Heinlein Juveniles Postscript

This project has dominated my reading for 2025. I officially announced it back in November of 2024, as it was to be a project to take place between my thirty-ninth and fortieth birthdays. However, at that time I'd recently started reading Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb, and I underestimated just how long that would take me to finish (it was a bit of a slog). So I didn't get to kick things off properly until February.

From February through July, Heinlein was pretty much the only author I was reading. Starting in August, I finally opened a Christmas present from last year and got back into Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series. But I knew that wouldn't stop me from completing the Heinlein project ahead of schedule.

Here are my final rankings for all fourteen books. It divided them up into five tiers, because really I feel kind of ambivalent about some of the individual rankings, but the tiers are solid and I stand by them. I'll link to my blog post for each book. And before I do that, I'll link to the post that introduced this project, so the post you're reading now can serve as a kind of master post for the whole project, indexing everything.

Tier 1: Transcendant, All-Time Superlative Works

1. Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)

2. Starship Troopers (1959)

Tier 2: Great Books, Personal Favorites (and not just among YA novels)

3. The Star Beast (1954)

4. The Rolling Stones (1952)

5. Tunnel in the Sky (1955)

6. Space Cadet (1948)

7. Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) 

Tier 3: Excellent Juvenile Science Fiction

8. Podkayne of Mars* (1963)

9. Starman Jones (1953)

10. Between Planets (1951)

Tier 4: Still Good, But Flawed

11. Red Planet (1949)

12. Time for the Stars (1956)

13. Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)

Tier 5: Mediocre, Deserved Revision 

14. Farmer in the Sky (1950)

This has been a blast. I might try something like it again some day.

*Arguably not part of the Heinlein juveniles, but I include it anyway for the sake of completeness. 

Podkayne of Mars

Back in June and July of 2006, this was the very first Heinlein novel I ever read. And having re-read it recently, I bring my personal Heinlein juveniles project to a close. Well, there's a complication I threw into the mix well after the project started. I purchased a copy of Grumbles from the Grave and I'm currently reading that. I already know that some of the information in that book might shed some light on some of the juveniles. But that's nonfiction anyway. So yeah, this project is completed. I re-read all twelve thirteen fourteen Heinlein juveniles before my own fortieth birthday.

I talked about alternative versions of a juveniles "canon" in my previous post, and I won't belabor the point. I'm counting Podkayne of Mars as a juvenile because it has a young protagonist with a tone and themes that put it closer to Starship Troopers than to something like Methuselah's Children. I could see an argument that some of his other works, The Door into Summer comes in mind, would probably also feel similar except for the fact that the protagonist is an adult. But I wanted to include it for the sake of being as complete as possible and in order to give this series a book with a female POV protagonist.

Although the first few Heinlein juveniles were pretty much distinctly boys' stories about boys, the author did eventually include some great female characters in the novels. Here's my rundown...

Rocket Ship Galileo (1947): Totally a boy's story. One of the boys' mothers gets some good lines early on, but this whole book is a sausage fest.

Space Cadet (1948): Setting is seemingly a gender-specific military academy, so human female characters are very minor. If the female aliens count, though? These are still some of my favorite aliens in any book. 

Red Planet (1949): Little sister is a minor character. It shifts partway through from being a boy-focused story to being one about a whole community, but most of the leading characters there are men anyway. There is a single instance of a woman taking the reins with some of this stuff, but it's very brief.

Farmer in the Sky (1950): Stepsister is an invalid and used to illustrate the grueling nature of the frontier environment. Stepmom gets some lines early on and then kind of weirdly goes totally silent for almost the whole book.

Between Planets (1951): Isobel actually gets some significant presence here. I compared this book to Esther Forbes' Johnny Tremain. What starts out as a survival story for Don sort of morphs into a revolutionary war framing with a boy becoming a man against that backdrop. If this had run on for longer instead of ending in a hazy Deus Ex Machina with no real denouement, we could have really gotten a lot more Don/Isobel material to work with.

The Rolling Stones (1952): So Hazel Stone steals the show here and Edith is a decent minor character too. Meade ends up being kind of the family member with the least development in the pages. Missed opportunity? Maybe. It's framed as a Castor and Pollux story, so the twins get top billing and their grandma steals the show anyway. The whole dynamic between the boys and their father is key to tying the whole narrative together, and their mother's profession keeps coming up as a hook that somehow causes more trouble for the family than the twins' shenanigans. There's just not that much room in such a thin book for the Big Sister character to take the spotlight. I read that James Nicoll called this book's "sexual politics" tragic, and thought that was an especially inane analysis.

