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.
Robert Heinlein dipped his toes into many genres over the course of his long career, and The Rolling Stones is the closest he ever got to writing a sitcom. That’s why I avoided reading it when I first came across the book in my youth—I couldn’t imagine who would want to read the adventures of Leave it to Beaver in space, and I couldn’t get past the basic premise of a family buying a used spaceship and knocking around the solar system. But when I finally decided to read all the Heinlein juveniles, I found the Stone family to be good company, and discovered that I had been missing out on a fun and entertaining tale…
My first exposure to The Rolling Stones was through a used library edition of a dramatization by Full Cast Audio. This was a good way to experience it, as the cast did a good job making the banter of the family entertaining. My first time actually reading it, I borrowed a paperback copy from my son, and I later found it included in a Science Fiction Book Club omnibus edition entitled To the Stars.
I’ve found that Heinlein sometimes used his juvenile novels as a proving ground for ideas and characters that would later resurface in his grown-up novels. One example is the Martian race first described in Red Planet, which later pop up with similar appearance and paranormal powers in the book Stranger in a Strange Land (and of course those same Martians are met by young Lowell in The Rolling Stones). Also in The Rolling Stones we meet Grandmother Hazel Stone, who early in her life was a leader in the rebellion that freed the lunar republic from the authorities on Earth. A younger version of this character, while not an exact match for the Grandmother Stone, appears in Heinlein’s later novel of lunar rebellion, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The idea of families or clans operating space freighters was picked up again by Heinlein in another, later juvenile, Citizen of the Galaxy. And members of the Stone family appear in some of the later recursive Heinlein novels, where he began to bring characters and settings back from earlier works.
A subplot in The Rolling Stones also famously influenced an episode of Star Trek, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” The producers liked the script written by David Gerrold, but were so concerned with similarities between the promiscuously breeding tribbles and the Martian “flat cats” portrayed in The Rolling Stones that they sought permission from Heinlein before going forward with the episode.
Another subplot in The Rolling Stones is the dramatic series that the father, and later the rest of the family, is involved in writing. While I have not found confirmation for my suspicions, the tales in that series bear a resemblance to E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, with a main character similar to the plucky lawman Kimball Kinnison. Which leads me to believe that “Doc”—one of the people to whom the book is dedicated—is Smith, and that Heinlein was poking a little fun at his friend.
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, a firm interested in publishing science fiction novels targeted at young boys. These novels include a wide variety of tales, and contain some of Heinlein’s best work, and include 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 The Rolling Stones has been reviewed on Tor.com, as the inimitable Jo Walton looked at the book over a decade ago.
Tramp Freighters
Tramp freighters have long been a trope in adventure fiction. They are generally small vessels that do not follow fixed routes, picking up cargo and sometimes a few passengers and taking them to a destination where they think another opportunity might await. Often, not being part of a larger organization and flying a flag of convenience, their crews are more diverse and less disciplined than the vessels sailing for the big shipping lines. And because they carry smaller, more high value cargoes, tramp freighters sometimes veer outside the boundaries of the law, and engage in smuggling or drug trade, either as a side operation or as their major source of revenue. Tramp freighters can provide a setting for adventure all by themselves, or else serve to take a protagonist to some mysterious foreign land where adventure awaits.
Traders and freighters have also been the subject of many science fiction stories. While it is difficult to imagine any extensive trade in an environment where spaceships are propelled only by reaction mass, or where travel between stars is limited by the speed of light, those constraints are often waved away by authors in search of a good story. It is very common for authors to posit jetless drives and FTL engines that make travel between planets or even stars no more difficult or costly than an ocean voyage on Earth—such devices make tramp freighters a possible means of transport in these tales. Examples of tramp freighters in space can be found in Andre Norton’s Solar Queen books, which follow an interstellar trading vessel; Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden series, centered on a trading clan; A. Bertram Chandler’s John Grimes adventures; and Poul Anderson’s stories about the colorful adventurer and trader Nicholas van Rijn. In visual media we have seen two tramp freighters become quite popular: Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, and Mal Reynolds’ Serenity from the TV show Firefly.
