extreme degree, This was one big part of my life story. I know that IQ tests are inherently flawed in many ways, but the fact that I topped out of the Stanford-Binet superior adult battery of tests at age eight is an indication that there was something not quite normal about me as a child. I knew it, the adults around me knew it, and above all,the other kids knew it - and they were none too pleasant about it. My social development was awkward and delayed, to say the least. I ran a real risk of becoming all intellect and nothing else, because my mind was what made me important enough to adults that they protected me from the other children.
And then I and a few others like me were saved, quite literally, by a group of educational psychologists who were trying to figure out how to teach the gifted child, and picked eight of us who tested the highest in our grade in the whole city to be their guinea pigs. It only lasted a few years, but the wide-open curriculum, the total acceptance, support and emotional guidance of the adults looking over us (there was little need to teach, just to let us loose in libraries, museums, laboratories, and make sure we didn't accidentally harm anything) and the utter bliss of being able to play as a child with other children in ways that were true both to our developing social natures and our advanced intellectual accomplishments - these things are a large part of what made me the at least somewhat well-adjusted person I am today, and helped me learn to move comfortably in the midst of people who had once tortured me for being different.
I saw a lot of myself, magnified by the lens of science fiction, in Wilmar Shiras' Children of the Atom.