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.