I’ve always loved Space Cadet, but reading it in the light of Patterson’s biography was almost like reading a new book. I had known about Heinlein’s naval career, of course, but I hadn’t known about the details of his own time as a cadet in the U.S. navy. It’s surprising how many of the details Heinlein just transferred into space and a higher tech level. It isn’t the details, though, it’s the spirit of Annapolis that Heinlein transmuted into space. Reading Space Cadet after reading the biography I kept comparing and seeing what he’d done, where before I’d always believed it was all made up—I mean they learned languages in the hypno-lab and had to do rocket equations!
Space Cadet (1948) is the second of Heinlein’s juveniles, a book aimed directly at teenage boys. It’s much smoother than Rocket Ship Galileo; it feels as if Heinlein’s got the hang of this now and knows what he’s doing. The story is about young everyboy Matt going into the Space Patrol as a cadet, going through a process of education, then going to Venus and having an adventure. The book has always felt to me just a little unbalanced, with the Venus part not quite fitting the rest. The reason for this is explained in the biography—Heinlein had planned a different ending, and had to rethink part way through when he saw that it wouldn’t work. Patterson tells us what that original end would have been, and reading the book knowing that, I can see the shape of that story showing through the familiar lines of the book I know so well.
This is a book about a boy going into space and becoming a man, through military training. I first read it when I was twelve and I have re-read it frequently since. I’d say it glorifies the military far more than Starship Troopers, yet people never scream about it. I think this is partly because it’s a juvenile and partly because it’s such a nice book. Repeating the names of the four dead heroes in every roll-call doesn’t feel like glorifying the military, it brings tears to one’s eyes. There’s no war here, no oppression, the Patrol are keeping the peace. This is a “man against nature” story.
If Rocket Ship Galileo had a crew of multi-ethnic American boys, Space Cadet goes one better and has a Texan, an Iowan, a boy from Venus and a boy from Ganymede. There’s also a francophone officer. Their actual identification is with the Patrol—Heinlein does a very good job of showing how boys from different planets and backgrounds are immersed in the traditions and demands of the Patrol and emerge as officers. It’s not just “pie with a fork” and the customs of the natives of Venus, it’s also Matt going home on leave and finding that it has become strange to him.
They’re all boys. The book contains no girls, and neither does the space service. There’s one funny moment when the cadets try to pick up a woman on a space station who invites them to a Baptist youth club—apart from that I don’t think there are any human female speaking parts. This is balanced by the Venerians, the alien inhabitants of Venus, all being matriarchal and female and making the cadets use words like “mother” and “daughter” and “she” about themselves. Heinlein didn’t need to make them matriarchal, it was an interesting choice, and I wonder if he did it deliberately out of a desire to balance things.
Spoilers for the original intended ending coming up.
Patterson said Heinlein intended Matt to nuke his own hometown. This would have been a much darker and grimmer book, and I’m not sure how it could have been a juvenile in 1948. The hints are there, the stuff about which bombs are overhead when Matt is on leave, his father’s smug complacence about the U.S… If the book had gone in that direction that would have been set-up, as it is, it goes in the Venus direction and that’s just character balance. To get Matt to nuke Iowa, Heinlein would have had to have put in a lot more politics—and as it is, there aren’t any. It would have been a very different book, better in some ways, worse in others. It would have been closer to Ender’s Game than anything else Heinlein wrote. Kids would have loved it. I certainly would.
He didn’t write it—instead we have an adventure on Venus and a light age-appropriate story. I said it was “man against nature” but years ago my son suggested dividing stories into “man against man,” “man against plan,” and “man against canal.” By that division, the post-training half of this is, like most of Heinlein, man against canal—dealing with technology to overcome obstacles.
I’m extremely and irrationally fond of this book and greatly enjoyed reading it with something new to think about it.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
“Man against Man”, “Man against Plan”, “Man against Canal” meet all three criteria?
years ago my son suggested dividing stories into “man against man,” “man against plan,” and “man against canal.”
I laughed out loud at this… but what does “man against plan” mean?
What, no man against Panama?
Jaspax: It means the kind of story where somebody is scheming and somebody else is trying to stop them. Or alternatively, the kind of story where somebody thinks they understand what’s going on, and they’re wrong.
