Book Sale Finds: Mental Hygiene by Ken Smith

I haven’t had this much fun with a book in quite some time 

 

I first heard about this book, which chronicles the many hundreds of classroom educational films produced from the late 1940s through about 1970, on a podcast about the evolution of the American teenager, and I tracked down a copy at a used book sale. Used copies are readily available online, and if you have even the slightest interest in independent filmmaking, ephemeral films, or retro pop culture, I can’t recommend it highly enough. 

You know these educational films from their endless parodies on The Simpsons, usually starring Troy McClure, or featured appearances on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But you probably don’t know the people responsible for making these movies, the reasons they became so prevalent, and the way in which, taken as a whole, they chronicle almost the entire postwar American experiment. 

Ken Smith profiles hundreds of these films, along with the individuals and companies responsible for making them. But beyond that, Smith weaves this information into a broader story told with a lot of insight and humor. In fact, the longest section of the book is a catalogue of hundreds of titles with blurbs about each of them. When I first got my copy, I figured I’d read the narrative chapters and probably skip the catalogue, or just look at it as a reference source. Instead, Smith’s descriptions were so entertaining and in many cases the choices the films made were so bizarre that I found myself reading the whole thing, and often subjecting my family to the descriptions after I broke up laughing while reading on the couch.

At the time this book was written, these films were not available to the public. Smith combed university archives and relied on the assistance of icons in the film preservation field like Rick Prelinger to screen these films privately and subsequently write about them. Thankfully for big ol’ nerds like me, many of these films are now available on YouTube or archive.org. I put together a playlist if you want to dive in.

Classroom Social Guidance Films

During World War II, the U.S. government relied heavily on filmmaking for the first time to aid in the war effort. Famously, directors like Frank Capra and William Wyler left Hollywood to create pro-Allied propaganda films. Disney and Warner Bros. also contributed cartoons that had some type of training angle or rallied viewers to the cause. The government realized that you could train thousands of soldiers all at once, all across the globe, by showing them a film. The military produced a ton of films on different topics, and one of the most widely seen was Sex Hygiene, directed by John Ford and starring George Reeves of the Superman TV show fame, educating servicemen about how to not get syphilis.

1943 Collier's cartoon

 

Immediately after the war, progressive educators saw an opportunity to use this same idea to benefit kids in school. My cursory understanding of these films before reading the book was that they were a method for enforcing conformity across society, but the truth is far more complex. 

Smith breaks up the bulk of Mental Hygiene into three sections: The Genres, The Producers, and The Films.

The Genres include Fitting In, Cautionary Tales, Dating, Girls Only, Drugs, Sex Education, Bloody Highways, and Sneaky Sponsors. Each genre contains a spectrum from “kinda good” to “mostly ok” to “wow, that’s cringe” to “oh no” to “what the hell did I just watch??”

The Drugs and Bloody Highways categories are the most likely to make your skin crawl. Many of the anti-drug films, which really emerged in the 1960s, rely on exploitative scare tactics and have almost no relation to the reality of drug use. Seduction of the Innocent, for instance, claims that marijuana is a powerful hallucinogenic. That movie’s 11 minutes of full-on batshit crazy. The Bloody Highways collection, which famously scarred generations of drivers-ed students by including real footage of mutilated bodies at accident scenes, is worse. These films remain grisly and disgusting – they are essentially snuff films – and Smith references other reporting that suggests that the producers of these films were giving kickbacks to police and ambulance companies to get out to accident scenes first, and that larger bribery and corruption scandals arose out of those arrangements.

I expected the “Fitting In” and “Dating” categories to be oppressive in their encouragement of rigid conformity, and some of that is definitely there (Control Your Emotions essentially advocates not having any emotions), but I found something else that I didn’t expect – actual good advice.

