Space Cadets
“You take someone else, though. Someone like Bob Haldeman, Henry. He doesn’t grok these things.” Pooch indicated his forehead to show what he meant, and Bell smiled again, to show loyalty in return. “He lacks the right receptors. He’s gotten onto the wrong track.”
Leave it to Pooch to borrow a word from Robert Heinlein’s classic 1961 sci-fi novel, Stranger in a Strange Land; to “grok” means to understand completely. That book was a hippie favorite for its emphasis on free love, spirituality, and individualism. Not that I see Pooch as an inveterate sci-fi reader. No character in SPLIT THIRTY would have had more than a glancing familiarity with the stuff (with these provisos: Bell thinks that Walton is carrying around “a piece of science fiction garbage,” so Stevie himself might have read some-- only fitting for a boy growing up in the land of the aerospace industry-- and I bet that Bertie Kahn had seen Kubrick’s 2001 at least once).
Like many other pre-teens (male division), though, I went through a phase of sci-fi reading myself. It was my personal bridge between children’s literature and the lower rungs of Steinbeck and Hemingway; I also never made it past Arthur C. Clarke. But because it served that purpose in my life, I’ve always kept a sentimental fondness for it (bothering to read Stranger in a Strange Land in college, for instance, which was just the right time to hit upon that book). And last summer, I found a stack of Heinlein paperbacks in the outdoor stalls of the Brattle Book Store in Boston, I picked out a few of them (for the covers, of course), I put up with the clerk’s snobbish disdain for me at the cash register, and I finally read them, just this past week.
It was hardly a scientific sampling of his work: Space Cadet from 1948, Red Planet from 1949, and Between Planets from 1951. And they were all of a piece, besides. Cardboard characters, lots of focus on the mechanics of gravity, a great deal of corny slang. Yet I enjoyed them pretty completely, and each one surprised me. Between Planets seethes with a distrust of authority and the joy of combat. Red Planet not only idealizes colonial revolt; it also touches on the same type of quasi-religious mysticism and love of the alien that made Stranger in a Strange Land so popular twenty years later. And Space Cadet strikes me as quietly profound. It features a population that wholly distrusts its rulers; rulers who consider themselves better than the population; and their entirely valid reasons for feeling that way. It does not resolve the conflict between democracy and professionalism; it simply presents it as a post-war fact.
“Always beware when amateurs get involved,” Bell warns Walton. “Government is a difficult business.” And it isn’t kid stuff, either. Not on Venus, and not on Earth.
Leave it to Pooch to borrow a word from Robert Heinlein’s classic 1961 sci-fi novel, Stranger in a Strange Land; to “grok” means to understand completely. That book was a hippie favorite for its emphasis on free love, spirituality, and individualism. Not that I see Pooch as an inveterate sci-fi reader. No character in SPLIT THIRTY would have had more than a glancing familiarity with the stuff (with these provisos: Bell thinks that Walton is carrying around “a piece of science fiction garbage,” so Stevie himself might have read some-- only fitting for a boy growing up in the land of the aerospace industry-- and I bet that Bertie Kahn had seen Kubrick’s 2001 at least once).
Like many other pre-teens (male division), though, I went through a phase of sci-fi reading myself. It was my personal bridge between children’s literature and the lower rungs of Steinbeck and Hemingway; I also never made it past Arthur C. Clarke. But because it served that purpose in my life, I’ve always kept a sentimental fondness for it (bothering to read Stranger in a Strange Land in college, for instance, which was just the right time to hit upon that book). And last summer, I found a stack of Heinlein paperbacks in the outdoor stalls of the Brattle Book Store in Boston, I picked out a few of them (for the covers, of course), I put up with the clerk’s snobbish disdain for me at the cash register, and I finally read them, just this past week.
It was hardly a scientific sampling of his work: Space Cadet from 1948, Red Planet from 1949, and Between Planets from 1951. And they were all of a piece, besides. Cardboard characters, lots of focus on the mechanics of gravity, a great deal of corny slang. Yet I enjoyed them pretty completely, and each one surprised me. Between Planets seethes with a distrust of authority and the joy of combat. Red Planet not only idealizes colonial revolt; it also touches on the same type of quasi-religious mysticism and love of the alien that made Stranger in a Strange Land so popular twenty years later. And Space Cadet strikes me as quietly profound. It features a population that wholly distrusts its rulers; rulers who consider themselves better than the population; and their entirely valid reasons for feeling that way. It does not resolve the conflict between democracy and professionalism; it simply presents it as a post-war fact.
“Always beware when amateurs get involved,” Bell warns Walton. “Government is a difficult business.” And it isn’t kid stuff, either. Not on Venus, and not on Earth.
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