''The Blue Boy'' is a children's picture book by

Martin Auer Martin Auer is an Austrian writer. He was born in Vienna in 1951. After finishing school, he started but never finished the study of German and History. He was an actor, a singer-songwriter, a journalist, and a magician, before he published his ...

, with illustrations by Simone Klages. It was first published in

1991 File:1991 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Boris Yeltsin, elected as Russia's first president, waves the new flag of Russia after the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, orchestrated by Soviet hardliners; Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Phil ...

in German as ''Der blaue Junge''.

Plot summary

The Blue Boy lives on a war-torn planet. When his parents get killed he does not want to love anyone anymore, because he has cried so much that he has no more tears left. He declines the company of a little dog, an old woman, and a girl. Instead, he builds himself a giant armoured robot to travel around in and starts looking for someone who cannot be killed by a gun. At last he meets an old man on the moon who cannot be killed by guns because there are no guns up there. But the Blue Boy has brought his gun with him. Only when the old men offers him to use his telescope to study the people down there on the blue planet and to find out why they fight wars and how this could be stopped he agrees to drop his gun so he can stay with the old man. "Who knows? Maybe he'll fly back one day and tell his people everything he's learned".

Background

The original was also translated into Japanese. An American English translation was published in

1992 File:1992 Events Collage V1.png, From left, clockwise: 1992 Los Angeles riots, Riots break out across Los Angeles, California after the Police brutality, police beating of Rodney King; El Al Flight 1862 crashes into a residential apartment buildi ...

Macmillan MacMillan, Macmillan, McMillen or McMillan may refer to: People * McMillan (surname) * Clan MacMillan, a Highland Scottish clan * Harold Macmillan, British statesman and politician * James MacMillan, Scottish composer * William Duncan MacMillan ...

. Martin Auer first wrote the story for the German television series ''

Siebenstein ''Siebenstein'' is a play by the German writer Maxim Ziese. It is a First World War drama. It appeared at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin from March 1933 with Jürgen Fehling directing and a cast that included Veit Harlan, Lothar Müthel and Hi ...

'' (

ZDF ZDF (, short for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen; ; "Second German Television") is a German public-service television broadcaster based in Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate. It is run as an independent nonprofit institution, which was founded by all fe ...

). It was then published in book form by Beltz & Gelberg. The story is also part of the collection ''

The Strange War ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in E ...

'' by Martin Auer that has been translated in more than 25 languages.

External links

''The Strange War – Stories for a Culture of Peace''
1991 children's books Science fiction picture books German science fiction Works about orphans Picture books Anti-war books German children's literature Austrian children's literature 20th-century Austrian literature 20th-century German literature Beltz & Gelberg books {{child-picture-book-stub