Isolation, a lack of community, and difficulties making meaningful connections plague our current moment, here in 2025. I have heard countless people online and in person talk about the challenges of just knowing what to do in social situations. What’s expected on a date? Should you pay for your date, or no? Is sex expected, or no? How do you make friends? How do you keep them?  What do healthy relationships look like? Check the YouTube comments on a number of these social guidance films, and you’ll find modern viewers relating to the feelings of these characters and taking comfort in the fact that people have always had these social anxieties.

In Shy Guy, a young Dick York (later of Inherit the Wind and Bewitched) plays a high school student in a new town who loves tinkering with radios and doesn’t know how to make new friends. His father suggests just going to where other students hang out, not making a big deal of it or putting too much pressure on himself, but just putting himself out there where it’s at least possible to meet people. So Dick heads to the hang out at the malt shop or wherever, and watches how people interact. He notices that the people who have the most friends seem to be good listeners, ask questions, and take a sincere interest in other people. This is still good advice. If you meet a new person, you’re much more likely to grow that relationship by asking questions and listening to them than by plowing over them and talking about yourself the whole time.

Other social guidance films, like More Dates for Kay, take this too far. Kay basically knows everything about everybody and constantly reminds every other student she sees about their upcoming tests or doctor’s appointments and everything else, to the complete elimination of her own personality, or any personal wants or needs. So don’t be like Kay. But Dick York thinks everybody will laugh at him fixing radios, until he’s at a party and overhears another kid talking about building a radio. The 1950s didn’t have language for “finding your people,” but that’s basically what Dick does in Shy Guy.

The moral of other films is sometimes totally inscrutable. My daughters and I watched Are You Popular? in which all the boys have gone out with Jenny and so they think she’s a tramp, but they’re all also going out with Caroline every night, and she’s great. We were unable to determine a difference between Jenny and Caroline, or why Caroline wound up at the dance and Jenny wound up standing by a bus bench crying one perfect tear.

Before the rise of the anti-drug scare films, these social guidance films were intended to be a progressive resource for kids, providing them with a framework for understanding expectations in new situations. In the postwar economic boom, millions of Americans were moving from rural to suburban communities, many families had stable economic resources for the first time, and the rise of the automobile and commuter culture were changing the fabric of society. These films were an effort to help kids adapt to new environments, and some actually managed to do so successfully. Some less so. Like Cindy Goes to a Party, where little Cindy’s fairy godmother comes to her in a dream with tips for how to behave at her first party at a friend’s house, including the rock-solid advice, “Don’t Break Things,” which is optically printed onscreen when Cindy looks at a lamp that she presumably would’ve been fine with breaking.

Recontextualizing Conformity

However much fun I had reading this book, though, I don’t want to gloss over the actual, profound effect it had on me and my broader understanding of America in the 20^th century. I have always had an appreciation for both educational and marketing films of the 1950s. Animated educational films from production companies such as John Sutherland (Destination Earth, Rhapsody in Steel, A is for Atom) were produced in partnership with commercial firms and industry groups, while companies like General Motors (Design for Dreaming) made consumerist fantasies designed to sell housewives on new kitchen technology and commuters on the latest automobiles. 

These films were stylistically adventurous, especially the animated ones, and provide a truly unique time capsule of a period where innovation was happening rapidly, and the American middle class was exploding in size. Against the backdrop of the dawning Cold War, the films equate the ideas of American patriotism with being a good consumer, and promise a future of ease and contentment. But until Mental Hygiene, I never fully realized that classroom social engineering films were a distinct category, separate from the types of industrial/educational films I was already familiar with. And it’s the story of these mental hygiene films that really allowed me to recontextualize much of my understanding of the 1950s.

