Between Planets

 I was already about two-thirds of my way through the 1952 novel, The Rolling Stones, by the time my copy of Between Planets arrived. So another one of these posts should arrive sooner rather than later. And like I said, I already read Between Planets years ago and it was one of my favorites. Well, now that my re-reading is fresh, how does it hold up?

I rate this as the second-best of the novels so far. In some ways, it should really even take the #1 spot. The strong points here are strong. The Venerian "dragons" and the delicate, enigmatic Martians presented in this story are interesting aliens. Heinlein's portrayal of the struggles of an adolescent finding himself unwittingly at the center of political intrigue is convincing and poignant. Don is smart enough to know that things are tense, observant enough to know that some of the other characters are lying to him, and experienced enough to know that some characters are overconfident or foolish in their own assessments, but he is still frustrated and ultimately clueless for much of the story.

I'd remembered the two key plot points involving the Isobel character, but was pleasantly surprised to see how much actual presence she got in the text, easily more than any female character so far (although I already know that The Rolling Stones will shatter that record). But the real star of the show here is the recurring dragon character, "Sir Isaac Newton."

Ultimately, where I consider this story to fall short of the standard set by Space Cadet is in the abrupt Deus Ex Machina with no real denouement and too little detail to feel engaging. Both Space Cadet and Red Planet finish very strongly, while Farmer in the Sky and Between Planets sort of feel rushed, as though Heinlein couldn't think of a satisfying conclusion and just phoned it in. No idea if there's any chance that that is what happened, though. Apart from that flaw, this really does stand out as the best written and most interesting of Heinlein's juveniles so far.

If Book #2 was a naval academy coming-of-age story set in space, Book #3 was a Western set in space, and Book #4 was a pioneer story set in space, I guess I'd kind of liken Between Planets to something like Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain, a revolutionary war story (in space). I don't know if I can keep doing this analogy for every one of these books, and I already don't know how to classify the very first one anyway. But there you have it. Now for some Critical Reception.

Groff Conklin reviewed the novel favorably, calling it "a magnificently real and vivid Picture of the Possible".

 It's an excellent one for sure.

Boucher and McComas named it among the best sf novels of 1951, characterizing it as "more mature than most 'adult' science fiction".

I'm actually not sure what "mature" means in  this context.

P. Schuyler Miller praised the novel as "very smoothly and logically put together", although he noted that it lacked the level of "elaboration of background detail" that he expected from Heinlein.

 Yes! Exactly. Well, that's mostly a problem for the final section of the book. The early and middle parts are richly detailed.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Between Planets as "mov[ing] the series still farther from its juvenile origins toward grownup concerns". Although describing the plot as "pretty traditional space opera", he praised the novel for its "ably drawn" characters, its "well-imagined" background, and its "story told with zest". Williamson also noted that Heinlein closed the novel "with a vigorous statement of his unhappiness with 'the historical imperative' leading to the loss of individual freedom as governmental organizations grew".

I know that Heinlein is constantly accused of laying it on thick with the political stuff in Starship Troopers, and I'll have some words to say once we come to that one. But the portrayal of politics in Between Planets is good stuff, and shouldn't be remotely objectionable to anyone with more than half a brain.

I'm already nearly done with The Rolling Stones, so we'll have another post coming soon. After that, it's on to a cluster of re-reads: three in a row.

Farmer in the Sky

Well, I think that this is easily the weakest story so far. Now, it's not bad. As a pioneer story in space, it's generally well-conceived and engaging. I'll also give it props for using more grim and mature themes than the earlier stories, and for doing a fine job of that as well.

I hadn't realized it, but this story was serialized in Boys' Life magazine. Not sure if it was hand to Scribner's after that, but I assume so. The book is full of references to scouting, most of which have little connection to the main plot. So it becomes a bit distracting. There's a larger cast of characters than in the earlier novels, and while I enjoyed many of the characters, at some point the roster outgrew the capacity of the story to maintain proper focus and flow. Farmer in the Sky is still well worth the read, but I couldn't get into it as much as I did with Space Cadet and Red Planet.