Starman Jones (1953): Eldreth counts as a major character here, but it seems like this whole thing could have been smoother with a female crew member taking on that role instead of a passenger. The whole idea is that Max ordinarily can't go where the passengers are. And I guess Heinlein wanted to make her a spoiled rich girl, so the passenger thing fit the bill. Maybe a missed opportunity, though?

The Star Beast (1954): Betty is great. If the whole series had female characters like this, then the Heinlein juveniles would probably be remembered very differently in the zeitgeist.

Tunnel in the Sky (1955): Pretty balanced. Multiple important female characters. And the treatment of gender roles struck me as pretty thoughtful.

Time for the Stars (1956): There are various minor female characters. Actually, I think this book could be a candidate for gender-swapping the original twins. Maybe I just didn't love this one as much.

Citizen of the Galaxy (1957): Multiple minor female characters, but the main character bounces from each of his main arcs to the next such that there is really only one major character because no one else is really following him to the next leg of his journey. Reasonably balanced, given the settings described.

Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958): Peewee and the Mother Thing are both major characters.

Starship Troopers (1959): Various female characters, but Heinlein commits to the bit of having the main character take up a role in what is basically heavy infantry, a role that was historically about 100% male. Even its closest analogs in the present day are still sausage fests.

Even if Heinlein later contextualized it in a different way (and I'm curious to see what he says about it once I get to that section of Grumbles from the Grave), it really feels like Podkayne of Mars was partially about him wanting to finally do one of these stories with a young girl front-and-center, to make it her story and not have her show up as the sidekick to a boy. He'd already done that in short stories, but never before in a novel.

I believe that Heinlein found his mark with Podkaynen's narrative voice. Initially, Podkayne struck me as being rather witty, but so over-the-top that it was a bit cringeworthy and almost chauvinist. But then I remembered that the character is about sixteen Earth years old, and I've met some sixteen-year-old girls myself. They really are over-the-top. And Podkayne's voice hitting the mark is vital to the story because it's mostly just a kind of travelogue with lots of foreshadowing for the dark conclusion. Most authors could not pull that off and wouldn't even try. Heinlein pulls it off. This was never going to be as great of a book as The Rolling Stones or Have Space Suit—Will Travel. But it really is pretty good.

Two matters surrounding the publication of Podkayne of Mars are especially noteworthy. The first isn't such a big deal, I think, but I'll address it anyway. For better or worse, Podkayne of Mars is more similar to the juveniles than to most of Heinlein's books for adults. And while Heinlein did write plenty of short stories for adults that were published in magazines during the early arc of the juveniles and even eventually wrote some adult novels for other publishers in between the publication of the Scribner's juveniles, I think those could be said to have taken a back seat to the juveniles. It looks like the only ones that were actually both written and published contemporaneously were The Puppet Masters (1951, after Between Planets and before The Rolling Stones), Double Star (1956, between Tunnel in the Sky and Time for the Stars), and The Door into Summer (1957, between Citizen of the Galaxy and Have Space Suit—Will Travel). But Podkayne of Mars came out in 1963, and the 1960's were when almost all of Heinlein's most famous and beloved books for adults were written. Just look at the sequence starting from the canonical end of the juveniles, with Have Space Suit—Will Travel marking the final volume published by Scribner's. It goes...

1959: Starship Troopers

1961: Stranger in a Strange Land

1963: Podkayne of Mars

1963: Glory Road

1964: Farnham's Freehold

1966: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress 

Of those, Farhnam's Freehold has generally been panned, but the others are probably Heinlein's most famous novels of all time. Actually, even Glory Road probably gets overshadowed by the other three. They're critical and commercial juggernauts, and having Podkayne of Mars right there in the middle of them makes it look especially weak by comparison.

But that's fine! There's no rule that says an author's greatest works should be distributed in some specific manner through the course of a career, nor one that states a less remarkable work standing amidst a cluster of masterpieces in a bibliography is made worse by the greatness of its neighbors.

And now we come to the elephant in the room: the ending. The final page of the final chapter of Podkayne of Mars were changed at the insistence of an editor at Putnam's. While this blog has never been a spoiler-free safe haven, I also don't really even want to get into the weeds with the differences between the two endings. Instead, I'll put it this way...

