However, I refer you over to Ace, who has written a review that might be longer than the film itself.  Despite the length, it is well worth the read!  Go hence.

In all cases, I think the core aspects of the human story hold up very well.  However, the story elements of some simply won’t translate well to a youthful (or adult) reader of today.

Rocket Ship Galileo might be the ‘most dated’ of all the stories (even if one gives a charitable pass to farming on Ganymede).

Take a good look at the emblem on the wing of that ship, just over the head of the near figure on the cover.

Yeah.  An Iron Cross.

I present to you: Lunar Nazis.

Rocket Ship Galileo was written in 1947, and is the very first in the Heinlein Juvenile group.  Nazis on the moon really isn’t that bad of a concept for 1947, particularly when memories of the V2 were fresh, and we really didn’t seem to be that far away from human space flight on a ‘hobby’ level.  In addition, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still current, so the presence of nuclear weapons in the book brought all of the major concerns of the age together into a nice, action-filled read.

A small club of rocket enthusiasts, under the guidance of an older professor as a father-figure, purchase an old, second hand ‘mail rocket’, designed to ferry cargo from point to point on the earth.  Improbably, they manage to refit the ship with a thorium reactor in place of the chemical rockets, fueling it with zinc as a propellant (the high mass of the vaporized zinc provides a fairly impressive impulse).

Eventually, the group stocks up the rocket and embarks on a trip to the moon.

I should pause here.  Yes, some teenagers build a rocket and fly to the moon.  I know.  However, Heinlein spends a lot of time on engineering aspects, giving the whole endeavor a patina of genuine plausibility.  While there might be some hand-waving, there certainly isn’t as much hand-waving as my little explanation might lead you to believe.  Heinlein makes kids work at understanding the science.

So, it is off to the moon on an eleven day voyage.  After arriving and erecting a small Quonset hut, the Galileo is destroyed by undetected moon Nazis (please, it isn’t really that funny…).

Our intrepid youth are left to their own wits as they try to infiltrate the Nazi base, seize the Nazi rocket, and coerce a Nazi pilot in teaching them how to operate the ship so they can return home.  (Moon Nazis.  I hate Moon Nazis).  Toss in Nazi nuclear weapons, and evidence that cratering on the moon is a result of a nuclear exchange between some older races, and you have a nice mixture of timely villains and fears of the era.

Rocket Ship Galileo has all the ingredients of a Heinlein Juvenile, but it just doesn’t quite come together as nicely as the later works.  I still have fond memories of it, but writing this review has illustrated weaknesses I had glossed over in my recollection.

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.

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.

Heinlein has been tagged, unfairly, as a ‘fascist’ by the self-declared enlightened who stand opposed to any perception that some people might be more capable than others. Spider Robinson wrote a great essay in defense of Heinlein, well worth the time.

Tunnel In The Sky is a hard hitting book for a younger reader. Here you’ll find Heinlein’s political ideas that were later presented in Starship Troopers and the rest of his novels.

Rod Walker is a high school student who’s ambition is to become a colonist. Earth has been shipping excess population through a gate system, dumping enterprising colonists on habitable planets to fare for themselves and build a new life. Since the gate technology is very expensive to operate, colonists have to go through self-sufficient, and can only establish a permanent gate back to Earth once they have the ability to pay for it through trade.

Lesson one of economics for a young reader – economics dictate resources. Sentiment has very little purchasing power.

Rod is facing his final exam in Advanced Survival, part of his curriculum to apply for a colonist position. The exam is simple – students are dumped on a pristine planet with whatever they can carry through. Survivors are picked up in a week to ten days. Failures are buried, or in most cases, consumed by the local fauna.

The class is all dumped on the same planet, but widely scattered. Rod comes across the corpses of classmates, and eventually hooks up with a living friend as they deploy survival skills.

Two weeks go by, and the pickup never happens. Two months pass, and they realize something is terribly wrong. Pickup might never happen, and short term survival becomes a long term issue. Slowly the students gather together, and the story turns to a political tale as the students form a community. The problems of government are confronted, as are the problems of ‘citizens’ who refuse to work.

I can’t deny that Heinlein’s writings shaded my political views, even if many of the ideas didn’t really take firm root until my early twenties. The roots of individual responsibility, self-reliance, and limited government are strong in his writing, yet expressed in a way that are accessible to a younger reader.

