In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
A couple of weeks ago, while rummaging through old books, I came across my old copy of Citizen of the Galaxy. “That was a good one,” I thought. “Perfect for re-reading out in the backyard on a sunny summer day.” I’d first read it back when I was 12 or 13, but didn’t remember many details. It turned out that the book is both more preachy and a lot darker than I had remembered…which made me wonder why so many authors write books for juveniles and young adults that expose the protagonists to so much misery.
While most of Heinlein’s juvenile characters suffer during their adventures, I think poor Thorby is perhaps the protagonist who suffers most. He starts out as a slave, not even remembering his origins. During the brief, happy time that follows his adoption by Baslim the Cripple, the boy is used as an unwitting courier for the undercover intelligence agent. When Baslim is captured, Thorby joins a ship of the Free Traders, a society that wanders the stars but whose individual members have very little freedom. Honoring the wishes of Baslim, he is released to a ship of the Hegemonic Guard, where he enlists in an effort to trigger an investigation of his origins (without having to pay the exorbitant cost of a background check). And as anyone who has served in the military knows, a junior enlistee has very little freedom. When Thorby’s true identity is finally determined, he learns that he is heir to a gigantic fortune—but finds the obligations of his wealth and power to be perhaps the most onerous burden of all. As it turns out, my fond recollections of this book come not so much from its subject matter, but from Heinlein’s writing style, which makes even the darkest and weightiest of subjects interesting and worthy of exploring. And in the end, Heinlein has some positive and thoughtful things to say in this work regarding the duties and responsibilities of being a citizen, and the reader finds that there is some valuable medicine mixed into the spoonful of sugar.
About the Author
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) is among the most notable of science fiction authors, and not surprisingly, I have reviewed his work in this column before. You can find further biographical information in my reviews of Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And you will find more information on his series of juvenile novels in my review of Have Spacesuit—Will Travel.
Citizen of the Galaxy was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1957 as part of their series of Heinlein juvenile adventure novels, and serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in three parts during the same year. In a review on the Heinlein Society website, I found a mention that the two versions were different, with the Scribner’s edition shortened and modified for younger readers.
Citizen of the Galaxy is, at its heart, a rumination on duty and civic responsibility. Readers who are interested in Heinlein’s thoughts on the topic can find more in a Forrestal Lecture he gave to midshipmen at the Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1973. A version of the speech was later printed in Analog, and reprinted in the Heinlein anthology Expanded Universe. The speech is notable in making explicit themes that show up in many of Heinlein’s fictional works. You can find excerpts of it here and there on the internet, but I was not able to find a link to any authorized version. If you can find it, it is worth a look.
Disasters and Dystopias
One might think that books written specifically for young audiences would be a bit gentler than those written for adult audiences. But counterintuitively, the opposite is often true. It seems that the most popular young adult stories are those that put the protagonists in difficult, even extreme, environments and dire straits.
In recent years, dystopias have definitely been in vogue. In Suzanne Collins’ wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy, poor Katniss and her friends are thrown into life-or-death gladiatorial games, and then a full-scale, violent revolution. The Divergent series, by Veronica Roth, takes place in Chicago after an apocalypse, where the inhabitants are divided into warring factions. And the characters in James Dashner’s Maze Runner books find their way through challenging mazes, only to find that the outside world has been destroyed by solar flares. The Harry Potter series is often seen as a whimsical look at a magical world, but starts out with the orphaned Harry living in a closet. While he is rescued by an invitation to Hogwarts, before the series is over, he and his friends will be engulfed in a grueling total war between the forces of good and evil. Back in 2011, Tor.com presented a “Dystopia Week” exploring facets of this subgenre, which featured articles like this one by Scott Westerfeld, and this one by Gwenda Bond.
While young adult dystopias are currently in vogue, they are not new—the subgenre has been around for a long time. A few years ago, Jo Walton wrote a Tor.com article pointing out the dystopic settings found in many of Heinlein’s juveniles, where we encounter wars, disasters and all sorts of grueling rites of passage. And when I look back at some of the books I enjoyed in my youth, they are filled with dire situations and mortal threats. One example that comes to mind is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, where young David Balfour is betrayed by a relative trying to steal his fortune and then finds himself trapped in the midst of a revolution.
Young adults are at an age where they are looking at what their life will be like when they become independent, which can be a scary prospect. I suspect reading adventures set in dystopias, and seeing the protagonists overcome the intense challenges they face, gives the readers a sense that they, too, can overcome their own obstacles and anxieties. Moreover, seeing how characters react to adversity can teach youngsters some valuable lessons about life and ethical behavior. While older adults might want to shield the young from difficult thoughts and concepts, younger adults are eager to leave the nest and strike out on their own…and fiction can be a first step in doing that.
