The Star Beast

I was in error with my statement at the end of the previous post, and I'll indulge myself a bit to try recapturing some of my own history with these books here.

 Despite seeing his books on library shelves as a kid in the 90's, Heinlein wasn't one of the authors I picked up back then. At some point in this blog, I think I've talked about how I got into Asimov back in 1997. While I was still in high school, I began taking an interest in some other big-name science fiction authors, primarily Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance. I also got into L. Sprague de Camp through his work on Conan, but generally stuck to his fantasy stories and didn't think of him as a science fiction writer back then.

I think that my first actual Heinlein book was Stranger in a Strange Land, which I read in 2007. Over the next year or so while I was still going to GRCC, I also read Starship Troopers and Podkayne of Mars. Although I read some of Heinlein's "adult" fiction while I was working at the Covington Library, the only "juvenile" I read at that time was Starman Jones. I read Between Planets in 2012, followed by Space Cadet and The Star Beast in 2015. After something in a podcast piqued my interest, I checked out Tunnel in the Sky in 2021, which I'm seeing now was actually the very last book I ever checked out through KCLS (haven't been borrowing library books to read these past few years since I'm sitting on so many bookstore purchases).

When I said that The Star Beast was one of my favorites, I was actually saying that because I'd just started re-reading it and was a bit enthralled. But in 2015, I thought of it as just another juvenile. I saw that on Goodreads, I'd actually rated this one lower than most of the others. Apparently a decade ago, this book just didn't strike me as compelling. I will make a single excuse for 2015 Stephen Bahl: he was working for Clean Harbors at the time. His judgment was thrown off by that.

On my second reading, this is easily the best of the series so far. I love this book. It's a strange change of pace from previous entries. The Star Beast takes place entirely on Earth. It's a kind of creature feature, a magical pet story about John Thomas Stuart and his amazing companion, but with the twist that the surrounding events let it serve as a scathing satire of bureaucracy, sensationalist journalism, and politics. But even more poignantly, it tackles an even more important issue, which is just as real today as it was in 1954: our culture's tendency to heap responsibility onto adolescents while dismissing them as ignorant and inexperienced when they try to actually find their voice.

There's not a lot I have for this one other than gushing praise. My biggest criticism is that the character development for John Thomas's mother is a bit lacking and all at the end of the story, so her overbearing behavior is maybe a bit much even with the book's theme. But she's not a major presence in the story anyway. Betty is the notable human female character in this one, and she steals the show. And now for Critical Reception...

Damon Knight wrote: This is a novel that won't go bad on you. Many of science fiction's triumphs, even from as little as ten years ago, are unreadable today; they were shoddily put together, not meant for re-use. But Heinlein is durable. I've read this story twice, so far – once in the Fantasy and Science Fiction serialized version, once in hard covers – and expect to read it again, sooner or later, for pleasure. I don't know any higher praise.

Yeah. I'm slightly taken aback that I hadn't remembered this one as being so great. It's easily taken a place as not just my favorite of these juveniles, but as one of my favorite Heinlein novels and one of my favorite novels of all time.

Groff Conklin described the novel as "one of Heinlein's most enchanting tales." P. Schuyler Miller found The Star Beast to be "one of the best of 1954."

Agreed. I'm surprised that authors didn't do stories like this more often. It's squarely "science fiction" in the conventional sense and could be borderline "hard sci-fi" when it comes to human technology, but the Hroshii are basically fantasy monsters with powers and traits that defy human understanding.

Up next is Tunnel in the Sky from 1955, the third re-read in a row for me and also the Heinlein novel that I'd read most recently (2021) before embarking on this project. So it might be more fresh in my mind than The Star Beast or Starman Jones had been. From my recollection, I do not think I'll rate it quite as highly, but it's also not going to be dead last. Probably somewhere in the middle, but we'll see.

Starman Jones

As noted in previous entries, this is the first of run of three re-reads in a row for me. So I already knew that I was going to rate this one highly. I remembered loving it before. I briefly thought that I'd even place it above The Rolling Stones. I thought better of that, but this is still an excellent book. It has some of the nautical-adventure-but-in-space aspect that I attributed to Space Cadet, but without the naval academy component of that at all.

I think the elephant in the room here is that the main character, Max Jones, has a kind of super-eidetic memory: he can recall everything. Some of the main characters in previous stories were very talented or had technical skills and knowledge that would really stand out, but they were generally relatable characters as ordinary kids. But in this case, the main character basically gets a superpower. And it's central to the plot. Even after having read the book twice, I don't really know how to feel about it. Starman Jones is a great story and that story doesn't exist without this detail: it's too crucial. But it also makes the the previous six books seem more grounded in comparison, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that. Max is also one of my favorite characters among all of the Heinlein juveniles so far, and I don't know what that says about me either. Oh well.

