Book Review: Tom Swift and His Ocean Airport by Victor Appleton
The Tom Swift series of books are about a young inventor who gets into various adventures involving the technology he works with. They started out relatively realistic, with him as a teenager who tinkers with motorcycles and motorboats that he comes into possession of, but later crosses over into techno-thriller territory if not outright science fiction. (The Tom Swift, Jr. books went into pure science fiction territory.)
“Victor Appleton” was a house name for the Stratemeyer Syndicate that produced the books along the same principles as an assembly line. An idea would be thought of, some preliminary plot hashed out, and then the actual writing would be farmed out to a ghost writer.
This volume is much further along in the Tom Swift (Sr) series than my previously read book, Tom Swift and his Motorboat. Tom is now the owner of a factory that produces his inventions, childhood friend Ned is his business manager, African-American handyman Eradicate is now a full-time employee of the Swifts, and they’ve added the giant South American Koku to the team as Tom’s bodyguard. Tom is also now married, although you can hardly tell. We don’t learn the wife’s name in this volume, she is never “on stage” and is mentioned only twice, once to establish that she exists, and once to let us know she’s not going on the adventure. We hear a bit more about elderly adventurer Mr. Damon’s wife, who he keeps ditching to visit Tom.
Oh, the plot. One of Tom’s old friends we (and Ned) have never heard of before has his plane forced down by a competitor in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Tom decides to avert any such future disaster by building a floating airport for emergency landings. About this time, a new engineer is employed by the Swift firm, a swarthy foreigner named Emil Gurg. Yeah. He’s actually useful at first, since his home country of Haargoland in Central America just happens to have exactly the kind of wood Tom needs to make the airport feasible. But once it’s actually built….
Ned comes off the best in this vclume. He correctly suspects Gurg from the start, and expresses a wish for Tom’s new silent wireless transmitter to make a lot of money…so that he can give raises to their employees.
Tom means well, but sees nothing wrong with rearranging another country’s government to suit his needs, as long as there’s no violence. Gurg exploits this for all it’s worth.
It’s Eradicate and Koku that raise my hackles. They’ve become the “bickering sidekicks” so beloved of early 20th Century action stories, the comic relief characters that constantly fight, but secretly would lay down their lives for each other. Except that what they bicker about in this volume is which of them is more properly servile towards Tom. Rad had some dignity in the motorboat story, not so much here.
Between the ethnic stereotypes and the way Tom never learns his lesson about interfering in other countries’ politics, I cannot recommend this book to anyone who isn’t already a Tom Swift fan.
