In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
For his second juvenile novel, written in 1948, Robert Heinlein decided to follow the old dictum “write what you know.” As a 1929 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, it would have been obvious to him that the story of an academy cadet would make a great plot for a juvenile novel. All he had to do was set it in the future. The book, rather unimaginatively entitled Space Cadet, picks up on some of the themes of Rocket Ship Galileo, with the United Nations Interplanetary Patrol using advanced versions the first tale’s atomic rocket, and tasked with controlling the atomic bombs staged in orbit that keep peace on the planet. It is not a direct sequel, as the “Nazis in Space” plot of the previous book has been dropped, but it does pick up on many of the same themes.
I had not read Space Cadet in my youth, and only got around to reading it sometime in the last decade or so. It may have had something to do with occasionally being called a “space cadet” myself, as over the years (possibly because of TV shows like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet) the term had become a pejorative for someone not in touch with reality. And as a youngster whose nose was often in a science fiction book, I must admit the term did fit. In my first reading, I was not impressed, as the book is laden with descriptions of life in space that might have been new and interesting when the book was written in 1948, but by the 21st century had become rather predictable. But I recently found it available in an excellent full cast reading from Bruce Coville and the people at Full Cast Audio, which gives you the full text of the book with a narrator, but with all the dialogue presented by a troupe of voice actors. This time around, I found the story much more engaging. Whereas before I wanted to get past the Academy part and onto the good stuff, this time I was willing to give Heinlein, and his ideas about how training and education should be conducted, more serious attention.
Of course, reviewing a book you listened to poses some challenges. It is hard to flip back and forth among the pages to check for names and events you want to mention. So I set out to find a physical copy. The folks at my local used bookstore find that Heinlein works leave the shelves as soon as they come in. My son and I own a number of Heinlein’s juveniles, but not this one. And while some Heinlein books are easy to purchase on the internet, many of his juveniles are only available for an unreasonable price. So I decided to renew my acquaintance with my local library and signed up for a new library card. The Heinlein books on their shelves were limited, but computers put the entire catalog of every library in the state at my fingertips, and soon a copy was on order from the inter-library loan system. I was expecting an old and tattered edition, but was surprised to find a more recent 2005 reprint from Tor Books with a nice cover by accomplished science fiction illustrator Vincent Di Fate.
About the Author
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) was one of America’s most widely known science fiction authors, frequently referred to as the Dean of Science Fiction. I have often reviewed his work in this column, including Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, “Destination Moon” (contained in the collection Three Times Infinity), The Pursuit of the Pankera/The Number of the Beast, and Glory Road. From 1947 to 1958, he also wrote a series of a dozen juvenile novels for Charles Scribner’s Sons, which at the time had a young adult line focused on publishing science fiction novels targeted at young boys. These novels include a wide variety of tales, and contain some of Heinlein’s best work (I’ve added links for the books I’ve already reviewed in this column): Rocket Ship Galileo, Space Cadet, Red Planet, Farmer in the Sky, Between Planets, The Rolling Stones, Starman Jones, The Star Beast, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Have Spacesuit Will Travel. This is not the first time Space Cadet has been discussed on Tor.com, as the inimitable Jo Walton looked at it over a decade ago.
School Days
One of the main themes of what used to be called juvenile fiction, and is now referred to as young adult fiction, is the protagonist’s coming of age. There is a whole literary genre of what is called the “bildungsroman,” or stories that follow the formation or education of a person as they make the transition from childhood to adulthood. In Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey, this transition fits into the stages of departure and initiation for the hero or heroine. Leaving home and going away to a school provides the perfect setting for a character to be removed from the familiar comforts of their youth, tried and tested, and thrust into the world of adulthood.
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Some Desperate Glory
As a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, this would have been readily apparent to Robert Heinlein. Moreover, he would have also observed that the traditions of military service would likely ensure that the academies of the future would be similar, in many ways, to those of the past. I myself graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 1977, and when reading about academy life in the decades gone by, or reading accounts of academy life today, while there are some aspects that have certainly changed over time, much remains the same.
