CliffsNotes on Heinlein's Works

Cliff Notes

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• eBook ISBN: 9780544181984
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

The Juvenile Novels

In 1947, Heinlein published a novel which began a separate dimension in his work. Rocket Ship Galileo was the first of a series of books ostensibly written for teenagers, and rather specifically until the last few, for male teenagers. The test of an enduring “juvenile” novel has always seemed to be whether it could be read with pleasure by adults and the age group for which it was intended; after getting into stride, Heinlein provided works which certainly met this criterion. To many people, these works are his most successfully realized, combining the straightforward narrative action at which he excels with his talent for extrapolating the minutiae of future cultures.

Though successful enough to inspire a second attempt, Rocket Ship Galileo is probably the only one of these that cannot be readily enjoyed by anyone past adolescence. It concerns three boys, the uncle of one being a noted atomic scientist, who accompany the uncle on the first trip to the moon. While better than the usual “we-just-knocked-this-rocket-ship-together-in-the-back-yard” level of inter-planetary juveniles up to then, it is still a Hardy Boys-type thriller with leftover Nazis (who have also made it to the moon) as the villains. Nevertheless, the technical details are not glossed over, and to the science-minded generations just developing, it was doubtless a relief not to be talked down to.

Space Cadet was a remarkable jump above the first attempt at writing for young people, primarily because of the complexity of its detailed future milieu. In the 70s of the twenty-first century, humanity is more or less united in a Solar Federation, consisting of Earth, Mars, Venus, Luna, and the Jovian moon Ganymede. The Federation is policed by the Space Patrol, a paramilitary organization which acts as the repository for weapons “too dangerous to entrust to military men.” The story is devoted to the training of a cadet for membership in the Patrol (and, as such, is a preliminary sketch for the later Starship Troopers). Since the cadets essentially train on the job after passing the stringent entrance tests the major part of the action takes place on a Patrol ship where the hero, young Matt Dodson, is being initiated to rules and regulations.

Beyond the detailed observation of life aboard a small space ship, there are only two principal events to the narrative. The ship to which Matt is assigned is ordered to search for a missing sister ship in an asteroid belt; when the ship is found, the victim of a freak accident, there is also found evidence that intelligent life once existed on Lucifer, the exploded planet of which the asteroids are the remains. (This is a typical Heinleinian imaginative “throwaway” plot device.) Then Matt’s ship is assigned to investigate a problem on Venus, still a frontier planet. Matt and his companions become involved with the native Venusian race, an amphibious and matriarchal one. Here is an early attempt by Heinlein to create an extraterrestrial culture; he does so admirably, making the Venusians both alien and comprehensible (and amusing—the clan matriarch at one point says, in effect, “Chase your fish and I’ll chase mine” at unwanted interference).

Red Planet, Farmer in the Sky, and Between Planets, the next three juvenile novels to be published, all share one theme: the exploitation of Mars, Ganymede, and Venus, respectively, by commercial colonial corporations modeled on the British East India Company (updated, of course).

In Red Planet, the Martian colonists are still a relatively small group, consisting primarily of technicians and engineers working on the project to free oxygen from the Martian deserts to enrich the thin air of the planet. The adolescent hero, Jim Marlowe, and a friend run away from their boarding school (on Mars), which has been put into the charge of a tyrannical corporation headmaster. They also learn that the corporation has some unpleasant plans in store for the colonists, and the main body of the book is devoted to the pair’s journey across the Martian deserts to the home colony, and the action the colonists take against the Mars Company. Here again are myriad details of what life on Mars would be like for humans, all carefully based on scientific fact. We also meet Heinlein’s Martians for the first time; here is the basic model for that ancient and semi-mystical race that will result in the Martian culture so important to Stranger in a Strange Land.

In Farmer in the Sky, the conflict between colonists and corporation is less abrupt. The hero, again an adolescent, is Bill Lermer. The story follows him as he and his recently widowed father apply for and become colonists on Ganymede. The principal corporate mistake is to send too many people for the overloaded facilities of the colony; the principal narrative concern is how the Lermers make a farm literally out of nothing in the stony wastes of Ganymede. Two sub-themes are Bill’s adjustment to his father’s remarriage (a more emotionally complex problem than a juvenile Heinlein hero has encountered heretofore) and his involvement in the foundation of the Boy Scouts of Ganymede (a condensed version was first published in Boys’ Life magazine as “Satellite Scout”). Heinlein makes the latter less sticky than it might be, mainly by calling attention to the fact that in the frontier life of the planetary colonies, scouting will regain the fundamental values it may have lost in an urbanized society.

