Books: The Star Beast By Robert Heinlein (1954)

“In the future, Earth has had interstellar spaceflight for centuries and has made contact with numerous extraterrestrial intelligent species. John Thomas Stuart XI, the teenage protagonist, lives in a small Rocky Mountain town, Westville, caring for Lummox, an extraterrestrial beast his great-grandfather had brought home. Lummox has learned how to speak, and has gradually grown from the size of a collie pup to a ridable behemoth—especially after consuming a used car. The childlike Lummox is perceived to be a neighborhood nuisance and, upon leaving the Stuart property one day, causes substantial property damage across the city. John's widowed mother wants him to get rid of it, and brings an action in the local court to have it destroyed.”

An entertaining, if somewhat talky tale of diplomacy and family issues, The Star Beast excels in balancing humor with what is a very obvious plot. Designed for a male teen audience, it’s also clearly “of an age,” as the saying goes. I’ve said this before about the classic writers of the Golden Era of Science Fiction that as smart and often clever they were, when it came to actually try and predict a future beyond the 1950s, they fail. I mean, despite its futuristic “setting”, Westville is every homely small town Hollywood spit out in the era. And John Thomas Stuart and his girl Betty could be played by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland (I’m almost sure Heinlien used them as basis here). Everyone still smokes, there is not much in the way of advanced technology in Stuart’s home (or anywhere else, it seems), and has about as much tension as a deflated balloon.

Still, there is something charming about a 1954 book when read in 2024. Beyond the annoying mother, who clearly has issues trying to both mother and father to her son, the “real” world is sort of suspended and we get a simple, familiar, predictable tale about a boy and his alien Lummox who, in the end, is not what he/she (who has, apparently, six sexes) and a His Girl Friday who seemly is brighter and tougher than the hero of this tale.

Books: The Puppet Masters By Robert Heinlein (1951)

In the summer of 2007 Earth is under clandestine attack. Slug-like creatures, arriving in flying saucers, are attaching themselves to people’s backs, taking control of their victims’ nervous systems, and manipulating those people as puppets. The Old Man, the head of clandestine national security agency called the Section, goes to Des Moines, Iowa, with Sam and Mary, two of his best agents, to investigate a flying saucer report, but much more seriously the ominous disappearance of the six agents sent previously. They discover that the slugs are steadily taking over Des Moines, but they cannot convince the President to declare an emergency. Sam takes two other agents and returns to Des Moines to get more evidence of the invasion. They fail and are obliged to leave the city quickly, but in the confusion of their fleeing the city’s television center a slug sneaks onto one of the agents. Back in Washington the team discovers the slug and captures it, but later it escapes and attaches itself to Sam, using Sam’s skills and knowledge to make a clean escape. Thoroughly puppetized, Sam begins to infiltrate more slugs into the city, using the Constitution Club as a recruiting center. He’s gotten off to a good start when the Old Man captures him, takes him to Section’s new headquarters, and interrogates the slug through Sam. Under drug-induced hypnosis Sam reveals that the slugs come from Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn. After recuperating from his ordeal, Sam finds that the President and Congress are ready to accept the idea that the United States has been infiltrated and they mandate a law that requires people to go naked to demonstrate that they are not carrying slugs.

According to Wikipedia, Heinlein's original version of The Puppet Masters was heavy edited, mostly because it was considered too risque for the 1951 audience -in the original version the book begins with Sam waking up in bed with a blonde whom he had casually picked up the evening before, without even bothering to learn her name!! Anyways, in 1990, two years after he passed, his widow authorized a new expanded version that reinstated a majority of what was cut 40 years previous. However, there is also a few unintentional humorous phrases that may have not seemed funny back even in 1990 -Schedule Bare Back- but now make me snicker every time I read it. Then there is how liberal he made the US, including the idea that everyone who did not want to be possessed by the titans was walking around naked. I'm certain, no matter what, there would be plenty of Americans (stuck in their Puritan ways) who would never walk around in public without a stitch of clothes on. I can see why some of these parts were edited out in 1951. 

