Space Cadet - A Review
February 14th, 2007 | by Todd W |
The reviews of the Heinlein juveniles continue. As I look back at these books, the impact they had on my life becomes undeniable. They’re like that old. warm blanket, or that quiet, safe place you might have had as a kid. Certainly nostalgia comes back with a lot of power as I browse through the books and smell that old, musty odor of aged paper yellowed over time. I remember them new and crisp.
Sometime in my youth, I used the pages of Space Cadet to doodle a flip-cartoon in blue ink. Some small animal runs around the page in a jerky animation.
What was that all about?
Anyway, Heinlein wrote these books in the late 1940s, and this one suffers perhaps the most from the ravages of time and progress.
The juveniles deal with coming of age stories. Young protaginists learn their place in the world while leaving the old familiar comforts of home and school behind. in Space Cadet, Matthew Dodson joins the Space Patrol, an organization pledged to serve humanity and patrol the various worlds of the solar system, serving as a military force, police patrol and rescue service all rolled into one. Members of the patrol renounce their allegeince to their home worlds and nations, and pledge themselves to the patrol. Indeed, one of the biggest heros and legends of the patrol deployed a nuclear bomb against his own hometown when a dictator seized power and threatened the world.
Dodson passes through his training with an assortment of characters; a fellow Earther named Tex, a native-born Venusian, and a colonist from Ganymede. The first part of the book follows basic training, where more life-lessons and Heinlein views are interjected into the story. Duty, service and human nature are the themes as the cadets are stripped of any illusions about the Patrol.
People tend to fall into three psychological types, all differently motivated. There is the type motivated by economic factors, money and there is the type motivated by ‘face,’ or pride. This type is a spender, fighter, boater, lover, sportsman, gambler; he has a will to power and an itch for glory. And there is the professional type, which claims to follow a code of ethics rather than seeking money or glory - priests and ministers, teachers, scientists, medical men, some artists and writers. The idea is that such a man believes that he is devoting his life to some purpose more important than his individual self. …Mind you, this is terribly oversimplified
The Patrol is meant to be made up exclusively of the professional type. In the space marines [by contrast], every single man jack, from the generals to the privates, is or should be the sort who lives by pride and glory.
The last half of the book follows the newly graduated cadets as they face various crises, from a too-late-rescue of a mining vessel in the Asteroid belt, to a distress call from the surface of Venus. Through it all, the cadets confront challenges and either succeed or fail. Bad outcomes aren’t softened for the sensibility of the reader. Heinlein didn’t go for that.
Space Cadet wasn’t one of my favorites, and that was only because Heinlein wrote so many quality books. Considered alone and removed from his other great works, Space Cadet would be considered a fine book produced by another writer.
Heinlein had a tendency to eclipse his own quality works.
