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Double Star

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1956

Published: 2021.10.02

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > Double Star

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry. Cover art by Barclay Shaw.

★★★★ (of 5)

 

Summary

Winner of the 1956 Hugo Award for Best Novel (beating out Asimov’s The End Of Eternity, among others), Double Star was Heinlein’s first Hugo win — he eventually totalled four Best Novel awards, more than any other author.

Narrated in first person, Double Star is the story of down-on-his-luck actor Lawrence Smith (who uses the stage name Lorenzo Smythe) taking on the biggest role of his career, but one for which he will get no credit. In a future that includes human colonization of our solar system (with various sentient species on Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and others), a spaceman offers Smith decent pay to temporarily impersonate a politician. Smith doesn’t learn until it’s too late to back out that his role is that of John Joseph Bonforte, leader of the opposition party and one of the most prominent men in the Solar System — who has been secretly kidnapped by political opponents. Smith was only supposed to impersonate Bonforte until he could be rescued, but ends up going for much longer. Part adventure story and part political intrigue, there are also strong undercurrent themes about the value of politics and reform, as well as condemnation of xenophobia. (Smith begins the story as an anti-Martian racist, but while portraying the Martian-loving Bonforte, he comes to see the Martians as “brothers” and fights for their inclusion in the human-dominated parliamentary government. He also began the story as an “I don’t mess with politics” person, but learns how politics affects real life, especially the marginalized.)

 

The Good

One 1957 reviewer said Lawrence Smith was “the only first-person narrator Heinlein has created who is a living, completely independent human being”. I might not use “only” (because I enjoy some of Heinlein’s other first-person narrators), but I agree that this one stands out as a fully-fleshed out individual who is separate from the author (which takes some skill, I think). Without taking up much space or time, Heinlein manages to give Smith a believable and realistic childhood background — including a too strict but terribly talented father who shaped his personality and views. And the character arc Smith undergoes is well-handled.

Though Heinlein doesn’t draw attention to the historic parallels, for many readers of the time it would have been obvious. Brown v. Board Of Education had been decided in 1954 and early 1956 saw the signing of the infamous Southern Manifesto, in which 19 U.S. Senators and 82 U.S. Representatives from southern states declared their staunch opposition to school desegregation in the United States. The Montgomery bus boycott was ongoing while Heinlein wrote and published this novel. The human characters in this story include humans of various shades and cultures, all living as equals, in direct contradiction to real life at the time, while Bonforte’s Expansionist Party aims to accomplish the same for the non-human sentients in the Solar System.

Though Heinlein seemed to swing back and forth on his world-building skills, sometimes using up several pages to explain the history and description of the future society, in this book he expertly uses asides and in-passing phrases to tell the reader about what kind of future his characters live in. The only time a paragraph or more is used to detail some facet of society or government, it is because Smith was unaware of it and it has to be explained to him. Though the latter is an obvious exposition tactic in many works, here it feels natural and not contrived at all.

The story moves easily and enjoyably from one stage to the next. The timing is on point. Just as the reader thinks a boring stretch is approaching, something interesting happens. Heinlein also makes good use of episode-style cycles, in that the book has multiple near-conclusions, where it looks like we’ve passed the climax and everything is winding down but then a new problem unfolds to begin the next cycle. (This might have been due to the original publication being serialized in magazines.)

Normally, I wouldn’t consider it a positive feature that science is mostly left out of this one — but it works here because Smith is entirely unfamiliar with science. Rest assured that Heinlein calculated the travel times and gravity in the background, so the number of days/hours for transit times matches with the gravitational thrust of the spaceships, but uncharacteristically, none of the characters discuss it. Instead, the skills discussed are those of actors (specifically impersonators) and politicians, both those in the public eye and those working behind the scenes. It was a pleasant departure.

Points Off For...

This one definitely falls short in the feminism category. There are almost no female characters, and the main one is a love interest of Bonforte (and later Smith). Yes, unlike many women characters in Heinlein’s work, Penny is competent and educated, but it is clear she was only included as a love interest — and as a vehicle for a more emotional/feminine viewpoint when that is required. (Because, apparently, it would have been unseemly to have a male character with such a viewpoint.)

I could find little else to criticize here. It’s easy to see why this one won the Hugo.

Conclusion

I don’t remember having such a favorable impression of this book the first time I read it — probably in the mid- or late 1990s. Honestly, I had forgotten most of the storyline until I re-read it. So it was nice to discover this again.

 





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