My life in books

Heinlein project, revisited: now that Farah Mendlesohn’s book on Heinlein and his work is out and I’ve started reading it, it’s really time to finish the project I’d set for myself, to reread all his sf and fantasy work so I could appreciate her text more readily. I’d finished up the early novels and the short stories, so now for a quick tour through the juveniles.

The juvenile is an odd thing. It usually begins with the protagonists squarely set in the category of children, because they need to be people that a young person can identify with as someone like them, or at least like them in a few years. These days we also have the young adult novel, which lets us fudge things, pick almost adult protagonists that perhaps could reasonably overthrow a government or build a ship that will take us to the moon. But for adults to read and believe that a child could do these things requires a strong ability to invoke a sense that yes, it could happen. Never mind that n our past, people we’d consider children have in fact done such things - we don’t see the possibility of children doing it n now. Thus, with Heinlein’s first juvenile, we begin within pages to accept the ideas that an adult man with access to used rocketry equipment and some radioactive fuel can build a space ship - more, would choose to do so - with three teenaged amateur rocket enthusiasts.

Reading the juveniles together in close sequence allows for an interesting reading of the exploration and colonisation of the solar system, at least among the first half dozen stories. Whether this reading was part of Heinlein’s intentions with these books, I do not know. But viewed together, it seems to be on the one hand, Heinlein’s view of how and why civilisations spread to new worlds, and on the other, how to discover and train the kind of ethical man who will carry the best of a civilisation to its new home.

Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947

Heinlein’s first post-war novel, and first juvenile novel was not sold to Campbell at Astounding. It focuses on three budding young rocket scientists and their trials to build a real space ship - something a lot of kids were engrossed in in the late 40s and 50s, when it seemed as though every neighbourhood had some kind of space exploration club. Of course, this is set a bit in the future, when rockets are already a part of life, but the moon is still a goal. So these kids and their science club have a head start over the youth Heinlein anticipated as the audience for his novel.

What’s interesting about the protagonists, young Art Mueller, Morry Abrams and Ross Jenkins is that they’s all highly intelligent and motivated, they attend a science-and tech oriented high school, and they have adult mentors who let them actually get away with building a space ship. They are also a varied group - Morry is Jewish, and Art is German, his father a defector.

Most of the book is straight procedural with a shot of mystery/espionage - what has to be done to build and crew a space ship, and how to handle mysterious break-ins and other disquieting events while doing so. In places, it reads like a rocketry manual rather than a novel. It gets busier, of course, when they find both a secret Nazi base and ruins from an ancient civilization awaiting them, and end up saving the world by the skin of their teeth. Pretty impressive for a bunch of scholkids.

From a teenager’s perspective, it’s a great adventure story, but read from the viewpoint an adult, it sure looks like criminally negligent exploitation of three naive young men by a single-minded scientist who can't persuade anyone to give him the backing to carry out his experiments in a safe and ethical manner. Instead, he uses the unpaid labour of the boys and never discloses the full scope of the risks – particularly the indications that someone who is not averse to violence is trying to keep him from getting to the moon. Also, what is up with the parents of these boys? Two boys simply tell their parents about the scheme, and they say “if that’s really what you want, dear.” The third set of parents initially say no, but when creepy exploitative scientist talks to them about using their kids as unpaid labour and risking their lives in space, we discover that all the parents are really worried about is their kid not going to a good school in the fall – and when creepy scientist promises to tutor the boy, this makes it OK.

As a story, there are a number of things not particularly well thought-out, but Heinlein was at the beginning of his career writing juveniles, and he hadn’t quite hit on the formula for making a protagonist young enough, but not too young, which is a tricky thing to do.


Space Cadet, 1948

Space Cadet is the classic boy’s boarding school juvenile dressed up as a training camp for an elite force of Peacekeepers. It’s also a picture of how to train the ideal individual, if that person also has to be a spaceman and a peacekeeper.

The first half of the novel covers the basic training of the protagonist Matt Dodson and his friends, with special attention paid to those psychological moments that set out the change from civilian mindset to that of the committed patrolman, and more importantly, the spaceman. This is something common to Heinlein’s writing about living in space - the idea that there is a kind of psychological distinction between the spacing outlook on life and the ‘groundhog’ outlook.

Once Matt and his friends are truly cadets, the action begins. On their first cadet mission, their ship locates a lost vessel, carrying information indicative of an ancient civilisation. They then encounter a nasty confrontation brewing between humans and indigenous Venusians that only the Patrol can resolve, proving that after everything they’ve been through, they are true members of the Patrol. T

Red Planet 1949

Heinlein’s third juvenile is set on Mars, and among other things continues to drop hints about Martians, which will come to fullness in Stranger in a Strange Land. Here we meet young colonist Jim Marlowe, his friend Frank Sutton, and his Martian ‘pet’ Willis. No one in the colony has any idea that Willis is actually an infant of the dominant species, but Jim forms a close rapport with him, and senses that he is more than just an animal. When Jim and Frank go away to boarding school, at one of the communities on the path from the northern settlement, where the colony spends the summers, to the southern settlement, where it spends the winters, Wills goes with him.

