Martian Rock - Hardcover

Is there anybody out there? People have been asking this question for thousands of years and will go on asking it as long as there are stars in the sky. Three brave astronauts and a mascot blast off from their home planet full of hope and yearning for intergalactic friendship. They endure a dizzying array of dangers in their quest and are about to give up when they make a surprising discovery.

The creators of Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp team up for a playful interplanetary trek that follows four Martians on a mission to find alien life. The travelers' first destination is the distant Orb Number Nine, which Earthlings call Pluto: "It was dreary and dark,/ and mostly all granite./ They radioed home--/ 'No life on this planet.' " The Martians work backward through the inhospitable Neptune, Uranus and Saturn, but at Jupiter "they decided to beat it./ 'If anything lives here,/ we don't want to meet it!' " Before heading home, they land pessimistically upon the blue-and-green Orb Number Three. At last, in a twist similar to that of Neil Layton's Smile If You're Human, the aliens meet some friendly organisms--a flock of playful penguins--and present them with a souvenir "Martian rock." Nash, like Layton, models the buglike, antennaed aliens on a vacationing family. He takes comic liberties with their bright red hovercraft, which looks like a 1950s-era car with tail fins and includes an ovoid silver trailer. An informative afterword nicely recaps all the Orbs in the Martians' solar system. Ages 4-8. (Nov.)
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