Citizen of the Galaxy
The book opens in a slave market, with young Thorby being auctioned off to the highest bidder. A powerful customer is insulted by the auctioneer, and when a beggar puts in a low bid for Thorby, the powerful man forces the auctioneer to take the bid. The beggar, Baslim, trains Thorby in his trade but also educated him in languages, math, history, and offers him a life more comfortable than anything the boy has seen since he was captured by slavers. The auction takes place not in the American-influenced Terran Hegemony, but on Sargon, a planet of the Nine Worlds. These worlds are inhabited by a society influenced by cultures of the Middle East, India, and China. As a young reader, I apparently took it for granted that “foreigners” would stoop to evil practices like slavery. But as an older reader, my feelings on the issue are more complex; I feel that Heinlein took the easy way out by putting the practice of slavery into a culture foreign to his American readers. After all, when Heinlein was growing up in Missouri in the early 20th century, there were still people in the region old enough to have been born into slavery, and many of the echoes of slavery still existed in practices like Jim Crow laws. While we are ashamed to admit it, the concept of slavery is not as foreign to our culture as we might like. Putting the problem of slavery into the Terran Hegemony would have added some interesting dimensions to the tale.
Baslim, or Colonel Richard Baslim, turns out to be an intelligence agent from the “X” Corps of the Terran Hegemonic Guard, who volunteered for his current post because of his hatred of slavery. (I was stunned to find, despite Baslim having some past notoriety, he used his own name while undercover; but while that is bad tradecraft, I suspect it was done to make the book easier to follow). While Baslim uses Thorby as a courier, he does his best, through hypnosis and kindness, to help the boy overcome the cruel treatment he had received as a slave. Baslim is a representative of a frequent archetype in Heinlein’s work: the older and wiser mentor who serves as a mouthpiece for the author’s philosophy. Baslim had once done a great service to a people called the “Free Traders,” and gives Thorby information on the ships and captains Thorby should seek out if anything should happen to him. Since he suspects that Thorby had originally come from the Terran Hegemony, he also provides instructions that Thorby be turned over to the first Guard vessel they encountered. In one of the most exciting sequences in the book, Baslim is indeed captured and killed, and Thorby must make his own way through local security forces to the spaceport.
The Free Traders are a collection of families or clans who live on the spaceships they own, tramp freighters that follow business opportunities from star to star. While each ship is as free as an independent nation, keeping those ships functioning forces the individuals aboard them into extremely rigid roles, hemmed in by powerful rules and customs. Because of his math ability, Thorby is trained as a fire control technician, working as part of the ship’s defensive capabilities, and Heinlein does a good job of extrapolating his own naval experience in the 1930s into the future—in fact, those passages have aged surprisingly well in intervening years. Thorby befriends a girl in his watch, and like most Heinlein juvenile heroes, he is utterly clueless about sex and completely misses the fact that she wants to be more than a pal. He is stunned to see her traded off the ship to prevent a violation of mating customs. This section also has a subplot that surprisingly made it past censorious editors, where pin-up magazines are confiscated from the young men on the ship, but then found to be valuable trade goods. This episode in Thorby’s life ends when the captain keeps his promise to Baslim and turns Thorby over to a Terran Hegemonic Guard ship.
Because of Colonel Baslim’s far-reaching reputation, the Guard ship takes Thorby on as a passenger. When their initial efforts to trace his background fail, they talk him into enlisting, which would trigger a deeper, more detailed investigation. Heinlein takes some delight in showing how military personnel can bend rules to accomplish what they need to do. And since military enlistments are basically a form of indentured servitude, Thorby again finds himself in a slave-like role. While he has some run-ins with a messdeck bully, Thorby finds his experiences and Baslim’s training have made him well-suited for naval service. But this service is cut short when Thorby’s actual identity is discovered, and he moves into another phase in what is proving to be a very eventful, episodic life.
It turns out that Thorby is actually Thor Bradley Rudbek of Rudbek (a city that was once Jackson Hole, Wyoming). With his parents dead in the pirate attack that led to his enslavement, he is heir to one of the largest fortunes on Earth. He meets John Weemsby, who wants Thorby to call him “Uncle Jack,” and his “cousin” Leda. After a short period of time, Uncle Jack gives Thorby papers to sign, and when Thorby wants to understand what they say before he signs, Weemsby becomes more and more aggressive in trying to force Thorby’s compliance. On this last reading, Weemsby began to remind me of Tolkien’s character Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who refuses to accept the rightful king when he returns from a long exile. Thorby also finds that his company has been indirectly supporting the slave trade by selling ships to organizations that support the trade. Thorby decides to challenge Weemsby for control of the company, and fortunately, he has won over Leda, who supports Thorsby’s efforts and introduces him to lawyer James Garsh. Garsh is another of the archetypical characters who appear in more than one Heinlein tale, the feisty and principled lawyer. With the help of Leda and Garsh, Thorby ends up unseating Weemsby and taking control of the company. Thorby approaches the Guard with the information he has discovered about the slave trade, and begins supporting them behind the scenes. While the wealth and power Thorby now wields might be seen as liberating, he actually finds himself feeling more constrained than he has ever been in his life. The book ends on a note that seems incongruous in a story targeted for young readers, with his lawyer telling Thorby he’s working too hard and inviting him out to a restaurant that features dancing girls.
