This Just Read: Rocket Ship Galileo

I decided to take a trip down memory lane this week. I re-read Robert Heinein's classic: Rocket Ship Galileo (just recently available on Kindle). This was Heinlein's first published novel and the first of his series of juvenalia: novels written for teens, including Space Cadet, Have Space Suit - Will Travel, Red Planet, and others. All feature plucky kids (unfailingly young men) with a scientific bent thrown into perilous sci-fi circumstances and forced to become men. Classic bildungsroman.

Rocket Ship Galileo is about a group of three midwestern teens who--under the guidance of an atomic-scientist uncle--build and pilot a rocket ship to the moon. What's not to love?! I read it when I was a teen myself, and every time I re-read it I'm transported back.

As it was published almost seventy years ago (1947), I don't feel bad about spoiling the plot twist. When our heroes safely land on the moon, they discover that they're not the first ones there! The Nazis have established a moon base and are planning to threaten the world with nuclear annihilation. SPOILER: Our plucky boys save humanity!

This mid-story plot twist is a device Heinlein uses in other novels, sometimes well, sometimes not so well. In Rocket Ship Galileo it's clever and drives the story further. In Farnham's Freehold, for example, it turns what may be one of the best first halves of a Heinlein novel into a disaster by the end.

Of course, Heinlein's strong streaks of American exceptionalism and libertarianism are evident here at the very beginning of his career--they'll be with him to the end. I don't mind them, and can even get swept up by them. I love Heinlein's future vision of American education--his teens usually have done lots of calculus and physics by the time they graduate high school. I wish I'd been as ambitious when I was their age.

There's also a hopefulness and a naivete in the juvenalia, both things I encourage and think necessary for a bright future for humanity. I love many of Heinlein's more mature writings (e.g. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land), but my heart belongs to his young adult fiction. He was John Green before John Green was John Green!