Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

Time Enough for Love is one of Heinlein's later novels, and he uses it to some extent to wrap up some threads from his Future History. The prime character, Lazarus Long, we encountered previously in Methuselah's Children, when he rallied the troops and led the Howard Families into their exodus from Earth to avoid persecution. He is the oldest human being, born at a time when the Howard breeding experiment hadn't really produced any fruit, but long-lived nonetheless.

As the story begins, we find Lazarus in a hospital on Secondus, the seat of government for the Howard Families, undergoing rejuvenation therapy. After a long and adventurous handful of centuries of living, he has grown tired of the whole game, and decided to let himself die naturally of old age, but Ira Weatheral, Chairman Pro Tem of the Families, has had him tracked down and rescued from himself, in a belief that the universe needs the wisdom tucked away in Lazarus' brain. The families have grown stagnant, and Ira intends to con Long into leading another exodus, to break civilization out of its rut.

Lazarus works a Scheherazade-in-reverse deal with Ira, agreeing to proceed to full rejuvenation only if he demonstrates, by hanging around whenever Lazarus requires him, to listen to his tales of wisdom...and woe. So Ira, and/or his deputies and the workers in the clinic, and we gentle readers get to hear Heinlein once more use his favorite bit of gadgetry for preaching - the cranky old curmudgeon who's been everywhere, seen everything, and just doesn't give a damn.

There are several key stories in this book, bound together by the main narrative of Lazarus' healing. The first one is The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail, which draws fairly heavily on Heinlein's experiences at the Naval Academy. David Lamb was born and raised on a farm, and decided very quickly that manual labor was not to his taste. Thinking, however, wasn't really like work at all, and he manages to get himself an appointment to a military academy, where he figures he can study all the time, and not do a lick of physical work.

The tricky way he games the system at the academy makes for fun reading. He manages to avoid being forced to play football, which seems too much like work, by rapidly becoming indispensible on the fencing team, and avoids much of the corporal punishment meted out to cadets by a nearly perfect memory and some subtle psychology. After graduation, he becomes a pilot, but not of fighter jets, which could be shot down over enemy territory or the deep blue sea, but of quiet and slow transport aircraft, which don't often get shot down, and even better, allow him to sleep in his own bed with his own wife at night. After his military career ends, he figures out a way to become a farmer again, without the hard work of growing any crops, by taking advantage of government subsidies. Lots to like here.

In The Tale of the Twins Who Weren't, Lazarus, as Captain Aaron Sheffield, gets far more than he bargained for when he buys a pair of slaves and tries to free them. Once again, we revisit the anti-slavery theme he explored in Citizen of the Galaxy. The problem, Sheffield finds, is that when you take responsibility for setting someone free, they may not have the skills to survive as free men, so you also bear the responsibility to teach them how to live as such.

He also explores some related ideas in The Tale of the Adopted Daughter. Sheffield has delivered a shipload of colonists to a backwater planet, and decides to hang around for a while, making sure the colonists have the best shot at surviving. He operates a General Store, where he keeps the value of the "currency" stable by holding prices steady, even if it means personally taking a loss. Some interesting thoughts about economics in this section.

When a fire kills a young couple and leaves their infant daughter behind, he works out an arrangement with a local schoolteacher to care for the girl, while he helps foot the bill. About the time the girl, Dora, becomes a woman, Sheffield has heard the wild goose calling, and is about to leave the planet. Dora convinces him to stay (in the most convincing way a woman can) and he ends up following the call to wander by heading out with her to the most remote, unsettled part of the planet, to homestead there. Some great stuff about survival and civilization in here, similar to Farnham's Freehold.

In the central tale these others punctuate, Lazarus and the people he comes to know and make part of his extended family spend many hours dissecting philosophical and sociological questions, which is entertaining in and of itself. The final tale weaves a bit of time travel into the equation, when Lazarus travels back to visit his own past, when he was a child growing up in Kansas City.

This book is a classic in Heinlein's writings, and in my opinion represents the peak of his writing skills - things began to go downhill far too soon after this.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

Stranger in a Strange Land is probably the most famous of all of Heinlein's works, known even to people who don't really read science fiction. It was picked up by the 70s rebellion culture of free love and anti-establishment sentiments and thus came into common usage. This book has been reviewed to death, so I'm just going to lay out some of my impressions, after many readings over the decades.

Of course, the entire idea of the story came from the germ of Heinlein wondering to himself, "What if there once was a Martian named Smith?". The novel marks a bit of a turning point in his career, where he really began to focus on writing to and for adults about very contentious issues, like religion, sex, crime and punishment, social responsibility, and what it really means to be human.

In synopsis, a mixed-gender expedition lands on Mars, and all hands are reported lost. When the next expedition arrives, they find one survivor, Michael Valentine Smith, who is the son of the captain and the ship's doctor's wife, and who has - in the time lapse between expeditions - been raised by Martians, who have an ancient culture far different from our own. He is returned to Earth, and spends hundreds of pages learning how to be human. Once he figures it out, he spends the last hundred pages of the book trying to teach humans to escape the shame and misery of the human condition, using ways of thinking he learned on Mars.