The book is episodic in nature, with each stage of Thorby’s journey, and each difficulty he endures, offering some different perspective on the topics of freedom and responsibility. There are some solid action scenes throughout that keep the reader engaged (and keep the narrative from reading too much like a civics lesson).
Final Thoughts
In researching this article, I noticed that many people count this book among their favorite Heinlein works. It certainly features some of the hallmarks of his best work, and explores many of the themes that he was most passionate about. On the other hand, poor Thorby suffers mightily throughout, the story is clunky at times, and while Heinlein makes the proxy battle at the end as interesting as he can, corporate governance is not the most exciting of topics. I enjoyed the book when I first read it, but having read more of Heinlein, and much more fiction in general since those days, I can’t say that it ranks among my favorites. I do feel, however, that because of the lessons it contains, the book is a good one to offer to young readers.
And now I turn the floor over to you: What are your thoughts on Citizen of the Galaxy? And what do you think about books for young readers that put the protagonists into dystopias and difficult or traumatic situations?
Alan Brown has been a science fiction fan for over five decades, especially fiction that deals with science, military matters, exploration and adventure.
I suspect the reason why Heinlein didn’t make this a self criticism of slavery or the treatment of minorities in the US, is that national self-criticism is not the role of the Heinlein juvenile – its purpose is character formation. That is, he wanted to improve the character of the reader, not to invoke a defensive reaction. By showing that slavery and mistreatment of the “other” is an unquestioned evil committed by enemies, it provides a clear dichotomy to the reader about how that your reader should act. This is entirely intentional. Heinlein was not shy about his opinions on equal treatment of all people.
I’m skeptical of your formulation that military service is like slavery. This is not Heinlein’s message at all – the act of volunteering for service is seen as particular important by the author. You may give up your freedom, but its yours to give.
Wasn’t my first (that’d be Red Planet), but it’s definitely one of my favorites as well. Not entirely sure why — maybe in part because Thorby (and, by extension, me) keeps going to entirely different places and doing entirely different things?
I think this is the first Heinlein I read, and it remains a great favorite. I am surprised that your summary omits any mention of the anthropologist who is on board the trader ship to study the trader family culture. She is clearly modeled on Margaret Mead, and her perspective is important to the plot and to Thorby’s development (even if the exposition is a bit clunky). The very concept of comparative anthropology made quite an impression on me when I was young.
“Citizen of the Galaxy” was one of my favorite books as a kid, and it held up extremely well when I reread it as an adult. I’m a bit surprised that you criticize the climax on the basis that “corporate governance is not the most exciting of topics”; one of the things that impressed me most as an adult reader is the way Heinlein manages to make that proxy battle absolutely gripping. One of the differences between reading it as a child vs. as an adult is that, as an adult, I’ve been forced to accept the fact that horrific things are happening all over the world and I can’t do much about most of them. I miss the innocence of being able to be shocked at the idea that slavery could be happening anywhere in the universe and humans could just ignore it. The bit that disturbs me even more now than it did years ago is the way Heinlein handwaves the young women of the Free Traders being exiled from their homes and families — possibly into some form of forced marriage, we don’t really know — with a smirky comment along the lines that “they’re crying now, but by tomorrow they’ll be smiling and laughing.” SO very Heinlein — but then, so was the respect he showed for his female characters as technicians and academics. I kind of love Heinlein’s contradictions, and boy, could he tell a story.
As for your question about dystopias and traumatic situations in books for young readers, all I can say is — meh? I mean, that seems like kind of a non-issue to me. Look at the list of Newbury award winners and honor books over the decades — you’ll see that many of them feature children and teens dealing with traumatic experiences and situations including abandonment, physical injury, poverty, war, and, yes, both slavery and dystopia. Heinlein wrote SF, so his character’s trauma takes place against a backdrop of galactic scale; but I’m not sure it’s any worse than the worlds depicted in “The Giver” or “The Slave Dancer.”
Thank you for the reference to the 1973 lecture — I have the “Expanded Universe” ebook and will look for that essay; it sounds interesting.
I too re-read this book when I was much older and was also taken by how much I had either forgotten or maybe mis-remembered. I started reading science fiction with the Heinlein juveniles and never really realized how much he was trying to drive home a point with most or all of them. I thought they were just good stories. I have a much different view of these stories now and still re-read them occasionally.
This is certainly my favorite Heinlein juvenile and possibly the second Heinlein I ever read (after Red Planet).
