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A review by oleksandr
Astounding Science Fiction, February 1943 by Lewis Padgett, Frank Kramer, Kolliker, Colin Keith, L. Sprague de Camp, Will Stewart, Jack Williamson, Henry A. Norton, Webb Marlowe, Henry Kuttner, Fox B. Holden, C.L. Moore, John W. Campbell Jr., A.E. van Vogt, J. Francis McComas, Malcolm Jameson
3.0
This is a novelette, first published in 1943, so it is eligible for Retro-Hogo this year.
In a far, far future, a sentient being experiments with time machine and sends their offspring toys to somewhere around XX century. Twice. Without response. They declare it a failure and move on. In the mid-20th century a boy finds the stuff and starts to play with it, giving it also to his younger sister. And as all good toys, those are educational.
One of popular at that time ideas, based presumably on behaviorist paradigm in psychology, that kids are tabula rasa and can be taught anything and become anyone. Here it even leads to quite surprising statements like: ”Babies, of course, are not human—they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes; the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates. In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own, which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.”
An interesting read of old school SF
In a far, far future, a sentient being experiments with time machine and sends their offspring toys to somewhere around XX century. Twice. Without response. They declare it a failure and move on. In the mid-20th century a boy finds the stuff and starts to play with it, giving it also to his younger sister. And as all good toys, those are educational.
One of popular at that time ideas, based presumably on behaviorist paradigm in psychology, that kids are tabula rasa and can be taught anything and become anyone. Here it even leads to quite surprising statements like: ”Babies, of course, are not human—they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes; the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates. In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own, which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.”
An interesting read of old school SF