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.

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 (in the book they're the "Free Traders" but the real-world analog definitely seems to be Romani caravans).

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. 

Time for the Stars

With the possible exception of the very first of these juveniles (Rocket Ship Galileo), the two from 1956 and 1957 were the novels I was least familiar with. Other than looking up the titles on the internet prior to purchasing copies to begin this project, I believe that I was unacquainted with either of these. It was not obvious to me from the title that the "time" aspect of Time for the Stars would mean Heinlein would be playing around with the passage of time, something I'd seen him do in books like The Door into Summer and Time Enough for Love. Fortunately, Heinlein is a master at playing around with time in storytelling, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that done in one of these books.

This books is only a time travel story in the relativistic sense. There's no "time machine" involved. It's Paul Langevin's twin paradox told as a science fiction story. The story is so much of a nod to "Rip Van Winkle" that Heinlein even mentions newspaper headlines referring to the surviving crewmembers returning from the voyage as "another load of Rip Van Winkles."

A notorious feature of Heinlein's work I haven't really touched on in these reviews, and which I was actually kind of expecting not to, is his proclivity to normalize sexual arrangements in his fiction that would be highly unusual or scandalous in the real world. I'd seen a slight hint of this in The Star Beast when Betty was the one who proposed marriage to John, but I guess I'm still not too sure how strange a female-initiated marriage proposal was or wasn't in 1954. I think that it was abnormal but socially acceptable? Not sure. Well, this book has the main character marry his twin brother's great-great-granddaughter. While that's tame compared to some of Heinlein's later fiction, I'd think that it would have maybe been shocking to audiences in 1956, but perhaps that assumption is wrong. Obviously Scribner's kept publishing Heinlein juveniles after this one, so apparently they weren't offended.

The writing here is solid and the character development is as interesting as it is in any of the other books in the series. The ships and planets were cool and the descriptions of the struggles with instant-speed telepathy while confronting time dilation wonderfully imaginative. But my favorite part of this whole book was seeing Tom and the other "Rip Van Winkles" return to Earth and deal with the culture shock of having been out in space for the past four years and returning home with seventy-one years having passed in their absence. I've seen other science fiction stories do the whole "Rip Van Winkle" thing before, but they usually have the guy who goes to the future be some contemporary dude, as Asimov did with Pebble in the Sky. It was refreshing to see this device used not as a trope, but with what really starts as a character in a science fiction story and keeps being one all the way through.

I say that my favorite part is the part after Tom's ship returns to Earth. Well, there's the rub: that part of the book is deplorably brief. Heinlein spent so much time with psychological drama and Tom's trials and tribulations as a crewmember aboard the ship that by the time we get to the really interesting part, we're almost out of book. I described Heinlein as a master of playing around with time in storytelling, and I stand by that. In this case, ironically enough, he manages the time devoted to each plot point rather poorly. The stuff about Tom communicating with Pat while Pat is undergoing surgery for his injury just isn't that interesting. There are parts of Time for the Stars that I really like, but overall, I found this to be one of the weakest books in the series overall.

There's not much in the way of Wikipedia "Critical Reception" on this one.

Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale praised the novel as "an engrossing yarn", saying "The plot twists will take you by surprise and the characterizations delight you.

That's true enough. I hope I don't imply that I disliked this one. I do like it, just not quite as much as most of the other juveniles. In comparing all of them, one of them does have to be in last place after all. For me, that's still Farmer in the Sky. But next-to-last is a contest between this one and Rocket Ship Galileo.

I've already started Citizen of the Galaxy and I'm mildly surprised at the difference in tone. For no reason other than that these two stories were bundled together in the same volume, I mentally associated them with each other. Looks like that will probably seem a bit silly, but that's a topic for my next post.

Tunnel in the Sky

Here we are. Chronologically this is the eighth of Heinlein's juveniles and the third and final entry in this run of three re-reads for me, as well as the re-reading of a book for which the original reading was freshest out of any of these (I read this one in 2021). The next three posts here should all be about books I've never read before. So that's exciting. Before returning to this book, I'd noted that while Starman Jones and The Star Beast both exceeded my expectations based on prior memories of them, I didn't think that this one would be quite as good. More specifically, I said, "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."

That's kind of a low bar, and I think I know why. The end of this one is frustrating, and in notes that are very deliberate. Rod Walker refers to an Earth-based corporation pulling the rug out from under him, and it really feels like Heinlein pulls the rug out from under the reader too, so that we get a vivid sense of his anxiety. It's a bold technique, and I respect it, but it also really accentuates the bitterness in the bittersweet conclusion.

Reading this book directly after The Star Beast (something I had not done before) really drives home a certain theme that Heinlein delves into. Our culture, American culture and presumably its spiritual successors if we're optimistic about American hegemony in space colonization, and perhaps just Western culture in general has a tendency to treat adolescents as second-class citizens. We take children and, as they transition out of childhood, we run them through a gauntlet. We put them through trials and tribulations and impress upon them all the improvements they'll need to make in this new, adult world. But the moment it's convenient, we tell them that they're just kids and don't have rights anyway and need to listen when grownups are talking. And we justify it with all sorts of rationalizations, but it's bad. Like, this is really, really bad. I'm hoping something in the culture shifts to at least mitigate this issue, and I think Heinlein was hoping for that and using these stories to sort of lampoon the absurdity.

Ultimately, the ecology of "Tangaroa" in this book isn't as interesting as some of the other ecosystems that Heinlein devised. To some extent, the landscape is here in service of the narrative, and this is a landscape where a bunch of young people are stranded for two years, so the conditions have to be pretty mild.

I'd rate this as being one of the better stories so far. Glad I'm making that assessment after a re-read. I was recalling the gloomy bits and thought that I'd rate this one lower, but I ended up loving it right up to the moment of the rug-pull and feeling the full impact once the rug-pull happened. Of course it's still behind The Star Beast and The Rolling Stones. Knew it wouldn't dethrone either of those. Is it better than Starman Jones or Space Cadet? Hm, that's close. I'm calling it too close to call, but if pressed I'm pleading recency bias and giving the nod to Tunnel in the Sky.

I don't see "Critical Reception" for this one on Wikipedia. There's some comparison of the themes in this story to the ones in Lord of the Flies. I recall that the comparison piqued my interest and was what drew me to read this book back in 2021. I feel like the whole point of comparison is a stretch and that it's compounded by Lord of the Flies being published just a bit before Tunnel in the Sky, so folks were able to see it as a rebuttal or echo or whatever. But for my part, I'm unconvinced.

The next three books, starting with 1956's Time for the Stars are all brand new to me. And then we close the series out with two more re-reads.