The academy in Heinlein’s Space Cadet produces officers for a United Nations Interplanetary Patrol, charged with keeping the peace, and most importantly, with maintaining a network of orbital nuclear weapons that deter nations on Earth from going to war. Heinlein makes it clear that this is an international organization, drawing personnel from all nations, religions, and races. One thing he missed in imagining this future was the presence of women. Women serving in a combat organization was still far from becoming a reality in the 1940s, and was still met with stiff resistance when the first female cadets reported in the senior year of my own Coast Guard Academy service (the number of female cadets has since grown, with the corps of cadets now consisting of 38 percent women).
What Heinlein gets right based in his own experience (and which gives the book a grounding in realism), is the process of academy training. Old possessions are taken away, and uniforms are issued. There is a steady stream of new information to be learned, and new customs with which to conform. There is a profusion of tests, examinations, and evaluations. The cadets are thrust together with others from different states, nations, and in this case, even planets, and new friendships are forged. Cadets who are accustomed to being among the smartest and most capable person in the room now find themselves to be average, or struggle to keep up. There are grueling physical challenges, which in the Interplanetary Patrol Academy include exposure to high acceleration and zero gravity, piloting, and learning to function in space suits. Because of the challenges, attrition rates are high, and the cadets gradually leave behind their old identities and begin to see themselves as part of a larger organization. It was impossible for me to read this part of the book without flashing back to my own academy experience.
Some parts of Space Cadet deliberately diverge from past practices. Heinlein had a lot of opinions about the weaknesses of traditional public education in America, and often aired those opinions in his juveniles. The book lingers on how cadets are educated, in a largely self-directed manner. The length of the Academy program is not fixed, and being a cadet may also include long cruises aboard Patrol ships in a training status.
Space Cadet
The book opens with Matthew Dodson re-reading a letter appointing him a cadet in the Interplanetary Patrol, as he travels to report to the Commandant, Terra Base, located in Santa Barbara in the North American Union. He immediately meets another cadet, Bill “Tex” Jarman, who will become a friend serving with him throughout the book. Upon their arrival, they find a motto over the door in Latin, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” or “Who will guard the guards?” a crucial issue for a force that controls the ultimate weapons of the age. They meet Oscar Jensen and Pierre Armand. It turns out Oscar is from the colony on Venus, and Pierre, or Pete, is from Ganymede. The processing is intense and impersonal; even the meals are highly structured. Then come tests—some physical, some mental, and more than a few psychological. Matt meets the irritating and opinionated Girard Burke, a rich kid who resists all efforts to mold him into a member of the Patrol. Matt also hears what will be the first of far too many stories about Tex’s colorful Uncle Bodie.
As the boys explore the museum, they find an exhibit dedicated to a hero of the Patrol, Lieutenant Ezra Dahlquist, who prevented a coup d’etat, known as the “Revolt of the Colonels,” where a cabal of officers attempted to take control of atomic weapons that the United Nations, and its nascent Interplanetary Patrol, had staged on the moon. Dahlquist defied these illegal orders and sacrificed his life by sabotaging the highly radioactive bombs. [This is a reference to one of my favorite Heinlein stories, “The Long Watch,” which interestingly enough, had not yet been published, only appearing in 1949 in American Legion Magazine. If you have never read that inspiring story of duty and sacrifice, you can find it available to read for free here, in the Baen Free Library.]
At the next day’s breakfast, Matt finds the attrition rate has been staggering, and the survivors of three different tables now fit at one. They go over the “bumps,” a high-speed elevator system that simulates the effects of high G’s and zero gravity. The cadets then go on a short sub-orbital hop in a chemical rocket. At the end of the day, Matt lingers to watch other rockets, and sees one crash, reminding him that the course he has undertaken can be dangerous. He encounters Burke again, who is convinced the crash was a hoax, perpetrated as part of the psychological testing the cadets are receiving. They then participate in their first muster, and find the patrol takes seriously the heroes who have been lost while performing their missions. If it wasn’t obvious before, Burke is more a straw man than a character, set up by Heinlein to represent all that is wrong with people who do not accept the wisdom of the Patrol and its customs. Shortly thereafter, Burke resigns from the Academy to take command of one of his rich father’s merchant rocket ships.