But major changes that will affect all the colonists are in the air, and they begin with the Headmaster banning pets and confiscating Willis to sell to a zoo on earth. Jim and Frank discover this, and the company’s plans to end the habitual migrations, and escape the school in an attempt to get home and warn their families.

They run into some serious difficulties, but thanks to Willis, Jim and Frank are accepted as water brothers to Willis’ family, and are able to bring proof of The Company’s perfidy to the Martian settlers. Here as in other places, Heinlein’s inclinations are capitalist but anti-corporatist, as the human settlers defeat the Company and force a reevaluation of the new policies, while the Martians ensure that those who wanted to put Willis in a cage are never seen again.

Farmer in the Sky, 1950

In Farmer in the Sky, we begin to see the somewhat dystopic future for earth that is hinted at in Red Planet and some of the historical sequence stories - population pressure driving immigration, scarcity of resources, rationing.

Farmer in the Sky is a book about the perils of homesteading, a topic Heinlein was clearly attracted to, and would revisit in other novels, particularly Time Enough for Love - and if a particular theme is of importance to him, then it will be found somewhere in Time Enough for Love.

Bill Lermer and his father George are unhappy on Earth. George is a widower who wants a new beginning; Bill wants a different kind of life. Naturally, the new arrivals on Ganymede discover that conditions are far from what was claimed, the Colonial commission has set things up to work in the worst possible way, the current settlers resent them, and life on Ganymede is going to be ten times harder than they’d thought it could be....

But it’s possible, with some good will, and what follows is a manual on what you need to think about to colonise a new planet, and what not to do. Again, there is a strong suggestion that there are people who are ‘right’ for the rigours of a life away from earth, and it’s made quite clear that those who aren’t ‘the right stuff’ aren’t really pleasant people to be around, at least in Heinlein’s eyes. The kind of person needed for the job of space man or planetary colonist is the sort of person Heinlein sets his readers up to identify with. And the events of Farmer in the Sky are exactly what one would expect to find in an examination booklet on finding out if one has what’s needed to be the best colonial settlers.

Between Planets, 1951

In previous juveniles, Heinlein has implied some tensions between Earth and various colonial governments, and the colonies, developing independence, filling up with (at least for the first few generations) people who have, and are, the ‘right stuff.’ In Between Planets, one of the few real interplanetary citizens - Donald Harvey, a young man born in freefall, his mother a Venusian, his father from Earth, both scientists now living on Mars - gets caught in the middle of an interplanetary war when Venus declares its independance while he is at school on Earth. His unusual birth circumstances mean that no one trusts him, and no one is willing to do the obvious thing of sending the neutral citizen to a neutral planet. And as it turns out, he’s not exactly neutral - his parents represent an unknown but active factor in all the negotiations and allegiances, and they’ve committed Don to something he doesn’t know about, without his consent or understanding. This will leave Don with two serious ethical issues - first, which of all the people who want the secret he knows, are the people his parents would have trusted, and second, does he agree with his parents?

Between Planets is straight action all the way to the end, with very little of the blatant ‘how to be the right kind of person’ training in the earlier books. What we see instead is Don navigating the path to an ethical decision.

Rolling Stones, 1953

Rolling Stones is a comic, picaresque novel about an eccentric family of Lunar colonists, and in some ways resets the cycle we’ve seen in the earlier juveniles. Now it’s Luna that’s beginning to be too quiet and commonplace for the born explorer. As Hazel Stone, a character one will see as a child revolutionary in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, says to her complacent son, ‘Your mind may not be made up; mine is. Luna is getting to be like any other ant hill. I'm going out somewhere to find elbow room, about a quarter of a billion miles of it.’

The Family Stone consists of Hazel Stone, engineer and veteran of the revolution, her son Roger, also an engineer by trade, formerly mayor of Luna and currently a comic strip writer looking for a change of pace, his wife Edith, a doctor and sculptor, and their children, Meade, the irrepressible twins Castor and Pollux, and the youngest of the family of supergeniuses, Buster, aka Lowell, potential telepath and certified pain in the neck. Before very long, his restless family has convinced Roger to buy a family spaceship.

Before you can say “second star to the right..” the Stones are off on a Grand Tour of the solar system, with virtually al the action resulting from Cas and POl’s generally unsuccessful attempts to not quite con the locals into a business scheme. At the end of the book, they have floundered through Mars, an Asteroid mining city, and Ceres, and are preparing to ramble on toward Titan. The ideal colonist now lives in space.