Your ruminations on the darkness so often found in juvenile/YA literature put me in mind of the famous GK Chesterton quote about fairy tales not teaching children about dragons. The children know dragons exist. Fairy tales teach them that dragons can be beaten. I think much the same principle is in play in YA.
If you want some darkness in stoies for children look no further than fairy tales and nearly all Disney stories; Dead parents, cruel relatives, witches and monsters.
I think the point is more morality plays about what happens to children when they have been left to face the world on their own. The older stories are dark tales about losing it all while I think what we call YA is more about facing down the terrors and suriviing.
I have a whole entire diatribe about how women were portrayed until just recently. Besides, Princes are like cops, there’s never one around when you need one.
I find this one of the less exciting juveniles, but I enjoy it greatly nonetheless. I agree that Thorby is never fully free to act, but this is always because of his own sense of responsibility and desire to fit into a family.
This was a favorite of mine as a kid, and I still think there’s a lot to like in it. It does a good job of making the reader feel that there’s a complete universe there — perhaps the fact that Thorby only ever gets a worms-eye view of each of the successive contexts in which he finds himself means that Heinlein can focus on detailed descriptions of the local environment without having to world-build an entire universe. Thorby’s immediate surroundings are so rich that we just take it for granted that they’re parts of a larger whole.
Even as a kid, I could tell when Heinlein was preaching at me and as I read more Heinlein I started to recognize his favorite tropes (i.e. older people who underestimate/patronize/try to hold back younger, more capable people; this is stock in YA, where the kids are never believed/trusted, but Heinlein seems particularly fond of this one). I didn’t care. “Citizen” has the one essential quality of good space opera, which is the sense that there’s a big, complicated, colorful universe out there to be explored.
I also think that in “Citizen”, Heinlein does a better job of sugaring the pill of his preaching than in many of his other books: evidently he knew that kids wouldn’t stand for the lengthy and heavy-handed lecturing of some of his other works, so he just gets on with the story and trusts his readers to pick up whatever moral lessons he’s trying to get across without laboring the point.
Simply a fantastic and hugely influential book. Drills right down into the core of your awareness that slavery is wrong; evil; and constantly resurgent.
As someone in my late 50s who read COG in the early 70s the fact that he had a matriarchal society in the middle section which he basically favoured, a clear rejection of slavery, a whole hearted endorsement of research being a good idea in itself and a distrust of unconstrained capitalism was a pretty good starting point for thinking about the world more critically. As with many of that generation the sexual politics do not date well although as they were reacting to a climate where often the message was that nice girls do not enjoy sex perhaps some of the excesses could be forgiven to a certain extent (and I would stress the perhaps), Also some of the attitudes to the military perhaps fits in with feeling that for many World War 2, if you survived it, was when you were the closest to and relied upon others more fundamentally that you did before or afterwards.
One of my all-time favourite SF books, from the first line on. Heinlein used a lot of irony throughout (which might go over the heads of some in the “juvenile” audience). I can think of at least one very good SF book, written decades later, where the entire plot is modelled on Citizen.
As a physician, I retained one particular line from reading this in my long-ago youth:
“All deaths can ultimately be traced to heart failure”
I remember Heinlein had a scene that made reference to the US history of slavery, but it focussed on how the US stopped. He sees a giant statue of Lincoln and asks why he was such a big deal, and when they (Leda?) tell him it was for freeing the slaves Thorby approves.
I have read CotG only once I think, and that never in close proximity to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, but I suspect a re-read of both back to back would show some parallels. The book opens in “Jubbulpore”, an Indian-sounding city name; Kim opens in Lahore. Thorby falls in with the Guard who discover his origins; Kim falls in with the Army who discover his origins. Thorby and Kim both get involved in espionage with old men affecting disguises who arrange for his education, and so on. And one of Kim’s cognomina is Friend Of All The World, which sounds a little like the title of Heinlein’s book.
Kipling’s Captains Courageous also has Thorby-like resonances.
Certainly one of his greats. I think this was if not the first at least among the first books that I read as a kid that really resonated deeply with me in an emotionally powerful way.
@Virginia I don’t think the Free Traders were supposed to have forced marriage. Girls had no choice about what ship they were traded to, and in a clannish society dominated by elders there’s certainly heavy social pressure on both sexes to encourage “appropriate” marriages and discourage others by assorted means. (And one suspects that there would be even more pressure against not marrying at all because the handful of appropriate age possibilities happen to be duds.)
But within those limits it seems as if the younger people did their own pairing up. E.g., the Captain’s wife is concerned that Thorby and Loeen will marry before she has a chance to try to arrange some other alliance if she doesn’t separate them, which strongly suggests that they *could* do so despite the senior officers and matriarchs. (She also implies that she’s the one who picked a likely young officer and shepherded him into the captaincy.)
@15 Del: There’s no question there are parallels. Heinlein freely admitted to using Kim as a springboard for Citizen.
