The Great Heinlein Juveniles Plus The Other Two Reread 10: Time for the Stars

[james_davis_nicoll]

In which archaic sexism and racism provide unwelcome distraction from dubious physics: Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein


As ever, corrections will not be dealt with until I get home tonight.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I did learn something embarrassing from this, which is that I have been conflating Beta Hydri and Beta Hydrae for years. FOR YEARS.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

This blog now has TV commercials. James, you're coming up in the world.

Typo patrol ,delete after reading

[hazelchaz]

hostile, well-organized native.
s/b
hostile, well-organized natives.

Re: Typo patrol ,delete after reading

[hazelchaz]

just as irrelevant as the mutiny
s/b
just as irrelevant as the mutiny.

Re: Typo patrol ,delete after reading

[hazelchaz]

he telepathic communication
s/b
the telepathic communication

[(Anonymous)]

The one thing I remember from this is the way that the Pat-Tom dynamic turns out to be different than Pat (and the naive reader who takes Pat's narration to be fact) believes; particularly how Tom apparent victory in the competition to be allowed to go off into space is really Tom's victory, as he gets both to stay home where it's safe and comfortable, and get sympathy for being done out of his dream. I need to read this in the next few months since it will be a prime example in my next con talk, of how knowing equations doesn't mean you understand relativity.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Dad would also protest the explicit subsidization of children through tax deductions?

In any case, a tax seems a lot less heavy-handed than an outright limitation of children, like you see in a lot of these "overpopulated Earth" futures.

[rozasharn.livejournal.com]

I noticed that he had a stamp for "Paid under Protest". How many things did he stamp with that?!

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Everything, one assumes. Grocery receipts, electricity bills, diner tickets. Everything.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

He must have been a lot of fun at parties.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Great-uncle? About 12.5% shared genetics (assuming no inbreeding in between), which is the same as a first cousin. Marriage to the latter is squicky to some people, but legal in most of the world right now.

(Something that people often forget in SF/Fantasy where long lives/time dilation/time travel/whatever is involved: increasing the number of generations between people is equivalent to moving outward.)

[(Anonymous)]

It's not so much the degree of genetic closeness (and I presume time dilation took care of the age gap), but the "with whom he has shared an intimate mental connection since she was an infant" that is the source of the squick.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I remember being surprised about that when I applied for a marriage license. You can't marry your uncle or aunt in Massachusetts, but you can marry your first cousin. There are many US states where you can't, though.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

It's actually more in this case, as Pat and Tom are identical twins.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I didn't like the book much as a kid, but didn't realize why. When I reread it as an adult, it looked like it was a weird exception to science fiction because getting out into space was no fun whatsoever.

Offhand, I can't think of any other stories which made space so unappetizing except for Malzberg's astronaut stories. "Scanners Live in Vain" doesn't count because space is incidentally painful-- it's going to be good once the pain problem is solved.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Decades later, _Saturn's Children_ makes space travel sound like shit.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Ben Franklin was the youngest boy, not the youngest child. FUCK YOU, HEINLEIN.

[monte davis (from livejournal.com)]

it would be obvious the star would not last long enough for complex life forms to appear

Ummm... based on your sample size of how many star systems with complex life forms? We do not know enough to form a sensible opinion about whether our planet was precocious or rode the short bus... nor enough about the range of extremely specific possible star + planet histories (even for F, G and K stars) to make a good estimate of when the clock starts.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

There's also the way that SF back in the 50's tended to be completely innocent about matters of stellar types and lifespans. Writers plunked stars into stories based on the aesthetics or symbolism of their colour, or based on how harsh and hostile the sunlight was to visitors from Earth, with no regard for how the star's color was linked to its lifespan.

Heinlein's stories were no exception -- the Mother Thing in Have Space Suit, Will Travel, for instance, comes from Vega, which is a type A0 with a life span of well under a quarter billion years -- the Mother Thing's people must have set the galactic record for the speed of their evolutionary development.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Depends if you believe in the mediocrity principle: there's no reason to assume that there is anything unusual about the way complex life evolved on our planet (very slowly), so it's a stretch to assume "much faster" would be commonplace.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Beta Ceti is a red giant. At just over two solar masses, it would have spent about 2 billion years on the main sequence, and the red giant phase will last about 100 million years.

Things to like

[(Anonymous)]

There are some.

-- The pacing is weird, but it means we get to spend a lot of time on the ship, and that's actually kind of interesting. Heinlein did manage to give a feel for how a mixed civilian-military expedition crowded in together would feel.

-- The inhabitants of Elysia are almost Lovecraftianly creepy. The bit with the big? "It wasn't a mouth that got him. I don't think it was a mouth." That was downright disturbing, and very well done.

-- The future shock is depicted with a few deft strokes -- women without hats, ruffly around the ridge, and so forth.

-- It never gets pointed out, but the kill rate was crazy high in this book, I think less than half of the named characters make it to the end. Not sure if it sets the record for Heinlein generally -- I think maybe yes? -- but it's certainly by far the most lethal of the juveniles. As a young person, this gave me a bracing sense of unpredictability.


Doug M.

Re: Things to like

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I remember that as a naive young kid, I was shocked by the death toll. But mainly I remember that the "we are just a mathematical abstraction" line left me really unsatisfied.

Re: Things to like

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Women without hats! Dogs and cats living together! Kids on my lawn! And I can't turn off this damn automatically shaking cane!