Wsean: Man against Panama is a very small category of stories.
SPOILER discussion:
I wonder if the original ending would have involved Nehemiah Scudder trying to establish a theocracy centered in Des Moines. Scudder’s theocracy turns up a lot in Heinlein’s backstories.
I’m vaguely recalling that in “If This Goes On-” the capital was somewhere far from the coasts, but I could easily be wrong about that.
SPOILERS Captain Button: That would fit with the Future History, and this is in that history — Dahlquist proves that. So it’s possible, but there’s no indication that the US is anything other than the US as it was in 1948. If he’d wanted to go that way, he’d have had to have put the politics in to make it plausible.
SPOILER discussion:
That’s interesting that he wanted to nuke Iowa. Since I was growing up in Iowa when I first read this, that would have made it a MUCH darker story for me. I wonder if his tendency to nuke Iowa grew out of his growing up in Missouri. There’s always been a little interstate rivalry there.
I think the reason this book gets a pass for being pro-military is that it simply isn’t political. The thing that gets most people up in arms over Starship Troopers is the idea that one must provide service to the state before being allowed to vote. Due to the nature of the book the service that we see is military service. Most of those who get upset about it ignore or completely miss the fact that non-military service is just as valid a path to full citizenship. The Peace Corps would do just as well as the Marine Corps.
If Matt had nuked Iowa, Space Cadet might not have fared so well either.
Interesting way to put it – I’d have said to get the reader to accept, enjoy and to pay beer money for a book in which the lead character decides to nuke Iowa would have been quite a task – to get a hypothetical Matt in his capacity as a serving officer to nuke Iowa as an agent in a plausible even realistic fashion – that’s another question – and yet another different book – entirely.
As in Mr. Heinlein’s personal life and stories following Solution Unsatisfactory there is I think more emphasis on nukes than technically warranted compared to Dr. Pournelle’s Thor. The emphasis on nukes makes sense in the cold war context.
I think Annapolis has many spirits – just possibly there’s a file the numbers off description of the crypt under the Chapel (Patterson may have covered this, I haven’t yet seen the biography). Check pictures on the web and tell me what you think.
Military training may help many a boy grow up – going to war be it against the other or Iowa never did and never will.
I wonder if Matt of Space Cadet as written is a different man for missing the nuclear action – and so in my own mind I steal some thoughts from the very ending speech of the Caine Mutiny on the I think true nobility of peace time service – that service might I think lead to maturity.
At Annapolis it is (and was)Midshipman not Cadet.:)
Root beer money, Clark E. Myers. These are juveniles — the equivalent of young adult novels, or even younger ages.
Assuming Virginia Heinlein’s recollection of a discarded plot element fifty-three years earlier is correct — Patterson cites a 2000 interview — it is extremely dark. My first thought, in fact, was that it reminded me of modern initiations into organized crime.
I’ll set aside the morality of collective punishment for someone else to discuss, merely noting that it was certainly in the air in 1947, even in the United States. Odd that Heinlein, who celebrated individual responsibility, would turn to it as a plot device.
I don’t find it odd at all, Carlos. One of the four celebrated at the Academy did indeed bomb his own home town. I believe Matt makes reference to it in his discussion with his father. Foreshadowing, indeed.
You do, however, point out the primary problem with Heinlein scholarship today: Virginia Heinlein.
I’m pretty sure that one of the Four threatened to bomb his own hometown, while he himself was in that town, but didn’t actually do the deed. If a town had actually been bombed, Matt’s conversation with his father would have been very different.
(I hope this isn’t a duplicate post – having trouble with the capcha)
I’ve found the paragraph in question; here it is.
I’m not far enough in the bio to have seen the discussion of Space Cadet yet. But I’m finding it hard to believe Heinlein really imagined that Alice Dalgliesh (or any editor in the late 1940s) would take a juvenile in which the climactic event was the hero A-bombing Des Moines. Even “Solution Unsatisfactory”, where the atomic weapons were speculative and the protagonists adults, stopped short of actually having them Dust the US themselves (though they make the threat). And in the much later The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the protagonists are similarly restrained despite using potential city-killers.