@13: that’s from Between Planets, not CotG.
I’ve always thought Citizen should be made into a movie. It’s a little tricky because of the episodic nature, but a good script could tie it all together. Might need to up the action and skip some of the anthropology to keep it moving. But the message – that slavery exists, even if it’s somewhere you aren’t familiar with – is an important one.
Funny, Red Planet was my first Heinlein too. Was it big in kids libraries in nineteen-sixty-mumble?
P.S. I’d like to see a Have Spacesuit – Will Travel movie too. After the lackluster response to Wrinkle in Time, it doesn’t seem likely.
I think the world building is as strong as any story I’ve read.
@20 The movie I would love to see is “The Star Beast”
@1 The 13th Amendment got rid of outright slavery, but some forms of involuntary servitude survived until the mid-20th Century, including sharecropping, convict leasing, and peonage. There are two forms of voluntary servitude still legal in the United States. One is the articles that merchant seamen sign before a voyage. The other is a military enlistment. Both are entered into voluntarily, but for the duration of those contracts, the participants have surrendered control over their lives.
@3 That “Margaret Meade” character was certainly a positive addition to the book. I suspect, when researching customs to design his Free Trader society, Heinlein read and was impressed by Meade’s work, and decided to tip his hat in her direction.
@@.-@ Heinlein was clearly not presenting a utopia with his Free Trader society. The movement of young people (primarily women, from what I could see) from ship to ship was essential to prevent inbreeding, and mirrors practices of past cultures. But it is a problematic solution to that problem, as young people of marriage age appeared to be treated like chattel, with only limited control over their own futures.
@@.-@, @6, @7 You all raise good points about darkness and traumatic situations in the literature we provide to young people. The more I think about it, the more I realize that it is ubiquitous, and serves a useful purpose.
@15 @18 I have never read Kim, so I couldn’t comment on the parallels, but I have read that Heinlein was inspired by Kim when he wrote Citizen of the Galaxy.
Alan, I think you’d enjoy Kim and Captains Courageous. The latter is about an idle rich son of a railroad tycoon who falls off his ship in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and is picked up by the fishermen of the We’re Here. They decline to take him home until they’re good and ready to finish up their business in the area, and he grows to become a competent crew member in his own right by the time the voyage is over.
@23,
Yep, love them both.
An American slave couldn’t turn out to be, and be accepted as, the son and heir of one of the richest men in the country. Ethnicity and slave/ free status were too closely connected to each other. But in a normal Old World civilization, it was possible. So the latter would be a better fit for the slave-turns-out-to-be-heir-to-a-fortune story Heinlein wanted to tell.
By the time Scribner’s published this, I was alternating between Heinlein juveniles from the library and Signet paperback reprints of Heinlein Future History books that my parents picked up for me. (The first SF pb they bought me was the 1954 Pocket Books edition of Clarke’s Sands of Mars.) I do remember Citizen with some fondness, but I already preferred the adult books.
@25 Mark Twain did (sort of) do that with American slavery in “Puddn’head Wilson”.
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A couple of weeks ago, while rummaging through old books, I came across my old copy of Citizen of the Galaxy. “That was a good one,” I thought. “Perfect for re-reading out in the backyard on a sunny summer day.” I’d first read it back when I was 12 or 13, but didn’t remember many details. It turned out that the book is both more preachy and a lot darker than I had remembered…which made me wonder why so many authors write books for juveniles and young adults that expose the protagonists to so much misery.
Children enjoy being scared—in appropriate amounts. It’s one of the things they need to learn, and learn early. Today as in the Paleolithic, incorporating a proper sense of caution in the face of danger is survival training.
In the ‘90s a friend was bringing up two daughters. I suggested books to share with the girls. Many of them Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ann reported good conversations with the girls, about characters’ behavior and relationships and the consequences of their choices. “On Pern, they keep dosing someone with drugs, for his own good, without prior consent. This not good acting.” “In The Magic Casement series, the way wizards gain power and status by ripping off other magicians guarantees that the top tier will be ruthless and cruel.”
Ann said she found the SF and SFF books more useful for this than the current crop of children’s literature. Which offered less darkness and fewer occasions for conversations that helped a girl grow responsibility and compassion. “Those SF books are more realistic.”
I agreed, but noted that, “When your chosen books are full of fire breathing dragons and telepathic white horses and elven swords and traveling by tesseract, that’s an odd definition of realistic.”