Another fascinating aspect of this book is that there's a dystopian setting here. The blow is softened because Max makes it aboard a ship and almost all of the rest of the book takes place aboard that ship and on a remote uncharted planet. But we're shown enough of the Earth in this story to see that at least most of the planet is controlled by an oppressive guild system. Technically, the version of Earth in both Red Planet and in Between Planets seems pretty oppressive too, but that's in the context of controlling distant colonies and quelling rebellions. This is pretty different. Max had only ever been on Earth, but his prospects were vanishing to a pretty bleak point just because the system wouldn't give him a chance, and he had to cheat the system to get away from that. Reminds me of the Future History series as well as some of the stuff in Friday. Heinlein definitely liked exploring the theme of Earth going bad and of civilization needing to move to other worlds in order for humanity to survive, or at least for humanity to prosper. The future of the human race was among the stars, not languishing on Earth. Or something.

The superb use of dialogue I noticed in The Rolling Stones is present in this book as well. And ultimately, ranking this one is made or broken by the supporting cast: Sam Anderson, Eldreth Coburn, Doc Hendrix, Captain Blaine, etc. And now that I say that, I think I've got to conclude that while Sam and Doc Hendrix are successful in this regard, I've got mix feelings on the character of Eldreth. Her proficiency with 3-D chess seems a little too blatantly to have been concocted as a vehicle to teach Max a lesson that he's not necessarily smarter than girls, while her naivete feels a bit forced as a foil to emphasize Max's rugged upbringing and the street smarts it has bestowed on him. It feels nitpicky, but I say this with the previous book in the series being The Rolling Stones, which did a better job in comparison. Despite my nitpicking, Eldreth's character works well enough to make the story run smoothly and her dialogue is strong. However, the various members of the Worry Hole gang feel a bit too flat. They blend together too much, especially given how much time Max spends there.

The planet "Charity" and its symbiotic ecosystem is fascinating. I'd remembered the planet from my first reading, but I'd forgotten just how intriguing it was and how rushed and sparsely detailed the description of the settlement there actually was. There's just enough to make it seem like the story is moving to some interesting phase where Max and the ship's crew might have some interesting dynamic going on with the "colonists" in the new settlement, only for that to almost immediately get derailed.

It's between this book and Space Cadet for second place behind The Rolling Stones for now. And it's a close one. The supporting cast in Space Cadet is more balanced, but less ambitious. I'll give the nod to Starman Jones over Space Cadet, but only barely. So yeah, this one is really good. What's the "Critical Reception" say?

Groff Conklin in 1954 found the novel to be "a richly textured and thoroughly mature tale" and the best of the seven Heinlein juveniles available

Second best, I say. Also, kind of weird that most critics agree with me about the excellence of Between Planets and this one, but weren't as keen on The Rolling Stones.

Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas praised it for its "good character-development, rousing adventure-telling, and brilliant creation of several forms of extra-Terrestrial life".

Honestly, after a second reading, I want a kind of sequel in this same world just for the sake of exploring more of that "Charity" planet, even if it's not the same characters.

P. Schuyler Miller ranked it "close to the best in mainline science fiction".

It's a very strong one.

New York Times reviewer Villiers Gerson declared Starman Jones to be "superior science-fiction. ... carefully plotted, lucidly and beautifully written".

Agreed.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson described Starman Jones as "a classic example of the bildungsroman pattern" and noted that "with its bold symbolism, the book makes a universal appeal". Despite "coincidence and occasional melodrama" in the plotting, Williamson concluded that "the novel is a fine juvenile [which] reflects hopes and fears we all have known".

I think I grasp what he means by "coincidence." The plot is moved forward by a couple of remarkable coincidences. I don't know that I disagree about "melodrama" except that I'm actually not sure what he is classifying as melodrama here. It's too vague a term.

Damon Knight wrote that in Starman Jones "Heinlein is doing something more than just earning a living at the work he does supremely well: he's preparing a whole generation – the generation that will live to see the year 2000 – for the Age of Space that's as real to him now as it will be, must be, to them."

Wow. Looks like that review is from 1967. I've got to say that in 2025 it probably hits differently. Damon Knight is dead, but he actually did live to see the year 2000. I wonder what he thought at that time.

Up next is The Star Beast, which I distinctly remember being one of my favorites.

The Rolling Stones

I got somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of the way through this one before pausing, re-reading Between Planets in its entirety, and returning to this one. That should be the first and only hiccup when it comes to reading these in publication order.

In hindsight, I'm a bit surprised that I had only ever heard of this book in the context that the Martian flat cats were the inspiration for Star Trek's "tribbles." I loved this one. And now I'm finally willing to dethrone Space Cadet as the best of the series. The Rolling Stones is actually that good. Better character development, excellent dialogue, and a plot that, while admittedly meandering, fits nicely with the nature of the story.

I don't know a term for the genre, but this one is a kind of family adventure story, where the whole family moves from each port to the next one. The eponymous Stone family are all seemingly geniuses in one respect or another, and their antics and problem-solving are presented in a manner that is fun, slightly comedic, and intriguing. Heinlein isn't afraid to gloss over the parts of their journey that would be boring. Strong themes of entrepreneurialism, family, and inventiveness run through the story. Although the twins, Castor and Pollux, are presented to the reader as the primary protagonists, their grandmother, Hazel, ends up stealing the show. She was clearly Heinlein's favorite character to write, probably out of any character up to this point in his entire career.

