In order to read The Rolling Stones (1952), I picked up To the Stars, one of four hardcover volumes from the Science Fiction Book Club collecting the Heinlein juveniles (they have not really been kept in print). Of course, this meant that I then went on to read the other three books collected in the volume: Between Planets (1951), Starman Jones (1953), and The Star Beast (1954).
To the Stars: Between Planets / The Rolling Stones / Starman Jones / The Star Beast |
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Collection published: 2004 Novels originally published: 1951-54 Acquired and read: August 2025 |
I was glad I did, because in particular, I really enjoyed Between Planets and Starman Jones. I like a good bildungsroman, and these are indeed good ones. Between Planets is about a young man named Don Harvey who is born in space to scientist parents from Earth and Venus; he spent some time on Venus as a child, and is now attending boarding school on Earth while his parents do scientific work on Mars, but he feels no particular allegiance to any planet. (Hence, one of the meanings of the book's title.) The book begins when war is about to break out between Earth and Venus, and Don must get off Earth before his Venus-born status makes too much trouble for him; his goal is to join his parents on Mars, but he is thwarted at every turn, and finds himself not really belonging anywhere.
After the light, episodic nature of The Rolling Stones, I wasn't expecting how heavy this one could get. In an early chapter, before leaving Earth, Don meets up with a friend of his parents who can't speak freely but indicates something is up; they both get taken in by the Earth police, and when he asks to go back to his friend, the police grimly inform him that, alas, the friend died of a "heart attack" while in police custody! I didn't see that one coming! Unable to commit himself to any side, Don does his best to remain above it all while focusing on his goal of reuniting with his parents even while being sent to Venus. There are a number of excellent scenes as he struggles to stay afloat in the midst of all the political (and, later, military) chaos around him.
A bildungsroman is all about growth, about a protagonist who figures out how society works and how to place himself in it. That's definitely what we get here from Don, and Heinlein keeps it pretty nuanced. Don's virtue is that he doesn't get swept up in the fervor of either side, Earth or Venus, even when he enlists in the Venus military... but always being "between planets" isn't a virtue either. Don must learn to believe in something, otherwise, what's the point? The last couple chapters are perhaps a bit of an anticlimax, but the final decision that Don must make leading up to them is very well done. I liked this book a lot, and sped right through it in a way that wasn't true of The Rolling Stones.
So too did I enjoy and speed through Starman Jones. Like Between Planets, the book has a rougher edge that was missing from The Rolling Stones; its main character, Max, lives with his stepmother on a farm. His father is dead, and he's keeping his promise to take care of his stepmother and the farm... but what he really yearns for is space. When his stepmother remarries to a lout who intends to sell the farm. Max runs away from home, hoping to take his late uncle's place in the guild of astronavigators. Unable to do so, he falls in with a con artist who helps him join a spaceship crew under false pretenses.
Like Between Planets, it's a novel of growth, and like Between Planets, it's surprisingly nuanced. It would be easy, I think, to write a book where Max had to renounce the lies he had told; it would also be easy, I think, to write a novel where Max never did. What Heinlein does in Starman Jones, though, is to weave a middle course, where Max has to learn when a man must lie and when a man must tell the truth in order to do right by both himself and others around him. It's got a bit of a Rudyard Kipling Captains Courageous vibe to it, which I very much appreciated, though here it's not so much that shipborn service makes you into a better person, as it reveals the better person you were always meant to be.
Both books are solid 1950s science fiction: we have space dragons, telepathic speech, weird life-forms, lots of details about FTL methods that require people to do math in their heads (computer? what's a computer?), future space politics, and so on. Heinlein is good at this kind of thing, and I think the worldbuilding holds up in the sense that these futures (plausibly the same future, actually) feel lived and complete, even if we know a lot of elements of it would no longer come to pass now; I can imagine handing these books off to my own children in a few years.
Compared to these two, I found The Star Beast a disappointment. Between Planets and Starman Jones are both bildungsromans... but if Star Beast is supposed to be one, then Heinlein did a very bad job of it. Johnnie has an alien space pet that the local community finds to be a menace, and the government wants to get hold of, but he doesn't really make any interesting decisions or grow in any kind of way; he just obstinately refuses to let anyone have his pet, Lummie. It's his girl friend (and later, girlfriend) who makes all the smart decisions on his behalf, and it's a middle-aged Earth bureaucrat who otherwise does all of the book's problem solving. I liked Mr. Kiku, the bureaucrat, a lot... but I feel like you've messed up if the best character in your juvenile novel is a middle-aged bureaucrat! When Johnnie gets rewarded at the end, it's almost nonsensical, because he didn't do anything to deserve it, like Don or Max did, he hasn't grown in any kind of way. And his reward is so disproportionate compared to theirs, too! I really struggled with this one, to be honest, the worst of the four in the volume.
Quite possibly, my reading of classic Hugo winners and related works is long and complicated enough (current estimated date of completion: 2052, current number of installments remaining: 93)... but based on how much I enjoyed To the Stars, I've decided to add the three other SFBC omnibuses of Heinlein juveniles to it, though it might be a couple years before I work them in.
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: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Four
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