Their education then shifts into orbit, aboard the school ship PRS James Randolph, and Heinlein takes the opportunity to walk the reader through the basics of space travel, acceleration, functioning in zero gravity, and the physics of geosynchronous orbits. The boys also learn more about military culture and traditions, an important part of the process. Matt initially struggles with his studies, but eventually finds his footing. Eventually, a leave at home makes him realize how much he has changed, as he finds it jarring to be back among the surroundings of his youth.
The story shifts again as Matt, Tex, Oscar, and Pete head out on PRS Aes Triplex for a cadet cruise that turns into an incredibly action-packed journey (though Heinlein still takes plenty of time to paint a convincing picture of life on a spacecraft, where because of weight and space limitations, crews are small, and everyone aboard has a host of collateral duties). Their first destination is the asteroid belt, a mission to find a missing Patrol ship, PRS Pathfinder, which has not responded to radio calls for over six months. They find Pathfinder, its crew dead because of a freak accident, and they split the crew in order to bring her home, giving the cadets aboard Aes Triplex more responsibilities.
On their way home, Aes Triplex receives a call. There is a merchant rocket ship in distress on Venus, and theirs is the only Patrol vessel within range to assist. Their landing craft crashes in the muddy marshes of the planet, and they are taken prisoner by the Venusians, in this book portrayed as intelligent semi-aquatic creatures who live in a matriarchal society (unlike the later book Between Planets, where Venusians are portrayed rather charmingly as large intelligent dragons). And, in one of those coincidences that would be improbable in real life (but authors seem to find rather convenient), we discover that the captain of the merchant ship who has created an interplanetary incident is none other than Burke, the cadet who never fit in. There are both diplomatic and engineering challenges to overcome before they can fly to safety, and the cadets are aided by the intriguing Venusians, at first assumed to be pre-industrial, but who turn out quite adept with technologies humans have not mastered.
Heinlein’s decision to “write what you know” paid off, as this book is one of the strongest of the juveniles. His Interplanetary Patrol is an idealized organization, with a strong focus on ethics and character. His own military career was cut short only five years after his commissioning by illness, and as is often the case with those whose military careers ended due to situations beyond their control, his views of military life are tinged with a bit of nostalgia. While Heinlein has plenty of opinions and thoughts to air in this book, the “preaching” doesn’t get in the way of the story, because there is also plenty of action to keep the reader engaged.
Final Thoughts
In this second juvenile, you begin to see Heinlein hitting his stride and becoming more comfortable with writing for a younger audience. Space Cadet is an enjoyable adventure tale, with the realistic portrayal of academy life grounding an adventure story whose focus is outer space. It is a bit dated in parts (most notably in not anticipating the presence of women in the military, and assuming a habitable Venus), but holds up pretty well for modern times. And now, I’m interested in your impressions: If you’ve read it, what did you think of the book? And what other classic coming of age stories have you enjoyed reading?
Alan Brown has been a science fiction fan for over five decades, especially fiction that deals with science, military matters, exploration and adventure.
My copy is a hardcover library edition bought off the dollar table a few decades ago
This is the book that started my lifetime of SF reading in 1967.
I actually stumbled across Stand By For Mars. The first Tom Corbett book. The similarities are very clear, and I believe that Heinlein had done part in the original Rockwell books.
I read this when I was in junior high, in the late 1960s, when I was expanding my reading of SFF beyond The Hobbit and Andre Norton to … pretty much anything else I could find. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is my favorite Heinlein juvenile but this one is a close second and I remember it fondly and well. At some point 20 years ago or so I wanted to reread it and bought a paperback, and was pleased to see it had held up pretty well. It’s probably still on a shelf in the basement and now you’ve made me feel like reading it again.
OP: Is this the one where one of the tests is instructions to press a button when a certain pattern of lights appears and our protagonist figures out it’s impossible? I don’t remember which book, but that one has stayed in my memory far longer than any other specific scene from his juveniles, in spite of the fact that I enjoyed them all.