Heinlein really fully realizes in Stranger an gimmick he used quite heavily in later novels, introducing an "elder" figure - in this case Jubal Harshaw, retired lawyer and active author - who can deliver the lectures that Heinlein needs spoken, on whatever topic Heinlein feels we need to understand.

On free love...Heinlein had had an open marriage for years, at this point (never mind that his first wife went nuts) and uses Jubal's preaching and Mike's boyish innocence about Earth people's reproductive habits to expound on all of the reasons why everyone has an unlimited supply of love to go around, and shouldn't feel any sense of shame about their bodies or their desires or with how many or what types of partners they want to share the physical act. Ace reporter Ben Caxton bears some of the brunt of Jubal's criticism for allowing the green monster of jealousy and the ugly sin of hypocrisy to keep him from enjoying to the utmost the sexual freedom that Mike and his groupies (did I mention he starts a church?) freely practice.

I think we've managed to reap the results of the sexual revolution today, with its broken families, abandoned children, the genocide we call abortion on demand, and its degrading of social mores down to the most basic animal levels. It all looks great on paper, if you're a self-enlightened God on Earth, as Mike and his friends become.

Speaking of Mike's god-like powers, this is another theme that Heinlein was fascinated with for years, and occasionally tossed into the mix. ESP, telekinesis, precognition, and all of the mystical tricks of the mind are explained away in this novel when it turns out that we're all capable of miracles, if only we learn the proper way of using our entire brains - Mike learned it from the Martians.

There are some positive virtues that Jubal/Heinlein espouses, as well. Heinlein was always deeply patriotic, and in a future world that has now fallen under the rule of the United Nations, you still get the feeling that the U.S. of A is the best, most free place to live, and Harshaw demands that the President of the United States be given honor above all other nations by seating him at the head table with Mike when he is acting as the Martian ambassador. Jubal also delivers a great lecture about how to appreciate really good art, especially sculpture, with some of Rodin's pieces explained.

Heinlein's libertarian streak takes an interesting turn here. As the story begins to spool up, Jubal Harshaw is living in a seclusion - he's made enough money to build his "castle" and he doesn't have to put up with any nonsense from anyone. He obeys the laws he needs to obey (renders unto Caesar only what he must) and ignores the rest. He is a "man of good will", who cannot be bought, cannot be coerced, cannot be enslaved. Then the Man from Mars comes along and stirs up a storm in Jubal's household, wakening the old man from his slumbers, forcing him to take notice of a world that has for the most part, passed him by. I wonder if some other part of Heinlein's psyche was closely involved with that feeling; he lived in a small house in L.A. around this time, and was making a decent living from his writing, had no great cares nor obligations.

As the novel unfolds, Mike himself displays the ultimate in libertarian thought. He is a man who is totally in control of himself and his surroundings, he can't be physically attacked unless he allows it - his telepathy warns him of ill intentions, his telekinesis can block attacks, and if you really get on his nerves, he can disappear you into the fourth dimension. He can teleport away from any jail, survive naked in any environment, and make all the money in the stock market he needs - precognition, you know. His sense of morality and ethics comes from within, and it is rock-solid and perfectly good (maybe not from a judeo-christian perspective, but close enough). He needs no government, yet harms no one.

There's much more of interest I could talk about, but I'll leave something for you to discover on your own.

Personally, I think that Heinlein was very nearly at his peak at this point. The writing is interesting, engrossing, entertaining. There are only a few really good novels left in him at this point, before things started going downhill. It's grown a bit dated, now, but is still a fun read and a truly classic bit of SF.

Heinlein Collections

  There is a collection called 6 X H, published by Pyramid Science Fiction, that is just The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by another name. Unless you're searching for utter compleatness in your collection, pick up one or the other, not both.

  The Past Through Tomorrow is a collection of all of the short stories that fit in Heinlein's Future History, which are also contained in other earlier collections, including The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Green Hills of Earth, Methuselah's Children, The Menace from Earth, and The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein.

The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein

  Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein is a nice little short story collection, though a bit inconsistent. These are reprints of some of his stories from the pulps, and he includes a short dissertation on the nature of science fiction, writing, and the future in his introduction, called Pandora's Box. I can see some of the roots of what I consider to be the essential elements of good writing described here - I always thought I'd come up with them on my own. Ah well. In this essay, Heinlein gives some of his predictions for what the future will be like in 50 years, and he was writing in 1966, so at this point one can tell how well he did as a prognosticator.

1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door. Nowhere even close.
2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure. Nailed it.
3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space. See #1.
4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventive war." ROFL.
5. ...the housing shortage will be solved...Still with us.
6. We'll all be getting hungry by and by. We'll all be getting obese, more likely in the U.S.
7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. What an impossible dream.
8. ...psychoanalysis will be replaced by 'operational psychology' based on measurement and prediction. Naw.
9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered. Unfortunately, no.
10. ...mankind will have explored the solar system, and the first ship to reach the nearest star will be abuilding. Sadly, our spacefaring days may be over.
11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Wow! He had no idea.

He lists a few more, but nothing of consequence.

The first story, Free Men, is about the resistance movement in the U.S. after invasion by an undescribed foreign power. It ends abruptly and inconclusively, as if perhaps there was a larger story in mind never got around to penning. The only thing recognizable is the quote "You can't enslave a free man, the most you can do is kill him."

