- Heinlein, Robert A.
Rocket Ship Galileo.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, [1947, 1974, 1988] 2014.
ASIN B00H8XGKVU.
-
After the end of World War II,
Robert A. Heinlein
put his wartime engineering work behind him and returned to professional
writing. His ambition was to break out of the pulp magazine ghetto
in which science fiction had been largely confined before the war into
the more prestigious (and better paying) markets of novels and
anthologies published by top-tier New York firms and the “slick”
general-interest magazines such as Collier's and
The Saturday Evening Post, which published fiction
in those days. For the novels, he decided to focus initially on a segment
of the market he understood well from his pre-war career:
“juveniles”—books aimed a young audience (in the case
of science fiction, overwhelmingly male), and sold, in large part, in
hardcover to public and school libraries (mass market paperbacks
were just beginning to emerge in the late 1940s, and had not yet become
important to mainstream publishers).
Rocket Ship Galileo was the first of Heinlein's
juveniles, and it was a tour de force which established him
in the market and led to a series which would extend to twelve
volumes. (Heinlein scholars differ on which of his novels are
classified as juveniles. Some include Starship Troopers
as a juvenile, but despite its having been originally written as one
and rejected by his publisher, Heinlein did not classify it thus.)
The plot could not be more engaging to a young person at the dawn
of the atomic and space age. Three high school seniors, self-taught
in the difficult art of rocketry (often, as was the case for their
seniors in the era, by trial and [noisy and dangerous] error), are
recruited by an uncle of one of them, veteran of the wartime
atomic project, who wants to go to the Moon. He's invented a novel
type of nuclear engine which allows a single-stage ship to make the
round trip, and having despaired of getting sclerotic government or
industry involved, decides to do it himself using cast-off parts and
the talent and boundless energy of young people willing to learn
by doing.
Working in their remote desert location, they become aware that forces
unknown are taking an untoward interest in their work and seem to
want to bring it to a halt, going as far as sabotage and lawfare.
Finally, it's off to the Moon, where they discover the dark secret
on the far side: space Nazis!
The remarkable thing about this novel is how well it holds up, almost
seventy years after publication. While Heinlein was writing for a
young audience, he never condescended to them. The science and
engineering were as accurate as was known at the time, and Heinlein
manages to instill in his audience a basic knowledge of rocket
propulsion, orbital mechanics, and automated guidance systems as
the yarn progresses. Other than three characters
being young people, there is nothing about this story which makes it
“juvenile” fiction: there is a hard edge of adult morality
and the value of courage which forms the young characters as they
live the adventure.
At the moment, only this Kindle edition and an unabridged
audio book edition are available new.
Used copies of earlier paperback editions are readily available.
March 2015 