A classic coming of age novel is Tunnel In The Sky. It’s one more of my favorite Heinlein juveniles.
Rod Walker is taking a class in advanced survival and the final exam is Solo Survival. Using the gate technology to transmit him to another planet, he will be dumped on an unknown planet with whatever he can carry with him. Object: Survival. Until they retrieve him he is on his own.
He along with several other students are put down at various locations on the planet.
The situation becomes complex when the retrieval time comes and goes without the reappearance of the gate. Something clearly has gone wrong.
So Rod and his fellow students have to survive for who knows how long. Maybe forever.
Some of the most challenging threats to survival turn out to be his fellow humans, as usual.
This novel has a little of the Lord Of The Flies to it and is a really great adventure story. Rod survives and grows up in the process which is one of the classic types of juvenile story. A lot of good SF tech is there, matter transmission, space colonization, a very different education system, etc. The golden era of SF often featured these tech hero types and Rod is a juvenile version of that icon.
All in all one of Heinlein’s better efforts.
The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein is about my favorite of his juveniles. In some ways it is not a juvenile, since it is really about the Stone family, but the two twins Castor and Pollux are the main stars in my estimation. And they are teenagers.
There are a number of things about this novel that I like. Hazel Meade Stone, the grandmother, is the Hazel Meade from my favorite Heinlein book The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. She is an 11 year old in that book, and 85 plus in this one.
There is not a direct connection, this is not a sequel, but it seems obvious to me. Hazel is on of the founding fathers of The Luna Free State for instance.
This book is part of the Future History of Heinlein. The Moon, and Mars, as described in this book are similar to the planets in others, like Red Planet, another of my favorite juveniles.
The story is a lot of fun. The Stone family, eccentrics all, buy a spaceship and start touring the solar system. Various adventures occur along the way.
Heinlein again gets into his thing about education being important, in particular mathematics.
And that Yankee can-do spirit is pervasive.
Whether or not Americans ever had this particular approach to life may be debatable, but it is an American myth. And one that I think has some basis in fact. And I am sad that in many ways it has disappeared from our culture.
It may be more ‘mature’ or 'realistic' to look at the world in the cynical way we do now, but it’s a shame that we do.
Yes we bumped up against reality in the late 1960’s with Vietnam, The Credibility Gap, and all the events that ended ‘Camelot’ and optimism. But I remember it and wish for its return.
Even in a modified, more useable form. If we think that every time someone proposes a difficult, expensive thing for us to try it will fail, then we never try. People need things bigger than themselves to believe in, and we suffer from a lack of them now.
OK, enough ranting.
One last thing about the story. Towards the end of the novel the Stones pick up as a pet a Martian Flat Cat. On board ship this fuzzy, harmless, loveable creature eats too much as everybody feeds it. So,it starts having babies. And then, its babies have babies. Soon the ship is overloaded with them. They get into everything and are consuming all the families food.
So, they lower the temperature and when they curl up like Martian wildlife does, they get put into the hold.
Sound familiar? I wonder if Gene Roddenberry, or whoever wrote the episode The Trouble With Tribbles on Star Trek ever read this book.
The next series of juveniles I want to post about are the ones that almost every SF fan knows about. At least the fans of my age. I know the younger fans still read Heinlein, but I don’t know if the juveniles still get read. I think they are amongst his best works, and really are readable for adults. At least most of them.
Heinlein wrote a number of them and in them you can see why he is a Grand Master of SF. He knows how to write and they are interesting books in many ways.
The first one I will post about is Between Planets by Robert A. Heinlein. This is a story of growing up and becoming a man, and of rebellion against authority. In particular authoritarian government.
Those of you who know Heinlein’s politics are not surprised about this. He was a Libertarian by most accounts and it shows in many of his books, including to a lesser degree, in his juveniles.
In this one, Donald Harvey gets caught up in the rebellion of the Venus Colony against the Federation. The Federation is Earth, or the Earth government.
We see how Earth has become repressive, even to its own people. Security, the IBI, is everywhere. Citizen’s rights are routinely violated or ignored. There is a war looming, but apparently this has been developing for a while.
That’s one of the things you will see in Heinlein’s juveniles that you don’t in many of the others. He talks politics. Whether or not you agree with his theories, it’s something that was unusual for 1950’s America.
I grew up a little later on and it was the same. Middle class American kids didn’t think about politics. That only changed in the mid 1960’s with Vietnam and Civil Rights and everything else.
So Heinlein is kind of breaking a taboo here to my thinking. And, unless I am misinterpreting it, he is making a point about McCarthyism, which was in full flower at the time.
Anyway, Don is (unknown to him) caught up as a courier in a conspiracy to change things. Then he becomes a guerrilla fighter in the swamps of Venus. (The old solar system again)
Don is not a misfit or a junior scientist, just an ordinary kid caught up in events. He handles them well and is a hero of sorts.
All in all, a good story well written. One I enjoyed then, and on re-reading.