Maybe that really was Heinlein’s plan, but I have to wonder.
Iirc, it’s explained in Space Cadet that if an order comes down to nuke a crew member’s home, that crew member is put in the brig first– the Space Patrol expects a high but not inhuman standard of conduct. I’ve admired that as an example of Heinlein’s pragmatism.
I think a reason (besides the earning franshise bit) that Starship Troopers is politically explosive in a way that Space Cadet is not, is that ST is written from a much narrower point of view– not surprising in light of the description of three sorts of motivation (iirc, idealism, status, and money) in SC.
It spooks me (even though it’s plausible) that Rico doesn’t care about politics and doesn’t think he should (or thinks he shouldn’t?). The Space Patrol knows it lives in a larger context.
Carlos has pointed out, in e-mail, that the whole “nuking Des Moines” thing is based entirely on Virginia Heinlein’s statements 50+ years later — apparently there are no other statements or letters of Heinlein’s to support it.
It does fit the textevd! And that counts for a lot. But on the other hand, Virginia knew those books backward and forward, and was perfectly capable of spinning a narrative based on something Heinlein might have said offhand many years later.
Apparently Patterson has a whole discussion of how hard it was for Heinlein to shift gears — but it’s based entirely on Virginia’s recollections, and not supported by Heinlein’s contemporary letters or other evidence.
Nuking Des Moines would be all too consistent with some tropes and concerns of Heinlein’s later fiction. OTOH, it would /not/ be consistent with Heinlein’s stated reason for writing those first couple of juveniles, viz., for money. (And apparently he was close to rock bottom during the writing of ST — living in cramped circumstances and having fights with his new wife over spending money.)
Carlos hasn’t quite convinced me, but he makes a plausible case IMO.
Doug M.
Doug M — well, if we’re not going to trust Ginny’s recollections then there’s a lot of the Patterson biography we’d have to toss. I think in this case it fits the text evidence (and the evidence of how Heinlein plotted that’s apparent from other books and Heinlein’s own comments) too well not to be at least Heinlein’s original intention.
It will be interested to see in the second half of the biography how Patterson deals with the books where Heinlein’s method of plotting let him down and after he ceased to be edited.
(I think the first chapters of the two published versions of Stranger in a Strange Land should be read side by side by anybody who’s interested in what it is that editors get paid for doing — the edited version is so much better.)
Let me be clearer: the only cites Patterson gives to the claim are from interviews with Virginia Heinlein, over fifty years after the fact. There may be other evidence that Patterson does not cite, for whatever reason.
Patterson does quote a letter in which Heinlein describes his difficulties in writing Space Cadet — two weeks on the couch, fretting — seven years later to his brother. (I think. It’s to Rex Ivar Heinlein, and Patterson doesn’t clarify which family member of that name.) Unfortunately, the passage Patterson quotes does not include anything about the cadet attacking his home town.
I have difficulty in seeing Heinlein, as a writer with some commercial success under his belt at this point, coming up with a plot so apparently unsuited for the children’s book market of 1947/1948. (I try to picture Alice Dalgliesh’s reaction.) On the other hand, Heinlein also had a unique vision. It would be good if more information came to light on this point.
“well, if we’re not going to trust Ginny’s recollections then there’s a lot of the Patterson biography we’d have to toss.”
I haven’t read the book yet. But here’s a question: are there points where Patterson questions or challenges Virginia’s recollections?
Doug M.
bluejo: (I think the first chapters of the two published versions of Stranger in a Strange Land should be read side by side by anybody who’s interested in what it is that editors get paid for doing — the edited version is so much better.)
Quibbling again, but wasn’t the editing/rewriting done by Heinlein there, at editorial request?
SC vs ST-
The Patrol is mostly policing human vs human conflict; the Mars and Venus civilizations are not portrayed as even a potential threat. Conflict would be human on human, and politics would be a likely part of that.
Johnny Rico’s world is human against Bug, and humans are already fighting for survival. From his perspective, politics are irrelevant. Sure, higher ups are thinking about negotiation, but the MI doesn’t have to worry about why they are fighting, or whether they should.