Reading potential nominations for the shorter fiction categories for the 1943 Retro Hugos is no easy task. Unless you have a vast collection of golden age short story anthologies or access to a collection of the original pulp magazines, you are not going to be able to read much of the relevant material, even if you restrict yourself to looking for stories other people have already recommended. But I did make some efforts to read some of the more readily accessible stories and novelettes, in order to do what justice I could to the nominations. I managed to acquire, through the auspices of my friendly internet faeries, a variety of magazines from 1942 that I’d flagged mostly because they contained at least one piece of short fiction from an author I’m generally a fan of, or a story I’d seen recommended. Couldn’t find everything I would have liked to, but did find enough to keep me busy for a while. Looking in this post at eligible novelettes...

First up, Robert Heinlein’s novelette “Goldfish Bowl,” which is an unsettling story about unexplained phenomena, including fireballs that kill some humans but cause others to vanish, and two huge waterspouts that stretch mikes into the stratosphere. The story follows two men who try to find out what’s at the top of the strange spouts, and who succeed, to their own ruin. The net result is to bring a large dose of humility into the standard American sf narrative of mastery of science, the world and outer space.

Leigh Brackett’s “Out of the Sea,” is a novelette set on contemporary Earth, in California. Recently jilted newspaperman Webb Fallon is drowning his sorrows by the sea when suddenly a wave of giant, mutated sea creatures boils out of the surf onto the land, and some even into the air. Fallon and the blonde he’d been flirting with survive, Fallon with minor wounds. Imperial Japan claims responsibility and demands surrender from the Pacific allies in the war. But Fallon, working from his memories of an interview with an undersea geologist, has other ideas and sets out to find the truth. The story is fast paced and engaging, but what caught my interest in particular was the way it deals with the changes in Fallon’s character and his relationships with women. He starts out being somewhat of an angry and entitled ass, selfish, a very reluctant hero. But under pressure, and stung by the scorn of his new companion Joan, and the scientist Bjarnsson, he makes the heroic choices.

Yet another of Leigh Brackett’s tales published in 1942 is “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon.” Set on a Mars of ancient, lost civilisations and dried out seas, it features adventurer, rxplorer, and tomb robber Max Brandon, who, lost in a deadly sand storm, stumbles across an untouched relic, a Martian ship hundreds of thousands of years old. Within is an ancient consciousness that has survived long past the death of its body, ready to awaken old enmities. Brackett also gives us a competent, interesting woman as Brandon’s partner and love interest - Sylvia Eustace - who saves Brandon and is as instrumental in bringing about the eventual successful conclusion to the story as he is.

E. E. Smith’s novelette “Storm Cloud on Deka” is set in the Lensman universe, part of the “Vortex Blaster” series, and deals with illegal drug manufacturing and production, which was one of Smith’s go-to careers for nasty people. Drug smugglers operating under the cover if being a legitimate business sometimes need to kill people, even their own employees, and they need to do so in a way that no one will investigate. The druglords of Dekanore III have been blaming ‘excess’ deaths on an atomic vortex - but now mathematical genius and vortex buster Neal “Storm” Cloud has sensed something is not quite right with the way this vortex is reportedly behaving, and he moves the rogue vortex to the too of his schedule. Naturally, Cloud figures out what’s going on, saves the day and the Lensmen arrive to finish up. A fairly standard “Doc” Smith adventure.

A. E. Van Vogt’s “Co-operate - Or Else!” is an interesting survival story in which a human and a large, intelligent alien crash land on an extremely dangerous planet with many large and nasty life forms, and must co-operate, despite their differences, in order to reach safety. This is one of Van Vogt’s Rull series, where a multi-species interstellar civilisation including human is fighting an alien species bent on total destruction of all other intelligent life. In this story, not only must out intrepid human convince his alien companion to cooperate in the short term to escape the planet and a patrol of Rull, he must persuade him urge his people to join humanity’s fight against the Rull. Not nearly as overwrought in literary style as some other Van Vogt pieces, and rather fun to read.

One of van Vogt’s best stories, I think, was also published in 1942 - “The Weapon Shop.” Setting aside the underlying pro-gun philosophy, which I don’t agree with, it’s a narrative of collective resistance and support for social justice. When an illegal weapon shop first appears in the village of Glay, Fara Clark, a loyal citizen of the Empire is appalled and leads the fight to get it closed down. But when misfortune strikes, thanks to a vicious son and a grasping corporation, and suicide seems his only option, Fara discovers what the weapon shops are really doing in the Empire, and his entire way of looking at the world around him is changed.

