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.