Hugos Side-Step: Between Planets / Starman Jones / The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein

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
by Robert A. Heinlein

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

Hugos Side-Step: The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein

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
by Robert A. Heinlein

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

Hugos 1967: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Every year after I vote in the Hugo Awards, I read the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't previously read. This year, that brings me to the winner for 1967, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I picked up some five years ago (after really enjoying Heinlein's previous winner, Double Star) but never got around to.

If you're a fan of classic print sf, this book probably doesn't need a lot of introduction; it's set in the twenty-first century, when Earth's moon is a penal colony. The inhabitants of the moon decide to declare independence, and the novel follows the course of this revolution, told from the first-person perspective of Mannie, a maintenance worker who has a special relationship with the computer that runs the moon, which he nicknames Mike.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Originally published: 1966
Acquired: June 2020
Read: July 2025

I haven't read as much Heinlein as some, but I've read enough to know he was very much interested in what the obligations of government were to the people, what the obligations of people were to the government, and what the obligations of people were to each other; that's the key question in his earlier Hugo winners, Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land (neither of which I read as part of this project because I read them in high school), for example. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress reads as the ultimate extension of this line of thought, its most thorough explanation. I know enough about Heinlein to know he doesn't necessarily endorse every idea promulgated here, but more that he liked to explore a question and come at it from different angles. In The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Farah Mendlesohn says that the book reflects "both the degree to which Heinlein believed in the community..." (which certainly sets him apart from most would-be libertarians!) "...and the degree to which he was beginning to despair of the ability of Americans as individuals to understand their role in creating that community."

Like any Heinlein book, it's highly readable. Mannie is an affable narrator, and the characters are fun (so long as you can filter Wyoh through Heinlein's ideas about women, which admittedly not every reader is going to be able to do; I also enjoyed the role of Hazel, so I know I will get to read more about in The Rolling Stones, which I plan to read next). The lunar society is well thought out, which interesting worldbuilding, and I enjoyed the mechanics of the revolution being front and center. I once thought about doing a study of revolutionary violence in science fiction (I'm doubtful I ever will do this now), and this surely would have been front and center if I had.

Unfortunately, as the novel goes on, I found it gets duller. It struck me about halfway through that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a variant of a novel I'd read before—or rather, a novel I'd read before was a variant on it—Ursula K. Le Guin's The Disposessed, which is also about an anarchist revolution on a resource-deprived lunar colony of a largely capitalist planet. Not in the sense that Le Guin ripped off Heinlein or anything, but in the sense that it seems to me Le Guin was clearly in dialogue with Heinlein. (I'm not the first person to make this connection, of course; there's a 1994 SFS article by Donna Glee Williams with the great line, "The similarities are impressive. Why then does Heinlein's book inspire some readers to run out, buy a gun, and vote Republican, while Le Guin's book opposes it (non-violently, of course) on every point?") The most noteworthy comparison to me was that, in Le Guin's book, everything is hard. Hard because of the realities of life on a hardscrabble satellite of course (and Le Guin even makes things easier for her anarchists by giving Anarres a breathable atmosphere), but also hard because taking political ideals and putting them into practice is never easy for any number of reasons: faults of logic, contingency, aspects of human nature.

In MIHM, though, nothing is hard, because you have Mike, the supercomputer who always knows the answer. Though some would argue the role is also distributed to the professor, Mike is probably the most extreme example I can imagine of Heinlein's "competent man," the person who can figure out anything and make it happen. You are never in doubt the revolution will succeed, because you soon come to realize that Mike will have the solution to every problem. To me, it feels like an admission that making a new society is very difficult, but instead of making that the topic of the novel, as Le Guin did, Heinlein elides it by having Mike solve every problem. So though MIHM remains readable throughout, because Heinlein is a strong writer, the book kind of got boring as it progressed.

Heinlein won the Best Novel Hugo Award four times, and this was the last of them. He would be a finalist three more times, though, in 1974 (Time Enough for Love), 1983 (Friday), and 1985 (Job). Of those, I've read Friday, and while it just predates when I took up book-blogging, so I have no review of it, I remember finding it overly long, aimless, and self-indulgent; Mendlesohn says that Moon is a Harsh Mistress is "short, sharp and punchy, the very last of Heinlein's novels to be so." In a phenomenon we continue to see in the present day, once a writer gets onto the Hugo ballot a few times, they often continue to recur on it even once they've passed the point where they're doing anything Hugo-worthy.

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 Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein

Hugos 1956: Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein

Trade paperback, 208 pages
Published 2013 (originally 1956)
Acquired and read August 2019

Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein

I was surprised how much I liked this book. It's a relatively simple and predictable plot: Lorenzo Smythe is an actor hired to impersonate a politician at a key political moment. Only thing is, the politician is pro-Martian, and Smythe is racist against Martians. Plus, things kind of spiral out of control, and the impersonation keeps going on longer and longer...

I was rarely surprised by what happened, but often surprised by how much I felt it regardless. This is a story of a man coming to understand what it means to be a good person, to stand for something bigger than the self. It's actually quite moving in parts, and dreadfully earnest, but earnest in the sense that you want people like this to be out there. But it's also not naïve (there are no Pollyannas here), and even if the set-up is contrived, Heinlein imbues it with enough procedural and character detail to make it work. For example, I liked the idea of the Farleyfile, but also the way in which it ultimately let Lorenzo down made sense.

I've read Heinlein before, of course, but everything I've read previously came from his imperial phase (Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers) or from his twilight era (Friday). I've never read anything from his early career before, when he was making his name as a solid, successful writer, but Double Star makes me want to read more of his early stuff. This is solidly successful sf; I zipped through the whole book in about an evening, and I enjoyed every word of it.