There are no different worlds, are there?

Both books could be classified as science fiction for children. The plot of "Summer with Agatha" by Renata Opala (1989) seems to be set in the future, it begins in a top-modern city at the Baltic seashore, Ustronie. The main characters - Agatha, Wojtek and Richard, three friends, around 12 years old - are kidnapped by Leonidas the mad scientist, who requires their help in creating a better, fully mechanized future. When they are diving to collect algae for Leonidas' eternal youth machine, an accident happens and they regain consciousness in a strange underwater world. It's Chi-o Chiauauaua, a land under the false bottom of Sargasso Sea. They learn to know the inhabitants, including people who also got there accidentally and decided to stay, which can be made possible by exchanging their blood with blue plasma. Only one person can't ever go back - a little American girl who has grown and can't have her blood transfused back because it would be too little. Moved by her drama, Leonidas becomes a better man and decides to stay and try to help her. Agatha, Wojtek and Richard return to the surface - they are told beforehand that they will forget what happened in Chi-o Chiauauaua. Actually the memories don't disappear in 100% - when the children see a Polish yacht, Wojtek, not knowing why, greets the crew with a Chi-an sign.

In "Great, Greater and the Greatest" by Jerzy Broszkiewicz (1960) the main characters, Ika and Pea-Nose - a girl and a boy of about 10 years of age - are set to a series of three adventures in which they have to prove their courage. Everything starts when they find an old car, recently bought by a neighbor, in their yard and discover they can communicate with it. In the half-fantastic world of this novel machines also communicate with each other and so the children are help their radio and the car find a kidnapped boy. The machines are impressed and so, some time later, the kids travel with a little plane that can pilot itself to Sahara, to find a missing airplane and its pilots who went to seek help. Yet later, when they are traveling with friends of their families, the car finds them and asks them if they would participate in the greatest adventure - to leave Earth and travel to a distant planet. In the planetary system of Vega they have to show that not all Terrestrials are cruel, that they can also show great courage when having to help an alien.

Before I show what is common to this book and "Summer with Agatha", I'll quote some curious fragments...

On one of the walls a pulsating green rectangle lit up. So the most difficult moment has come.

Green light - it means: go. But what will be outside the sphere? A city or a sea bottom? A mountain top or a desert? A zoological garden or just Nobody-Knows-What?

(...) The green light was now guiding them in the opposite direction than before. They followed it - slower and slower, and more reluctanly. It seemed to twinkle joyfully, as if it was inviting them: Please, come! But they - not even knowing this - slackened. For just in a moment, in a second, in three of four steps, they were to encounter... What? NOBODY KNOWS! SOME GREAT UNKNOWN!

Later, when the kids save an alien boy and suddenly their surroundings - a burning forest and sea waters - disappear, they are told it was just a test. That nothing was for real - only Oneo, the child actor - and their true courage. Meda - a poet and a member of the Assembly that has to decide whether Terrestrials pose a danger - tells the children that "it's like a cinema, like movies you can enter and experience everything like in real life"...

Upon return, the children are reassured that time was passing much slower on Earth and that they won't be late for supper. When they leave, the Assembly decides that Ika and Pea-Nose must have their memories from Vega erased so that they are not perceived as liars or mentally ill if they ever speak about this adventure. Meda and Oneo ask the professors to leave the children just "a misty memory of beauty and adventure", so on Earth Ika calls some part of the sky "the Meda Nebula" and doesn't know why.

This novel was even screened many years ago - and in the film version it ends with a "funny" fragment about the machine accidentally erasing memories of the earlier adventures as well...

Both in "Summer with Agatha" and in "Great, Greater and the Greatest" children are not fully trusted. It's not enough to tell them that they can never tell others what happened - for their own good. No, their memories have to be erased. The children are protected from being perceived as sick, the Different World is protected from people who could want to get there if they knew about it - and our "real world" remains the only world there is.

I have been surprised by the similarity of this motif in both novels, but isn't it generally typical for literature for children? Even Lewis Caroll, author of "the most psychedelic nursery books", suggests us that Alice's adventures were only a dream. On some level all these books are about the same problem: protecting the vision of a single reality.

As a child I have at times actually been angry that characters of the books I read experience such great adventures - and I can't. Have I failed to learn that Books are something completely different than the Real World? What do other children think? Do they accept the reality? Or maybe children's books are in fact subversive by suggesting that these adventures were for real and only the world of adults prevents us from believing them? It can be seen on various levels. One is sure: "reality" must be a problem for us if considerations about its nature are even woven into books for children.