Have Space Suit—Will Travel

Wow. What a book. This was my final book in the series to not be a re-read. It's the best one so far and feel like a proper culmination to twelve years of these novels. Maybe this is giving Heinlein too much retrospective credit. But I could almost see him thinking, "I can already tell that the stiffnecks at Scribner's aren't going to let me keep doing these the way I want to do them. My next book is going to push the maturity of themes here and if they go for it, then great. We'll be doing books for a bit of an older audience than before. But if they don't, then this can be capstone for the kids who followed this journey through the previous eleven books."

We started with Rocket Ship Galileo, which grounds itself in a near-future scenario. From there, we start out with books taking place primarily around our own solar system, moving outward from Venus to Mars to Ganymede, and beyond. The scale and scope of settings continues to grow, eventually moving up to a galactic scale. Then we bounce back to a kind of near-future scenario with Have Space Suit—Will Travel, but it recapitulates the theme of travel to the moon, then out into the solar system, then to a distant star, and finally moves beyond our galaxy before bringing us back home. It feels like the perfect conclusion to a journey.

Perhaps Heinlein had no idea that this would be the last Scribner's juvenile. I don't know. But even if he didn't, I think that the idea was for this book to close the arc he'd started with the first book, and for his next "juvenile" to become the beginning of something new.

Anyway, this one is pretty damn close to perfection. I love it. Ten out of ten, etcetera.

That's my take. What about Critical Reception?

Floyd C. Gale wrote that the book "is possibly the most unabashedly juvenile of Heinlein's long list ... Great for kids, chancy for grownups who don't identify readily with adolescent heroes".

Who hurt you, Floyd C. Gale? Who hurt you?

Final ranking for the twelve "Scribner's" juveniles, bearing in mind that even the worst of them is still better than most science fiction out there:

1. Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)
2. The Star Beast (1954)
3. The Rolling Stones (1952)
4. Tunnel in the Sky (1955)
5. Space Cadet (1948)
6. Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)
7. Starman Jones (1953)
8. Between Planets (1951)
9. Red Planet (1949)
10. Time for the Stars (1956)
11. Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
12. Farmer in the Sky (1950)

 Up next is Starship Troopers. 

Citizen of the Galaxy

This was the third and final book contained in the Infinite Possibilities omnibus. I guess the publishers chose that title for the novels from 1955 to 1957 because they expanded the scope of human civilization beyond the solar system and did this considerably more than the eight previous juveniles. I believe I grasp the theme. But wow, this one was a departure from the others. Most of the juveniles start on Earth. One never even leaves! And although some stories involve travel beyond our own solar system through super-futuristic technology like space-folding, there's a general theme of protagonists assuming some role in civilization as it expands, explores, and moves outward from Earth. The previous book, Time for the Stars, did this in a very literal sense, with a protagonist living aboard a ship traveling at relativistic speed away from home. Then this book starts and dumps the protagonist in a city on some planet we know nothing about, being sold as a four-year-old child slave on an auction block. Time for the Stars made the universe feel bigger through use of relativity and scale. Citizen of the Galaxy does it by presenting a kind of mature star-spanning civilization. It feels almost like a prototype for stories that other authors would later tell in the 60's, 70's, and beyond.

 I didn't know what to make of Citizen of the Galaxy during most of my time reading it. The previous juveniles had things in common that this one steered away from. His young protagonists were usually relatable American kids. Even the one who was born on Mars seemed like an American country boy. Then he goes and pulls a bait-and-switch on us. The protagonist is a professional beggar living in a city named "Jubbulpore" on a planet that has no relationship with Earth. Freed from slavery but hunted by a tyrannical government that has targeted him for spying (he was an unwitting spy), Thorby escapes the planet and joins a clan of, well, they could be space gypsies.

The transitions in Thorby's life effectively divide the book into four phases. Heinlein does a masterful job of balancing them, so each one resonates and it feels like there's a meaningful sense of progression.

 I do not know that anyone else has pointed it out, but I suspect that the anthropologist Thorby meets on the Sisu, Dr. Margaret Mader, is named as a little homage to Margaret Mead.

 I wasn't enthralled by this one, but I did come to appreciate it by the end. Let's see some Critical Reception.

Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale praised the novel, saying "Heinlein is invariably logical. And invariably entertaining."

I'll endorse that blurb.

In The New York Times, Villiers Gerson received the novel favorably, declaring it "better than 99 per cent of the science-fiction adventures produced every year" despite structural problems and a weak ending."

 A weak ending, huh? Well, the end is kind of terse. And its impact is really only felt if one really buys into the themes of freedom, duty, and justice that run throughout the story. It's a kind of intricate tapestry, and for that I'll give this one the nod over Starman Jones, but still rank it below my beloved Space Cadet.