Alan Nourse was a science fiction writer with a day job as a practicing physician. He began writing science fiction to help pay for his medical education and continued writing in the genre for over 30 years. In his first novel, Trouble on Titan (1954), a boy travels to Titan with his stiff-necked military father. He makes friends on Titan and helps his father deal with a dangerous rebellion. There are other surprises as father and son each have things to learn. The adventure keeps moving, and the science elements are not as dated as one might expect, with one glaring exception--no one would use wood to shore up a mine tunnel on Titan. Nourse and Robert Heinlein were friends for decades, and Trouble on Titan reads like an early Heinlein juvenile, which is not a bad thing. ( )

Pretty good s-f novel of my youth. ( )

Good 1950s SF by Nourse.

Alen E. Nourse wrote more than a dozen SF novels, this one being the first. He never won any awards but was a physician so he already had a profession.

This juvenile fiction is pretty good for a first novel. I give it three stars for being average but it would get more if I was 14. I'll look for more of his books and hope his later works are better. He does not make my list of undiscovered gems with this one. ( )