We know what Dahlquist did to be one of the Four- he has a story. We also know what Rivera did, through Matt’s recollections. What about the other two- Martin and Wheeler? Do we know why they are part of the Four. (and I agree- having them in all the roll calls is a definite tear jerker) “Wheeler’s here, too.”
Captain Button observes accurately:
Yes, but after he’d already cut it as far as he wanted to. It took an editor to tell him to cut again.
If, say, The Puppet Masters had been filmed and made him independent of editorial fiat as Stranger later did, the book would probably be bigger (and less good) than the current uncut version.
And I’ll agree with Jo: While many of the cuts are, in isolation, cramps in Heinlein’s style, the overall effect of having them restored into the uncut version was overload. I’ve always admired Seamus Heaney’s guts in editing and conflating, for publication, some of Whitman’s poems into versions he liked better than any of Whitman’s own, and would admire the guts of the person who did the same for Heinlein.
Captain Button: Totally, all his own work, the editor told him what to do and he did it and the end result is just so much better. Boy, those editors earn their pay some days! I’ll freely admit that I’ve had the same advantage in my published fiction.
DougM: It isn’t that kind of book.
Carlos: Definitely his brother.
Pam: I don’t know of it being mentioned anywhere. Now that’s the sort of trivia I would like to hear, if anyone knows.
Re: Martin and Wheeler, I checked the Heinlein concordance at the Heinlein Society’s website, and they say that no information is given anywhere in his fiction. Unless he happened to tell someone in a letter or something, we’ll never know.
I certainly hope that this post on Space Cadet, following the earlier one on Rocket Ship Galileo, means Jo will give us her perspective on all the juveniles.
The comparison of Space Cadets with Starship Troopers is certainly interesting and fodder for debate. I think the difference in the two books is actually discussed directly in Space Cadets: Matt is tempted to switch from the Patrol, built on tradition, professionalism and scientific learning, to the flashy Space Marines, built on flash, discipline and fighting skills. The Space Marine tells him they call the Patrol the “Professors.”
In this framework, Space Cadets is a book about the Patrol, and Starship Troopers is about the Space Marines — two different military functions, but in Heinlein’s mind complimentary and both necessary. Starship Troopers is focused on the Space Marines and their mindset to the exclusion of everything else — which is either a feature or a bug, depending on your point of view. For me, its a bug (or maybe a Bug).
Having gotten to the relevent period in the bio, it looks like (at least in Patterson’s report of Virginia Heinlein’s interview) Heinlein only briefly considered having Matt bomb his hometown when beginning the project. “But as he got more into it, that ending rang more and more false: as a practical matter, the Patrol would not ever put a cadet in that position, ever.” Which conclusion is made explicit in the book, with (IIRC) Matt’s CO telling him that in the unlikely event became necessary to bomb Des Moines, Matt would be locked in the brig preemptively.
(I would speculate that if that plot element had remained in the book, the most that would have been allowed would be for Matt to have to make the decision, only to have the necessity averted at the last moment. I can at least imagine that being publishable, though I may be wrong.)
Re Space Cadet and Starship Troopers, one thing that struck me was that the MI had a lot in common on the surface with SC’s Marines, which make their characters’ differing relationships to the ground troops interesting. (Matt is, in essence, told he’s too smart and inwardly motivated for the Marines, while the MI is structured to funnel people like that into its officer corps.)
DavidA: I’m not planning to write about all the juveniles in chronological order right now. I did these two because of the new light cast on them from the biography. However, I have written about Starman Jones, Time for the Stars, and Citizen of the Galaxy and will probably do all the others in due course as I feel like reading them.
In #18 Doug M. writes:
“Nuking Des Moines would be all too consistent with some tropes and concerns of Heinlein’s later fiction.”
Look in the other direction: Heinlein’s earlier writings.
Having learned about uranium fission, which he discussed with John Campbell and with his friend Bob Cornog, beam jockey (then working at Berkeley’s cyclotron lab), he wrote “Blowups Happen” in 1940. It’s about a nuclear reactor and the possibility that a mistake in its operation might lead to a devastating explosion.