Van Vogt’s “The Ghost” is one of those neatly plotted time paradox attempts to change a predicted future stories, about an old man who has been a ghost for at least five years, but continues to act just as he did in life - including walking through gates, and getting mixed up in time and talking about things that haven’t happened yet. It’s very well crafted, engages the reader, and keeps one guessing about what’s going to happen right to the very end.

C. L. Moore’s “There Shall Be Darkness” is an end of empire narrative, modelled on the end of the Roman Empire. Earth’s troops are being called home, to fight the barbarians at the gates. On Venus, a young and impetuous people - as colonial subjects naturally portrayed as too uncivilised to take up the reins of effective self-government - may be the next home if civilisation, if they have enough time to mature before the barbarians come for them, too. So, yeah, it’s a hot mess of colonialist tropes and the white man’s burden, but it’s also a compelling story about a woman - the Venusian Quanna - who wants out of a patriarchal society and is willing to do it by any means necessary.

Moore, writing with Henry Kuttner under the name Lewis Padgett, also published the deeply ironic “Piggy Bank,” about Bob Ballard, a robber baron type who has built his fortune on the sale of diamonds - artificially created thanks to a secret process known only to his partner in crime, who naturally has set up a deadman scheme to have the secret released if he ever dies. Ballard has another problem - people keep stealing his diamonds. He can always have his partner make more, but the more there are on the market, the less value they have. So he comes up with the perfect solution - he has a robot built that’s specislised to do one thing only - escape from anyone who doesn’t know the password. Ballard takes care of his first problem, too, but his partner had been prepared for that eventuality too, and the story of how his revenge from beyond the grave plays out is actually rather satisfying.

Irony seems to have been one of Kuttner and Moore’s favourite devices. In “Compliments of the Author,” originally credited to Kuttner alone but now considered to be written by both, Tarbell, a corrupt newspaperman tries to blackmail a magician, but ends up killing him instead. He inherits two things - a book that can be used ten times to answer any question that involves danger, threat or great need, and the magician’s familiar, who swears revenge. Tarbell uses several of the book’s uses to escape attempts by the familiar to kill him, and then tries to use the book to get rid of the familiar. He succeeds, but at the end, he learns that sometimes the answer to finding an escape is “No.”

Henry Kuttner’s “The Crystal Circe” is a standard planetary romance, with three human adventurers finding an asteroid with a seductive, fatally beautiful, ancient and very alien being on it. One survives, forever changed by his experiences, to tell the harrowing tale, the others go on to their fate, neither life nor death as we know it. Competently written, as one would expect from Kuttner, and quite engaging, but a fairly ordinary example of its kind.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “Medusa” tells a story about a trip to hell in a ship full of madmen. Eight military spacemen, all but one of whom has had his mind carefully taken apart and put back together with “schizoid” personalities - one paranoic, one manic-depressive - are sent on a mission to discover the source of a mental field emanating from a strange planet, a field that drives men mad if they come too close. The reasoning is that a certain kind of mental illness might actually protect humans against the effects of the field. The final man has been given powerful hypnotic conditioning, to destroy the generator of the field, no matter what it is. It’s a fascinating look at interpersonal dynamics when paranoia goes wild, with a rather ingenious explanation at the end for what caused the killer mental field in the first place.

What delight! An entire anthology devoted to modern reimaginings of those glorious old school planetary romances, set on that long-lost imaginary planet of fetid swamps and humid jungles, of thickly overcast skies dripping hot rains, of slimy and slithery things that flourish in the warm, damp dimness, of scaled and webbed amphibious denizens of vast blood-hot oceans, and the ruins of ancient decadent civilisations overrun by thick, lush vegetation - the Venus of my youth, destroyed forever by the flyby of Mariner 2. Yes, I'm talking about George R. R. Martin and Garner Dozois' collaborative editorial effort, Old Venus.

It's a wonderful homage to the great pulp writers of planetary adventure, from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline to Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore, a collection of stories with all the fast-paced action, adventure, and even at times terror of the originals, but infused with a modern, often post-colonial awareness. In many of these stories, lurking in the shadows behind the hard-boiled adventurer's narrative lies an acknowledgement of damage done by the bold colonising Earthmen, the exploitation of Venusian wealth and peoples, the question of who is the monster - the indigenous, adapted life form, or the alien writing the story. And in some, there is awareness of the hubris of the explorer, the belief that the indigenous peoples can not be as knowledgeable, even of the nature and history of their own world, as the ones who "discover" them. This is planetary romance, all grown up.

While all the stories have something to recommend them, I particularly enjoyed "Bones of Air, Bones of Stone," by Stephen Leigh, "Ruins," by Eleanor Arnason, "The Sunset of Time," by Michael Cassutt, "Pale Blue Memories," by Tobias S. Buckell, and "The Heart's Filthy Lesson," by Elizabeth Bear.



* This anthology contains 16 stories, 13 of which are written by men, and three of which are written by women