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sociotom 's review for:
The Ugly Little Boy
by Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg
This book is one with a fascinating core idea that just ends up missing the mark for me. "What if we bring a Neanderthal child to the future to study it, but due to the limits of our time-travel tech it can't leave the dedicated room we have set up?" is a heck of a question, and in some ways Asimov and Silverberg raise interesting questions.
But then, at the same time, there's so much that could have been done differently. The child's caretaker is a woman who is a childless matronly spinster (and was the Goldilocks pick), the scientists who did all this without a care about the effect they were having on the child are painted as perfectly reasonable, very intelligent men who kno what they're doing, and the only character who appears to ever try and argue that this is child abuse is painted as a self-obsessed glory-seeking crackpot, who is being pushed into going after the scientists by a ladder-climbing woman who's mad she didn't get the caretaker job.
At its core, the story of a small child who gets yanked through time just to be studied has a lot that can be done, and some of it is here, but so much of it just doesn't quite make it. Possibly a product of its time, possibly a product of its writers. Not a bad book, but not one I'll be revisiting.
But then, at the same time, there's so much that could have been done differently. The child's caretaker is a woman who is a childless matronly spinster (and was the Goldilocks pick), the scientists who did all this without a care about the effect they were having on the child are painted as perfectly reasonable, very intelligent men who kno what they're doing, and the only character who appears to ever try and argue that this is child abuse is painted as a self-obsessed glory-seeking crackpot, who is being pushed into going after the scientists by a ladder-climbing woman who's mad she didn't get the caretaker job.
At its core, the story of a small child who gets yanked through time just to be studied has a lot that can be done, and some of it is here, but so much of it just doesn't quite make it. Possibly a product of its time, possibly a product of its writers. Not a bad book, but not one I'll be revisiting.