Having read it now, I can hardly believe that this book isn't more popular. I imagine that, to some extent, there isn't really any strong good vs. evil theme going on here. It's just a fun story about a family in space. Sometimes their own lives are on the line, but that's it. It's not overtly political and there's no villainous character. I can see how someone who really wanted that stuff might find The Rolling Stones to be lacking. But the writing is some of Heinlein's best, and this book deserves recognition for that.

These days, I think that there's more pressure on authors to write explicitly in series of books and to connect stories in shared universes. I knew that Heinlein reused some details repeatedly, but I'm left wondering to what extent he envisioned these "Juveniles" as sharing a universe. The descriptions of Martian life seem to be consistent with Red Planet and the brief comments on Ganymede are consistent with Farmer in the Sky. The idea that the asteroid belt comprises the remnants of a destroyed planet, as demonstrated in Space Cadet and used repeatedly in many of Heinlein's other stories, also shows up here. I think that Heinlein mostly just reused whichever concepts he felt like reusing, but with no commitment that any one one book would be canonically set in the same universe as another, at least until he started deliberately connecting his "Future History" stories to each other. Notably, The Rolling Stones has a minor connection to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

And now for some Critical Reception.

Jo Walton writes that as a teenager, she considered the book one of the weakest of the Heinlein juveniles; upon rereading it as an adult, it "leaves me feeling I can't get no satisfaction."

Well, obviously I disagree. Also, I don't care for the rock and roll reference gag in that review. It's just a little too obvious. This book predates "The Rolling Stones" as a rock bad by a decade, and there's really nothing that interesting about the shared name.

Both Walton and James Nicoll criticize the book's sexual politics, with Nicoll specifically stating that "(t)he [book's] sexual politics are tragic."

I actually had no idea what these idiots were talking about? Sexual politics? This is a family-friendly story, you weird perverts. Looking up the review from the "tragic" line, it seems that the reviewer's gripe is with the perceived mistreatment of Meade, the older sister of the two primary main characters, Castor and Pollux. Essentially, the twins get top billing, followed closely by their mischievous grandmother (Hazel) and their exasperated father (Roger). Their mother (Edith) gets fewer lines of dialogue for sure, but her expertise as a medical doctor keeps coming up and serves as a reason that other characters in the story are contacting the family in the first place. Although the twins' older sister Meade and younger brother Lowell are generally there with the rest of the family for most events, they're somewhat relegated to serving as minor characters. Apparently this dork named James Nicoll is offended that Meade doesn't get a bigger role. He's also affronted at some trivial details. For instance, after a brief introduction to the twins themselves, the first chapter has them arrive late for dinner to the family residence (this is before the family moves into a spaceship). When they arrive, their mother is "modeling a head of their older sister." For the rest of that scene, Edith occasionally instructs Meade not to move, something which really bothers James Nicoll for some reason. I can't remember the modeling thing ever coming up again in the book. Also, that's not what "tragic" means. You can't just use that word as a stand-in for "something I didn't like." What a loser.

Heinlein himself wrote, in a letter to his agent after he had finished the first quarter of the book, that it had "an unsatisfactory story line thereafter," and that he found a "domestic comedy" "harder to write" than "revolutions and blood."

Don't get me wrong. I'm fine with revolutions in blood too. But I think that he did a fine job with this one. It doesn't have the more grand plot of something like Red Planet or Between Planets, but character development, witty dialogue, and interesting settings are enough to compensate for that.

Groff Conklin described the novel as "a thoroughly delightful job". Boucher and McComas praised it as "easily the most plausible, carefully detailed picture of an interplanetary future we will encounter in any year". P. Schuyler Miller cited the novel's "freshness and simplicity," characterizing it as "a life-size portrait-gallery of real people living in a real world of the future, every detail of which fits into place with top-tolerance precision".

Now, that's more like it.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Heinlein's story as "a dream of personal freedom" written with "an enviable craftsmanship", noted that the novel "carries its thematic burden tightly", unlike Heinlein's later adult novels, and praised The Rolling Stones for its "sense of an accurately extrapolated future background, with all of the new technologies given an air of commonplace reality".

In general, I do think that Heinlein nearly always did a great job of writing stories in a futuristic setting and making them seem futuristic without falling into the pit traps of either being so vague as to be surreal or so technical as to turn the story in a gadget story. That definitely applies here. Without any specific books being named, I don't know whether I agree or disagree with the comparison to "Heinlein's later adult novels." There are a lot of them, after all.

Well, I just started re-reading 1953's Starman Jones. After that it's 1954's The Star Beast followed by 1955's Tunnel in the Sky, both of which are also re-reads. So the next three entries here will all be for books I've already read once.

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.