Warning!: The Star Bear Odyssey is a “haiku horror picture story”. It was written as a cautionary tale for peculiar children of all ages, not for your average 11 year old:
From The New York Times‘ coverage of Alan Alda’s flame challenge:
“According to Elizabeth Bass, director of the Center for Communicating Science, … a few lessons could be drawn from the entries about successful science explanations. Videos appeared to work better than just words, perhaps simply because the videos required more thought and time to put together. The children appreciated humorous explanations but not jokes that were thrown in simply to be funny.
They hated haikus and other attempts to cast science into verse, Ms. Bass said.
She said one teacher reported, “There was almost disgust in their analysis.”
(My bold. Here is a wikipedia entry on abiogenesis. Starbear’s story is probably closest to a combination of panspermia and evolution…)
Odysseys are popular though, even if haikus for children are not. Everyone (well, almost everyone, I should guess) knows of James Joyce’s version, which satisfyingly (what a horrible word) was an adaptation of the epic-in-all-senses Odyssey for children. (“Joyce first encountered Odysseus in Charles Lamb‘s Adventures of Ulysses—an adaptation of the Odyssey for children”). Surfing Le Twitter last night, I came upon this interesting Axolotl Odyssey story; do go and read it. Some further surfing also brought up another version of the Starbear’s story, this one in comic form:
| Gavin Aung Than (@zenpencils)2012-06-20 7:43 PMHere are my Neil Tyson and @BadAstronomer comics translated into Portugeuese! bit.ly/LgT5OM bit.ly/LgT7WV thnx @AstroPT |
Star Bear Publications 