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The book opens in a slave market, with young Thorby being auctioned off to the highest bidder. A powerful customer is insulted by the auctioneer, and when a beggar puts in a low bid for Thorby, the powerful man forces the auctioneer to take the bid. The beggar, Baslim, trains Thorby in his trade but also educated him in languages, math, history, and offers him a life more comfortable than anything the boy has seen since he was captured by slavers. The auction takes place not in the American-influenced Terran Hegemony, but on Sargon, a planet of the Nine Worlds. These worlds are inhabited by a society influenced by cultures of the Middle East, India, and China. As a young reader, I apparently took it for granted that “foreigners” would stoop to evil practices like slavery. But as an older reader, my feelings on the issue are more complex; I feel that Heinlein took the easy way out by putting the practice of slavery into a culture foreign to his American readers. After all, when Heinlein was growing up in Missouri in the early 20th century, there were still people in the region old enough to have been born into slavery, and many of the echoes of slavery still existed in practices like Jim Crow laws. While we are ashamed to admit it, the concept of slavery is not as foreign to our culture as we might like. Putting the problem of slavery into the Terran Hegemony would have added some interesting dimensions to the tale.
Why should our own culture always be guilty of the bad stuff? It’s not as though Western culture is worse than any other. Slavery is a human institution.
Arab slave traders were operating in Africa long before Europeans got into the act. The Arabic word for negro is their word for slave.
The enslaving culture shown is other enough. But…when Thorby gets home, he discovers his own culture shares the guilt. On corporate levels it is participating in systematized interstellar slavery. That shows—not tells—that slavery is a human universal.
The story Heinlein wrote is morally superior to the story you wish he’d written.
I think it’s wrong to ding Heinlein for assuming that slavery was a frontier phenomenon– he’d seen it abolished in Europe and the western hemisphere.
I give Heinlein credit for portraying PTSD that was caused by trauma but not war.
It’s amusing that the Space Guard has a sort of PC– restrictions on insults.
Did you notice Thorby’s grandparents explaining away Nine World’s slavery as not really slavery? You see that a lot in contemporary academe. Non western slavery is represented as not so bad as opposed to the really evil western version.
I reflect on how ignorant I was at 11 years old and thought that Thorby’s world of slave markets, beggar story tellers and Arabic souks sounded cool and romantic. Influenced by Arabian Nights, Caravaggio and most strongly by Rimsky Korsakov, I really thought Thorby was lucky!
When I grew up a little I worked out the truth. However I also worked out I was not ever likely to be any Heinlein hero because they were all really bright, always right, had a rare talent or were fantastically rich.
The 1957 Astounding serial (four parts) is available via the Internet Archive online for free; considering everything Heinlein included in the plot, it moves along pretty well.
There are some solid set pieces, and more world-building for a Heinlein juvenile than one would expect. I think this may be the only juvenile set in a universe with faster than light travel, a human diaspora, and intelligent alien life.
It’s a universe without a universal state, suggestions of rival and potentially aggressive polities, and a central civilization that while wealthy, does not dominate the “settled” universe and hardly lives up to its ideals (and actually is quite happy to either ignore or make money from the realities of the frontier) … and for its day, he wrote a fairly balanced set of characters (gender and otherwise) and multiple perspectives.
A lot of other commercially successful authors would have ground out at least a trilogy in so rich a setting.
Link:
https://archive.org/stream/Astounding_v60n01_1957-09_Gorgon776#page/n7/mode/2up
@19 I stand corrected. I think this only goes to demonstrate how long ago I read both Citizen of the Galaxy and Between Planets. At least I didn’t conflate this with Nazis On The Moon…
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There are some solid set pieces, and more world-building for a Heinlein juvenile than one would expect. I think this may be the only juvenile set in a universe with faster than light travel, a human diaspora, and intelligent alien life.
Starman Jones
The Star Beast
Tunnel in the Sky: I’m not sure about the intelligent aliens.
Time for the Stars: The FTL shows up at the end.
Starship Troopers
@ 35. Fernhunter
Good list. I stand corrected.
The CotG universe does strike me as an interesting one; given the half dozen fairly distinct societies (human, human-derived(?), and alien), and yet all this is presented as a “lived-in” universe where none of the above is especially wondrous or unexpected, it seems like there’s a lot more potential in this one than what is immediately apparent.
@29 The reason I thought about an alternative to the original plot is that I see a bit of hubris in Heinlein portraying the American-influenced Terran Hegemony working to root out slavery in other civilizations. Especially since, when he wrote the book in the 1950s, slavery might have been illegal in the US, but many of the practices associated with slavery still lingered in American society. I am not saying that America is alone in having flaws, but I was always taught to look at fixing my own faults before trying to fix the faults of others. As Jesus said, “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
@33 and @35 There are other juveniles that had interstellar settings, but the one in Citizen of the Galaxy certainly was a compelling and convincing environment. In my mind, it is a more exciting setting for tales than his Future History timeline. It would have been interesting if Heinlein had revisited it.
@33 Cdr. Bowman
I think you can add Starman Jones as undoubtedly qualifying on all three fronts and Time for the Stars is the beginning of that diaspora and FTL (some of the aliens are likely intelligent).
Edit: Oops, didn’t check for new comments before writing the above.