I wish that Heinlein had given us more time for the Hank Jones character to act as a proper foil to Bill. Also, I can't get over this image I found on Wikipedia.

A major event in the book involves a moonquake on Ganymede triggered by the alignment of Jupiter's inner moons. Heinlein apparently wasn't aware that the alignment he described was impossible. Seems like something that would have been known to astronomy as a whole even back in 1950. I'd think it would be amusing to see what response, if any, Heinlein had in his own lifetime to this fact being pointed out. Anyway, let's get to some "Critical Reception."

Groff Conklin wrote that although Farmer in the Sky was "conceived as a novel for 'adolescents' ... this book is also one of the best of the month's output in science fiction for adults ... an adventure story with an unusual amount of realism in its telling. It is not childish".

I deduce that much of this is owed to the descriptions of devastation in the aftermath of the aforementioned moonquake, including the death of a family member and the main characters' realistic response to it.

Boucher and McComas named Farmer "just about the only mature science fiction novel of the year [1950]", describing it as "a magnificently detailed study of the technological and human problems of interplanetary colonization."

I concur with that characterization.

Damon Knight found the novel "a typical Heinlein story ... typically brilliant, thorough and readable."

Sure. Like I said, this one is not bad. I'd even say it's good. But Space Cadet and Red Planet are great, and this one has to follow them. Nevertheless, it is brilliant.

P. Schuyler Miller recommended the novel unreservedly, saying that Heinlein's "minute attention to detail ... has never been more fascinatingly shown."

I mean, I'm not going to dispute these comments. I'd have thought that there'd be better reception for the two previous books. That's all.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson noted that Farmer in the Sky "has harsh realism for a juvenile." He described it as "a novel of education" where the protagonist "tell[s] his own story in a relaxed conversational style."

Again, I apparently agree with the critics. "Relaxed conversational style" is a good way to describe Bill's narration.

This concludes the four books I purchased bundled together in the Four Frontiers omnibus. The next book in sequence should be the 1951 novel, Between Planets. Well, I ran into a problem. My fault. I thought that I'd bought all of the books. To my surprise, when I went to open Between Planets, I found that I was actually opening a nonfiction astronomy book from 1956 (technically, a revised edition of a book originally published in 1941) by Fletcher G. Watson: Between the Planets. Articles are critical. A copy of the correct book is on its way and I should receive it next week. In the meantime, I've already started the 1952 book: The Rolling Stones. Ordinarily, I'd be bummed out to be reading the books out-of-sequence. But I have already read Between Planets and it's actually one of my favorites. I figure if I'm going to have this sort of mishap, at least at least it's with a book I'd already read anyway. I'm sure I'll have high praise for Between Planets, either before or after I post an entry here for The Rolling Stones.

Red Planet

I went into this one essentially blind. I knew that it was published in 1949 and I assumed from the title that it would take place on Mars.

Given the general use of rite of passage themes in the first two novels, I started to get an impression from this one early on, and it turned out to be way off. I assumed that we were being introduced to Jim and Frank as characters in their home life before they were sent off to a boarding school and that the school itself would be the primary setting for the story. When conflict emerged between Jim and the strict new headmaster at the school, I thought that this was going to be a novel with that conflict as its central theme. I thought that everything was building to that. Instead, Heinlein immediately raised the stakes and had the main characters trekking through the wilderness while evading corrupt government agents in a desperate bid to make it home and warn their families of impending treachery. It's a kind of frontier story. I don't have a lot of familiarity with Westerns, but I got the impression that this could be a Western. Just change some details around and move it to Mars.

I had no idea that the iconic Martians in Stranger in a Strange Land had predecessors in one of the old Heinlein juveniles. That was kind of cool to see. Not as cool as the Venerians in Space Cadet, and it might not have resonated with me if I hadn't already read that later novel (neither book is a sequel to the other, but Heinlein borrowed some of the features of his Martians from Red Planet for his Stranger in a Strange Land Martians).