To refresh my memory on the topic of tramp freighters, I poked around on Wikipedia, and found an article on Tramp Trade, the generic term for this trading practice. To my surprise, in a section that gives examples of tramp trade in fiction, I found the following: “The Robert Heinlein novel The Rolling Stones concerns a family who buy a used spacecraft and travel the solar system, financed partly by trading goods to asteroid miners. The novel was derived from a shorter story titled Tramp Space Ship.”
The Rolling Stones
The book opens with twins Castor and Pollux Stone, made wealthy by inventions they had created at an early age, dickering at a used spaceship lot on Luna over the purchase of a ship. Their father, Roger, wants them to go to Earth to study at a major university, but they have a better idea—they plan to become traders who wander the Solar System. Roger Stone is an engineer and former mayor of Luna City who now writes a popular science fiction drama series, The Scourge of the Spaceways, and is at first appalled by the idea. But his headstrong mother, Hazel, immediately volunteers to go with the boys. Then the twins’ older sister Meade also volunteers to go. Even Roger’s wife, Doctor Edith Stone, indicates that she might be willing to travel. The only person not weighing in on this discussion is younger brother Lowell. Later that evening, it appears dad is giving in, because he asks if the twins have seen any larger ships that might be suitable…
The family then goes about buying and equipping a spaceship, which gives Heinlein a chance to in engage in lots of interesting exposition on how an atomic spaceship would operate. Heinlein has a gift for packaging exposition in a way that feels organic to the story rather than interrupting the action, and that gift is on good display here. We follow the family through lots of training, assigning roles, equipment repair, and bickering about duties and command structures. While Roger will be the captain, like the beleaguered fathers in so many sitcoms, you never feel he is solely in charge of the operation. Their first destination will be Mars, and the boys fill the cargo hold with used bicycles that they think will fetch a good price on the planet. The newly christened Rolling Stone takes off in the company of many other ships, orbital mechanics determining the fact that the most efficient routes occur within narrow launch windows.
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System Collapse
En route, on one of the nearby spaceships, the passenger liner War God, there is an outbreak of a mysterious and deadly disease. They desperately need a doctor, and Edith heeds the call of her Hippocratic Oath, despite Roger’s attempts to hold her back. Her family fears for her life for the rest of the trip back to Earth, but Edith’s presence ends up being the difference between life and death for the crew and passengers of the War God.
When they get to Mars, Castor and Pollux sell all of their bicycles but end up in trouble for not paying tariffs; their grandmother Hazel represents them in court, giving us a glimpse of her political skills and tenacity. We don’t see much of Meade, which is true for most of the book, although there are indications she is dating. Young Lowell gets a chance to meet a real Martian, and acquires a Martian flat cat, a pleasantly furry creature that seemingly exists only to be purr, eat, and be cuddly. After some discussion about destinations, the family decides to move on to the Asteroid Belt, carrying goods to a cluster of asteroids found to be rich in precious metals.
During their journey, Lowell’s flat cat has babies, and then the babies have babies. Everyone initially enjoys the extra company, but soon the ship is overrun with hungry flat cats. Eventually there are so many flat cats the family begins to worry about their food supplies. They begin to consider the unpleasant option of killing the excess flat cats, because research shows that flat cats breed to the maximum capacity of the food supply. But they also learn that the flat cats go into hibernation in the Martian winter when no food is available, so the excess flat cats are put in a chilly cargo hold.
Reaching the asteroids, they have many adventures among the colorful miners of the frontier. The flat cats prove to be a valuable commodity among the lonely miners, although they are only sold with strict dietary guidance. As a doctor, Edith is in high demand. Grandma Hazel and Lowell have a brush with death due to equipment failure caused by sloppiness on the part of the twins, who learn a valuable lesson. The family had intended to return home after their trip to the asteroids, but when they all sit down to discuss it, you can probably imagine what they decide. After all, they are called “the rolling Stones.”
Final Thoughts
The Rolling Stones is an enjoyable entry in Heinlein’s juvenile series, refreshingly free of violence and warfare, especially when contrasted with the previous volume, Between Planets. The bickering among the family members is entertaining, and feels true to life. And their journey gives a convincing and imaginative view of what the solar system might be like if mankind spreads beyond the Earth.
