This post will be my contribution to the collective blogging about science books. In fact, I feel it will become a series of posts, not only one…

Lots of people wrote about the books that were important in their childhood, some of them sci-fi. I decided to talk about a series of books that are not about science, but that portrait science in a fantastic way.

These books were incredibly important in my childhood, and I still love the characters (I plan to call my daughter Emilia because of that, but I still have to convince my husband). Sadly, the Sitio do Picapau Amarelo is quite unknown outside Brazil.

The name means “Yellow woodpecker ranch,” but it doesn’t sound as good in English as pi-ca-pa-u-a-ma-re-lo in Portuguese (try to say that out loud).

It’s a series of books about the ranch, populated by two old ladies, two kids, a talking doll, a talking maize (or corncob, which word is better?), fantastic creatures, a talking pig and lots more.

The author, Monteiro Lobato, has just been described by my husband as the Brazilian Tolkien. These are very different styles, but the comparison is not completely out of place, although I think there is something of Lewis Carrol in the universe he created too.

In one of the books Emilia, the doll, decides to reduce humanity size to end the war (the story was written in the forties). Suddenly all humankind is reduced to something like 5 centimetres.

When the main characters are traveling around the world to see what happened, they find that almost all humans believe that the world has become huge, except one group of American scientists who have quickly adapted to the new conditions.

They analyzed the situation and concluded that the reducing of species was a very usual thing in evolution, so there was no reason to believe that the world had expanded. Although intrigued by the suddenness of the shrinking, they quickly find ways of living.

They founded a city inside of a bucket (called “Bucket City,” in English) raised cattle (worms), dressed using cotton fibres and even domesticated bettles and small insects!

That’s is just one of the situations. Other books were about the World of Arithmetics, oil exploration, how the human body works, nature and evolution (when they decide to reform nature and make things more “intelligent”), astronomy, all of this mixed with popular culture from Brazil, like the “Saci,” the “preto velho”, ex-slaves (by that time, slavery was a close experience), etc.

Well, this post is already huge now, so I will write more some other day. Unfortunately it is hard to find material about these books in English, but there is a Wikipedia page with some information.

The images are: Viscount Corncob (original illustration), Narizinho (not related to the reduced humans story I mentioned), Reforming Nature cover, The Saci cover