Farmer In The Sky - A Review
March 1st, 2007 | by Todd W |
Farmer in the Sky was written in 1950, and I had the benefit of first reading it some twenty-five or so years later. Like most of the Heinlein stories from this age, planetary exploration wasn’t too kind to it.
But even as the reality of science and discovery dated the book, other fundamental aspects still make it a timeless story for American youth. Farmer in the Sky is a story of a pioneer.
As usual with these stories, our protagonist is a teenage boy on the verge of manhood. Bill lives on an Earth teeming with people trapped in a dichotomy of high technology and food scarcity. I’m not one to quibble with Heinlein’s tendency to stretch things a bit to keep a story going, but it always bothered me that these people can establish colonies on other planets, but can’t figure out how to enhance their crops.
Bill, his sister, Peggy, and his widowed father enlist in a colony project on Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter. The first part of the novel covers the initial journey by ‘torchship’ out to Jupiter, with Bill and other young men reconstituting their scouting group to give them something to do (and incidentally serves a vital function when a meteorite punches a hole in the ship en route).
For me, the real heart of this book was the hardships on Ganymede.
Growing up, my family would make frequent trips to West Virginia to visit my Grandparents. My paternal Grandmother live deep in the mountains, up a meandering one-lane dirt road in the middle of nowhere. I’m amazed today to find it on a satellite image, thanks to Google. Back in the hills, nestled in a stifling valley, you could rarely get an AM station, let alone FM or TV. As a kid, I didn’t like it.
As an adult, I miss it.
Anyway, that farmhouse and the surrounding isolation served as a perfect setting for how I imagined the book. Bill and his family become farmers, working to build their own house, establish a life, and even manufacture the very soil they plan on tilling. Ganymede is essentially bare rock, and rock must be turned into soil by crushing and then seeding it with life designed to produce a media for plant growth.
Life is hard.
And to top it off, little Peggy can’t adjust to the lower atmospheric pressure of Ganymede (the air is still being manufactured as well). The family has to build her a pressurized room, diverting even more scarce resources from the farm just to keep her alive.
Then the kicker - a rare alignment of the moons of Jupiter triggers a massive quake, destroying the house, shutting down the power, and taking down the heat shield keeping the colony warm. Quickly, the climate turns arctic, and the community is forced to scramble, saving livestock and crops before everything freezes solid.
Peggy’s situation can’t be helped as the colonists struggle with keeping the able-bodied alive. Her death is another Heinlein-ian message to young readers - the world can be harsh, and only hard work and sensibility can change that. Heinlein was never much given to characters wishing their way to a solution. If you didn’t take life seriously, it took you first.
As with every book in this sequence, Farmer in the Sky is packed with lessons for young readers, as well as obstacle after obstacle to be overcome by reason and work. The age of the book, and the out-dated ideas about Ganymede, do nothing to harm the relevance of the story.