Blowups Happen is the story of how scientists deal with the difficult problem of keeping an atomic power plant running, when it could turn into an atomic bomb at any time, and when the entire economy of our nation depends on its continued operation. A little technical, yet hokey.

Searchlight is a cute short short about locating and rescuing a little girl - a piano prodigy - when her ship crashes on the Moon, using music.

Life-Line is the story of how Dr. Hugo Pinero discovers a scientific method to determine the date and hour of a man's death. This understandably upsets the life insurance companies, and begins a legal battle to prohibit him from doing business. Heinlein has some interesting things to say about the scientific method.

Solution Unsatisfactory might be regarded as an allegory, of sorts. It's a story in an alternate history, where the atomic bomb was never invented, and the path to a super weapon went a different direction, creating a radioactive dust which kills wholesale, and against which there is no effective defense. Some of this is about the "road not taken" by the U.S. after WWII, when we dropped the atomic bomb, but failed to anticipate the future proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the danger which they now pose when acquired by rogue states. Very thought provoking.

As I said, a bit inconsistent, but still a good read.

Waldo & Magic, Inc. by Robert A. Heinlein

  This book is a binding together of two novelettes by Heinlein. In Waldo, most of the U.S. industry and transportation run on broadcast radioelectric power, collected by a type of antenna called a deKalb unit. When these units begin to fail, for no apparent reason, the engineers of the North American Power-Air company are forced to seek help from a mad genius of sorts - Waldo. 

Waldo lives on a space station orbiting Earth, because he was born with a rare condition, myasthenia gravis, which has made his muscles extremely weak, and he is much better able to cope with life in zero gravity. He's quite brilliant, and highly arrogant, so consulting him tends to be a last resort.

In the course of figuring out what has caused the deKalb failures, Waldo is forced to travel to earth to consult an old man who has managed to make one of them work again...by magic, apparently. He teaches Waldo about the Other World, which he describes in somewhat mystical terms, but Waldo returns home and comes up with a theory about parallel universes that explains the phenomenon adequately for the purposes of repairing the device, though the solution can only be employed by someone with the right mental attitude (back to some of Heinlein's ESP musings again).

One rather interesting passage:

"Suppose Chaos were king and the order we though we detected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten-pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos - by Mind!"

Still not sure whether it's an apocryphal story or not that Heinlein was the one, in this book, who coined the term "waldo" for remotely operated manipulating tools, still used today.

The second story is, on the surface, about a businessman's struggle against a protection racket run by magical mobsters, and then against a professional association for magicians which threatens to wipe out all competition in the area. Actually, it seems to be a product of Heinlein's foray into politics, and either reflects things he saw happening around him at the time, or events he thought might come to pass - just without the magical twist that made it a story publishable by the pulps he wrote for.

Some good fodder for thought in this one.

I found it interesting what he had to say about gun control, over sixty years ago.

"I see the drawbacks of magic as well as you do," he went on, "but it is like firearms. Certainly guns made it possible for almost anyone to commit murder and get away with it. But once they were invented the damage was done. All you can do is try to cope with it. Things like the Sullivan Act - they didn't keep the crooks from carrying guns and using them; they simply took guns out of the hands of honest people."

Sound like a familiar bumper sticker, anyone?

The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert A. Heinlein

  The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag is another collection of Heinlein shorts. Heinlein wrote only one fantasy story that I'm aware of, Glory Road, and the title story of this book may be his only attempt at a psychological horror/mystery. A private investigator, Edward Randall, is retained by Mr. Hoag to find out what it is he does during his working day. Hoag seems to have a particularly strange form of amnesia which leaves him with no memories of how he spends his time during the daylight hours (an odd twist on the usual vampire meme), and after discovering a substance he thought was blood under his fingernails at dinner one night, has decided he must know, however horrible it might turn out to be.

Edward and his wife, Cynthia, begin by trailing Mr. Hoag on his way to work one morning. Strange things begin to happen, and the more they pursue the case, the more frightening things get. Edward begins to be visited in his dreams by the "Sons of the Bird", a mystical cabal of powerful beings, and eventually these SOBs threaten him and Cynthia if they continue to investigate Hoag. A rather interesting twist at the end, and a surprising profession for Mr. Hoag.

The Man Who Traveled in Elephants is just a light hearted look at the afterlife, and a rare glimpse of Heinlein's more whimsical side.

All You Zombies is a quirky time travel tale, about a man who, like the old song, was his own grandpa.

They is a solipsistic piece of work. A man is locked up in a mental ward after displaying signs of paranoia, and spends much of his time there trying to prove satisfactorily to himself that he is not at all like other people in the world around him, and that much of the world around him has been created to deceive him into thinking he is just an ordinary human. True to form, no surprises in the way it ends, really.

Our Fair City is a charming little tale about a sentient whirlwind that sweeps a city clean of political corruption.

And He Built a Crooked House is a fun bit about an avant-garde architect who decides to build a four dimensional house in three dimensions. When a Southern California earthquake twists the house into the fourth dimension, he and the owners get stranded for a while.

Not your typical Heinlein collection, but fun for a change of pace.

Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

  There are a small number of Heinlein's novels that seem to fall outside the scope of his Future History, and this is one of them. The political events mentioned, and the technologies used, don't fit with the rest of his stories very well, but despite that, this one remains one of my favorites. This is also another one that doesn't get too preachy about Heinlein's political opinions, and bears only a slight resemblance to some of his other works in that way.

One minor point of congruence is the idea of a course that is required in high school or college, before a person is considered worthy of citizenship, or in this case emigration to the frontier worlds. The class in Tunnel in the Sky is Course 401, Advanced Survival. Rod Walker is about to take his final examination in the class as the story begins. The exam consists of being "gated" to a remote planet with a hostile environment, dangerous animals, with only what you can carry on your person.

Rod's parents are not thrilled that he is going to actually follow through with the final exam; they seem to have allowed (indulged) his taking the class only to avoid a fight. Complicating matters is the fact that Rod's father has a deadly disease, and has recently decided to have himself put in stasis for twenty years until a cure can be found. Rod's sister, however, is a member of the fighting Amazon Corps, and she has been appointed his guardian for the duration. She, of course, has no problem with Rod going off to prove himself on a hostile planet, and Rod lays low until the storm of his parents' disapproval subsides.

You can see the similarities here to the Moral Philosophy class in Starship Troopers, led by the irascible Colonel Dubois, and Advanced Survival, taught by the sarcastic Dr. Matson. The parents in both books have similar attitudes, as well.

Unfortunately for Rod's group of students, as well as some other groups of students from various high schools and colleges around the country, something goes wrong with the pickup, which is supposed to occur several days after the initial drop, and they are not retrieved on time. They are left stranded for a couple of years on a primitive world, with only the technology they brought along, plus what they are able to devise from memory and education.

Filled with Man vs. Wild action, as well as some Man vs. Mankind, this is a pretty good tale about people's ability to survive, and even to thrive, wherever they may be planted. It's a touch short on details one could use to eke out an existence in the woods, but long on attitude. Heinlein does touch on a few themes he's played with before, such as "man is the deadliest animal of all", "your most effective weapon is between your ears", and a Churchillian, "Never give in."

Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein

I continue the Heinlein tour with one of my old favorites. This is the story of Tom and Pat, identical twins who are selected for special testing by the Long Range Foundation. It turns out that they are telepaths - they have been communicating with each other mostly by ESP all their lives without even realizing it - and that their services are in demand for the first group of expeditions to explore beyond our solar systems and discover habitable planets. It is believed that ESP happens simultaneously, or faster than the speed of light, and will be the only way to get timely communications between the ships and Earth on these long voyages.

One twin will stay home, while the other one boards a starship and heads out into the unknown. After some wrangling, Pat is selected to go, but injures himself in a skiing accident and Tom takes his place at the last minute.

I believe that this is the book where I first learned of the theory of relativity and of the time dilation effect that takes place at near-light velocities. This quirk of physics plays a large role in the story, as the twin who is left behind on Earth will age "normally", while the one who is traveling to the stars at high speeds will, from the earthly frame of reference, age much more slowly.

How the twins and the other telepaths deal with the pros and cons of their talents, the downsides of time dilation, and their gradual loss of rapport as they live vastly different lives makes for some interesting plot devices.

Once again, Heinlein uses a very odd twist at the end to finish off the story when he'd written his contractual page count, by having the Earth scientists develop a sort of drive that travels instantaneously between solar systems. Earth sends a ship out to "rescue" all of the surviving ships that the Long Range Foundation sent out nearly a century before, and the crews get to return home to experience the Rip Van Winkle effect of time displacement.

A good young adult novel, bereft of Heinlein's usual politicking.

Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein

I think Heinlein chose to tell this story just for the title. He had a hankering to tell the story of a Martian named "Smith" and I think he just had to accompany it with a Spaceman named, "Jones". Max is a dirt-poor farmer in the Midwest whose father passed away, leaving him to keep the farm going for himself and his step mother. When his stepmother gets married to a ne'er do well named Montgomery (Heinlein re-uses this name for one of his villains in Time Enough for Love), Max decides to run away from home and join the Space Force. His uncle, Chet, was an astrogator, and he hopes that he's been named a "legacy" and will be allowed to join the Guild.

On his way he meets a hobo named Sam, who shares his fire and a meal. Sam steals Max's uncle's reference books while Max is sleeping and leaves him behind. When Max gets to the big city, and approaches the Guild about membership, Sam has already been there, claiming to be Max, but disappeared when the people there wanted to get his fingerprints to confirm his ID. Max is disappointed when he finds out that Chet died without naming him heir, and turns down their offer of sponsorship to a groundhog type of guild, leaving in a bit of a snit, but with a bit of cash in hand as a return of the "deposit" on his uncle's books.

Outside, he encounters Sam again, and after some initial hostility on Max's part, they decide to let bygones be bygones. Sam comes up with a plan to get them both into space as crewmen on a ship, by falsifying their identities. Amazingly, the ploy works, and the two of them end up as crewmen on a cruise liner for rich folks traveling to a pleasure world on vacation.

Lots of great adventure here, and a number of little morality plays in the course of the plot's unfolding.

One quote for all you bibliophiles:

"The library book had been burning a hole in his rucksack...the book had to be returned. Vagrancy in the eyes of the law had not worried him, nor trespass, nor impersonating a licensed teamster - but filching a book was a sin."