For many people, the prevailing impression of the 1950s that lingers today is one of forced conformity. The image of the nuclear family – the breadwinner father, the homemaker mother, the two clean-cut kids staying out of trouble and getting good grades – is central to the iconography of the era. For too many people, that iconography is the only thing they know of the time. This leads to a misguided sense that “everything was better” in the 1950s – that it was an ideal time we should harken back to and try to somehow recapture. That misunderstanding (or willful misrepresentation) obscures several realities of life at the time (off the top of my head):

• The horrors of segregation and the Jim Crow South
• Polio
• The Red Scare
• The Lavender Scare
• The forced exclusion of almost everyone but white men from the workforce
• The extraordinary prevalence of alcoholism and emergence of medications in pill form (and subsequent rise of both acceptable –  “Mother’s Little Helper” (Valium) to help women forced to stay in the home battle anxiety – and unacceptable – teen – drug abuse)
• The untold levels of trauma in World War II veterans who had returned home
• The collapse of extended family support networks as large corporations began relocating workers to brand new communities around the country
• The unbelievable amount of death caused by motor vehicles that had yet to implement safety protocols, and
• The creeping cultural anxiety of the Cold War and possible nuclear holocaust.

But the successes of the New Deal and the defeat of global fascism (…at the time) created a sense of open horizons and limitless possibilities. Social guidance classroom films played a part in that and presented an opportunity for educators to try to build a better educational system that benefited the children and broader society, as well. The origin of these social guidance films was rooted in progressive education, and an anti-fascist focus on community. These films were largely good-faith efforts to help kids and reinforce a community-centric worldview that had helped defeat the fascist threat in Europe.

But here’s the rub: without anyone realizing it, the world had already moved on.

The people who were making the films – the writers, directors, and educational consultants – had endured all of that history…but the kids had not. These children, the Baby Boomers, were born into maybe the greatest economic upswing in human history, but at school they were being preached a wartime-rationing way of being in the world when it was no longer necessary and General Motors was telling them that to be good Americans they had to be good consumers. 

Even the projectors themselves were products war. The armed forces had pioneered the practice of using films to train thousands of soldiers quickly. The projectors in school classrooms used to play these social guidance films had been used first to train soldiers, and then given to the schools as war surplus. This gave progressive educators what they thought was a golden opportunity to teach kids using these same, industrialized approaches.

Then many of these kids came of age into a draft and multiple, new foreign wars. They'd grown up told by a cartoon turtle to hide under their desks in case the Soviets dropped a nuclear bomb on their town. They were being taught pro-social messages and told that if they followed these rules, they’d be happy, well-adjusted, and they’d fit in. But why? To grow up a drunk like dad, or take Valium like mom, or go fight Koreans and Vietnamese who never did anything to them? 

Traffic Safety films blamed teenagers for the massive fatalities on the road, when it had far more to do with a lack of basic safety features in cars, paired with increasingly powerful engines in vehicles built by manufacturers that didn’t - any of them - have a safety department. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed did what no scare-all classroom film could do – it got Congress to mandate safety features in cars. Only then did traffic fatalities begin to decline. In 1951, the rate of vehicle fatalities per 100 million miles driven was over 7. Since 1991, it's never been above 2. Yet teens had to watch films like Last Date (another Dick York role) that shared the concept of “teenicide,” where kids kill themselves before they can turn twenty by driving recklessly. It’s all your fault, kids!

Sponsored films were sneaky, although sometimes playing an important role. Tampon manufacturers were the only ones willing to make menstruation films, which was a positive, but they did so while promoting their own branded products. Many other companies produced pro-consumer propaganda films hoping schools would show them as educational films and not notice or not mind the product placements. Jam Handy, who was possibly the most prolific producer of these kinds of films, said they were intended “for people whose minds are to be reconditioned.” Oof.

I have to believe that the teenagers of the 1950s and 60s saw through this. The counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s seems inevitable as a reaction to the forced conformity of the 1950s that definitely was emphasized. But learning about these films showed me it’s also possible that the rebellion stemmed also from a generational divide, with parents and children talking past each other against the backdrop of unprecedented economic abundance and ever-intensifying cultural inequality and uncertainty.

The 1950s Indict the 1950s

With all this longing for the halcyon 1950s being so popular these days, it’s valuable to ask what folks in the 1950s thought about all that.