There is another abrupt jump in what might be called literary texture in the next book, Between Planets. Here, Heinlein presents a rather complex cloak-and-dagger type plot in an equally complex cultural milieu. It is basically the Solar Federation of Space Cadet, but Venus, tired of being exploited by the rulers of the earth-centered Federation, revolts. It is almost a case of the American colonies against Britain (one of the characters, in fact, enlarges on the comparison). Don Harvey, the leading character, gets involved in the struggle, though his loyalties are not easily placed. His mother is Venusian colonial; his father was born on Earth. They now live on Mars, and he himself was born in space (on a ship, needless to say). He is on his way to join them when hostilities break out, and he is trans-shipped to Venus. The intrigue involves the plans for a breakthrough secret weapon which Don is unknowingly carrying with him, developed by a semi-secret order of scientists to which his parents belong. The melodrama is handled as convincingly as the various settings; the details of a decadent, overcrowded Earth and a frontier Venus are made very real. Here again is another nicely conceived alien race—the highly cultured “dragons” of Venus.

The Rolling Stones is an almost plotless romp; the Stones are a family resident in the by now well-established Lunar settlement. Roger Stone is an engineer turned scriptwriter (he writes three episodes each week of “The Scourge of the Spaceways” for Earth’s entertainment channels) as well as being ex-mayor of Luna City. His wife is a doctor, and his mother, Hazel, is a founding “father” of the original Luna Free State. The children are fifteen-year-old twins, Castor and Pollux (the protagonists), their older sister Meade, and a younger brother, Lowell. The book is simply a chronicle of the family’s travels after they decide to buy a used space ship; the moon has become too crowded and “civilized” for their various independent tastes. Major stops are Mars, just struggling to become self-supporting (reference is again made to the ancient race of Martians), and the brawling frontier settlements of the Asteroid Belt, a recreation of the mining towns of the nineteenth century. Heinlein experiments a bit with character here; the twins are not quite the bland, nice young men that the heroes of this series have been up to now; they are venal and headstrong, and while all of this series are concerned with coming of age in one way or another, the Stone twins start a step behind in maturity. The two-year trip is shown as an exercise in discipline; Grandmother Hazel breaks down and admits they may be able to join the human race when they actually give something away toward the end of the book. She herself is a neatly drawn portrait of the independent pioneer woman; we see her in an earlier incarnation in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

In Starman Jones, Heinlein writes his ultimate Horatio Alger story: An Ozark farm boy whose only connection with space travel is a deceased uncle who had been an interstellar astrogator becomes, through pluck, luck, and the ability to remember verbatim everything he has ever read, the acting captain of a star-traveling liner. Even this Heinlein makes acceptable (though just barely) with, again, the solidly realized details of life aboard a space ship and a background of an earth where even the lowliest profession is totally controlled by its guild, an interesting speculation into the ultimate growth of unionism. Whereas in earlier books, the “villain” was often viewed as a corporation, the union here is viewed negatively as the other side of the coin of the limitation of freedom.

Compared to the simplicity of the preceding two books’ structure, The Star Beast is a complex work. Earth has taken its place in a galactic system of many intelligent races, but the level of ordinary life seems little changed from the twentieth century. John Thomas Stuart XI lives with his widowed mother in a suburban American setting which seems to differ from the contemporary only in the family pet, Lummox. The Stuart family has a long history of space exploration; Lummox was brought to Earth by John Thomas Stuart VIII from an exploratory mission. He was then a tiny, affectionate beast; over the succeeding generations, he has become literally as big as a house and is, seemingly, immortal. There are also signs of independent intelligence, but on a very low level. The first part of the book is devoted to the results of an innocent but destructive rampage when Lummox strays from the yard: A trial concerns the question of Lummox’s status as animal or intelligent being, reminiscent of the early short story “Jerry Is a Man.”