The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein

The Star Beast is a slightly more "mature" young adult novel by Heinlein. John Thomas is the owner of an extraterrestrial beast known as Lummox, who has been passed down from generation to generation - the creature was adopted by his grandfather on a voyage of exploration beyond our solar system, and has been living with the family ever since. Lummox is about the size of a rhinoceros, with armor plated hide and an appetite like a goat - eat anything that's not tied down. One day Lummox decides that the neighbor's rose bushes look quite appetizing, and ends up causing thousands of dollars in damages after being chased off by the neighbor, attacked with a shotgun by another, and pursued to the edge of town by the police.

The ensuing civil/criminal trial of John Thomas comes to the attention of the bureau of Extraterrestrial affairs, and the undersecretary sends his assistant to find out if the ET in question is a member of any of the known intelligent races in the galaxy. Lummox doesn't at first fit the criteria for recognition as a "human" equivalent being, as it doesn't have any hands. When the court decides that Lummox should be destroyed as a dangerous nuisance, John Thomas and Lummox run away to hide.

It turns out, however, that 1) Lummox is a girl, 2) she is the culmination of a millenia long breeding project by the Hrotha, who have come to Earth finally to recover their prodigal daughter, and 3) has been slowly maturing over the years and grows a set of arms and hands while she and John Thomas are wandering in the wilderness.

The story, however, is not so much about the two main characters as it is an an educational yarn about how government bureaucracies and diplomatic efforts work. Heinlein had plenty of experience dealing with the government when he left the Navy to work for a defense contractor, and he shows us in this story where the real powers in government live.

One of Heinlein's more enjoyable YA tales.

Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein

No, this isn't a story about the kind of space cadets we used to hang out with, it's about actual cadets at an academy for the Space Patrol. Peace has broken out on Earth for decades, and it's largely due to the efforts of the Patrol. This is a tale of four young men, Matt, Tex, Oscar and Pete, two from Earth, one from Venus and the last from Ganymede, who are selected to attend the prestigious and demanding academy.

We follow them through their final testing before they are admitted, and some of their early training. Heinlein just jumps ahead suddenly and we are joining them on their first cadet cruise through the solar system. They travel to the asteroid belt, where they search for a lost Patrol vessel, and find some interesting fossils that will likely shake up the beliefs of scientists about the origins of the belt.

Then, they have a wild and wooly adventure on Venus, where they come to the rescue of a commercial ship, and end up having to make the types of decisions normally reserved for officers when their superior suffers a concussion in a bad landing. They befriend a new nation of the Venerian swamp dwellers, and fly an antique space ship back to civilization.

Heinlein, I'm sure, drew a lot of the ambience of this novel from his time at the Naval Academy. It's a pretty good coming-of-age story, with his usual moralizing a bit muted. There's one tie-in to his short story, Requiem, in this novel. See if you can find it.

The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein

The Rolling Stones is another one of Heinlein's young adult novels, loosely tied into the story The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, taking place perhaps 60 years later. The matriarch of the family, Hazel, was a bit player in the revolution in the earlier novel. This seems to follow a well-used formula by this author, a highly competent pair of parents, Roger and Edith Stone (an engineer and a doctor), have a set of very precocious offspring, the twins Castor and Pollux, their older sister, Mead, and the youngest, an infant chess genius, Lowell. Note the astronomical references in their names.

Castor and Pollux, boy geniuses (or is that genii?), have invented a very successful breathing mask. Their father and mother have kept the proceeds from its sales in a trust fund for their education, but the boys have other ideas. As the story opens, we find them at a rocket ship junkyard, trying to negotiate the purchase of a space freighter, which they intend to fill with cargo (or contraband) and ply the spaceways to make a profit.

Unfortunately for them, their father soon brings them back to Earth - which is tough, as they all live on the Moon - and tells them in no uncertain terms that they're to go to college, not gallivant around the solar system. However, after Grandma Hazel - a variation on Heinlein's usual old wise cranky male curmudgeon - gets into the act, and then Edith puts her two cents in, Roger's hope of staying quietly at home is ground fine, and he ends up buying a spaceship himself, instead. The entire family jaunts off towards Mars on a grand adventure. Their ship is the Rolling Stone, and they are The Rolling Stones. I wonder if this was written long before Mick Jagger hit the scene?

The twins get some harsh lessons in shipboard discipline, the vagaries of commerce, and the inexhorable laws of physics. Roger and Edith keep their cool, mostly, amidst the demands of their extremely intelligent and devious children, and Grandma Hazel chimes in with all sorts of advice and harassment, as necessary. For once, Heinlein doesn't end the story awkwardly, but leaves it open for further adventures.

Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein

Rocket Ship Galileo is another young adult novel by Heinlein, which starts off well, and then goes in an unexpected direction. It begins with three young men, Morrie, Ross and Art, close to graduating from high school, who have formed an amateur rocketry club and have been designing and building rockets that are far from amateurish. While they are testing their latest rocket, Morrie's uncle, Doctor Cargraves - a respected atomic scientist, stops by to see how it's going. When the rocket explodes, it appears that he is hit by a piece of shrapnel, but fortunately survives.

