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.