As I've mentioned before, reading these novels later in life rather than when I was in my teens, I'm not so impressed with the plotting or the science. The Puppet Masters does try to invoke the Cold War aspect between the United States and Russia (set in 2007 there has been a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West which left both sides battered but unbroken, but then we fell back in another Cold War), but all I could think about was how this book shared a similar premise with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, even though that film was not released until 1956. But like Asimov's Foundation book, the story is a bit dry -a lot of talking with some minor action. Meanwhile, on the science side, in Heinlein's early 21st Century we have flying cars, we have space stations, and have a colony on Venus. Still, there is no communication satellites and TV broadcast are still line-of-sight as they were when Heinlein wrote the book. While this plays into the plot, it was hard part for me to grasp in 2015. 

I'm guessing that if I continue to read these books from long ago, I'm going to some how figure out how to understand them better. It's not that they're poorly written and all, it's just everything I've grown up with, all those science fiction movies and TV series are all built on the foundation people like Heinlein created. I've got to get passed the block in my mind that says "Seen this done before. Next."

You know what I mean?

Books: Methuselah's Children By Robert A. Heinlein (1958)

There is a lot of ideas in this thin little novel (183 pages of this old hardcover edition I got at the library) that could fill many others. But Methuselah's Children is not about filling endless pages of prose that may fill the ego of today's authors (there is no way writers like George R. R. Martin today could accomplish what Heinlein did without taking three or four books at a 1,000 pages each), it's about adventure, with humor, conflict and even romance to remind us that science fiction during it's Golden Age was characters who moved the plot. 

Heinlein also introduces us to a character that will pop up again in his latter writings. 

We begin in the 22nd Century, but the roots of the story go back to Gold Rush era. Despite wealth, Ira Howard will die young and childless. But he creates a trust that states he'll financially support families who have long-lived grandparents. This desire to prolong human life has, by the 22nd Century, have over 100,000 Family members living well over 150 years. 

Despite Earth being somewhat of a utopian society, the idea that human life can be extended creates a conflict -many believe the Families lifespan induced by selective breeding is a ruse, and they have developed a secret method to extend life. Of course, the family possess no such rejuvenation device. To prevent a pogrom, Lazarus Long (the oldest member of the Howard Family it seems), proposes to their one supporter and the Families: hijack the colony starship New Frontiers, and leave Earth.  Themes of the Bible also play into the story, as the first planet they discover turns out not be the Eden like place they hoped and are expelled when conflicts arise with the species that inhabit the planet. Then there is more issues with the second planet as well, that eventually puts the Family back on track to Earth.  But for Long, who reveals his age to be somewhere around 241, decides that Earth is no longer his home and with the help of brilliant engineer Andrew "Slipstick" Libby -who built (with the group minds that occupied the second planet) that helped create the FTL drive that got them home 74 years after they left, decide to recruit other members of the Families in hopes of exploring space with the new drive. And to see what's out there. 

As I said, there are a lot of ideas that the author puts out -from a Earth of the future that will be able to overcome war, prejudice, and famine ala Star Trek's Federation (and I suspect Gene Roddenberry got some of his ideas from this book) to the "magical" inertia device that removes mass to help space travel (along with the near faster than light travel). And long before it became fashionable for an author to tie everything to one single universe, this book (which began life as a serialized tale in 1941) falls into what John W. Campbell, Jr. coined as Heinlein's "Future History", a projected future of the human race between the 20th Century through the early 23rd (most of his short stories where written between 1939 and 1941 as well as 1945 through 1950 and complied into the 1966 book The Past Through Tomorrow). Although it seems Heinlein never fully intended to tie everything together (something that Isaac Asimov would eventually do as well) -he seemed to create a chronology of tales that fit together rather brilliantly. 

Then there is the character of Lazarus Long, who will go on to appear in four other Heinlein novels. Which are now on my reading list of 2015 and on.