He foresaw a nuclear arms race in “Solution Unsatisfactory” (1941). With a radioactive superweapon that can destroy cities, the U.S. quickly concludes World War II. But your country is not safe just because it is the only country with nuclear weapons; others can and will develop similar weapons. How to avoid wars? The unsatisfactory solution of the story is to give control of the weapons to an international agency staffed by (hopefully) incorruptible soldiers dedicated to keeping the global peace, even to the point of attacking their own home countries.
For four years, Heinlein brooded about nuclear war. He and Campbell noted in letters that physicists had abruptly stopped publishing anything about uranium. Bob Cornog sent a note: “For the nonce it’s completely impossible to visit or be visited– I’m in a ‘deep, dark void.’ Will let you know when things change–” A visiting relative found Heinlein staring out the window of his Philadelphia apartment one morning “to verify that New York is still there.”
The shoe dropped. The U.S. attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. Japan surrendered. To Heinlein, nothing was more important than preventing atomic warfare from destroying his own country. Conventional weapons were obsolete. Within a month he was in New Mexico, meeting with Cornog and with other Los Alamos scientists who would eventually form the Federation of American Scientists. They gave him a lump of greenish radioactive glass from the Trinity site. Heinlein and the scientists agreed to work toward international control of nuclear weapons.
Heinlein spent much of the next year writing nonfiction articles, trying to convince the public of the nuclear threat and the need for international control. He contacted politicians and military officers. Cornog, too, contacted a Congressman he knew.
Heinlein’s articles didn’t sell (some of them appear in Expanded Universe). Heinlein returned to fiction. In Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), Dr. Cargraves obtains his thorium from an international agency that controls fissionable material. Space Cadet (1948) portrays a Patrol prepared to enforce global peace with orbiting bombs. In “The Long Watch” (1949), a coup by not-so-incorruptible Patrol officers is thwarted by the loyal Lt. Dahlquist, willing to sacrifice his own life to uphold the principles of his service.
Heinlein continued to have a lot to say about nuclear weapons as the Cold War wore on. But Space Cadet has its roots in concerns that had troubled him for many years. In a sense it’s a sequel to “Solution Unsatisfactory.”
I’m thinking this through. Apologies if the order gets funky:
Rocket Ship Galileo An international agency managing fissionables, good
Space Cadet A system-wide government, good
The Rolling Stones No mention, I think, of Earth government
Red Planet A system-wide government, not so good
Between Planets A system-wide government, downright rotten
Farmer in the Sky A system-wide government, good
The Star Beast A system-wide government, good
Starman Jones A planet-wide (at least) government, good
Citizen of the Galaxy A system-wide government, good enough that Thorby gets his inheritance and burden
Time for the Stars A system-wide government, good
Have Space Suit, Will Travel Kip gives over the math to the UN
Starship Troopers A remarkably civilized interplanetary military oligarchy, you make the call
Now, I won’t swear I’ve gotten all this right, but I think, on the evidence, one could plausibly make the claim that Robert Heinlein was one of those soft-headed one-world propagandists, leading juvenile market into perdition.
Not exactly a conclusion I’d’ve reached without this thread.
Citizen of the Galaxy A system-wide government, good enough that Thorby gets his inheritance and burden
As I recall it, it was actually an interstellar government covering a large number of star systems. But there were plenty of systems outside of it, including the Nine Worlds.
Captain Button, you’re entirely right. I’m just thinking out loud here. And speaking of which: Oops! Left out…
Tunnel in the Sky I think it’s a still-fragmented Earth and as such goes against my hypothesis
In #34, John Arkansawyer writes:
Now, I won’t swear I’ve gotten all this right, but I think, on the evidence, one could plausibly make the claim that Robert Heinlein was one of those soft-headed one-world propagandists, leading juvenile market into perdition.
John, were you at the “Heinlein and the Bomb” panel at the Heinlein Centennial in 2007? I’d kinda thought you were.
There Tad Daley asserted (in a deliberately provocative way) that Heinlein advocated that the U.S. give up a portion of U.S. sovereignty to a supranational organization. The crowd got surly, and as moderator, I had to rein them in several times. I called for quiet and urged them to hear out Tad as he made his argument.