I'm really curious how cold Heinlein thought it was on Mars back in 1949, or what scientists knew about the planet back then. I take it for granted, especially with these early works, that we have far more knowledge about the true conditions on the surfaces of these planets than was available back when Heinlein wrote these stories. It's easy to forget that when the book immediately establishes that the surface is extremely cold and that the atmosphere is not breathable. But the version of Mars in Red Planet is reminiscent of Antarctic conditions on Earth, perhaps with a bit of Mount Everest thrown in. Actual conditions on Mars are far more harsh.

I like this one. Not enough to dethrone Space Cadet, but it's actually kind of close. And now let's check out "Critical Reception."

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Red Planet as Heinlein's first genuinely successful effort in the sequence, saying that "Heinlein [has] found his true direction ... The Martian setting is logically constructed and rich in convincing detail [while] the characters are engaging and the action develops naturally."

Not sure how the first two efforts in the sequence were unsuccessful. But yeah, this one is good. I'll grudgingly admit that, in some ways, it's actually the best one so far.

P. Schuyler Miller, reviewing the original edition, praised the novel's "verisimilitude, the attention to detail which Heinlein's adult readers know well. . . . the explanations are never dragged in for their own sake, and the plot grows naturally out of the setting."

Good take. Guess I don't have much to add.

I've already well into Farmer in the Sky. That'll be the final story in the "Four Frontiers" bound volume I've been lugging around. Then it's on to Between Planets, a book that I read years ago and expect to regard highly on my second reading.

Space Cadet

 This was the first Heinlein juvenile that ended up being a re-read for me, and I recalled it being one of my favorites of the bunch. I didn't remember that it was the second of these books to be written and published, dating all the way back to 1948.

This one might prove a high bar to clear for the rest of the series. It's a great book. The general concept of a naval academy coming-of-age story set in space is simple and predictable enough, but the character development is superb. I love the Venerians in this book. They're some of the coolest science fiction aliens I can think of. Heinlein did go back to Venus, but as far as I know he never revisited these particular aliens again and no other authors did anything like them. Too bad.

Maybe it's my lack of familiarity with science fiction from this era at work here, but one of the striking themes of Space Cadet is the importance of having the strategic military infrastructure in space controlled by the good guys, a theme that is deplorably understated these days, and it's bizarre to me that the first story to explore this theme is a book written for young boys. Heinlein was laying it out for kids in 1948, but now adults can't come to terms with this reality. Yikes. You guys, have we fallen or something? I don't know. Wasn't planning to make this a deep series of blog posts. Let's move on.

And let's engage with some "Critical Reception."

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Space Cadet as "a long step forward. ... The characters are stronger [and] the background is carefully built, original, and convincing, the story suspenseful enough." Williamson noted that Heinlein was "perfecting the bildungsroman form that shapes the whole series."

That's a fair characterization. Not much to add to that.

P. Schuyler Miller gave the book a favorable review as "a first-rate historical novel of the near future," saying "So subtly has the scientific detail been interwoven with plot and action that the reader never realizes how painstakingly it has been worked out."

Well, "near future" might be a bit of a stretch. Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure as to when Space Cadet is supposed to be set. I believe that 1971 is given as the year for the pioneering voyage to Venus, which comes up as something in the distant past for that characters in the book, but exactly how distant is not officially stated.

Like I said, this is going to be a high bar to clear. Up next we've got a book I know nothing about: Red Planet. Since I was bored half to death by Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, I hope that I have a better reaction to this one.

Rocket Ship Galileo

My earlier post about Heinlein juveniles indicated that you might not see anything more until "well into December." That ended up being far too optimistic. Oops. But we got there eventually.

