The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet

The advertisement in the newspaper asks for a small spaceship, built by a boy or two boys, and gives an address. David Topman and Chuck Masterson build one out of scrap wood and old tin, using the hull of a derelict rowboat, and haul it round to the address, where Mr. Tyco Bass turns out to be a very small man with a very large head who has been waiting for exactly this. Through a stroboscopic polarizing filter he shows them a satellite of Earth that nobody else has found.

Bass fuels the ship, makes the boys get their parents' permission, and tells them the trip will only succeed if they bring a mascot. In the rush at launch they grab David's hen, Mrs. Pennyfeather. Basidium is moss and mushrooms the size of trees and small green people with oversized heads, and those people are dying: the plants they take their sulphur from are failing. The hen's eggs are the sulphur. The mascot the boys almost left behind is the whole solution, and Cameron plants it lightly enough that it arrives as a discovery rather than a trick.

It lands for a seven-to-ten-year-old, read aloud, and it holds up better than most 1954 science fiction for children because the science was never the load-bearing part — the ship is a rowboat and the fuel is a favour. The reservation is that an alien civilisation's crisis is resolved by a chicken. That is either the best thing in the book or the moment a certain kind of reader stops believing any of it, and there is no middle position on offer.