★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Farmer In The Sky
• Author: Robert A. Heinlein
• Year: 1950 (mine was 1975 paperback)
• Pages: 221
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Del Rey (by Ballantine)
• ISBN 0-345-32438-2 (1975 paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

Winning a “Retro Hugo” in 2001, Farmer In The Sky is usually considered one of Heinlein’s juveniles, because its main character is a teenage boy and the structure is that of a coming-of-age story. However, as a reviewer remarked at the time, it was “just about the only mature science fiction novel of the year [1950]” and a later critic noted that it “has harsh realism for a juvenile”. It deals with the brutal and unforgiving nature of everywhere that’s not Earth, death (of both adults and children), colony failure, child labor, natural disasters, and other subjects without sugar-coating them for young minds.

(Yet it was “young” enough to be serialized in Boys’ Life magazine — allegedly the reason Boy Scouts are mentioned at least once per chapter.)

The story is told by first-person narrator Bill Lermer, a teenage boy who emigrates from Earth to Ganymede with his family. Nearly half the book is concerned with setting the stage, describing the testing and acceptance process for colonists, and relating the trip from Earth to Ganymede. The colonists arrive to find that their promised farms are not available, that the planet isn’t yet ready to absorb so many people. The existing residents of Ganymede resent the new arrivals and don’t make it easy for them. While Bill adjusts to his father’s new wife and his new step-sister Peggy, he also has to work while continuing his education and trying to survive on a harsh planet. Not everyone makes it.

The initial setting is an overcrowded Earth where families have to observe strict calorie rationing (though there is still plenty of wilderness for the Boy Scouts to explore).

 

Praise

For the science available at the time, the depictions of humanity’s attempt to colonize a Jovian satellite seem dead-on accurate. The writing is, as usual, tight and precise, and the story keeps moving. Where the prose gets loose or uses more slang, it’s coming from the mind of Bill the narrator.

And, though Heinlein would have been in his 40s by this point, his portrayal of the way a teenage boy might think, feel, and behave seem really well-done to me. This is especially true considering the dual time shifts involved: first he has to take himself back to what it felt like to be a boy, then he has to take that boyhood forward into a future that’s different from either the time of writing or the time of his boyhood. And that’s the part that was masterfully done.

Whereas most characters in earlier books were flat and interchangeable, this book shows marked improvement in Heinlein’s grasp and portrayal of each person having a different background and therefore different viewpoints and motivations. The reader can often tell which character is speaking simply by the way the sentences are constructed — each character has a different voice and manner.

 

‘For Its Time...’

Science/Technology: The world includes small and inexpensive passenger copters — safe enough to be operated by young teens, fancy futuristic kitchen gear (Bill gets a whole meal out of deepfreeze and cooks it for his father in two minutes), atomic desalination plants (so sixty million Californians can have drinking water), regular space travel within the solar system, a small city on the Moon, etc. The longhaul rockets are atomic powered, with the newest ones sporting 100-percent mass-conversion torches. On Earth, almost everything is incinerated after use, including clothes and dishes, which leads to Bill’s surprise that the colonists wash and reuse everything.

Racism: No one’s ethnicity is mentioned, though it’s assumed most characters are white. When Bill and the boys are starting Boy Scout troops on the colony ship, one of the boys is named “Douglas MacArthur Okajima” (page 75). Later there’s a character with an obviously Russian name, which was likely a bold step during the early stages of the Cold War.

Sexism: Here, Heinlein shows marked improvement over previous novels when it comes to his treatment of characters who aren’t men or boys, though it’s still not great. We get named female characters much earlier than usual (in the first ten pages) and more soon afterward. During the first spaceship ride, when the colonists are being taken up to orbit to transfer to the colony ship, the smartest, most skilled person in Bill’s compartment is a “stewardess” named Miss Andrews. Though Bill isn’t yet fond of his new step-sister, he’s impressed when she joins the starship’s “junior council”. When Heinlein describes the founding of Boy Scout troops in the colony ship, he also mentions that the girls started their own Girl Scout troops. When they arrive at Ganymede, the shuttle that greets them is piloted by a competent woman (Captain Hattie) — Heinlein’s first woman pilot as far as I know.

But all is not well. There are certainly signs that Heinlein doesn’t yet consider women to be full or complete humans. When he needs a character to be ignorant about space travel or technology, he chooses a woman (Mrs. Tarbutton in this case). Bill cooks for George at the beginning, but only because George is unmarried at the time and can’t cook for himself. And the narrator includes this ghastly passage:

“I think girls should be raised in the bottom of a deep, dark sack until they are old enough to know better. Then when it came time, you could either let them out or close the sack and throw them away, whichever was the best idea.”

—page 50

Though it could be argued that this is showing Bill’s development (he later acquires better opinions about girls), it’s an awful thing to include in a story that’s going to be read by boys nationwide.

Family: Bill calls his parents by their first names, and at one point his father apologizes for even mentioning corporal punishment. Both of those seem oddly forward-looking, not only for Heinlein but for 1950 in general. George (Bill’s dad) is a widower who remarries just before leaving Earth; his new wife has a daughter. This is a relatively complex family unit when compared to other sci-fi stories at the time, especially juveniles.

 

Points Off For...

Not that an opening line alone should be worthy of points (either bad or good), this one is pretty weak: “Our troop had been up in the High Sierras that day and we were late getting back.”

Just before the end, without warning and for no reason, Heinlein squeezes in a scene where Bill and a friend find some unexplainable crystals hiding a cave full of artifacts from an ancient alien civilization. It broke up the realistic nature of the story and changed the tone completely.

 

Extra

Some have suggested this book is part of Heinlein’s “Future History” series, because the narrator mentions the song The Green Hills Of Earth and its author Rhysling (from this short story). But reference is also made to the “Space Patrol” (from the novel Space Cadet), which is not part of the Future History series as far as I know.

 

Conclusion

This is one of the better ones.

 

 

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