And now I look forward to hearing from you: What do you think of The Rolling Stones? How does it stack up against Heinlein’s other juveniles? And as a fan of stories involving traders in space, I’d enjoy hearing about other such stories you may have encountered.
Ah yes, the glories of capitalism and the invention of tribbles. Enjoyable Heinlein fluff.
Both the tribbles and the flat-cats are presaged by the guinea pigs in Ellis Parker Butler’s “Pigs is Pigs.”
And don’t forget that Hazel Stone also appeared in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and I think is mentioned in a couple other books.
While Cat… isn’t as well known or well regarded as others of Heinlein’s books, it’s the one that really got me into him, and does hold a place for me.
There is a recent series about space-based commercial freighters, the “Golden Age of the Solar Clipper” by Nathan Lowell. The main character in the main series is Ishmael Wang, who is takes a berth on a freighter to avoid being deported. Well worth reading, free on Kindle Unlimited.
This is an excellent summary of a delightful book. I recall reading it in my youth and enjoying it greatly. This book would make a fantastic seed for a new family oriented show on TV. Jeff Bezos, are you listening?
I think of the ship covered in bicycles as reminiscent of the Beverly Hillbillies jalopy.
I also think Castor and Policy would be crypto currency bros if they were here today.
A bunch of C J Cherryh’s novels are set on tramp freighters. Like Tripoint or Merchanter’s Luck.
@@.-@: the Lowell series is enjoyable reading, interesting because the plots largely focus on a worker’s eye view of the process of trading and running a spacecraft
Tramp freighters have long been a trope in adventure fiction. They are generally small vessels that do not follow fixed routes
In fact this is the definition of a tramp – like a tramp worker, it goes wherever the work is, as opposed to a liner, which follows a fixed route (a line) on a fixed schedule. The aviation equivalent would be a charter aircraft, and they, too, are good for fictional adventures, from Steve Canyon to MJN Air.
While Roger will be the captain, like the beleaguered fathers in so many sitcoms, you never feel he is solely in charge of the operation.
I think the narrator actually says at one point something to the effect of “everyone in the family knew that nothing was ever decided until Dr Stone made up her mind”.
Meade is definitely the least-used character in the family; in fact you could cut her out completely and not really notice the effect on the plot.
This is an unusual juvenile in a lot of ways. Yes, it’s not as violent as Between Planets but like all the others it has danger and (offstage) death. But it isn’t a book about boys becoming men, like Space Cadet or Between Planets or Have Space Suit Will Travel. The twins haven’t changed much over the course of the book. It has sitcom qualities, as the post notes, but it also reminds me very much of the Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons books – the interplay between the family members, the relatively low stakes, the gentle sense of humour.
Gerrold’s appropriation of the Martian “flat cats” trope as a cautionary lesson in ecological unintended consequences, was indeed attributed to R.A.H. When Gerrold asked Heinlein what he wanted for the idea, Heinlein graciously declined any credit and suggested that the concept had come from another author. His point was that all literary allusions have origins that become untraceable through time all the way back to the ancient Greeks who stole ideas from the Arabian literary traditions. There is, after all , nothing new under the sun. I’ve always been an avid fan of Heinlein and credit his works with expanding my world view as well as my vocabulary. That is a debt that the venerable author concludes can only be paid forward. With regard to travelling the solar system, an atomic powered, constant boost vessel with a one Earth acceleration thrust could conceivably cover a lot of territory in a single lifetime. The conversion rate of mass to energy would need to be close to 100% of course and navigation would need to be precisely related to celestial positions and orbital locations.
There’s the issue that the twins if not closely monitored will probably accidentally kill everyone on board but mostly Meade gets back-burnered because she’s “husband-high” at, um, 17 or 18? Everyone expects her to marry the first man she meets who isn’t either a blood relative or a space-hobo.
On the plus side, at least she’s not husband-high at 12, unlike what’s her name from Moon. And a number of Heinlein novels are incesterific; if the book had been written in 1978, she would have hooked up with her brothers. As well, she isn’t killed off to teach Castor and Pollux a lesson, unlike Podkayne. In the grand scheme of things, Meade gets off easy for an unattached teen in a Heinlein novel. That said, if it turned out she left her family to start a women’s collective in the asteroid belt, who would be surprised?