@5: Yes, it is – and when Matt tells the proctor that he thinks there’s something screwy with the test, the first thing they do is look at the clock – suggesting that the real test is about how long it takes him to figure that out.
@5 Yes, one of the “tests” involves a complicated series of instructions involving buttons and switches and lights and “gates,” which turns out to be so written that it is impossible to make any score. When Matt points this out to the proctor, thinking there is something “wrong” with the instructions, he’s told the test is over (it was apparently about how carefully a candidate would follow directions). There was another test where he was supposed to drop beans in a bottle with his eyes closed, and was mortified about how badly he’d done. When turning in his nearly empty bottle, he asked what was to keep someone from cheating, and was told, “Nothing.” Again, the test wasn’t about what was being tested.
One thing that I think makes the novel stand up well is that Matt is no Mary Sue; he’s by no means the brightest or most physically fit cadet, makes mistakes, has a tough time, and contemplates resigning and joining the Space Marines instead. And during their adventures on Venus, it’s his fellow cadet, Oscar, who’s in charge, and Matt has to accept his authority.
As I recall, Heinlein and his wife actually did the calculations for the orbital dynamics in this book. By hand, on huge sheets of butcher’s paper. It took them days. Have to admire his efforts to get right what he could get right.
It’s also interesting that here we see Heinlein advocating international organizations with teeth. I think that his attitude changed later in life.
Excellent article, thanks. Space Cadet isn’t his very best juvenile, but it’s one of the best, and the balance between didactic explanation and action and character development is great. If I remember correctly, there’s a scene where Matt & his dad are watching one of the artificial satellites fly over in the evening, and I always think of it when I watch the ISS — I get emails from NASA telling me when to look.
Space Cadet, along with some Andre Norton, was my intro to SF. A few things I loved–
The Four are always part of roll call.
Matt being assigned to shepherd new cadets, not long after he was a new cadet himself
The intelligence of the aliens.
I suspect I read Rocket Ship Galileo before this, and possibly Farmer in the Sky, but despite it being almost 60 years ago I remember this well — particularly the idea of a global police force with independence (despite Matt’s father being certain that the U.S. had enough sway to never be disciplined) as well as teeth. I also remember the asceticism, vs the swagger of the Space Marines; he had some idea of what it would take to make an honest police force in control of ultimate weapons. (I wonder whether he actually wrote “The Long Watch” first but saw the buyer waiting for the perfect slot — common in magazines IIUC — where the novel was contracted, written, and published on a schedule; he probably wouldn’t have cared about the delay as long as he got paid on purchase, which was how Campbell and IIUC the slicks operated.)
AFAIK, none of the service academies have ever washed out people at anything like the rate shown here; I wonder whether RAH thought many of his fellow officers were unqualified, or just not physically fit enough, or that the current system would work better if an “appointment” (a privilege of elected federal representatives IIUC) were just a chance to try rather than a guarantee.
I was not nearly aware enough when I first read this to notice the exclusion of women as remarkable; I wonder how much of that was him and how much was the publisher assuming a blinkered market, since he was already starting to write about women taking on traditionally-male roles (e.g. construction). I also wonder how many fighter pilots choked on Starship Troopers saying a decade later that women were better pilots.
Always liked this book. I read it first as a teen and I could relate to Matt’s wide-eyed innocence. Tex is was a little cartoonish but probably a needed break of humor in the story. My favorites were “Farmer in the Sky” and “ Citizen of the Galaxy “, but this one is easy to read and like.
I also wonder how many fighter pilots choked on Starship Troopers saying a decade later that women were better pilots.
Women as pilots wasn’t maybe so much of a stretch for a man of Heinlein’s generation. Aviatrices (yes, real word) like Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart were world-famous – “women can fly as well as men” wouldn’t have been a wildly controversial thing to say. And the female pilots we see in Starship Troopers are not fighter pilots, as far as we know; the Rodger Young’s designation is “Tactical Fleet Corvette Transport”, its main role is to drop MI, and I’m not even sure if it has any weapons at all.