Alternating with this account are scenes concerning the problems of the Under-Secretary of Spatial Affairs for the federation of cultures to which Earth belongs, a Mr. Kiku. His department is vaguely interested in the Lummox affair since it concerns an extraterrestrial, but Mr. Kiku is much more concerned with the demands of a heretofore unknown race, the Hroshii, and that they return an important individual of their race when, for some reason, they believe to be on Earth. It is, of course, eventually determined that Lummox is that individual. Despite Heinlein’s attempts to rationalize the discrepancies, it is almost impossible to believe that a being from a race as superior as the Hroshii would be unidentifiable as an intelligent entity. Since this is the point of the book, it is severely flawed. Nonetheless, John Thomas’ frantic attempts to save his “pet” make for suspenseful narrative, and the workings of Mr. Kiku’s department are a quick and valid course in the realities of political diplomacy.

Heinlein returns to strictly human affairs in Tunnel in the Sky; though the setting is again a universe where man has traveled to the stars, aliens are mentioned but briefly. Starships are also abandoned; the mode of transportation is the “gate,” a form of matter transmitter—instantaneous transmission of an object from one point to another. Again life on an overcrowded Earth is geared to frontiersmanship; an important high-school-level course is basic survival. The final exam consists of the class being transported to a hostile environment; if you live, you pass. The test is for a matter of days; the class in question, because of a “gate” failure, is marooned on a primitive planet for over a year. The story is as old as Robinson Crusoe or The Swiss Family Robinson and as enduringly enthralling, updated with alien but believable animal life and the attempts of the class to form a workable society. Again the protagonist, Rod Walker, goes through a maturing process, but the formative details are the primitive, not the futuristic.

After the rousing adventure of Tunnel in the Sky comes a novel whose major impact is dramatic. Within its limits, Time for the Stars incorporates at least one theory of the ideal science-fiction work: The speculative idea should not only give rise to an interestingly speculative milieu, but the two combined should provide the action and the characters with their basic and distinctive dramatic impetus.

Though the basis for Time for the Stars is the exploration of space beyond the solar system, it is not the fundamental speculative idea. That is too common a theme in science fiction to provide a unique flavor; what is needed—and provided here—is a distinctive twist on a problem raised by such exploration: The answer to the all-important question of communication between ship and Earth base can be maintained given the enormous distances and incredible speeds (approaching the speed of light) involved, which preclude anything like radio.

Heinlein’s answer is to speculate that the human race, as a whole, is latently telepathic, but this ability can be heightened in pairs of individuals who are very close—primarily (but not exclusively) twins. In addition, the telepathic communication thus established is instantaneous, disobeying every law of physics. In less capable hands, this would be the sheerest pseudo-scientific fantasy; Heinlein’s delineation of the device makes the book a painless introduction to Einsteinian (and post-Einsteinian) theory. Beyond this, however, the speculative idea gives rise to an odd and moving human situation which is the core of the book.

Tom Bartlett is a twin and the first-person narrator. He and Pat are identical; they are in their mid-teens and subject to the antagonisms and dependencies which twins have on even deeper levels than most siblings. They are aware of their “specialness,” even beyond their twinship; their father, in the overcrowded Earth of the future, must pay extra tax for them, and the family is, by law, confined to an apartment that is too small. They take part in the research by which the foundation concerned with solving the problems of interstellar flight hopes to conquer the communication problem; when it turns out to be feasible, they are offered lucrative contracts under which one is to stay on Earth, the other to go into space in one of the twelve ships sent out to scout for planets with colonial potential.

The relationship between the twins becomes clear when it is determined which one is to go. Pat wins, as he always seems to in any important argument; however, near the end of the training period, he has a serious accident (subconsciously induced because he is afraid to go), and Tom embarks instead.

The second section of the story is devoted to another of Heinlein’s convincing evocations of life on a space ship, this one holding about two hundred people. There are several half-pairs of communicators aboard; they are literally “spare parts” in case something happens to any of the other partners.

It is here that the ramifications of the speculative idea appear. As a ship approaches the speed of light, time for these on board becomes distorted—speeded up—to the point where a subjective week for the travelers will be more than a year for those on Earth. Pat is rapidly becoming older than his twin. Further study of the telepathic phenomenon has shown that if younger relatives can be tuned into the communication “circuit” at an early age, rapport can be developed in this way; as Tom and Pat grow further apart, Tom “links” with Pat’s daughter, Molly. As earth years pass (just month...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Life and Background of the Author
• Introduction to the Works
• Critical Commentaries
• The Early Novels and Short Stories
• The Adult Novels and Short Stories
• The Juvenile Novels
• The Transitional Novels
• The Novels of the 1970s
• Critical Essays
• The “Future History” Framework
• The Major Themes in Heinlein’s Works
• Selected Heinlein Bibliography