Little Black Rule: there are people who think that all Traveller campaigns are about operating a tramp freighter (and dying before getting to play). Neither is true…
That cycle of crushing debt and dubious contracts sure works as an adventure hook,
Early adventures assumed the PCs were a crime gang with a shipping hobby on the side.
@10 Per the Patterson biography, Heinlein expressed some regrets about his restraint re the tribbles in correspondence with Harlan Ellison.
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They sent him the script for David Gerrold’s The Trouble With Tribbles a week later, and Heinlein realized he had been “overly generous, to put it mildly.” The “Tribbles” were his flat cats from The Rolling Stones. He was mildly conflicted because he knew he had created them fifteen years ago by “filing off the serial numbers” of Ellis Parker Butler’s comic story “Pigs Is Pigs.” This might be unconscious plagiarism: Gerrold had not even reworked his flat cats—just given them a different name and exploited the same comic turns.
Robert let it go—and even wrote Gerrold a letter telling him not to worry about it. The episode aired on December 29, 1967.
He was less pleased when, after the show went off the air, Gerrold began selling stuffed fake-fur and velour Tribble dolls at science-fiction conventions, substantially the same as the props used in the show, some of them with bladders to fake movement. That kind of merchandising was not covered by his original waiver—and when Gerrold printed the “permission” letter in another bit of gratuitous merchandising, a book for the series’ rabid fans, Heinlein found it harder to maintain a cheerful attitude.
‘If the matter had simply been dropped after that one episode was filmed, I would have chalked it up wryly to experience. But the “nice kid” did not drop it; “tribbles” (i.e., my “flat cats”) have been exploited endlessly. Well, that’s one that did “larn me.” Today if J. Christ phoned me on some matter of business, I would simply tell him: “See my agent.”’
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With regard to travelling the solar system, an atomic powered, constant boost vessel with a one Earth acceleration thrust could conceivably cover a lot of territory in a single lifetime. The conversion rate of mass to energy would need to be close to 100% of course and navigation would need to be precisely related to celestial positions and orbital locations.
True, but the Rolling Stone isn’t a constant boost vessel – it flies as God intended, in minimum-energy Hohmann transfer orbits, in free fall most of the time.
@16: complete with a powered flyby [1] of Earth on their way off Luna.
[1] More commonly known by the name of an early rocketeer and Nazi, alas.
16: Have I mentioned Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships today?
McEnroe’s The Shattered Stars gets its plot from the unpleasant truth that tramp freighters may be financially precarious. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be tramps, they’d be liners, and probably would not agree to ship doomsday devices for shady patrons.
I went to the trouble of acquiring a copy of that a few years ago and still it lurks in the depths of the Strategic Book Reserve.
Speaking of Belters, were there many other stories which combined the older consensus solar system of habitable Venus and Mars with asteroid miners? I tend to associate the latter more with the next phase, after it became clear that the planets weren’t quite so friendly and the prospect of exploiting asteroid resources was to be what brought humans in large numbers to space. (Frequently as a coherent Belter culture, even well after Pournelle’s essay poked holes in that idea.)
Definitely in Brackett’s planetary romances and I think in Williamson’s Seetee books as well.
I think that Lowell (same as young Woodrow Wilson Smith in Time Enough for Love) is Robert Heinlein himself as he was at a similar age…
Another example of the tramp freighter in science fiction can be found in Poul Anderson’s comic novel “The Makeshift Rocket” (AKA “A Bicycle Built for Brew”) 1962. The freighter “Mercury Girl” is a rickety old tub kept marginally space worthy by the hard work of her engineer an elderly Dane named Knud Axel Syrup (“A perfect good Danish name! Though like Middlefart liable to misinterpretation by foreigners.”) When the “Mercury Girl” makes port on the terraformed asteroid of Grendel to delivery a cargo of beer captain and crew find that it has been taken over by a force of Irish irredentists. Before his ship and shipmates are caught up in a shooting war Herr Syrup has to invent a way to get word to the authorities. Which he does; building a rocket out of cardboard boxes, kegs of beer and his beloved bicycle.
Anderson had fun with this. He offers gentle mockery of the English, the Irish and, not least, the Danes.