AFAIK, none of the service academies have ever washed out people at anything like the rate shown here
What about pilot training? That seems a closer match – Matt is learning to fly, after all.
In WW2, 50% of USAAF pilot candidates – so, people who had already passed medical examinations and aptitude tests – were not expected to make it through pre-flight, primary flight and advanced flight training. I’d say that’s a closer match to Matt’s situation. A modern Royal Marine officer candidate has a roughly 2% chance of becoming a Royal Marine officer once you take into account dropout rate during pre-commando training, dropouts during the commando course, and simple failure to get selected for one of the very few officer slots each year.
The idea of atomic weapons being under the control of an international peacekeeping organisation was very popular in the late 1940s and was briefly the official policy of the US government, but the USSR refused to support it, preferring to build its own.
In addition to “Venus is habitable”, one big prediction he got right, and one he got wrong:
Right: Matt has a mobile phone, and it rings at embarrassing moments when he’s in public. Not bad for 1947!
Wrong: all the spaceships spend considerable time out of radio range of Earth! I suppose that’s for plot reasons, because he wanted the vibe of being out at sea on your own so the cadets would have to solve their own problems rather than yelling for help from Mission Control, but he should have been able to do a bit of inverse-square law mathematics.
I’d like to see a feminist analysis which takes a look at the effect of having a female dominant (or at least only female-visible) alien species which is better at some science than humanity.
Generally speaking, Heinlein was good at humans and aliens living with each other on more or less equal terms, or aliens in a position of superiority but not tyranny.
I believe Podkayne was the last novel with aliens which were somewhat sapient. I don’t know why he dropped the theme.
There’s Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters for fear of aliens, and I guess almost Stranger in a Strange Land, but on the other side, there’s Citizen of the Galaxy, Red Planet, “We Also Walk Dogs”, Between Planets, Double Star, and probably more than I’m thinking of.
ajay@13: The idea of atomic weapons being under the control of an international peacekeeping organisation was very popular in the late 1940s and was briefly the official policy of the US government, but the USSR refused to support it, preferring to build its own.
The Baruch Plan was opposed by the USSR because they felt it allowed the US to retain its monopoly on atomic weapons; they proposed that the US eliminate its nuclear weapons before any agreement to international control over atomic/nuclear energy and weaponry. The US refused to do so, and we were off to the races.
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OT:
@6: it was apparently about how carefully a candidate would follow directions
Yes, that was how I understood it. When I was a high school teacher in a small private school, I was inspired by that bit to do the following: I always reminded my students to read all the directions before they started a quiz. Once a year, I would give a quiz with directions that ended with: Do not answer the questions. After you read this line, sign the bottom of your paper, and hand your paper directly to me. Those who actually followed these directions received extra credit (but the test questions themselves did not count for anyone).
OT:
@18: I took this test, more than once. It was ostensibly part of a Logic enrichment program (at a public school). The written directions on the sheet said right at the beginning to read all the directions before doing anything, and the last direction said to sign the paper and hand it in without doing any of the zany things in the middle. I got it right the first time, and of course once you’ve seen it done it’s harder to catch you in the future. It was amusing watching people put shoes on their desks etc before they realized they’d been had.
And the female pilots we see in Starship Troopers are not fighter pilots, as far as we know
It’s pretty clear that the vast majority of pilots in Starship Troopers are women and there’s discussion of bombing the surface of the planets, so I don’t think Heinlein was making the distinction you’re implying here.
Thanks for all the comments and discussion!
@3 I don’t think Heinlein ever contributed to the Tom Corbett show or books, but he is widely credited with “inspiring” the series. To my eye, that is a generous characterization, as the parallels between Tom Corbett and Heinlein’s work are too numerous to ignore.
@7 One of the strengths of Heinlein’s juveniles is that the protagonists are often not the smartest or strongest person in the room, and make their fair share of mistakes, which makes them a lot more relatable. And, other than Thorby in Citizen of the Galaxy, they are not long-lost princes or ‘chosen ones.’ (Although there are a few side characters who end up being special as part of a surprise twist.)
