Customer Reviews

Tom Swift, Jr. and the Captive Planetoid

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This rating is only in terms of other Tom Swift, Jr. books and not meant to compare this to - say "War and Peace" with a four-star rating.
The Captive Planetoid contains most of the standard plot devices of a Tom Swift, Jr. book. Bud says "Good Night!" a lot and Tom gets to explain his latest endeavour. Phyllis and Sandy provide picnic lunches when Tom is working too hard. Chow the old Texan cook has another loud shirt. There is at least one "terrific explosion" at the end of a chapter.
In this case, there is another scientific group who believes they are just as good as Tom Swift and Swift Enterprises and so when Tom passes on doing something, they decided to do it... and of course blow it. Despite the colossal urge to say "I told you so", Tom works hard to come up with a solution.
The final chapter is pretty cool in terms of the solution and how it ultimately works out. The scale is larger than usual for a Tom Swift book. I give it 4 stars for that; it's better than average.

Tom Swift Jr. was a great inspiration to me as a young man. For years, I amused myself by pretending that I was an inventor on a tropical island in the Pacific and that I was changing the world for the better. Many of the inventions that I conjured up had their origin in the Tom Swift Junior series. In this adventure, Tom and his group are making a spaceship out of an asteroid. By hollowing it out, the crew will be able to live in a relatively normal environment without the need for space suits.

There is another asteroid, which poses a danger to Earth. Sinister forces have used nuclear weapons to alter the orbit so that it will collide with Earth. Tom must come up with a way to have the asteroid have a soft landing on Earth. He manages to do this and in the course of exploring the mass, he discovers that it has a core made of sapphire. The villain in this case is a rogue scientific group headed by an evil scientist and the group is ruthless. They were the ones that altered the path of the asteroid and their goal was to have the asteroid land on the Swift base.

This is an exciting tale of space exploration, some day humans will use asteroids as space ships, after I read it as a child, I spent hours pretending that I was in charge of building such a space ship.