Bruce Coville
We did a nostalgia book share at the Personal Development Book Lovers meetup a couple months back. I talked about The Plant that Ate Dirty socks, but I had also checked out this series from the library while I was retrieving that. I still really enjoyed this series. The premise is that aliens have come to study earth to determine what to do about humanity. Many other alien races have achieved faster than light travel and all of them got there without war or poverty among them. They are concerned that human technology is approaching the point where humans will be able to explore the galaxy but humans haven’t socially matured enough to be without senseless violence and inequity. The aliens fear that humans will bring destruction and discord to the rest of the galaxy. It’s a pretty serious topic for a children’s book. The children in the book are exposed to awful atrocities, which their guides point out are frequently considered inappropriate for children to witness, even though the suffering is frequently happening TO children. It definitely feels like there’s something to this. Beyond the military capacity we’ve developed, we’ve also created perpetual digital brain leeches in smart phones and social media that affect us in ways that we’re not prepared for. We need to catch up and determine how to use the technology we already have in a healthy way, but the tech is outpacing that evolution.