Two films stand out. The first is 1955's The Sound of a Stone, directed by Herk Harvey for Centron Pictures in Lawrence, Kansas. Harvey made hundreds of films for Centron, but is best remembered for directing the ghost story film Carnival of Souls. A careful reading of Carnival of Souls reveals a male director and male screenwriter working in 1962 acutely aware of the hazards young women faced. In the film, Mary begins to experience frightening visions, but they are in some ways depicted as less menacing than the reckless challenges of drag-racing boys on the road, the advances of her aggressive male neighbor, or the powerlessness she experiences as a church organist under the gaze of the pastor, who can throw her out of the congregation and rob her of her livelihood simply for playing the wrong music. I think Harvey picked up this sensitivity by making films for young people in a deeply troubled time.

In The Sound of a Stone, a young English teacher assigns a book to his class, but when a student’s father discovers the name of the book on a list of “subversive titles,” the English teacher and his wife begin suffering under a reign of terror from the community. Soon, even students who worked with the teacher on the school paper are also swept up, and they begin receiving threats. It isn’t commented on, but one of the actors has a severe limp in the film – most likely the result of Polio (see above). Soon the boy’s father actually reads the book he was so quick to condemn, and stands up at a school board meeting and recants. He does the right thing, and everybody learns their lesson about blind censorship the Un=American Activities Committee the McCarthy hearings jumping to conclusions. Or so it seems, until the final scene in the movie when somebody else throws a brick through the teacher’s window, almost hitting his infant son, and letting them know that they’d still better leave town. It remains a genuinely compelling film today, but it’s not uplifting.

Then there’s 1959's What About Prejudice? In this film, none of the other students like the new kid – Bruce Jones. They accuse him of stealing things they misplace, or of starting fights, and attribute his behavior to “his kind,” an idea their parents all reinforce. But then two of the gang crash their car into a bridge, and the only witness to the accident is Bruce, who receives horrible burns all over his body while rescuing the two other kids. This causes the gang to rethink their blind hatred of Bruce, and reflect on how maybe they should’ve looked at Bruce as a person first, and not just as a member of a group they didn’t like. Here’s the conceit of the film, though – as much as Bruce is clearly presumed to be Black, the filmmakers intentionally never show him, so that the audience can insert Bruce into their own personally disfavored group. Maybe Bruce isn’t Black. Maybe he’s Jewish. Or Catholic. Or Hispanic. Or any kind of immigrant. Hell, maybe Bruce just has long hair. The film chooses not to say. The fact that in 1959 the producers of an educational film about prejudice for high schools intentionally didn’t show the object of that prejudice so the audience could fill up that mental space with any number of widespread societal hatreds is itself a horrible indictment of the society that produced it.

Mental Hygiene? Five stars, good book, very fun, thought-provoking. 

The 1950s? One-star, would not go back.   

__

Posted by Vance K - co-founder and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Sometime public service announcement and educational film professional. 

Review: Lavender House by Lev A. C. Rosen

 A 1950s murder mystery that queers all your expectations.

One of the big things about period detective fiction is they all do a great job of crafting a vibe, an atmosphere. Someone calls a woman "doll", and suddenly my mental images of the book shift to black and white, everyone's sitting depressed (or possibly just repressed) at a bar in a fedora or a red dress with a thigh slit and there's smoke in the air and clouds in the sky. It just all comes with the territory.

What's so fascinating about Lavender House is how neatly it overturns some of these expectations, with the tiniest of twists, while still occupying and playing with the same tropes and ideas.

Specifically, we meet our protagonist drinking to forget in a bar, and a beautiful woman sits herself down next to him and asks him to do a job... but she's gay. He's gay. And suddenly the narrative shifts entirely. We've overturned the core relationship dynamic of the noir detective, so where do we go from here? It's a seemingly small thing, yet one that not only changes the content of the story - which is unsurprising - but also the entire feeling of the setting, of the type of book. It takes all of my issues with a certain sort of historical detective story and makes me re-examine them entirely, and I find that, when that landscape of attraction is changed, so too is the feel of the whole world.