@35 Fernhunter
In The Star Beast, do we know that there are humans spread to the stars? I think there are individual humans who have left the earth but it doesn’t seem as though there were a widespread movement to emigrate.
Edit 2: obRelatedContent
IIRC after Baslim dies, Thorby hides from the authorities in a “house of ill repute”. I’m shocked this made it into a Scribner’s juvenile at the time it was published.
@@@@@ 38, vinsentient
@@@@@35 Fernhunter In The Star Beast, do we know that there are humans spread to the stars? I think there are individual humans who have left the earth but it doesn’t seem as though there were a widespread movement to emigrate.
I don’t know. It’s been too long since I read the book to remember details. But…
We know humans have been out there for multiple generations. See the row of Beast-houses in the back yard. Lummox has been raising John Thomases for a long time.
We might just be out there as traders. But humans being humans, I bet we found inviting planets and stayed.
@AlanBrown, I think the intent in a juvenile literally written for idealized Boy Scouts was to be aspirational: that, with the (then) next generation’s influence, “We” should be working to wipe out all vestiges of slavery.
@39 it’s been a long time for me too. I think that John Thomases were specifically explorers and malcontents who couldn’t stay on earth; so they seem like the exception. That’s why *our* John Thomas’ mother was so over-protective. Of course, it could be that there was a large number of these exceptional individuals… Time to dig out the paperback for a look-see!
@40 the thing that sticks out to me about the Boy Scout-ish audience for the juvies is how strongly Heinlein hammers on the idea of duty and that is very apparent in CotG.
@37, Actually Thorby and the guard are working to eliminate the Hegemony’s involvement in slavery. Baslim’s focus is on the slave trade coming from pirates and the like. He’s not trying to change Sargon’s culture.
@40 That is exactly the way I read the book when I encountered it as a youngster (and a Boy Scout, I might add). And, upon reflection, perhaps my ideas for a different plot are not driven by what would make a good juvenile story, they are driven by the kind of tale I want to read as an older person.
I cut my teeth on Heinlein and Norton juveniles (they were actually shelved in the “Juvenile” section of my local library back then!) and Citizen was one of my favorites. I’ve re-read it several times and I really enjoyed your take on the story.
@37 “The reason I thought about an alternative to the original plot is that I see a bit of hubris in Heinlein portraying the American-influenced Terran Hegemony working to root out slavery in other civilizations.”
As I remember, it was not so much the Hegemony was fighting against slavery in the Sargon Empire, as they were trying to stamp out the elements in their own society that were supporting and enabling the slave trade (such as Thorby’s company which was clandestinely selling star ships to Sargon slavers).
As far as suffering is concerned, you have to remember Heinlein’s age. He grew up on children’s books from the 19th and early 20th century. My mom, who was a bit younger than Heinlein, kept some of her books from her childhood. I read a lot of them. Two of the biggest themes were death and becoming an orphan. In a pre-antibiotic world children and younger adults died a lot more frequently than they do now. Another theme was poverty. Wealth distribution was extreme in the 19th century and there was no safety net. Adversity was a factor in children’s books because it was a major part of life. I think Heinlein absorbed a lot of this. He also believed that adversity built character and coming of age was the single most important theme in his YA books.
Citizen of the Galaxy was one of my favorites. I first read it when I was eleven and fell in love.
@37 — that’s an awful lot like how the Royal Navy worked against slavetrading.
A nice thread. I grew up on the Heinlein juveniles. They were wonderful. I still have a very soft spot for “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel,” which is one of the first SF books I ever read. (First were the Mushroom Planet books.)
Since a big market for YASF was school libraries, the publisher’s editor tried to make sure that each of his novels did not contain anything that would be considered “offensive” by school librarian standards anywhere in the country. As years past and standards changed, authors were then able to include scenes that they would have had to delete (or sanitize) previously.
This is my favorite Heinlein juvenile too, with “Have Spacesuit” coming in second. Probably “Between Planets,” “Space Cadet,” and “Tunnel in the Sky” next up in roughly that order.
Slight correction to a poster above, though: leasing convict labor is alive and well as a US practice in the 21st century. In the era of private prisons, it may be more deeply rooted than in Heinlein’s time.
@15: Poul Anderson’s Game of Empire is a blatant pastiche of Kim, down to a direct quote of the last line; CotG is enough subtler in its resonances that I hadn’t noticed them. Note also the large differences, e.g. Kim starting free and ending as a roving between-worlds agent rather than built into a hierarchy.
@20: the episodic nature of the story suggests it should be a TV miniseries (which also wouldn’t have to cut radically to fit) rather than a movie
@33: a lot of more recent successful authors would have made a trilogy; the form wasn’t prevalent in Heinlein’s time. Yes, there was the “Foundation Trilogy” — a pileup of ~9 stories in which a sort of novel is split between volumes 2 and 3. And Anderson wrote several books evolving a single character — but each book was complete, rather than leading directly into the one following.