@11, 13 As a data point, as I recollect, less than half of the cadets who walked into the Coast Guard Academy with me in the 70s left with commissions four years later.
@13/@21: 50% washing out during a multi-year program is a lot less than two-thirds washing out in the first day (per the description). wrt “aviatrices”: Earhart and a couple of others were seen as exceptions; when the U.S. was shipping planes through Alaska to Germany’s eastern front, women flew the planes only to the coast; it was assumed they weren’t up to flying across the Bering Strait or over Siberia, i.e. they weren’t thought capable even of transporting empty planes (despite the example of deadly female USSR pilots), let alone troop transports under fire, or of making orbital corrections to meet a corvette that missed its takeoff; my recollection matches @20’s that most of the pilots are women, although I don’t remember being shown any Star Wars -style fighter combat. (There has to be something as ships in orbit aren’t entirely safe, but I’m blanking on whether that was solo fighters or ground-based missiles.)
wrt range of communications: that was a trope of the time; see the “Venus Equilateral” story of a very-few years before about the incredible difficulty of contacting a ship traveling between inner planets. IIUC, it wasn’t the strength of signal as much as the difficulty of picking it out with noisy vacuum tubes — I remember asking about this on the Space digest 40+ years ago (after we’d been getting photos, albeit very slowly, from Mars) but not the answer; the size of dish believed necessary for reception may also have been a factor.
Women pilots – Americans of the GI generation would be well aware of the US Army’s WAFS and WASPS (two different organizations – at the time, regarded as civil service – that merged); Nancy Love Harkness and Jacqueline Cochran were quite well-known.
A People at War (archives.gov)
It’s worth noting that a year after Space Cadet was published, and the same year that The Long Watch was published, so was Delilah and the Space Rigger, with a female protagonist who is hired (by a civilian company) to serve as a communications specialist in space – not military, but at the time of writing, licensed women merchant mariners would have been pretty close to non-existent; although the USMMA has never been the only route to a license, the academy only opened its doors to women in 1974 – two years before the other federal academies, however.
Washout rates – Heinlein’s choice of the word “cadet” is interesting; although students at the USMA have always been known as cadets, students at the USNA are “midshipmen” (male or female); at the time Heinlein was writing, however, both the Army and the Navy had programs where trainee pilots – known as “air cadets” or “aviation cadets” or some variation on the theme, learned to fly (or become aerial navigators, etc.), and the washout rates were pretty high. In roughly the same period, some pilots – including some who had graduated from the “cadet” programs referenced above – were not commissioned, instead serving as warrant officers or even enlisted pilots after being cadets.
Even today, many US Army pilots are warrant – not commissioned – officers.
@22 The British Air Transport Auxiliary had women flying just about every type of military aircraft that the Allies used during WWII, although not in combat, and as I recall they flew planes across the Atlantic.
<i> IIUC, it wasn’t the strength of signal as much as the difficulty of picking it out with noisy vacuum tubes </i>
Ah, that makes sense – thanks.
Not that the Patrol uses vacuum tubes for everything, of course. Their flight control systems are mechanical. Matt and Oscar decide to land on Venus manually, to save the trouble of “cutting a cam for the automatic pilot”. You programmed your computer by hacking a bit of metal into the right shape.
There’s an aside, earlier on, that the Asteroid Belt is made up of fragments of a single planet, and this was proved only after spaceflight, because the “giant strain-free computers” needed to do the orbital maths could only work in zero-g.
What’s a strain-free computer and why is it so good and why does it need to be in zero-g? Well, in zero-g, of course, you can build a big computer and not have to worry about gravity making its axles and driveshafts bend. This isn’t UNIVAC that Heinlein is thinking of here – UNIVAC doesn’t exist in 1947. This is a descendant of a Babbage Analytical Engine, or a Norden bombsight or a Kerrison Predictor.