And on this bedrock of delightful uncertainty sits Lavender House. In some ways, it's a standard murder mystery - rich family, house out in the countryside, a whodunnit, secrets behind closed doors, some upstairs/downstairs drama, learning about the detective's life as he learns about the lives of the victim and suspects, clues slowly seeping out until the answer becomes clear, a red herring or two. All the good stuff. If we just examine it as a murder mystery, we find a very competently built plot, with some compelling characters you find yourself doubting - but not wanting to doubt - and a substantial setting that leaves plenty of scope for the petty grievances and betrayals and heartbreaks that are the necessary backdrop to any investigation. Which isn't to play it down - as a murder mystery it is very well done - just not really outside the scope of the normal. I could pick up any number of books about dead rich people in the UK, the US or anywhere else, and find something that does just a good job of puzzle and clue and reveal as this does.

What I'd be much less likely to find is one that does all the peripherals quite so well as this. And it's in the peripherals that I found most of my joy in reading Lavender House.

Firstly, of course, it's a book about queerness in 1950s San Francisco. And that's already interesting - it's managing the balance really well of the terrible state of culture and law for queer people at the time with acknowledging that they were nonetheless there, and there was culture and life and joy to be found amid the awfulness. And in that dual reality - of hardship and of joy - is the divide between our protagonist and those he encounters.

Which is the second thing - Rosen does a frankly amazing job when it comes to characterisation. Every single person we see in any significant detail, and particularly Andy, our detective, and the residents of Lavender House itself, feels rounded, full and human. Some of this is par for the course for a good mystery, because you need to understand the people who might have done the murder to try to piece together the clues (hopefully just before the detective solves it on the page, so you can feel smug). But Rosen takes it that step further, and where some stories might have a house full of the haughty rich, where motives are understood intellectually, but emotionally speaking it's just a puzzle, he manages to make them all genuinely sympathetic, at least for a time. At several points in the story, I cared about who had done the murder less for the challenge of solving it and more because I was really invested in these characters I cared about not having done it please and thank you. And this I find rare, and wonderful, especially in the murder mystery genre.

Because here's the thing - and this is far bigger than can be grappled with in a single review about a single book - murder stories need to be humanised. There's a lot of terrible, grisly, cold and emotionless discussion of murders, rendering them only puzzles to be solved and obsessed over, whether in or out of fiction. And then in some cases, we push it so far in that murder becomes "cosy" - a soft, comforting genre of story where death is just a necessary premise, and the human cost is hidden in the setup, likely off page. It's not even really important except as a motive force for the plot. But if we want a story that feels real, that feels human, then that human cost needs to weigh on the page too. We need to feel like the dead were people, whose ties reach out into those who remain in the story, and critically that the murderers are people too. That complexity is the antithesis of the Scooby-Doo style mask-off reveal, where the moment the truth is known the culprit drops their own façade of humanity to become a cackling, amoral villain, but the crux of why these stories are so interesting. They're all people, doing people things for people reasons. And they feel more people when we understand them, not just logically but emotionally, especially when we don't agree with them. A senseless murder is no good story at all.

And this, Rosen has grasped fully. When we are at that point in the story where we still don't know who it might be, it is incredibly easy to care about so many of the characters, so easy to see where their insecurities, uncertainties and grudges come from. We feel like anyone could have done it, and if they did, we'd see why they were pushed to that point.

Of course, our detective gets exactly the same treatment, but from a very different angle. We meet him at a low point in his life - as we open the very first page, he is contemplating suicide because of what has happened to his career in the police - and watch him build himself back up through the course of solving the murder. We watch him begin to care about the suspects, just as we do. We also see that he, like them, is far from perfect, and has done many things we may judge, may not condone, but nonetheless understand.

