So I’ve been re-reading various Heinlein “juveniles”, the books he published between 1947 and 1958 with Scribner’s that were written for young male readers. (Starship Troopers, published in 1959, is sometimes regarded as belonging to this group, but I think it’s different enough in its feel that it doesn’t count, a view that others share.
As with many of these re-reads, I don’t have a lot to say that hasn’t been said already by writers at Tor.com and elsewhere. It’s easy to get hung up on the middle-American white maleness of all of these books—if you were going to teach an American Studies course on the 1950s and the Pax Americana, Space Cadet would be as good a book as any to use. The Space Patrol of that book is international (in fact, interplanetary) but it’s very much the way that postwar American leaders wanted to imagine the U.S. in the world, as a benevolent peacekeeper with technical, scientific and cultural expertise sufficient to solve any problem.
But even if you get hung up on that, it’s easy to see why some men who read the books remained deeply attached to the science fiction that Heinlein perfected in these twelve books. The central character is typically a boy who imagines himself as average or normal—he’s often got a pal who is more of a wiseass or more palpably clever—but who has a good heart, a humble bearing, and a lot of understated courage. There’s often a male antagonist—sometimes a peer, sometimes a teacher or leader—who is vain, authoritarian, greedy, and/or pretentious and who often seems to be winning out for much of the story, but the hero and his friends invariably triumph, usually through trust in one another and often through making a kind of low-key democratic community that can stand against the aristocratic or authoritarian attitudes of their unworthy enemies. You can see the family tree of his characters well enough—a little bit of Red Badge of Courage, a little bit of Horatio Alger, some Tom Sawyer and Natty Bumppo, some Treasure Island, re-situated in space.
When I re-read them as a group, I’m most drawn to the books where the situation is a bit more sharply drawn and the stakes are a bit higher and the corniness tuned down just a notch—often books where the cranky, laborious libertarianism of Heinlein’s late career peeks through in a much more appealing fashion. So Between Planets, for example, has an oppressive Earth government seeking to violently subjugate free human-alien cultures on on Venus and Mars, and the main character’s arc remains kind of enthralling—he goes from being a complete innocent who is attending a boarding school on Earth to being a hardened insurgent on Venus. Red Planet is mostly about a boy and his alien Martian friend (whom he treats as a pet, but as we eventually discover, that’s not quite right) that can be read as a subtle reckoning with settler colonialism (the Martians come close to deciding to kill all humans on the planet, which they could do without any fuss or regret if need be).
I think my favorite remains Tunnel in the Sky, which is Heinlein’s optimistic response to Lord of the Flies, published the year before. Humanity is expanding throughout the galaxy via teleportation gates, desperately trying to escape an overcrowded and environmentally degraded Earth, and one professional pathway now open to young people is to be the leader of a pioneer group, trained in survival. For the final exam, high schoolers and college students studying survival are dropped on an unknown, unsettled planet where they have to stay alive for a week with minimal gear. No holds barred—they can attack each other if they so desire.
The hero is a standard Heinlein boy—stubborn, moral, not especially gifted, lucky, and a leader despite himself. When the young people taking the test realize something’s gone wrong and they are not being recalled at the end, they form a new society and learn to cope with the dangers and hardships of their new home. Tunnel has all the requisite squickiness of the juveniles in terms of its referents—these are colonial settlers (though thank god in this book there’s no intelligent aliens for them to fight, displace or reckon with), with the hero at the end of the book heading out on a wagon train as a scout, it’s an early example of Heinlein’s celebration of highly armed and militarized individuality, and so on. But I still like it, with some feelings of shame, because the stakes feel very real, because the optimism of Heinlein’s response to Golding, and most of all because it’s really the only one of the juveniles where women get to be something close to fully-realized characters in their own right.
In most of the juveniles, the male protagonist is somewhat stolidly uninterested in romance and is deeply homosocial (e.g., his inner voice frequently narrates how he’s just interested in hanging out with male friends). There’s often a love interest hanging around the edges but she’s often quiet or somewhat passive and her romantic interest in the hero only gets articulated near the end of the book. Obviously, some of this is to preserve the chasteness required for “books for boys”—it’s a lot like the studied sexlessness of the Hardy Boys with their girlfriends. There are a few counter-examples—the love interest of The Star Beast is a brash, quick-talking, fast-thinking character whose attachment to the (unknowing) hero is very plain from the outset.
But in Tunnel, women in the survival course are treated by the narrative as equals, though the male protagonist never quite shakes his own paternalism. (And Heinlein’s paternalism also suffuses everything, regardless of his intent.) As the survivors make a democratic community together, many of them form romantic bonds and a number of them have children together. It has a whiff of the sexual libertarianism and gender egalitarianism that Heinlein would commit to in his later writing (though there’s no hint of the homosexuality that he would try, somewhat awkwardly, to leave room for later on). It’s not at all clear in the book as I re-read, but Heinlein also insisted in a later letter that the main character, Rod Walker, was Black—and at least one other major character clearly is. (The later audio version cover I feature here reflects that understanding, unlike the DAW edition that I own, where Rod is stolidly white.) Rod is not the most appealing of Heinlein’s juvenile protagonists, but even that is actually almost a strength of the book—his interior sense of himself as inexpressive and mediocre raises an interesting question about where his political charisma within the community is coming from, which his more articulate friends (men and women) actually reflect on a few times.
I’ve tried re-reading Heinlein’s later post-juvenile works like Stranger in a Strange Land, Glory Road and Time Enough for Love and the plain truth is that they’re just not very good. They don’t hold up at all, though there are some revisions and re-iterations of character templates from the juveniles that I like. (Jubal Harshaw, for example, whose ‘family resemblance’ to Hazel Stone in The Rolling Stones was recognized by Heinlein himself in his late-career metafiction). But the juveniles still read well and they’ve got just enough going on sometimes in terms of themes and characters that they rise above dull mechanistic YA work from the same era (Tom Swift etc.).
IMHO, neither _Red Planet_ nor _Between Planets_ are at all **subtle** reckonings with settler colonialism and imperialism...
& in my view, at least, _Space Cadet_ is best (although not necessarily most accurately) read as Heinlein's anticipatory refutation of _Starship Troopers_. The Patrol's attitude toward the MI and Johnny Rico is very clear, and not at all flattering...