Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet

Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet is the second in the series of Mushroom Planet books by Eleanor Cameron, and was published in 1956, two years after the original.

This children's book is set in a beach community in California, as well as on a tiny, habitable moon -- "Basidium" -- in an invisible orbit 50,000 miles from Earth. The "Mushroom Planet," visited by the protagonists David and Chuck, is covered in various types of mushrooms and is populated by little green people.

 The story opens with Theo Bass, the cousin of Tyco Bass, coming to Pacific Grove, CA and visiting the two boys (Chuck and David) from the first book. He has been a traveller around the world for many years, and when he finds out about the mushroom planet, he decides to rebuild the boys' lost spaceship and return to what he knows is his ancestral home.

Earlier, the boys had written a letter to a nearby university professor inviting him to come and give a lecture to their young astronomers' society. The letter arrives while the professor is away and is received by his ambitious young assistant, who comes to Pacific Grove to give the lecture himself.

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he young assistant, Horatio Peabody, ends up going to the Mushroom Planet as a stowaway, and causing quite a bit of trouble there. This book is much more topical than the last one was, as Peabody insists that the Mushroom Planet must be explored and exploited "for the good of science" (as well as for his own personal glory). Mr. Peabody ends up committing an act of sacrilege on the Mushroom Planet that almost gets everyone involved killed, and in general annoys and scares all.

However, by the end of the book, Horatio Peabody learns his lesson about the arrogance of his scientific beliefs, and the situation, overall, returns to equilibrium until the next book.

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Mr. Bass's Planetoid

 Mr. Bass's Planetoid is a 1958 children's science fiction novel by Canadian author Eleanor Cameron. The novel followed The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954) and Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet (1956).

  I loved these books as a child. The notion that 2 boys could build a spaceship out of tin cans and travel to outer space was very appealing!
 The Illustrations are by Louis Darling.

Prewytt Brumblydge, inventor of the Brumblitron, must be found in order to disable the device before it destroys the Earth. This is a job for Mr. Bass, but he has disappeared... so the boys pore over his notebook for clues and go spacefaring to find Brumblydge. This time, instead of journeying to Basidium, they fly to an airless rock named Lepton that orbits 1,000 miles above the Earth's surface.

This novel also introduced the fictional metal Brumblium, a greenish metal, that shows as infragreen on a spectroscope, and is twice the density of uranium.

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet is a science fiction/fantasy children's novel written by Eleanor Cameron in 1954. It is set in a beach community in California, as well as on a tiny, habitable moon, "Basidium," in an invisible orbit 50,000 miles from Earth. The "Mushroom Planet," visited by the protagonists David and Chuck, is covered in various types of mushrooms and is populated by little green people who are in a state of distress.

When two boys find a mysterious ad in a newspaper asking for two young boys to build a spaceship, they quickly construct one out of old tin and scrap wood, and bring it to the advertiser. This man is the mysterious Mr. Bass, a scientist living in an observatory who goes unnoticed by most of the townspeople for some reason. He shows the boys a previously undetected satellite of the Earth, the eponymous planet, which can only be seen with a special filter he has invented. He refits their spaceship, giving them some special fuel he invented to power it, and tells them to fly to the mushroom planet (after getting their parents' permission). He warns them that their trip will only be successful if they bring a mascot.

When it is time for launch, they grab a hen at the last moment for a mascot, and rocket into space. They wake up on the mushroom planet, a small, verdant world covered in soft moss and tree-size mushrooms. They quickly meet some residents of the mushroom planet, small men with large heads and slightly green skin, of the same people as the mysterious Mr. Bass. They tell the boys that their planet has had a crisis and that everyone is slowly dying of a mysterious sickness. The boys meet up with the king of the planet, the Great Ta, and end up solving the natives' problem, before returning to Earth.

The mushroom people's crisis was a lack of sulfur. The boys resolved this with their mascot hen, as chicken eggs have a high sulfur content.