And herein lies the third thing Rosen has done so well - and again is found so rarely. He genuinely interrogates the structures within which we find our characters (and their general archetypes). For Andy, our detective, this means getting to grips with the moral weight of being a gay man, in an anti-gay world, in a world where the law gleefully and regularly commits violence against queer characters. He has his reasons - of course he does - but those are never used as a carte blanche for the choices he's made or the ramifications they may have had. He has to face up to the fact that he was complicit in the system that has hurt and killed people like him. He has to face up to the fact that there may be no forgiveness from some quarters for that. And he has to face up to the fact that he might still be there, might never have pulled himself out of that complicity, but for circumstances conspiring. There are no simple answers to his moral situation. And nor are there for our - however beloved - suspects. Because they too are complicit in their own injustices. This is a small, sheltered house whose safety is bought by financial security. They have made freedom - each in their own way - to be themselves, but their is always a cost. Whether in bribes to the police for absence of scrutiny, or lip service to societal norms, or in aggressively playing the part of heteronormativity outside the confines of their sanctuary, no matter the cost, there is always a price to be paid, and there is a mark on each of them for their privilege. We see them for themselves, but we also see them, see the house, through discussions with the servants, who have their own place in the system, their own view of the injustices in the world around them, and whose voices are given the weight they deserve.

Almost everyone in the story is queer. But no one is given a free pass for it. Everyone is scrutinised for the harms they commit by their place in the world, even as we acknowledge their oppressions, and the sympathy we feel for their positions never excuses their privilege. The rich country house isn't merely a setting for the story, but the whole architecture through which to examine the world and the characters. And in this, Rosen has done what makes Lavender House truly stand out from the crowd. Because for all this examination of privilege, this acknowledgment of intersectionality, and this genuine weight to the moral questions of the book, somehow the story never falters in pace, in readability, and in due consideration of the mystery at hand. It is both a genuinely critical, thoughtful story while being a fully engaging murder mystery.

If I had any criticism - though it isn't much - I might say that the reader feels a little too in the dark about who might be the murderer for a little too long. The clues are not always paced quite so well as we'd like. But the ultimate reveal is handled well and smoothly, with sufficient drama, and the ending is satisfying, so with all the rest the story is doing, it feels very easy to forgive.

I have seen this book often likened to Knives Out, and I think the comparison falters when it comes to humour, which is my primary thought about Knives Out. There is a common thread in their examinations of wealth and privilege, but the difference in tone is a stark one. Don't go into this wanting either constant humorous undertones or the savageness that underlies the film's examination of wealth. See instead - as is present in Knives Out, though less prominently - a great deal of human sympathy, human feeling, and a murder mystery dedicated to a critical examination of what that genre truly entails. I can't wait for the next one.

--

The Math

Highlights: Moments of genuine complexity and interest, a compelling cast of characters, a nuanced view of the queer world of 1950s San Francisco

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Lev A C Rosen, Lavender House, [Forge, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Interview: Gideon Marcus, Kitra and Galactic Journey

You very likely know Gideon Marcus from his Hugo nominated fanzine Galactic Journey, his work as a space historian, and his educational lectures, but did you know he also writes fiction?  His short fiction appears in the anthology Tales of Alternate Earths 2, and his debut YA novel, Kitra, is available now.

Nineteen-year-old Kitra dreams of traveling to the stars like her mother, and she jumps at the chance to fly into space on her own ship.  A diverse crew of nerdy young adults on an old junked Navy ship,  what could possibly go wrong? Well. . .  everything.  Before they know it,  they are stranded. No fuel, no way home, and no one coming to rescue them.  Did I mention Kitra's ex-girlfriend is among the crew?  Talk about awkward!

Kitra is a story of perseverance in the face of fear and uncertainty, and that we only get through times like these by helping each other.   Uplifting and positive,  this novel speaks to all ages.

Galactic Journey is Gideon's Serling award winning and Hugo nominated web-project. Going back in time 55 years to bring today's readers news from the past, the site features reviews of published short stories and novels, and tons of articles on movies, tv shows, "current" events such as the Space Race, and other interesting things. The neat thing is that everything on the site is written as if it is happening right now. You can also follow Galactic Journey on twitter, @journeygalactic.

