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David Starr, Space Ranger is the first in a series of juvenile science fiction novels Isaac Asimov wrote in the early 1950s. This was in the middle of the cold war and the novel shows traces of this, both in its educational intent and in the nature of the social forces involved.
Title: David Starr, Space Ranger
The title is unique in the series in that it starts with the hero's name instead of his nickname "Lucky Starr". All the others stated the nickname and a detail or feature of a body in the solar system, as in Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus.
Author: Isaac Asimov
The book first came out under the pseudonym "Paul French". When Asimov started this series he was warned that it could become a TV show. At the time production values for science fiction TV series were somewhat laughable. Asimov did not wish to be associated with such a potential horror, so he used this pseudonym. Eventually he used his own name in later editions. Some cover pages bear his name only while others indicate "Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French".
Publisher: Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1952
This novel has a long and varied publishing history. It came out in hardcover with Doubleday in its first edition. Bantam was the latest, in 1993, to bring out the series in 3 volumes, publishing pairs of titles together. In 2001 the Science fiction Book club came out with all six novels at the same time in one volume under the title The complete adventures of Lucky Starr
Description: 186 pages. ; 21 cm high
Cover artists have illustrated Lucky's actions in an impressively professional manner over and over again but the editors have not been always kind or competent: In the Signet edition of the 1970s they mixed images intended for one volume in the series with another.
Notes: Rip-roaring adventures but with typical Asimov logic
As with the other books in the Lucky Starr series, Asimov carefully introduced astronomical concepts which corresponded to scientific knowledge at the time. In later editions he pointed out in the preface that scientific discoveries had completely changed the descriptions of Mars presented in the novel.
The first novel, like the others in the series, offers more action scenes than the normal Asimovian piece of fiction. However, it is filled with the logical argumentations and disputations Asimov used in all of his other fiction.
The novel was written at the start of the cold war, when many concerned scientists, engineers and educators in the United States felt that their country, and what they considered to be the free world, was falling behind the communist bloc in scientific research and engineering developments. In this context, it was important that the youth of the country be given a solid scientific start, and the adventures of David Starr were as a result rather didactic in nature, despite all the action involved.
The book was translated to French in 1954 under the title Sur la plančte rouge (On the Red Planet) with the original pseudonym, Paul French. It was published in the famous "Anticipation " series of Fleuve noir, a publishing house best know for its detective novels.
Unique Identifiers: ISBNs
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