No More Maple Candy for You
March 22, 2009 8:50 PM   Subscribe

No more maple syrup candy for you! -- Help me remember this SF novel I read in the 1970s.

Everyone lived underground, and sat in specially contoured seats as they ordered their dinners, and the protagonist teenaged boy got demerits for ordering maple candy too many times in a row from the wall-set food machine. He and his sister found a passage near to the surface and collected a rock that got them in trouble because analysis showed it had received solar radiation recently. They wound up emerging and, presumably, reclaiming the surface world. Possible Christian subtext -- but equally possibly not.

Or so I remember. I remember reading this as I sunk through a Mississippi River lock and dam in a canoe in about 1974. Can anyone identify this book?
posted by gum to Writing & Language (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Google: underground maple sci fi novel

Reiffen's Choice?
posted by rafter at 9:09 PM on March 22, 2009


Rafter, that book wasn't published in 1974 and maple candy is mentioned in the review in an entirely different context.
posted by Pants! at 9:23 PM on March 22, 2009


Best answer: I think it was The City Under Ground.

I read it too & loved it.
posted by felix betachat at 10:17 PM on March 22, 2009


Best answer: Ha, and...it's been asked about before.
posted by felix betachat at 10:23 PM on March 22, 2009


Response by poster: This has to be the answer. Thanks, Felix!
posted by gum at 11:32 PM on March 22, 2009


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