This was the first Heinlein juvenile and one of a few that I knew absolutely nothing about prior to starting my little project. So I went into this one blind. I ended up being pleasantly surprised. Rocket Ship Galileo is an underrated book. It's light on interpersonal drama and character development and forgoes worldbuilding on the basis that it takes place in America and that readers already know what America is like. It's the future. There are rocket ships. They can go to space. Deal with it.

I know that there have been other points in my life when the somewhat shallow character development in this one would cause me to rate it unfavorably compared to Heinlein's later work. So I guess it's fortunate that I held off on this one until I was 39. I found the trim, technical nature of this one to be satisfying. I think it meets the definition of "hard" science fiction, although the book is actually so old that it predates the term (just looked it up and supposedly "hard science fiction" was coined a decade later).

I don't know if I'll do this for all of these books, but I found a "critical reception" section on the Wikipedia article for this one, and I think I'll respond to it.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson noted that while Rocket Ship Galileo remains "readable, with Heinlein's familiar themes already emerging," it was a "sometimes fumbling experiment. ... The plot is often trite, and the characters are generally thin stereotypes."

I actually don't know what this means. Very little time was devoted to character development, and none of the characters were stereotypical in any way I can think of. There's a very minor recurring theme with the Cargraves character being uncomfortable with the aggressive driving habits of the teenage characters, but that feels like such a trivial detail to use as the basis for a review.

Robert Wilfred Franson said that "Heinlein wants there always to be young people of the right mind and character to seize such opportunities. His novels went a long way toward educating such a class of people, and still are doing so."

Yeah, that's part of why I chose to embark on this little journey.

Andrew Baker wrote: "'Rocket Ship Galileo' shares with numerous works composed before the advent of the actual Space Program a gross underestimation of the huge costs and investment of resources needed for any jaunt outside Earth's gravitational field. (...) The idea of private people (boys in this case) being able to just take off to the Moon on their own can ultimately be traced - like so many Science Fiction themes - to the fertile mind of H. G. Wells and to the two English gentlemen quietly taking off to the Moon in The First Men in the Moon. (...) The politics of 'Galileo' are still those of the World War II anti-Nazi Alliance, not of the emerging Cold War. Had it been written a few years later, the villains would have likely been Russian Communists."

I suspect that Heinlein had a better grasp on the technical challenges of space flight than Andrew Baker, who seems to have misread the book. It's not a few boys building a rocket and taking off to the moon. It's a professional rocket scientist who creates a design for a nuclear-powered rocket drive, but whose last commercial venture went poorly, so he lacks the funds to realize his dream. When old, basically-still-spaceworthy rockets are sold as government surplus to make room for a newer generation of rockets, he buys one and recruits his nephew's amateur rocket club to help him retrofit the existing orbital space rocket into a rocket capable of voyaging to and landing on the moon. Not only does this book take place in a world where space travel already exists, but Heinlein even invents details about differences between the space suits that the characters wear while on the moon and the earlier models of space suits. This criticism makes it seem like Earth's gravity well is just too much for private enterprise, while disregarding the fact that we're talking about a nuclear-powered rocket. Nuclear power is a gamechanger.

As for the Nazi villains, I felt like they were super-cheesy when I was actually reading the book, but after the fact I had to admit that this was because they struck me as being too similar to all of the later stories to reuse Nazis as villains. In Heinlein's defense, he beat just about everyone to the punch with this one. Lots of authors have done "the Nazis are back" as the villains in their stories. It looks like Heinlein invented that trope. And I think there's a rule somewhere that the first book to use a trope gets a pass or something.

The line about the Russians is hilarious, written as though Andrew Baker has no knowledge of anything else Heinlein ever wrote. Heinlein's career spanned almost all of the Cold War. He had plenty of time to make the Russians the bad guys in his books if he wanted to.

This one was good, but I'm already rereading Space Cadet, which was one of my favorites among the Heinlein juveniles I read before this project. We'll see how I think it holds up...

Crap from the internet for December 7th, 2024

 I use "crap" in the most mild, generalistic sense here. The primary impetus for this post comes from this video.