@20: Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr series included a semi-habitable (ocean-covered) Venus, as well as asteroid pirates (and maybe miners). I recall reading Asimov’s remark that Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids was the only book in the series that still held up (more or less) in the light of the scientific discoveries that followed not long after.
On the other hand, while the Lucky Starr books certainly have an inhabited asteroid belt, I don’t think they have a “Belter” culture as such.
@11 James. Reviewing all these juveniles, and comparing them to unfettered Heinlein, I am beginning to better appreciate the editorial influence of Ms. Dalgliesh.
@20 mschiffe. I remember quite a few stories, set in the consensus solar system with a habitable Venus and Mars, that also had habitable asteroids.
Fresh from England at nine years old, Heinlein’s TRS was my first-ever SF (second was Andre Norton’s The Stars Are Ours, third was Heinlein’s Starman Jones—heady stuff). Nearly 70 years later, the last paragraph still gives me a thrill whose poignancy I didn’t understand until I was much older.
Best
read as a domestic comedy. As usual with Heinlein, the science is solid and the technology taken for granted. What is convincing is the increasing loneliness of humans the further from the sun the Rolling Stone travelled. What was hard to accept was RAH’s conception that the further from the sun one travels, the more the resulting miner society channeled the American frontier, complete with folk society terminology such as “those science Johnnie’s” and everyone sayin’ ‘Howdy, storekeeper’.
Meade. Ah, Meade, Our nonentity housekeeper. RAH gave her one wonderfully teeth-bared moment toward the end of the book in the exchange with Hazel (from memory so maybe not verbatim): ” But they’re research.scientists, hon. They’re all too dedicated..” “Well, maybe they won’t be so dedicated when I get through with them.”
If you can get past the ingenuous idea of buying a used nuclear-powered rocket from Honest Joe’s second-hand rocket lot the way we might buy a 92 Corolla, the negotiations are some of Heinlein’s best comic—and hard-nosed—dialogue.
Personally, I think that Heinlein’s best work was his Scribner’s juveniles, where, ironically, SF’s most libertarian author was best on the editorial short leash he hated the most.
(Frequently as a coherent Belter culture, even well after Pournelle’s essay poked holes in that idea.)
I think he was maybe a little too harsh on that. His argument was, basically, that if you have Asteroid A, Asteroid B, and Earth, you can’t expect to have a common culture on A and B that’s different from Earth if it’s far easier to travel A-Earth or B-Earth than it is to travel A-B.
Well, maybe, but I can think of counterarguments. Imagine you have a colonial state with three territories – let’s say an industrialised Britain with agricultural settler colonies in South Africa and Canada. That fits the model. But it’s very plausible, isn’t it, that South Africans and Canadians would find themselves having more in common with each other culturally than either does with Brits – and that they might even conceive of themselves having economic and political interests in common that they didn’t share with the mother country.
@27 Similarities and common interests, definitely. (P.J. O’Rourke was struck at how similar depictions of Boer settlers in South Africa during the apartheid years were to American depictions of pioneers.) But Canada and South Africa didn’t form a confederation or consider themselves part of a larger Dominion culture (at least as far as I know).
I think it gets even tougher when the cultural products of the metropolis are beamed out to the asteroids at lightspeed vs having to wait for a freighter to learn if Little Nell died. (And the delays to real-time communication are largely the same between rocks as from them to Earth.) There’ll be a lot more space-Netflix shows coming in from Hollywood (or Bollywood or Nollywood) than there will be from Ceres or Vesta.
I could definitely see economic and political cooperation where applicable. But it seems more like the fact that auto workers have common interests in Michigan and Kentucky (except when they don’t) than the basis for a coherent separate polity or nation.
Still, stranger things have happened. I’m sure it would be possible to write a path-dependent Belter nation. E.g., a culture emerges on the first big asteroid to be exploited, and then for reasons does better at expanding to other asteroids than Earth does.
Or a culture gets dispossessed on Earth, disproportionately goes out to mine because they’re cheap and desperate, and makes an explicit point of retaining ties (strong customs of wandejahrs to other asteroids which often end in marriage and family connections between them, and staying clear of a hostile Earth) as a matter of self-preservation.
Just a small correction. Edith was on the War God after they’d passed Earth, on the way to Mars, and not “the trip back to Earth.”