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Have Spacesuit — Will Travel

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1958

Published: 2021.12.19

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > The Door Into Summer

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry.
Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet.

★★★ (of 5)

 

Usually listed as the last of Heinlein’s juveniles (a few reviewers list 1963’s Podkayne Of Mars as the last), Have Spacesuit — Will Travel is an adventure yarn narrated by the main character, a high school age boy named Clifford “Kip” Russell. No doubt the title was inspired by the popular radio and television series Have Gun — Will Travel, which first went on the air in 1957. The book was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 but lost out to Jame Blish’s A Case Of Conscience. (Heinlein had won a few years earlier with Double Star and would win the following year with Starship Troopers, on his way to a record six Hugos on 12 nominations.)

The story begins with Kip explaining how he came into possession of an actual space suit (winning a soap brand’s write-in contest), and then how he fixed it up and tested it while also trying to plan for college. He accidentally gets mixed up in a secret interstellar conflict and the suit saves his life more than once as he rescues a human girl who’d been kidnapped by aliens, helps diffuse a war between two different ET species, survives on the surface of Pluto, and — in the climax — successfully defends all of humanity in a galactic court presided over by non-human intelligences.

The Good: Once the story gets going, it’s fun and interesting. Kip and the girl (Peewee) are imprisoned on the Moon by aliens (Wormfaces), along with an alien of a different species (Vegan) who later turns out to be an intergalactic police officer of sorts. They escape for a long trek across the Moon’s surface but are recaptured and taken to a secret Wormface base on Pluto, where the Vegan prisoner manages to construct both a bomb and a beacon, simultaneously destroying the Wormface base and calling her own people. The Vegan forces show up to the rescue and take the humans to their own planet, and later Kip and Peewee represent humanity in an intergalactic court. All very wild, very space opera type stuff.

Another high point is that Heinlein found several places to work in science and math education where it felt natural rather than forced. For example, Kip was able to calculate how far the Wormface spaceship traveled based on how long it took them (five and a half days) and the stated acceleration (8 gravities) so he knew where he was imprisoned. It worked out to close enough to 2.8 billion miles that the answer had to be Pluto or Neptune, and Neptune’s gravity didn’t match what he was experiencing so he concluded: Pluto. This is just one example of several where basic scientific and mathematical knowledge proved helpful. (For future reference, the equation is s = 1/2 at2, where s is distance, a is acceleration, and t is time.) I’ve lost track of how many sci-fi stories completely ignore stuff like this and have impossible scenes where a spacecraft accelerates at one gravity and gets to Pluto in a day or something.

The Not So Good: The story really doesn’t get moving until page 41 or so. It should have only taken a page or two to tell the story of how Kip acquired the suit (which he names “Oscar”), but instead we get detailed descriptions of the methods he used to win the contest, how his local high school was failing him and so his Dad supplemented his education, the way his father’s personality shaped his young life, what kind of job he had (soda jerk) and one of his annoying customers — it is this specific customer who provides the title sentence, teasing Kip about running a classified ad now that he has a spacesuit.

A bit like 1951’s Between Planets, Kip himself often doesn’t take action that furthers the plot — usually things happen to him. He often doesn’t know what’s going on (the true protagonists and antagonists are usually off-stage) and in a first-person narration book, this leaves the reader just as in the dark as Kip is. Perhaps this makes it more endearing to youth — who often experience life this way (others presenting them with very limited options), but it also looks like lazy writing (“I don’t have to explain these fairly complex phenomenon or events because my main character didn’t see them happen and doesn’t understand them anyway!”)

Whether the author was expressing his own opinions or pushing the opinions of his character (or, most likely, both), the story comes across as very pro-patriarchy. This is at odds with other Heinlein books, both before and after this one, which tout competent and fully equal female characters. In this one, the girl (Peewee) is a super-genius but otherwise a feminine child — and therefore (in Kip’s eyes) in need of protection. Kip sees himself as the protector, provider, planner, thinker, etc., and the phrasing makes it clear that it’s not because Peewee is a child, but because Peewee is a girl child.

Legacy: Apparently, most amateur radio satellites are referred to as “OSCARS” (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio), thought to be a reference to the spacesuit named Oscar in this book. The first OSCAR was launched in 1961.

 

Conclusion

If my memory is anywhere near accurate, this was one of the first five Heinlein books I ever read, back in the mid-1980s — the others being Red Planet, Rocket Ship Galileo, Space Cadet, and Farmer In The Sky. The latter two held up in my recent re-reading, while this one and the other two didn’t fare quite as well. Have Spacesuit — Will Travel is a fun romp (once you get past the boring first 40 pages) but I can’t really recommend it.

 





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