When he sees what a professional setup the boys have built for testing their rockets, he makes them a proposal. He's trying to build an atomic-fueled rocket to go to the Moon, hoping to capture a large financial prize, and he's working on a shoestring budget. He needs some help building the spaceship, and hopes they can work for him over the summer. After overcoming some objections from the boys parents, they all set off for a secluded spot in the New Mexico desert and begin construction.

There are nefarious forces in opposition, however, and someone tries to sabotage their efforts several times. They perservere, and end up blasting off for the Moon just one step ahead of a subpoena.

There's some great, though dated, educational bits about rocketry, stellar navigation, engineering, and a number of other subjects here, and a good look at what science fiction authors thought about space travel before the U.S. succeeded on putting a man on the Moon.

Unfortunately, after the landing, things go wacky rapidly. Space Nazis?? I mean, really. Heinlein seemed to have a problem ending his stories back in those days in a reasonable manner. He always used some outlandish premise - more outlandish than space travel.

Revolt in 2100 by Robert A. Heinlein

Revolt in 2100 is another collection of stories set in Heinlein's Future History series. The first and longest story is set in the time of the Prophet's theocracy. John Lyle is a West Point graduate, granted the special honor of being assigned to the Angels of the Lord, responsible for guarding the Temple. He is from the back woods, and extremely naive, which lands him in trouble when he finds himself falling in love with one of the Temple Virgins, Sister Judith. The Virgins only remain so in name, after they are called to "serve" the current Prophet once.

John is taken under the wing of Zebediah Jones, another one of Heinlein's wise avuncular characters, and gets his eyes opened to what really goes on in the world of power and politics, even among the Faithful. When they decide that Judith must be saved from "a fate worse than death (it rarely is)", they become involved in the Cabal, a resistance organization which sprang from the Masonic Lodges when the first Prophet, Nehemiah Scudder, declared his vision to be the only true religion and seized all political power in the U.S. The Cabal has been working for years to build an organization to overthrow the repressive state, and John and Judith's innocent love affair provides the trigger for the revolution to start.

Once again, Heinlein is given a bully pulpit to preach his own brand of political libertarianism through the mouths of Zeb and the Cabal leaders. It's a pretty good story. I only wish Heinlein had written a longer one that followed John Lyle's future a little farther.

The second story, Coventry, takes place after the Prophet is overthrown, and when all of the citizens of the U.S. live at peace and harmony with each other. If they don't, they can either be cured of their antisocial tendencies by psychological reprogramming or sent to Coventry, a rugged isolated area where rugged individualists have carved out their own dystopia. This is the story of one man who elects to keep his mind intact, and take exile as his lot, but who ends up cured of his madness after all. Sort of a treatise on crime and punishment, in the usual Heinlein fashion.

The final story, Misfit, gives us a look back at the humble beginnings of Andrew Jackson "Slipstick" Libby, Lazarus Long's companion in the misadventures of Methuselah's Children. Andy has his first job on a construction crew on an asteroid far from Earth. His natural genius for mathematics, denied any outlet in the rural countryside, suddenly comes in very handy, when he learns about demolition, construction and orbital ballistics. Fun filler material for fans, but nothing truly startling.

Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein

Podkayne of Mars is just a cute little young adult story about a teenaged girl who gets caught up in events a bit beyond her control and understanding, very similar to Red Planet. Podkayne (named after a hero of Martian history) wants to be a space pilot someday when she grows up. Her parents are very accomplished professionals who have unexpectedly been burdened with three extra babies due to a mistake at the creche just as they are about to take her and her brother, Clark, on a family vacation to Earth, and she is horribly disappointed when the trip is cancelled.

But Podkayne's Uncle, Tom (Heinlein was obviously having some fun with this name, as Tom is a black man of Maori descent), a Senator at large from Mars, saves the day when he browbeats the creche administrators into providing an all-expense-paid trip for himself and the two teens to Venus and Earth. But Tom has another purpose in making the trip; he has been named ambassador plenipotentiary to the solar system council meeting that's soon to take place on Earth, and he hopes to throw his political opponents off the scent by disguising his trip as a pleasure jaunt with his young relatives.

Podkayne is an attractive young thing, and she soon has the crew of the ship wrapped around her little finger, conning them into showing her all around the control room and teaching her differential equations used in astrogation. She has her pick of the young officers to dance with, and makes some friends among the passengers, as well, though she soon finds out that some of them are two-faced - harboring prejudices about Martians, who are the descendents of convicts used for forced labor on Mars.

The political forces opposing Tom's mission are not totally flummoxed by his ploy, and one faction uses his nephew, Clark, to smuggle a bomb on board the ship. Clark is a bit smarter than the average adolescent, however, and realizes something is wrong with the picture, so he disassembles (dissembles, too) and disarms the bomb, tucking it away for future use, perhaps. When the trio arrive on Venus, they are entertained by the planet's governor, and his son becomes quite entranced with Podkayne, squiring her about the planet in style.

Their fun is spoiled when another one of the factions abducts first Clark, then Tom, then Poddy, and they are forced to use all their wits to escape intact. Unfortunately, the story stops at Venus, so we don't get to experience Earth with Poddy. I wonder if Heinlein had intended to finish the story in a sequel?

Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

Orphans of the Sky is another one of the young adult novels by Heinlein. In this one, he explores what might happen when the crew of a vast starship, headed to Far Centauri, is decimated by a mutiny, and the survivors end up spending generations on the ship, while knowledge of their journey gradually gets shifted to the status of legends. It loosely fits into Heinlein's Future History series.

The central character is a teen named Hugh Hoyland, who likes to explore the remote decks of the ship with his friends. One day he climbs to a place where he is captured by a group of Muties - possibly descendents of the original mutinists or merely just mutants born after the ship's shielding began to fail. He becomes a servant to Jim-Joe, the two-headed leader of the band, and begins to expand his horizons by reading books Jim-Joe has rescued, not available where Hugh comes from, and then his world view is totally torn apart when Jim-Joe takes him to the Control Room, where he sees the stars for the first time.

The passengers on the ship have come to regard the ship as the whole of their universe, and regard the Trip as merely a metaphorical religious journey, not a literal one with a destination on a new planet. People who disagree with the Captain and his Scientists are summarily executed and fed into the mass converters. It's against this ignorance that Hugh realizes he must fight and attempt to win converts to help him find a way for the ship to complete its journey, and land on a new world.

This novel isn't particularly inspired, but it does contain some insights and metaphors about small, insular communities.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Written in the mid-60s, just before the U.S. successfully launched a Moon mission, Heinlein's book seems now overly optimistic about colonizing space. The Moon, "Luna", has been used as a penal colony, similar to the way Australia was used, and after about 100 years, there are many citizens of Luna who have never been criminals, per se, but who are still living under the thumb of the Warden and the Authority of Earth.

Manuel "Manny" Davis (did Heinlein intentionally recycle surnames, or was he just being lazy?) is one of these, an ice driller turned computerman when he lost his left arm in a laser accident. He is the only person trusted to work on the main computer in the Warden's complex, as he can generally get it working properly when no one else is able to. His secret is that he has recognized that at some point, the computer has become self-aware, and he treats it as a person, and named it Mycroft "Mike" after Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother. Mike has developed a primitive sense of humor, and occasionally plays practical jokes on the humans. Manny meets with Mike when he does odd things, and convinces him that they are either not funny or "funny once," so he shouldn't do them again.

Manny inadvertently attends a meeting of a cabal of rebels in Luna City one afternoon, and when the Warden's goons attempt to break it up, a riot results in the death of the goons, a few casualties among the Loonies, and Manny becoming part of the conspiracy to free Luna. He befriends Wyoming Knott, an agent provocateur from Hong Kong Luna, and hides her from the authorities. He also introduces her to Mike, and when he includes Professor Bernardo de la Paz in the computer's circle of friends, the revolution really gets under weigh. Mike's capabilities give them the advantage that they need to make the odds of success no worse than 10 to 1, against.

A quote about one of the qualities of a good teacher:

"I liked Prof (de la Paz). He would teach anything. Wouldn't matter that he knew nothing about it; if pupil wanted it, he would smile and set a price, locate materials, stay a few lessons ahead. Or barely even, if he found it tough."

Interesting, too, that Heinlein recycles a plot idea here. We have a computer named Mike who wants to learn how to be human, or to understand humans better. In Stranger in a Strange Land, we get a human raised by Martians who needs to learn how to be human.

Gawd, I'm such an old patriotic softie. When the Loonies meet to draft their Declaration of Independence from Earth, and sign their names to it, "pledging their lives, fortunes and sacred honor", I got all weepy.

A good quote on government:

"What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing."

The usual Heinlein themes of adult novels continue here, various flavors of polygamy, religious relativism, and a political philosophy of rational anarchy. This one's definitely part of the canon of scripture a la RAH.

I Will Fear no Evil by Robert A. Heinlein

I will Fear no Evil is another one of the later novels by Heinlein, written in 1970, after his breakout success with Stranger in a Strange Land. It perhaps is an indicator of the
quality he was to turn out for the rest of his life which, in my opinion, was not nearly as good, in general, as his earlier works.

Enter the character of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, grouchy old multimillionaire, who is so similar to many of Heinlein's cranky old man characters in his later books that I very nearly suspect a conspiracy. Smith's angelic yet spunky secretary, Eunice Branca, and a sharp Jewis lawyer, Jake Salomon, seem to be the only people closest to friends in his world. He is suffering the ravages of advanced old age, and only the life support systems of modern medicine are keeping his many relatives from swooping down like vultures to plunder his business empire.

The dialogs between Smith and Salomon and Branca sound like a rehash in flavor, tone and content, from Jubal Harshaw, Ben and Jill in Stranger, and Lazarus, Ira and Minerva in Time Enough For Love. Nothing new here, move right along folks.

Smith concocts a scheme to stay alive and outwit his heirs, having his brain transplanted into a new body. When by an amazing coincidence it turns out that Eunice has the exact rare blood type as Jonathan, and she is killed in a random mugging, her brain goes in the oubliette and Smith rides again.

However, it seems that the seat of consciousness doesn't reside alone in the brain, but in the body as well, and Smith finds Eunice's "soul" very comforting as he learns to live again in a female body. From this point on, there's not much plot action, aside from some legal wrangling by his heirs, which Jake, the newly minted "Joan Eunice", and their merry band of men of good will thwart quite handily. The bulk of the book consists of internal dialogues between Joan and Eunice, primarily about sex and sexuality, and how everyone but RAH has it all horribly wrong. This was very amusing when I first read it as a teenager, but it wears a little thin these days, when we can plainly see the results of many of his fellow travelers' libertine social attitudes.