1. The originally written ending is now widely available. I'd say that it is and should be considered the canonical ending. Any analysis that judges the book as a whole based on the originally published ending would be disingenuous, unless it was written decades ago, when it was the default ending.
2. I appreciate that Baen published my version with both endings, for a neat side-by-side comparison.
3. I'll read Heinlein's letter about this in Grumbles from the Grave, but I think it's pretty obvious why he'd be annoyed about the specific nature of the revision that Putnam's demanded.
4. I can wrap my head around the objection that the editor had to the original ending. I can wrap my head around Heinlein's objection to the objection. But what I just don't get is how the editor, on seeing the revised version, ever thought, "Yeah, OK. This fixes what I complained about. This works. We shall publish this version." Heinlein didn't just phone in a tonally different ending. He managed to, in six paragraphs, craft an ending that presumably met the technical requirement of the editor, but which is somehow so much darker and basically just screams, "I don't belong!"
5. Plenty of authors experienced great frustration at editorial interference in their work. Heinlein hardly ever did, so the fact that he did with this novel is noteworthy. In some ways, the controversy over the ending surpasses the importance of the entire book in the story of Heinlein's career, and that's just kind of sad.
6. From what I've read so far in Grumbles from the Grave, maybe Heinlein avoided editorial interference most of the time because he was such a diva about it.

That's enough on this one. I decided I'll do one more post to wrap this project up. There may or may not be an epilogue post related to information I learned in Grumbles from the Grave.

Starship Troopers

I am now most of the way through my re-read of Podkayne of Mars, so I'd better hurry and write up a post for Starship Troopers. In my previous post, I wrote about how Have Space Suit—Will Travel sort of acts as a culmination or capstone on the thematic arc that started with Rocket Ship Galileo and then continued for eleven more novels. It's such a perfect ending to such an amazing series that extending my personal "canon" of the Heinlein juveniles feels wrong. And that was in the back of my mind for most of my re-reading of Starship Troopers.

I could probably make a case for three different versions of the juveniles "canon" as I envision it. One version stops with the end of the Scribner's run, with a series of twelve stories that expand their scope in time and space, bringing the reader on a wonderful journey that eventually comes back home in an intriguing, yet sobering way. Another version includes that entire arc, but doesn't stop there. It includes the final book submitted to Scribner's, which remains a juvenile, but expects a bit more maturity out of the reader, a start of what could have been "Juveniles 2.0" and introduced the kids who grew up with the first dozen novels to more advanced topics. And a third version, the one I'm processing now that I'm midway through Podkayne of Mars, has everything from the first two version, keeps the tone set by Starship Troopers, but ultimately shows how when Heinlein came back to the well for another juvenile protagonist, he was thwarted in one of the biggest upsets in his writing career and moved on to books for adults thereafter.

There is so much that I could say about Starship Troopers. It is Heinlein's second most famous book for good reasons. And I guess I'll start with my own Livejournal post from just over nineteen years ago.

I read this book almost a week ago, but I'm so lazy that I didn't make an entry until now. Anyway, I was definitely impressed. It's a good book. I don't know. I think I was expecting more. Not that something was really missing, but maybe I thought the book would be longer, even though that doesn't really make sense because I had the book in my hands and could see that it was easily less than 300 pages.

Even thought I knew better, I expected the book to be like the movie, and it was not even remotely similar. Basically none of the characters that are in the book are actually in the movie. They did keep some names, but the characters themselves are completely different. And the book has like, messages and stuff. The movie is just a cheesy caricature. It's as though Paul Verhoeven hated the book but wanted to make the movie anyway. For what it's worth, I kind of like the movie. The biggest problem is that it has the same name as the book and is purportedly based on it.

One thing the book does that's a bit contrived is give us really long flashbacks that are conveniently placed for Heinlein to deliver his philosophy (via the main character's schoolteacher). It's interesting stuff, but seems so removed from the events going on in the rest of the book. Really, I guess my criticism is that the book hops between being philosophical and being action-packed and it gets to be a bit awkward, but mostly, even that is actually done with class. It's an easy read and certainly kept me hooked. A lot. It feels like I've been rather critical here but this book definitely makes my top 50. Not sure exactly where I'd rank it, but it's going on the list.