Heinlein doesn’t sugar-coat reality. People die as a result of stupidity, or deciding that good intentions are sufficient to change reality.

Tunnel In The Sky is another excellent Heinlein book, introducing younger readers to more adult content and themes. It is rare to find stories that both teach and entertain. This is certainly one of them.

This book was recently loaned to and read by Chris Gidman. I would love to read a write-up of his perceptions as an adult reading it for the first time.

The Ballentine version I own was printed in 1977, and I purchased it new.  I’m guessing I bought it in 78 or 79 at the latest, so I had to be nine or ten years old.  The fact that a ten year old could plow through a seventy-five thousand word novel without coming up for air speaks more to Heinlein’s skill than my abilities as a reader.

Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was part of the Heinlein Juvenile series; twelve books written with boys (or girls) in mind.  The protagonist was almost always a teenage boy with above average intelligence, possessed with a worldly sophistication beyond his years.  Even with their gifts, they struggled, suffered, and sometimes failed.  Nothing was sugar-coated for youth, and really bad things happened to people.  Heinlein’s universe was unforgiving.  Naivety or stupidity didn’t earn you a pass from the laws of physics.

As a young reader, I loved the fact that Heinlein didn’t condescend to me.  He pushed me with new terms and concepts, forcing me to pepper my father with endless questions about basic mechanics or simple physics.  I had to figure out why a pressure suit had issues with joint flexibility when pressurized, or why operating a suit in one atmosphere didn’t work that well when it came to walking around.  The story entertained, as well as serving as a solvable puzzle.

My physics degree probably stems from my young exposure to Heinlein, and my ever-growing library is certainly his fault.

The specifics of Have Spacesuit might sound a little corny today, but it touched upon so many dreams of a young boy keeping an eye on NASA in the late Seventies, yearning for SOMETHING to happen during the lull between Apollo (too distant to remember) and the Shuttle (not yet flying).

Kip is a smart young boy dreaming of space, in the might-have-been that followed from an aggressive space exploration policy in the US (the book was written in 1958, and assumed we would go to the moon to stay).  Kip enters a slogan contest that offers a trip to the moon as the grand prize, only to be crushed to find out his winning slogan had been beaten by an identical entry with an earlier postmark.

As consolation, an old, surpless space suit is delivered to his front door, still in the packing crate and minus a bunch of critical systems.

Now what kid wouldn’t want a fantasy prop like that?

Kip, being a really smart kid, spends his time tinkering with it.  He cobbles together an air system and a cheap radio, and spends a lot of time walking around in fields and the woods, imagining his coveted trip to the moon.  His determination to enter the Air Force Academy forces him to consider selling “Oscar” for tuition money (am I the only kid who had a name for his bicycle?  Naming the space suit seemed natural to me.)

On Kip’s final outing with Oscar, his fantasy radio calls are answered by the voice of a young girl, requesting help.  The next thing he knows, a spaceship lands and another space suited figure flees from a hatch, along with a large feline looking ‘thing’.   A bright flash occurs and Kip is unconscious.

Only to wake up in a ‘cell’ occupied by the feline and a young girl (who is also smart beyond her years).  From there, we are in for a fun ride of ‘help the good alien escape from the bad aliens’, with the young humans drawing on tenacity and intelligence to squeak by a number of close calls.  The story spins from the moon, to a near fatal freeze on Pluto, and ending up around the star Vega and eventually a court of civilizations in the Lesser Magellanic Clouds as the fate of humanity is judged.

Heady topics for a young boy.

I haven’t read Have Spacesuit in twenty-five years or more.  Recently, I did loan another Heinlein Juvenile to a friend who had never read them, and he reported that the story held up very well, even for an adult.  I’ll return to these books someday, but I’m guessing the nostalgia will be overwhelming.  I remember my grandmother – an avid reader like my mother – would take me to the bookstore every week and buy me a paperback.  Many of the Heinlein Juveniles were bought by her.  Reading them will remind me how much I miss her.

If you have youngsters in your life, the Heinlein Juveniles are a great gift.  You might just shape a life.

So, I’m going to review every book I own and have read.

I’m not promising a schedule, nor will I promise a certain depth of the review.  Some books I haven’t read in twenty years, but I’ll do my best to convey my impressions.

Look for these under the Book Review category, coming soon.