Going back to the original thesis: there’s a gray area between dystopia and adventure. Most of Heinlein’s characters go through difficulties because there aren’t many ways an author can do an ordinary day (with or without peanuts) and hold the reader’s interest; many of them are exposed to evil people or societies for the same reason, but those people and societies are not the sole features of the built world, as in an out-and-out dystopia. I wonder whether the modern writers start with the feeling that anything less than “everybody’s mean to me!” won’t hold interest, or start with (often jury-rigged) dystopia because it’s easier to build than a more balanced world.
I think I am going to have to acquire and reread this one. Not sure why but for some reason this book never really resonated with me. After reading the article it is coming back to me but not in the same way say Starship Troopers or Podkayne of Mars or The Rolling Stones does.
One thing that did get to me in this article was this: After all, when Heinlein was growing up in Missouri in the early 20th century, there were still people in the region old enough to have been born into slavery, and many of the echoes of slavery still existed in practices like Jim Crow laws. This needs a few more words added to it and they should be to the effect of; or variations of, which were still in effect in a majority of the rest of the USA.
And for some reason references to the Jim Crow laws frustrate me because most people do not realize how widespread they were throughout the entire United States not just a few (typically Southern) states. That’s all I wanted to say about that.
Although there was this other book involving time travel and a nuclear explosion….. but I don’t think that was a juvenile.
@@@@@ 38, vinsentient
@@@@@35 Fernhunter In The Star Beast, do we know that there are humans spread to the stars? I think there are individual humans who have left the earth but it doesn’t seem as though there were a widespread movement to emigrate.
I gave The Star Beast a look-through. At the beginning, when Lummox is locked in a pit, the Chief of Police Dresier decided to kill him, no matter what the law said. First he tried to drown him. Next he tried to poison him. Neither worked.
“What did the Chief do next?”
“Nothing as yet. I asked O’Farrell to impress on Dreiser that he was likely to end up in a penal colony thirty light-years from Westville if he persisted in bucking the department.”
Would Heinlein be talking about a penal colony on a planet occupied only by space aliens? I don’t think so. Anything else aside, he has too much respect for the English language.
Later we hear:
“Force me to spill what I know, and one of two things happens. Either the Secretary General throws you to the wolves, or he decides to back you up and risk a vote of ‘no confidence’ from the Council. Which is what he would get. The Martian Commonwealth would gleefully lead the stampede, Venus would follow, the outer colonies and the associated xenic cultures would join in.”
I don’t see another way to read it than that those outer colonies are human colonies.
@carl Schierhorn:
Have Spacesuit is also the first SF I remember reading. Maybe it’s the name.
@52 You are entirely correct. I focused in on Missouri because I was addressing how close the remnants of slavery were to Heinlein’s upbringing, and did not mean to imply that the issue was confined to that region.
I’m not sure if the first SF book I ever read was John Christopher’s White Mountains (elementary school library) or Heinlein’s Red Planet (one of Dad’s; although I only recently figured out that many of his Heinlein paperbacks that I was reading back in the day were actually editions he’d bought a couple of years after I was born).
Making slavery part of the ‘normal’ world would be a mistake. Heinlein could have chosen a different way to show it, but slavery really should be depicted as something beyond the pale.
#57. Slavery is still going on– just in the US, there’s slavery in prisons and there’s slavery of people for commercial production, housework, and sex.
@58, Not to mention non western nation’s, which people don’t.
Heinlein’s juveniles are what made me a life-time SF reader. I loved everything he wrote before “Starship Troopers,” CotG being my all-time favorite. I read it repeatedly, every ten years or so. When I read “Troopers,” in college, I felt the change that ultimately turned out to mean we would never get another “Space Cadet” or “Starman Jones.” From “Time Enough for Love” onward, I read out of loyalty alone. (I never have finished two earlier works, “Farnham’s Freehold,” and “I Will Fear No Evil.”)
When people at conventions ask each other for our favorites, I always have to explain that I mean Rocket-Story Heinlein, not Libertarian-Freudian Heinlein. Turns out they are somewhat like Ginger and Mary Ann: nearly everyone has a preference, almost no-one likes both.
I guess that makes me kind of unique, Stevens. Mind you I can’t finish Fear No Evil either. Basically I’m a Juveniles fan who also adores Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers.
@61, If I had to pick two from his after-the-fall phase, they’d be the ones you named. It wasn’t an overnight change. But, by the time he got to “Number of the Beast” and “Sail Beyond the Sunset,” everything I loved about his work was no longer in it.
What did you think of those two?
Very little. Though I do think he finally did a pretty good job of writing a woman iin Sunset. Number got too darn confusing and all the incest in Sunset was a turnofft.
Just to let everyone know, the kickfstarter for an early version of Number of the Beast has funded, and it’s apparently much more like a normal novel than the published version.