I hunted this post down prior to beginning my re-read, but I kind of can't wrap my head around it. I can't quite remember the space my head was in back then. My take now? The book is great and I wasn't positive enough about it back then. I'd say that I'd fight the twenty-two year old version of myself over this crappy review, but I am out of shape and he would probably wear me down.

I am spontaneously electing to write the rest of this post, other than a brief conclusion, in bullet point form. Tacky? Too bad. I thought of the idea just now and it appeals to me.

• I cannot believe that I had anything positive to say about that movie. The years since my first reading of the book have really exhausted my patience with trite comparisons between the book and movie.
• A lot of the criticisms of the book, specifically winging about militarism, fascism, misogyny, conflating it with the aforementioned bad movie, or siding with the aliens instead of the humans because some folks are telling on themselves about their own misanthropy, was fully addressed in this essay I'll link to here: http://kentaurus.com/troopers.htm
• Johnnie's descriptions of women throughout the book and discussions of male-female relationships stand out to me more now, especially given the more explicitly sex-driven stuff in Heinlein's later work. There's a certain charm. When the topic comes up and I see any discussion of Heinlein writing about anything to do with women or sex, it's always post-Stranger infamous Dirty Old man Heinlein. But Starship Troopers? He hadn't given up on reining it in, I guess. Maybe it really is a YA novel. It is restrained. That's true. And in a certain sense it is artificial. It's a military story. The main character is infantry. Realistically, there'd be raunchier dialogue and stuff. It's also written with Johnnie as a narrator selecting details, so maybe he did see and hear stuff and even participate, but considers it crass to put in this account and is leaving it out the same way he left out things like the identities of which men were saved when the lieutenant sacrificed his life to throw two men into the evacuation bay. So on the one hand, it's dialed back a little too obvious and on the other hand there's plausible reason for that. But what struck me more than that was what Johnnie does say about women: it's so uncannily reverent. Almost worshipful. It really resonates in a way I guess I didn't pick up on in 2008, and I don't know why not.
• I know at some point I was told that the high school flashbacks to Mr. Dubois are intrusive or hamfisted, and I recall just kind of accepting that on my first reading. I was actually a bit worried that I'd enjoy this one less than the other juveniles because I was expecting long sermons to be in there. But that criticism now seems overstated. The book strikes a good balance and does a good job of grounding the progress of the main plot while still jumping around the timeline to add context. It's smooth. Even in that old LJ post, I described the political asides as "long flashbacks." And on re-reading the book, I'm taken aback. I had totally remembered a version of this book in which the political conversations pad the book out with numerous extended flashback scenes. Did I get brainwashed by online descriptions of the book, even despite having read it myself? Those scenes are sparse, are deeply connected to the scenes preceding them, and are each like two pages of dialogue.
• Considering how much fodder Heinlein gave readers for controversy in his later books, trying to mire this one is just tacky. Some of that just comes from a weird "Everything is fascist" crowd that decided Heinlein was fascist. And they're idiots. They're stupid, moronic people. I ain't got time for that nonsense. But that's only some of it. I think that much of the rest is more telling because it generally hinges on the nuances of the political system used in the world of Starship Troopers. Folks either misunderstand it as being a literal polemic by Heinlein, a blueprint for what he wanted society to look like, or they get pedantic about chasing after perceived flaws or inconsistencies. They want to challenge the realism of a political system used as a backdrop in a novel about a career soldier on the battlefield. At that point, it's like Heinlein already won. You already bought in. If you have burning questions about how big the labor battalions are or how dangerous they are or how free the press is, then don't kid yourself. That's not lit-crit. That's fangirling.
• If we divided up YA into two markets, it's kind of like the earlier books were more like "Early YA" and Starship Troopers is "Late YA." Booksellers don't operate that way, but maybe Heinlein wanted to. I don't know. I think that this could apply to Podkayne of Mars as well.
• I wonder about an alternate timeline in which Scribner's ran with Starship Troopers and Heinlein kept writing more books in that vein. That either means no Stranger in a Strange Land or that it gets pushed back until later in his career. Considering the cultural significance of that book and the timing of it, that's a huge change. He became the biggest name in science fiction and Stranger in a Strange Land was no small part of that. But then, what would we get instead?

In conclusion, this is one of my favorite books and one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time. Among the Heinlein juveniles, I'd rate it as being second, right behind Have Space Suit—Will Travel.