Possibly my least favorite Heinlein novel. One probably must read it to complete the Heinlein canon, but don't rush out to buy a copy.

Friday by Robert A. Heinlein

Friday falls into the category of "late" Heinlein, written in 1982. Heinlein had left his juvenile fiction behind, gained some acclaim for works like Stranger in a Strange Land, and begun to expound on his social philosophy, based a great deal on free love and plural marriages. These themes continue showing up in his stories until his passing in 1988, sometimes overpowering the story.

Friday is an Artificial Person, or Living Artifact, genetically engineered from the best of human stock to be a genius and to display physical strength and speed far greater than ordinary humans. Her fellow APs are discriminated against, and must jump through a number of bureacratic hoops before they can be regarded as human, legally, though they are often not regarded as human by just plain folks, no matter what they do. Friday works as a courier for a secret organization, run by Dr. "Kettle Belly" Baldwin, whom we encountered in Gulf, a short story in the collection, Assignment in Eternity. Just in case we don't remember, Heinlein posts a clue midway through Friday about a monument which stands in a crater on the Moon to Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Green, the heroes of Gulf.

Friday's adventures, hopping about between the Moon and the L5 stations, various nation states on Earth - the U.S. has fragmented into a handful of separate states in Heinlein's future - sets the backdrop for Heinlein to pontificate on politics, morals and society.

Some choice quotes:
"I have been assured that the typical California legislator will withdraw a bill if you can prove to her that pi can't equal three no matter how many votes make it so. But grassroots legislation ('the initiative') has no such limitation. For example three years ago a grassroots economist noticed that college graduates earned, on the average, about 30 percent more than their fellow citizens who lacked bachelor's degrees. Such an undemocratic condition is anathema to the California Dream, so, with great speed, an initiative was qualified for the next election, the measure passed, and all California high-school graduates and/or California citizens attaining eighteen years were henceforth awared bachelor's degrees."

Marks of a sick culture:

• When the people of a country stop identifying themselves with a country and begin identifying themselves with a group. A racial group. A language. A religion.
• The population must lose faith with the police and the courts (OJ and Casey Anthony?)
• High taxation
• Inflation of the currency
• The ratio of the productive to those on the public payroll
• Violence
• Muggings
• Snipers
• Arson
• Bombing
• Terrorism of any sort
• A dying culture demonstrates personal rudeness

Some days, Heinlein really nailed the future.

The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

This book by Heinlein definitely ranks right up there in terms of being one of my favorites, and I've certainly re-read it more often than most. Daniel Boone Davis is an inventor, who has created a really useful household gadget, a robotic cleaning lady patented as Hired Girl. He and his partner, Miles, are raking in money hand over fist, but that's not good enough for Miles. With the collusion of Danny's fiancee, Belle, he wrests control of the business away from Danny and boots him out of the company with a severance package. Miles and Belle appear to have become romantically involved while Danny was working hard on the next generation of household robot, and snuck off to Vegas to get married, sealing their unholy alliance.

Miles has a step-daughter named Ricky (Frederica) who adores Danny, and never trusted Belle. Danny has a cat named Pete who also never trusted Belle. Danny realizes that his life is in a shambles, and decides to take the Long Sleep, a cryogenic suspension process that has just become somewhat popular in 1970. After assigning the remainder of his Hired Girl stock to Ricky, and making arrangements for Pete to take the plunge into the future with him, he confronts Belle and Miles one last time. In the ensuing fight, Belle tranquilizes Danny with a truth serum/zombie drug and interrogates him, finding out that he wants to escape into the future 30 years hence, and she uses some of her connections to change the sanctuary where he will sleep the decades away to one that will ask no questions about his drugged state. This new sanctuary, though, doesn't send Pete to the future along with Danny, and he is furious that his cat has been left behind.

Fast-forward to the year 2000, when Danny wakes up. The assets he thought were in trust for him while he slept have been embezzled away, and he must make his way on his own in the new world. Things have changed quite a bit, and Heinlein missed the mark on some things, (writing in 1957). The common cold has been cured, gold is dirt cheap, and dental work has been replaced by tooth regeneration techniques. Would be nice if any of those were true today, eh?

A quote I can relate to:
"I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats - I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way."

Another principle that has played out in a number of situations in my life:
"Paymasters come in two sizes: one sort shows you where the book says you can't have what you've got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don't rate it."

There's a great bit, also, where Danny is working on a manufacturing line in an automotive plant in 2000, and he sees that a number of the cars coming off the assembly line are immediately sent to be crushed and recycled. When he asks about it, he's told that the cars are being built as part of a price and job support program funded by the federal government. Cash for clunkers, anyone?

Danny eventually decides that he needs to somehow fix the problems he ran away from in 1970, and through the offices of a defunct secret government project that discovered time travel, he is able to go back and see to it that Belle and Miles get their comeuppance, Pete is not left astray, and Danny and Ricky's financial affairs are left in far better shape.

A somewhat light hearted romp in the Heinlein spirit.