Danny Dunn and the Automatic House, by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin
Professor Bulfinch creates a fully automatic house to be shown at the state fair. Meanwhile, Irene babysits a toddler who speaks a language only she can understand and can summon dogs with an ultrasonic scream. These plotlines come together when Irene, Joe, Danny, and the toddler accidentally get locked inside the house.
Not the best of the Danny Dunn books. There are some funny hijinks but the actual premise (trapped in the automatic house) doesn’t occur until too late in the book. Though it’s satisfyingly disastrous when it does, as the house is over-efficient in all the wrong ways: trying to vacuum them, hurling them out of bed, etc.
What’s most striking is that Williams predicted a bunch of things that really did get invented, and which would have seemed extremely prescient… except that he also said how they’d work, and was invariably wrong about that. For instance, he correctly predicted that frozen food could be cooked in minutes, but by a super-oven rather than a microwave. He predicted that we could have libraries to read on a screen at home, but specified that they were in microfiche. If you want to avoid datedness when you write about future technology, it's probably best to just say what something does and not explain how it does it.
However, I note that Williams was 100% correct about several of the problems with making things high-tech when they don't really need to be. A manual garage door can be always be opened, but an automatic one can trap you if the power goes out or the opener malfunctions. And effective measures at keeping thieves out can be equally effective at keeping you out... or in. (Though that isn't just a technical problem. Manual booby traps also tend to be sprung by the people who set them.)
The entire Danny Dunn series is now available on Kindle for $3.99.
Danny Dunn and the Automatic House[image error]
[image error] [image error]
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Not the best of the Danny Dunn books. There are some funny hijinks but the actual premise (trapped in the automatic house) doesn’t occur until too late in the book. Though it’s satisfyingly disastrous when it does, as the house is over-efficient in all the wrong ways: trying to vacuum them, hurling them out of bed, etc.
What’s most striking is that Williams predicted a bunch of things that really did get invented, and which would have seemed extremely prescient… except that he also said how they’d work, and was invariably wrong about that. For instance, he correctly predicted that frozen food could be cooked in minutes, but by a super-oven rather than a microwave. He predicted that we could have libraries to read on a screen at home, but specified that they were in microfiche. If you want to avoid datedness when you write about future technology, it's probably best to just say what something does and not explain how it does it.
However, I note that Williams was 100% correct about several of the problems with making things high-tech when they don't really need to be. A manual garage door can be always be opened, but an automatic one can trap you if the power goes out or the opener malfunctions. And effective measures at keeping thieves out can be equally effective at keeping you out... or in. (Though that isn't just a technical problem. Manual booby traps also tend to be sprung by the people who set them.)
The entire Danny Dunn series is now available on Kindle for $3.99.
Danny Dunn and the Automatic House[image error]
[image error] [image error]
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