@23 This may be getting a bit OT, but as I understand, it was during World War II that pilots were commissioned officers, since traditionally officers were given better treatment as POW’s. That probably would not have been an issue in the world of “Space Cadet,” but I can imagine that the tradition would have continue for perhaps another reason. In the US military, officers swear an oath to the Constitution, while enlisted personnel swear an oath to obey their officers. Officers thereby have a duty to refuse orders they deem “not constitutional.” This would fit into the veneration of John Ezra Dahlquist, who refused the “unconstitutional” order of his fellow (superior) officers, in his higher duty to his oath to defend the civilian polis.
@27 United States enlisted personnel also pledge to follow regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which allows them to refuse to obey illegal orders, just like officers.
<i>it was during World War II that pilots were commissioned officers, since traditionally officers were given better treatment as POW’s</i>
The Patrol is all-officers, and that may have been where Heinlein got the idea. (Other air forces had non-commissioned pilots; the RAF, the Armee de l’Air, the Red Army).
Alfa-class fast-attack submarines also had an all-officer crew (31 officers) but that mainly reflects that you don’t really want semi-literate conscripts messing around with an Alfa.
@23: people would have been aware of women pilots, but as people doing the grunt work rather than the thrilling parts, where by Starship Troopers they were the best; that was what I was pointing at.
Interesting to hear that other countries were not as limiting in what female pilots were allowed to do. (Ford’s “Chain Home, Low” has a snarky remark about just how unhappy UK men were about female radar watchers, but I don’t know how historically accurate the line is.)
@25: I’d forgotten the literal hardware involved in piloting. I don’t know whether it was talking down to a young audience or just his own lack of imagination, but Heinlein seems to have repeatedly underestimated engineering progress (cf the computer on a LEO-LLO liner not being able to calculate courses — at least that was something like a computer!) while coming up with social innovations — did anyone before this have ~cell phones? I remember a lot of view screens in walls, but nothing portable.
A couple of more-recent borderline bildungsromans: John M. Ford’s The Princes of Air (long-term growth) and Growing Up Weightless (an immediate transition). The first is early and in my recollection awkward; I think the second still shines, but it’s not nearly as straightforward or stolid as Heinlein and threads an adult story through the protagonist’s.
@28 Actually, if what I have read is true, the powerplants of Heinlein’s atomic rockets have a lot in common with those on the Alfa boats (although probably a lot more reliable).
One thing that struck me was when Dodson was convinced he was going to wash out, and was considering a transfer to the Marines. The older student who was his mentor told him he would make a terrible Marine, and explained that there were two types of people in the service: the ones who collected honors and ranks as external signs of validation (Marines), and the ones who didn’t care about how much spinach was on their tunics but on how well they knew what they were doing (Patrollers). It was pretty clear which way Heinlein leaned :)
#26) Actually, the US armed forces in WW II had enlisted pilots; the USN/USMC/USCG had more than 5000 Naval Aviation Pilots (NAPs), from before WW I to shortly after WW II:
APPENDIX 1 The History of Naval Aviator and Naval Aviation Pilot Designations and Numbers, The Training of Naval Aviators and the Number Trained (Designated) (navy.mil)
and
VPNAVY – Silver Eagles Association Page
The US Army (Air Service, Air Corps, and Army Air Forces) did as well (more than 4000), and as early as 1912:
Enlisted Pilots: 1912-1945 > National Museum of the United States Air Force™ > Display (af.mil)
and “flying sergeants” flew in combat as such (not warrant officers) during WW II, 18 of them becoming fighter aces:
1941-1945: World War II Sergeant Pilots > National Museum of the United States Air Force™ > Display (af.mil)
And actually, the initial clause in the US military oaths for BOTH officers and enlisted is to support and defend the Constitution:
The US Military Oath of Enlistment | Military.com
#23) The WAFS – who were the prewar licensed pilots recruited by Nancy Love Harkness, and who included members of the 99s, etc. – were flying combat aircraft on ferry missions as early as 1942, essentially the same as the WRAFs, etc. The WASPs – who were (more or less) the women who were trained as military pilots in the organization led by Jacqueline Cochran – followed in 1942-44. Again, not really any different than female pilots in the British/Commonwealth air forces.