The reason that I watched the video was because I'm subscribed to the creator. I like the creator of the video and the point of this post isn't to throw shade. There were some aspects of the video that I agreed with. Still, it motivated me to write this one up. And most of the points in the video strike me as, at best, misguided.

Back in my Clean Harbors days, a recurring theme was that I kept getting tagged to support the beleaguered "team" for the King County Solid Waste contract. I started typing up a bit of a rant as to why I was doing this work, but it felt too much like airing someone else's dirty laundry. Also, it's too much of a tangent. So skip that. There were reasons why. I'm cognizant of them. Doesn't really matter. I was stuck working on these sites a lot.

On one particular day, I was running the Auburn Supermall HHW site with two technicians from a different branch of the company to help me. This was moderately unusual both because usually this particular site was one that our own people staffed and also because the company would usually short-staff the site on days when I was sent there and only give me one other person. Still, this would have been utterly forgettable if not for the fact that one of these technicians had no real experience with the sort of work we were doing, while the other one had considerable experience. So throughout the day, the new guy was effectively getting on-the-job training from both of us. There were a lot of questions, and eventually the conversation turned toward queries on the nature of a "labpack."

 Labpacks were, at the time, my primary job function. My actual job title was, I think, field chemist. But I could more specifically have been labeled a "labpacker" (if that wasn't a term more often used for a cardboard box than for a person). Anyway, I was a labpacker. The experienced technician working with me that day was not, but he'd worked on enough sites where he was assisting someone who was labpacking and he'd seen enough of it to have a general idea of the concept. He was also a generally knowledgeable guy, so in cases where labpack staff were new or incompetent, he might actually have known more than they did. This led the conversation to his someone exaggerated claim, "I have an app on my phone that can do your job."

He did not. There is no phone app that can comprehensively provide the information to prepare labpacks, especially not to the degree of expertise I have (or had). There still isn't, and there certainly wasn't back in 2015, which would have been when this little story took place. Even without playing around with the phone app, I knew that this guy was both underestimating the complexity of labpacks on the sorts of job sites where he normally wouldn't be around to see them (university research labs, for instance) and overestimating the capabilities of the app that he'd played around with. It's not that he was stupid: like I said, this was a generally knowledgeable guy. He knew way more about labpacks than the average person. He also didn't know enough to know what he didn't know. He wouldn't have been in a position to stress-test the app. Also, I think that his limited experience with the app misled him as to just how much human input was needed for it to function. So, it was maybe cool software with some potential, but the problem was that anyone with only cursory familiarity with the subject matter would be likely to drastically underestimate the gulf between the capabilities of the software and the hypothetical capabilities that would be needed for it to "do your job." Not only could the app not do my job, it couldn't even come close. This got me wondering, "But what if it could?" And almost immediately, the obvious rejoinder to that occurred to me, "Then I'd lose my job."

I don't know how to make this clear without coming across as protesting too much, but I wasn't worried about this. At this point, I'd probably only relatively recently seen CGPGrey's "Humans Need Not Apply" video. So the general concept of humans losing their jobs due to new technology was relatively fresh in my mind. And almost immediately, I found myself arriving a some corollaries. We started with "Technology cannot replace my function at work, and really it's a long way off from being able to." From there, I moved on to "But what if it could?" followed by "Then I'd lose my job." Next came "And no one would care." Finally, there was "Not even me."

No one thinks that I am somehow owed the right to eke out my existence through my proficiency in labpacking. If I machine could do it better, then every customer would gladly use the machine. I'd have to find some other line of work, and it would be silly of me to think otherwise. If human labpackers were to raise a fuss at being replaced by machines, they'd be the subject of disdain and derision, the laughing stock of the entire hazardous waste industry.

