Looking for book title, author

[nativecolorado]

I'm looking for the Title and Author of a Sci-Fi book I read as a kid.

Basically, the story was about two kids living on the moon who take the moon rover out for a spin, and come across a hermit living in a cave. This cave has all sorts of beautiful plants and what not in it, and the hermit worships one of the plants, if I'm remembering correctly. The title of one of the chapters is in fact "The Worshiper". The kids are enticed to stay, and only just manage to make it out and get back to the family, but the guy disappears back into the cave.

Any help would be much appreciated!

[iansales]

Sounds a little like John Varley's 'Picnic on Nearside', a short story in the collection The Barbie Murders (which was also published as Picnic on Nearside). The story is also in The John Varley Reader.

[nativecolorado]

Hmm.

This was a full book, not a short story, and it's pretty old (I hate to say!)

I'm 45, and I read the book when I was in Jr. High School. Wow-so quite a while back.

[DanielH]

This is probably it:


I'm too young for links to go through, so google for "The Lotus Caves" by John Christopher (he's the same guy who wrote "The Tripods" series that were in Boy's Life magazine for so many years).

The Lotus Caves by John Christopher

Posted by Daryll Sloan on May 28, 2008
When John Christopher wrote The Tripods trilogy in the 1960s, it was a turning point for the author. As one who had written only for adults in the the earlier part of his career, he now wrote almost exclusively for children. The Lotus Caves is the children’s novel that immediately followed The Tripods.

This is a moon adventure, something that perhaps has limited appeal today, but would have been really exciting in the year of publication, 1969, the same year as the first manned moon landing. From a 60s perspective, the novel envisions a fairly gritty possible future, with a mining colony established on the moon and entire families living within a huge domed structure called The Bubble. Lives are a little colourless in comparison to Earth. Commodities are always in limited supply, so lifestyles of conservation are encouraged, where every little thing is important - in stark contrast to the affluence that’s possible on Earth. An artificial lake with its own fish is provided, to make the families feel more at home. But for some of the young, the moon has always been their home. Born there, and destined to remain until their parents have finished their contracts, the young nevertheless long to visit the blue world they’ve only ever seen in books and videos.

Marty is one such teenager. Bored with life in The Bubble, he ends up getting into a bit of mischief with his new friend Steve. Discovering a passkey accidentally left in the ignition of a lunar crawler, the boys take hold of a rare opportunity to travel far and wide across the lunar landscape. Their first destination is First Station, the now abandoned predecessor to The Bubble, where they discover the diary of a colonist who went missing under mysterious circumstances, telling stories of a vision of a strange impossible flower on the moon. Marty and Steve go in search of the mystery. From that point on in, we leave mundane science fiction behind and grasp the reins of fantasy. For under the surface of the moon is a bizarre plant-like entity who welcomes the boys and never wants them to leave.
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