Gideon was kind enough to let me ask him all sorts of questions about the novel and Galactic Journey.  In our wide ranging conversation we talk about everything from recent trends in YA fiction to characters writing the story themselves, to the importance of small moments, to the future of Galactic Journey, and more!

Let's get to the interview!

NOAF:  Congratulations on your new novel, Kitra! Who is Kitra and why is her story so compelling?

Gideon Marcus: Thanks very much! Kitra is a 19 year old amateur glider pilot with one overriding passion: to go to space. Her mother was an interstellar ambassador, an almost larger than life figure, and when she died, she left behind big (metaphorical) shoes to fill. What makes Kitra special is what can make anyone special: persistence and a determination to seek help in achieving one's goals.

As for what makes her story compelling, I think a story of hope against odds, of ingenuity beating adversity, always resonates. But right now especially, when we're all stuck in various levels of isolation and there's no clear path back to normal, a story about being trapped in a small ship for weeks on end resonates all the more strongly. It's eerily timely and, I'm hoping, inspiring.

NOAF: Sounds like there's a lot of wonderful things happening in this book!  What challenges did you come across, when you were plotting out everything that needed to happen?

GM: Plotwise, I wrote myself into a corner about 65% of the way through the book. I really didn't know how Kitra was going to accomplish the most important thing she needed to do to get home. When you read how she and her crew got through the puzzle, you'll think it was just brilliant foreshadowing . .  . but really, I just sat in my backyard and thought, "What would the characters do?" They quite literally wrote their own solution.

More technically, my biggest challenge was scientific consistency. Kitra is a "young adult" novel, which means it needs to be accessible to everyone age 10 and up. At the same time, there's plenty of Star Wars-style science fantasies out there that play fast and loose with physics. I wanted to write a story that is plausible science fiction while still enjoyable and a quick read. That was the challenge, making sure I kept all the numbers right - how much fuel they had, their food reserves, the mechanics of space travel, etc. It's all invisible to the reader (this is a novel, not a textbook!) but that consistency is important to me.

NOAF: What inspired you to write this novel?

GM: Two main reasons. First: I wrote what I wanted to read. Second: No one else was doing it.

I grew up on "classic" science fiction, mostly stuff from the 50s through the 80s. There wasn't a YA genre back then; it was called "juvenile" instead and usually featured young men doing adventurous things among the stars. Back then, space was the final frontier, after all.

For the last twenty years, YA has been dominated by fantasy and dystopia. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, but it got to the point where everyone was trying to write the next Harry Potter or Hunger Games. Space hasn't gotten any less interesting; science shouldn't be passé; and characters don't need magic or special powers to be extraordinary.

As for why Kitra in particular, in those books I grew up with, there weren't enough (read ANY) young women protagonists . . . except in my beloved L. Frank Baum Oz books. There weren't queer protagonists, rarely persons of color in starring roles. It was something I didn't notice when I was a kid. And that's, of course, the problem. I want young people, and older ones too, to read my book and see a world that looks like theirs, with all the diversity therein.

NOAF: What surprised you the most, while you were writing this novel?

GM: A lot of the book was planned well in advance. I'm not exactly a plotter, but I like to bullet point the pivotal scenes. Some, though, I just sat in front of a blank page with my 1000-words-a-day deadline looming, and pulled a chapter out of . . . hyperspace. :) The snowball fight was one of those.

I didn't plan the situation between Kitra and Marta. In retrospect, it's obvious - two close friends with a romantic history trapped together in an enclosed space - something was bound to happen. Not only does it affect the events in Kitra, it will be important to later books in the series, too.

I think that's the mark of successfully realized characters. They do what they want regardless of what you have planned for them!

NOAF: I hear there is a second novel in the series in the works! Where does Kitra's story go from here?

