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...