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Short thoughts: The Twenty One Balloons
Jan. 2nd, 2019 08:30 amThinking about food has me thinking about the steampunk-before-there-was-a-word-for-it Newberry winner The Twenty One Balloons. A fantastical tale of an old but spry teacher with a retirement plan of... Floating around the world in a balloon for a year. (Yes, the Pixar film Up probably owes something to The Twenty One Balloons). It's a short by adult standards, charmingly illustrated, easy to find, and surprisingly influential tale, so I have to recommend reading it yourself before you are totally spoiled by this post.
Anyway, the bulk of the book is taken up by a description of the society on a small island the balloonist crashes on, a la Gulliver's Travels or Dinotopia (definitely a common genre there, drawing on similar tropes. Would be a good but very accessable paper to compare and contrast The Twenty One Balloons and Dinotopia). Here's a link to a discussion of 21B, spoilers ahead: https://www.thebooksmugglers.com/2015/07/decoding-the-newbery-the-twenty-one-balloons-by-william-pene-du-bois.html
That all said, the idea of a society where all families are equally wealthy in a situationally based way, and all quite well off by outside standards such that they have leisure to invent and create, but end up settling on a kind of service economy, where each family cooks for the others in turn, because while they have plenty of food and all the modern conveniences money can buy or their minds invent, *good* food still requires human cooks, who must be paid in kind, with fine prepared meals in turn. It's an obviously unrealistic society, and not independent of the greater global society, but again, it makes a good starting point to discuss possible alternative ways of organizing a society. The Rats of NIMH and some Babar books would be some other good comparison literature.
Anyway, that's a lot of talking about everything else interesting about 21B, when it was the food that really stuck in my mind today.
Anyway, the bulk of the book is taken up by a description of the society on a small island the balloonist crashes on, a la Gulliver's Travels or Dinotopia (definitely a common genre there, drawing on similar tropes. Would be a good but very accessable paper to compare and contrast The Twenty One Balloons and Dinotopia). Here's a link to a discussion of 21B, spoilers ahead: https://www.thebooksmugglers.com/2015/07/decoding-the-newbery-the-twenty-one-balloons-by-william-pene-du-bois.html
That all said, the idea of a society where all families are equally wealthy in a situationally based way, and all quite well off by outside standards such that they have leisure to invent and create, but end up settling on a kind of service economy, where each family cooks for the others in turn, because while they have plenty of food and all the modern conveniences money can buy or their minds invent, *good* food still requires human cooks, who must be paid in kind, with fine prepared meals in turn. It's an obviously unrealistic society, and not independent of the greater global society, but again, it makes a good starting point to discuss possible alternative ways of organizing a society. The Rats of NIMH and some Babar books would be some other good comparison literature.
Anyway, that's a lot of talking about everything else interesting about 21B, when it was the food that really stuck in my mind today.