Ever since the hullabaloo regarding "AI art" started, I think back to that day in 2015. I think about it a lot. I've been characterized as "smart." Sometimes, that was due to distorted perspectives on the part of others. But at least I've maybe been mistaken for being "smart" or "intelligent" or "brainy." I've never been mistaken for being "artistically talented." And maybe that's for the best. It sure seems like the so-called "intelligent" kids all eventually get their lessons in humility. Think too highly of your own cognitive abilities and the world will slam you face-first into a reality check. But art is subjective. Once enamored with ones own "creative" powers, how can one be brought to earth?

Perhaps the biggest story of the 2020's will be the gargantuan, protracted hissy fit thrown by spoiled brats who grew up being told that they were "creatives" and that their artistic talents were wonderful. The video I watched today wasn't the first one to blather on about some notion that AI art is soulless or to bemoan the loss of genuine artistic genius in a sea of "AI." No, I could have written most of this in response to numerous other videos or posts I found on the internet. It's a common sentiment. And sure, technically I never asked any of these artists whether they'd care if an app could replace labpack field chemists. But I don't need to. I already know the answer. And no one would care. Not even me.

The people who produce this content won't actually come out and say that of course it's fine if technology replaces other jobs, but that creative jobs are different because they're sacred or something. But they'll dance right up to that line. I guess that's what I like so much about the CGPGrey video. He never does any of that. He contemplates the topic from as many angles as he can. He tries to present it in a balanced way.

Anyway, that's my message to all the "creatives" out there. You are a beautiful and unique snowflake. But also, you know, nobody owes you lunch for that. So suck it up. The mundane commonfolk around you, lacking your magical artistic spark, have been dealing with this stuff the whole time. Welcome to the club.

An aspect of the CircleToons video that I hadn't really noticed in previous screeds against "AI" art was the drastic overestimation of "AI" capabilities in non-artistic matters. It's an echo of that conversation from back in 2015. Artists know art, and they are keen on all the flaws in "AI" art that I might not notice so easily. I haven't looked for examples, but I'd imagine that musicians might similarly deride the obvious-to-them flaws in "AI" musical compositions. And just like that environmental technician knew enough about labpacks to have some idea, but not enough to realize how deficient his phone app really was when it came to its capacity to do my job, it seems that most artists severely overestimate the capabilities of "AI" to write longform content, or accurately provide information on technical topics, or really to do anything outside their sphere of art. The know that the machine is bad at making art, but they assume that it is good at doing other things (it's actually still pretty bad).

Heinlein juveniles

Robert Heinlein was a great writer, generally considered the #1 science fiction author in the world for most of his lifetime. Between 1947 and 1958, he wrote twelve "juvenile" novels that were published by Scribner's. One of his most famous novels, Starship Troopers, was rejected by Scribner's. This ended that particular relationship, but he went on to write another "YA" novel and some short stories.

It occurs to me that I missed out on Heinlein in my own youth. I believe that I've used this blog to reminisce about how I discovered Asimov's work back in 1997. I would have loved Heinlein's "juveniles" back then. It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land, and this sparked my interest enough to read some of his other work.

I thought it would be a fun project to go through all fourteen of these books before I turn 40. I've got just under a year. The plan is to read each one in publication order and to blog my thoughts here.

Prior to brainstorming this little project, I'd already owned three of the fourteen books: The Star Beast, Starship Troopers, and Podkayne of Mars. In addition to having already read those three, I've also read Space Cadet, Between Planets, Starman Jones, and Tunnel in the Sky. That's exactly half of them. However, for this project I'm going to reread the ones that I already read at some point in the past. So I really will go through all fourteen books in publication order.

As I write this post, I've got copies of thirteen of these books in my house: Have Space Suit—Will Travel was the most elusive, but it has been ordered and should arrive soon. I have no current plans to track down Heinlein's "YA" styled short stories.

I'm going to finish the book that I'm currently reading before I jump into Rocket Ship Galileo. So there might not be any updates here until well into December. But watch this space for some hot takes on seventy-year-old science fiction books for teenagers, written by me, a thirty-nine-year-old!