If I read and enjoy a Hugo-winning novel, I like to follow that up with related books by the same author. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1967, but it was actually a prequel of sorts to one of his earlier juveniles, The Rolling Stones (1952), a novel my wife actually remembers reading and enjoying as a kid. The Rolling Stones is about a family taking a trip around the solar system in their own spaceship: fifteen-year-old twins Castor and Pollux, their parents Roger (a writer) and Edith (a doctor), their older sister Meade, their baby brother Lowell, and their grandmother Hazel. We're told Hazel was a key figure in the revolution for Lunar independence, even helping write the constitution—and she appears as a minor character in exactly that role in MIHM.
To the Stars: Between Planets / The Rolling Stones / Starman Jones / The Star Beast |
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Collection published: 2004 Novel originally published: 1952 Acquired and read: August 2025 |
It's a fun book but not as sharp, I think, as some of the other Heinlein bildungsromans I have read (a category that would include his juveniles, but also books like Double Star and Starship Troopers, I would argue)... although actually, it's not clear to me that Heinlein is really going for a bildungsroman here the way he is in some other juveniles. Castor and Pollux are bright kids who want to do adult things, overestimating their own abilities; they want to go out on their own in a spaceship. Their parents aren't into this, but decide to go on a whole trip as a family. Basically the format of the book is that the family goes some place, there's some kind of scrape, they then extricate from it and move on. These include helping a nearby passenger liner deal with space plague, getting bicycles through customs on Mars, dealing with trade duties in the asteroid belt, and so on. While Castor and Pollux often overestimate their abilities (particularly at the end of the novel, where they very nearly kill their grandmother and kid sibling), the novel mostly seems to come at them from the outside, without the kind of emphasis on their interiority that you get in Heinlein bildungsomans like Double Star or Between Planets or Starman Jones. It's more focused on dialogue and action than personality.
To be fair, I don't think Heinlein was going for this. I could be wrong, of course, but the tone of it seems much lighter than his other books that I've read, and probably also the target audience younger. But that did mean there wasn't quite as much here to sustain my interest. I found it quite readable, but at his best, Heinlein is readable and deep. Still, the world is—as usual for Heinlein—well thought out. He makes the tax implications of importing bicycles both plausible and interesting! The family interactions are fun, and of course I enjoyed Hazel; I don't see how anyone couldn't. As a complaining dad myself, I definitely vibed with Roger (though I would have even before becoming a dad). To be honest, that's probably the book's problem, in that I think all the adult family members are more interesting than Castor and Pollux. Is that really what you want in a "juvenile"? It's certainly not what you want in a bildungsroman!
One of the subplots here is that Roger writes a weekly radio serial (later, Hazel takes it over); it make me think that the episodic, dialogue-heavy nature of this very book would make it work well as a radio drama. Adapt it as a podcast, someone!
Other thoughts:
- I had known that, notoriously, Star Trek's tribbles were a rip-off of Heinlein's flat cats. I had not realized quite how much of a rip-off! I guess I had assumed that flat cats (because of the name) were more catlike, but no, they are physically exactly like tribbles... or rather, the other way around. The way the twins end up with a flat cat is basically exactly how it goes down in "The Trouble with Tribbles" too.
- I found the treatment of the twins' older sister, Meade, quite weird. At the end of the book, we're told she's of "marrying height"! James David Nicoll sums up the issues well in his review.
- When I got to the section set in the asteroid belt, I was like, "Surely James S.A. Corey read this." Not that The Expanse is ripping it off or anything, but the world of Corey's Belters feels like a natural extrapolation from it... and of course, the Expanse books have that same interest in orbital mechanics you see here. (I can't find a lot of specific stuff about Heinlein's influence on them, but it is occasionally mentioned.)
I will say my whole reason for reading this book now was kind of a lie. The backstory given for Hazel here is largely incompatible with the one that we actually see in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress! According to Rolling Stones, Hazel was a single mother on Earth, working as an engineer when she ran into a glass ceiling, less competent men being promoted above her, such that she made more money working in a casino; she emigrated to the Moon to get better opportunities for her and her son Roger. But in MIHM, she is a teenager when she gets swept up in the revolution, no abortive engineering career or kid she's raising on her own anywhere in sight!
(One thing I've noticed through this project of reading 1950s and '60s sf is the authors were clearly less hung up on "continuity" than contemporary ones. Authors were happy to reuse elements between stories without it meaning that all their books were set in the same "universe"; you see much the same thing in Philip K. Dick, whose works often have common worldbuilding elements but rarely line up in the details.)
I obtained my copy as part of an omnibus from the Science Fiction Book Club; from 2002 to 2006, the SFBC released all of Heinlein's juveniles in a series of four hardcover volumes. It's an attractive volume, and I'm going to pick up the lot of them now. Before then, though, I'll read the other three novels collected in this one.
I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: Between Planets / Starman Jones / The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein
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