Mitch's Blog

Nov 22, 2024 ↓

I found this photo of the cover of David Gerrold's novel "Yesterday's Children"

I read the book when I was about 12 and thought it was amazing. It was my first exposure to the type of main character I would learn, years later, is called an "antihero." I loved the worldbuilding, the imagined technology, and how the characters interacted with it. Some scenes were just dialogue, characters describing what machines were doing and what they were doing to try to get the machines to obey them, and I loved that.

I read it several times as a teen-ager but not since. I wonder whether I would love it today.

Good cover too. Captured the spirit of the book.

It occurs to me now that "Yesterday's Children" echoes "The Caine Mutiny."

Close-up photo of a thin paperback book with an abstract cover illustration of a starship comprising about a dozen attached spheres of various sizes stuck together like Tinkertoys, hanging inside what looks like a bare cubical room with purple and blue walls covered in clouds. On the floor of the room are about a dozen stylized human figures. The lettering on the cover reads, 'For one man _survival_ — for the other, _attack!_ Yesterday's Children a conceptual journey into war by David Gerrold.'