GM: I'm never certain how much to spoil in these interviews! Kitra's saga definitely doesn't end with the first book, though Kitra wraps up satisfactorily (all of the books in the series will; no one likes a novel that's not a complete story.) By the end of the first book, Kitra and her friends have just been forged into a crew. There's a whole universe to explore, and mind-boggling things to discover. Plus, Kitra will grow as a person, as will those around her. I think that will resonate with readers, too, watching these characters mature over time.

NOAF: In another interview you did, you mentioned that you're "not really about villains". Does Kitra's world not have any bad guys?  What does a world without baddies look like?

GM: What's a "bad guy"? I grew up on superhero comics, and I enjoyed the MCU for a while, but I got tired of the zero sum game. If there were heroes, the rationale went, there had to be equally powerful villains, and they had to fight incessantly. In a dystopian novel, there's the big evil government. In a fantasy, there's the Sauron/Voldemort. I wanted to try something different.

The real world is a complicated place. The "enemy" can be poverty, natural disaster, or closest to home right now, a pandemic. There are definitely selfish, cruel people in this world, but they are almost always the symptom of a problem rather than the source.

My wife once observed that "good writing is the art of making small things matter." Writers have gotten obsessed with toppling Big Bads, or a series of successively tougher "bosses". The scope is always enormous: the world, or the universe . . . maybe even the multiverse. With Kitra, I dialed it back. It's just her and the four friends she feels obligated to help. There is no enemy, just a challenging situation to deal with creatively.

That said, the scope will expand as the series goes on. Will there be trouble? Of course. Politics? To a degree. People who try to hurt Kitra and her crew, sure. But there will never be an arch-nemesis for her to rail against.

NOAF: I'd be a terrible interviewer if I didn't congratulate you on your Hugo nomination for Best Fanzine, Congratulations!  You've been on the Hugo ballot a few times now, how did it feel to get that first nomination? What will winning a Hugo mean for you?

GM: Becoming a Hugo Finalist was literally a life-changer. It happened at the same time as my first professional fiction sales (I've been a nonfiction writer for 15 years) as well as my first educational performances. That was when I realized I could make a go of this writing thing. Two years later, I have a successful publishing company, I'm working with laureled authors, and I'm doing what I love most - telling stories that entertain.

NOAF: Why did you start Galactic Journey? Has Galactic Journey's goals or focus changed since you started it? Where do you see the site going in the next few years?

GM: It all began in 1954. That's when my dad started collecting science fiction magazines. He died in 1993 and left me almost a thousand of them. In 2009, I decided I wanted to read them all. To keep me on a regular schedule, I decided to read them once a month "as they came out" with a time-shift of 55 years. In 1958 . . . er . . . 2013, my wife asked me to recommend some of my favorite stories. I decided to write a blog instead, sort of projecting myself into the past to live in the bygone age, day by day. I'm a space historian, and my specialty is the late '50s, so I added articles about the Space Race, too.

Well, you can't immerse yourself in a time, listening to the music, watching the movies, reading the paper, and not have it become part of you. And I kept seeing our modern age reflected in the past. 55 years ago is now, just a little crappier. I found myself excited on the rare occasions I saw a woman's byline in my fiction and started chronicling the (these days largely forgotten) contributions women made to science fiction back then. I got invested in the struggle for civil rights which, even today, is far from complete...and has faltered lately. I wanted to know more about the world of that age, not just the fiction and technology, but the culture, the fashion, the politics, and how they ultimately led to the age we know today.

Twenty people make up the Journey now, demographically diverse, from all hemispheres of the globe. What we make is, I think, a lot more than just a fanzine. It's a living time capsule with something for everyone. We've finished The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and we pretty well wrapped up the latter Silver Age of science fiction. Doctor Who is in its second season and will go on for a long time. Over the next few years, we're going to be covering a lot more familiar franchises: Star Trek, the New Wave of SF, 2001.

And we're really just starting the 1960s in earnest. Society is about to be turned on its ear, and at the end of the revolution are the seeds of our current world. I hope folks enjoy the trip as much as I am!

NOAF:   Thank you so much Gideon!