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!

This Just Read: The Killer of Pilgrims

I just finished Susannah Gregory's The Killer of Pilgrims on my Kindle. It's the sixteenth book in her series featuring Matthew Bartholomew, a physician in 14th century Cambridge. I've only read one other of the series, the one immediately preceding this one.

I'm a fan of several historical mystery series,especially the Joliffe series by Margaret Frazer and the Templar Knight Mysteries by Maureen Ash. I read them as an antidote to the other, serious reading I like to (and sometimes have to) do. Currently I'm a quarter-way into Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August--a very serious read. I needed a break and decided to try a second book in this series.

I like the historical mystery settings. I generally find them well written with a good bit of historical flavor. Having lived in England, I can connect with some of the settings (e.g. Lincoln or Canterbury).

The main characters in these series usually have a few modern quirks--anachronisms that set them apart from the other characters and make them more like us. Matthew Bartholomew, for example, is an unusual physician. He looks for actual organic causes of illness, rather than consulting horoscopes to treat his patients, like the other (more respectable) physicians in town.

So, I just finished The Killer of Pilgrims and found it pretty exhausting. It depicts a series of thefts and murders set against the backdrop of inter-college rivalries in 14th-century Cambridge. I have no doubt the historical details are accurate; these books stand or fall on their historicity. That said, in the wake of last week's shooting spree at UC Santa Barbara, my heart just wasn't ready for a tale filled with such callous indifference to human life. The major and minor characters in The Killer of Pilgrims seem ready to run each other through for the slightest insult. Maybe it's accurate, I didn't care.

I finished it, and may well try another one some day. But not today.