Which was (as I said above) that Heinlein in the 1940s saw an international agency with control of nukes as the only reasonable way to avoid atomic war–notwithstanding his reluctance to give up a measure of American autonomy. Once Tad laid out his reasons the audience’s hostility simmered down, though it didn’t disappear. Most people had been thinking of the fire-breathing, anti-Communist, fallout-shelter-building Heinlein of the late Fifties and Sixties.
The guy who has really thought about this aspect of Heinlein is Éric Picholle, critic and physicist. He edited Solution Non Satisfaisante, which includes a French translation of “Solution Unsatisfactory” and various commentary on Heinlein and the Bomb (I contributed a chapter on Robert A. Cornog).
Dang, Bill, I think I’d’ve remembered that*. I mostly stuck with “Heinlein as writer”- and “Heinlein’s writings”- type panels (and your presentation on jetpacks). But if the crowd got surly**, I surely would’ve enjoyed the presentation.
I’m glad to hear there’s a better case to be made than my idle speculation. Heinlein was a more complicated and changing man than many of us (including myself, in certain moods) think.
A friend of mine who is an old-style leftist likes to say that Marx wasn’t a Marxist. Heinlein wasn’t a Heinleiner, either.
I do wonder, though–I’ll have to reread my pre-Bomb Heinlein and look for creeping one-worldism there. My first take on it is that only Beyond This Horizon*** and “Misfit” have a world government.
*But maybe I did. I’ll consult the program book and see what all was in that time slot. I now so wish I’d blogged the event.
**Between the libertarians and the polyamorists, I felt pretty surly at times myself. The spacers, on the other hand, must’ve had impeccable manners, because I remember them being sweethearts beginning to end.
***And maybe For Us, the Living, which I’m still saving, for various reasons.
Bill, John: The “Must be international control of nukes” is in the bio as something he rushed about feeling very strongly about for a few years in the late forties. It was all very “Solution Unsatisfactory”.
John: Starman Jones is one world government, pretty bad, guilds, castes, Earth going down the drain. I wrote a post ages ago (one of the first posts I wrote here) about how dystopian Earth tends to be in the juveniles.
I’ve got to re-read Tunnel- I tend to think of it as having system-wide government- at any rate, the different countries were working together to use the transport system. However, I do remember the announcer snarking about China and their population issues, so the control wasn’t that tight.
Hey Tor, $12 for this book? $10 on Kindle? Seriously? What a joke.
I’m surprised no one has brought up the input into this book of the hugely successful Collier’s article he had co-written with Cal Laning earlier that year, “Flight Into the Future.” Or, for that matter, how it (and so many other of Heinlein’s short stories) fits into H.G. Wells’s ideas from A Modern Utopia to Phoenix.
We got permission from Laning’s heirs to include “Flight Into the Future” in the Nonfiction volumes of the Virginia Edition.
Firslty – what’s “textevd”?
Second – re; one-world or system govts. being represented as good/bad. I dont’ think Heinlein every expected a style of government to save us. It could kill us ….
James Cameron’s “Avatar” owes a lot to the second half of “Space Cadet,” the part where the Space Cadets help out the Venusians against the evil mining company from Earth.
Dear Higgins:
Yes, that’s exactly my understanding: Heinlein was, like Wendell Wilkie and a lot of other people, a World Government man right after WWII, especially because he’d been obsessing over nuclear weapons since the amazing “Solution Unsatisfactory” (which he’d finished on 12/24/1940). I believe Heinlein says in “Expanded Universe” that something to the effect that didn’t work out, so he moved on.
It’s hard to put ourselves back in the shoes of people in the past and see how the future looked. The invention of nuclear weapons was the scariest development in human history. It took into the 1950s for the strategists to work out the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction, and then into the 1960s to build the secure submarine missile fleet that helped it make sense.
That part about the roll call stuck in my memory too, from when I read the book (must be more than 3 decades now, when I was a teen). Growing up in Canada, I didn’t hear about the story of “The Four Chaplains” who sacrificed their lives to save other crew members on a troopship in WWII until recently. I can’t help wondering if that’s one of the things that inspired Heinlein’s inclusion of the four martyred Patrolmen. A lot of Americans probably would have known about the original story in the postwar era.
The optimism with which internationalism was originally held pre-“Iron Curtain” dated rapidly.