59 pages • 1 hour read
Stuart GibbsSpace Case
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Stuart Gibbs
A prolific author, Stuart Gibbs has published several acclaimed series of young adult novels. Gibbs’s different series take place in many locations, reflecting the author’s love of travel. The Moon Base Alpha trilogy, of which Space Case is the first book, is Gibbs’s only series that takes place in space. Overall, Gibbs’s oeuvre reflects his dedication to crafting novels for young adults that support their growth, independence, and creativity.
Gibbs was born in 1969 and grew up in Pennsylvania and Washington, DC. After graduating college, he wrote film and television programs for ABC and Nickelodeon. Now a successful author, Gibbs lives in California with his two children, Dashiell and Violet. His wife tragically passed away in 2018. Readers may recall the names Dashiell and Violet as the names of the main character and his little sister in Space Case. Gibbs enjoys traveling and has been to many of the United States national parks as well as destinations in Central America, South America, and Africa.
Gibbs intentionally portrays young adults as characters who are able to solve problems on their own, with minimal adult intervention. This feature is an important component of Gibbs’s overall body of work because it makes Gibbs a highly successful young adult author who recognizes the inherent agency that adolescents possess. Many of Gibbs’s novels follow protagonists who take on difficult, adult problems and resolve them despite lacking some of the privileges that adult characters would have. Space Case incorporates this component, with Dash solving Dr. Holtz’s murder without his parents or other lunarnauts helping him much along the way.
Cultural Context: Space Travel
Space travel has captured the imagination of the public in recent decades due both to real-life science and technological advances and to fictionalized imaginings of what life beyond Earth might be like. When travel outside of the planet’s atmosphere became possible in the second half of the 20th century, it altered the way that people perceived outer space, and science fiction was changed forever. In the modern day, there are myriad television shows, movies, books, graphic novels, and songs dedicated to the possibilities of space travel. Some of the most popular of these have large followings and can even influence the direction of real-life investigations into space. Gibbs’s Space Case fits into this larger cultural narrative as Gibbs imagines what a colony on the moon might be like in the year 2040.
Fiction about space travel is culturally used to project and, sometimes, resolve anxieties about the human experience. Many popular science-fiction narratives portray characters going through normal human problems with love, loss, and greed, but in an interstellar setting, where there are also new planets, aliens, and dangers outside of the normal earthly concerns. Through these narratives, humans can think about how they might react to their own issues in life, without feeling that the narrative is too close to home. In Space Case, young readers can see Dashiell face and solve difficult problems within a confined lunar home, and readers can think about how they might respond to similar situations in their more mundane lives on Earth.
Literary Context: Science Fiction
As a genre, science fiction distinguishes itself from other literary contexts both because it imagines beyond the current reality and because it engages science and technology in a different way than other types of texts. Science fiction is generally characterized by utilizing imagined extensions or possibilities based on existing scientific knowledge. Common science-fiction topics include life on other planets, altered technology like robots and artificial intelligence, and medical discoveries changing something about people or the human experience. Science fiction also often addresses concerns in the present day about particular technologies and their uses.
While Space Case is primarily a detective novel, it still portrays some important characteristics of a science-fiction text. Firstly, it takes place in a colony on the moon, which is an imagined scenario taking place in the future based on current technology. Gibbs did extensive research about space travel to create a world on the moon that felt as realistic as possible. Additionally, Space Case imagines other extensions of current technology, since it takes place in the future. The computers and virtual reality screens have clear connections to the current artificial assistants used on modern-day phones and computers, as well as the functionality of virtual reality headsets that are available for public use. Additionally, Gibbs raises questions about the utility of the computers, which make many mistakes on Moon Base Alpha, as well as flagging a debate over the benefits and drawbacks of virtual reality. By building on these existing scientific advancements, Gibbs creates a fictional world that imagines what life on the moon might actually be like in the not-too-distant future.
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