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Podkayne Of Mars

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1963

Published: 2022.03.12

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > Podkayne Of Mars

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry.
Cover art by Stephen Hickman.

★★ (of 5)

(* 282 pages includes a 75-page appendix, consisting of an “alternate” [the original] ending, essays from readers about both endings, and a final new ending by publisher Jim Baen.)

 

Podkayne Of Mars was Heinlein’s first full-length book featuring a female first-person narrator and main character (1957’s Menace From Earth was either a novella or very long short story, and Friday was still nearly 20 years in the future). It likely came as something of a shock to Heinlein readers of the time — who had just finished 1961’s much more mature Stranger In A Strange Land and before that 1959’s hypermasculine Starship Troopers.

Podkayne “Poddy” Fries (it’s apparently pronounced freeze, because in the story someone thought it sounded like breeze, instead of the plural reading of my own surname) is a bit older than 15 Earth years though she is native to Mars where years are 687 Earth days long so she counts her own age as “eight plus a few months”. She has a younger brother Clark who is described as something of a sociopathic genius. Though perhaps not as much of a sexist trope as Holly in Menace From Earth (at least Poddy has ambitions to someday be a spaceship captain, which seems progressive enough and in line with the all-female starship crews in Starship Troopers), Poddy still seems like not-quite-a-girl and more like a cardboard cutout of what a 1960s man in his mid-50s might imagine a 15-year-old girl is like. Most of the book is written as if it’s Poddy’s journal, sometimes written and sometimes vocally recorded. Occasionally, Clark sneaks in and adds his two cents’ worth to the journal.

Poddy and Clark’s parents are overachievers — their father a Guggenheim fellow and tenured professor of history (and also a veteran of the Mars Revolution) and their mother is a master engineer who was in charge of rebuilding Mars’ two moons. Uncle Tom Fries is a “Senator at Large” for the Martian Republic and ambassador to an upcoming Three Planets Summit.

The plot, in short (SPOILER ALERT): After a family trip to Earth is cancelled due to younger siblings being accidentally thawed early, Poddy and Clark get to travel anyway when Uncle Tom invites them along on his trip — unbeknownst to them, he is only using them as cover for his diplomatic mission. The three are kidnapped by a Terran agent who threatens to torture the children in order to sway Tom’s vote at the upcoming conference. Clark and Poddy manage to escape after Tom is sent off to the conference.

Writing Quality

I found the quality of writing to be far below Heinlein’s normal standards. For one thing, the entire plot seems to take place off-screen until page 151 when Clark goes missing. Everything prior to that is Poddy describing her family and self, the trip getting sorted out, the trip itself (from Mars to Venus), onboard shenanigans, describing Venusian society (the whole planet is run by a corporation), and Poddy starting to date some guy on Venus. She goes on and on (as Heinlein must have imagined a 15-year-old girl would do) about things that aren’t terribly important. Then, after page 151, the writing style changes abruptly — because Poddy isn’t “writing” in her journal anymore; she’s now vocally recording it — and scenes happen swiftly until the end with no more of her beating around the bush as she did before.

This isn’t to say that everything before page 151 is boring; there are plenty of interesting scenes in those pages. They’re just not plot related, or almost unrelated to the plot.

Further, if it was ever explained why the Terran agent was after Tom or what was so all-fired important about the conference, those explanations were lost to me. Maybe this is because Poddy herself didn’t understand them and so Heinlein left them out due to his poor estimation of girl brains. In other words, most of the story happened elsewhere and no one wrote it down.

Two Endings

The book is known for having two endings. The one originally written by Heinlein has Poddy dying in a bomb blast, the shock of which breaks into Clark’s antisocial outlook and sets him to the path to betterment. When the publisher wouldn’t print it, Heinlein was forced to change the ending to one in which Poddy is badly injured, but survives. A later Baen edition featured both endings and asked readers to vote via essays. My edition includes both endings, some of the resulting essays, a 1962 letter from Heinlein to his agent explaining why the original ending is the “correct one”, and an even newer suggested ending by Jim Baen, publisher.

Having read both endings, Heinlein’s original seems to fit the story better, while the Poddy-survives one insisted upon by the original publishers doesn’t quite have the same sting to it, and in fact features an uncharacteristic monologue by Uncle Tom about how it’s all the mother’s fault. Not only did that speech not seem to fit the Tom character from the rest of the book, it was also incredibly sexist for blaming the mother — because she chased a career instead of raising her children — while ignoring that the father did the same. It sat even worse with me when I read Heinlein’s letter, which says basically the same thing:

“The true tragedy in this story lies in the character of the mother, the highly successful career woman who wouldn’t take the time to raise her own kids — and thereby let her son grow up an infantile monster, no real part of the human race and indifferent to the wellbeing of others... If their mother gets away with neglecting her children’s rearing without having it backfire on her — then the story is just a series of mildly adventurous incidents, strung together.”

—Robert A. Heinlein, pages 222-223

One could try to excuse Heinlein’s stance here by the old saw: “that’s what people thought back then”, but I know better. My own parents, about as conservative as anyone can be, both had careers in the 1960s and ‘70s and considered it just fine for my mother to be out of the home even after I was born. (There are plenty of other facets to that particular story, but the point is that even conservatives of the time knew better than what Heinlein insists upon here.) Clearly Mrs. Fries’ career was more successful than that of Mr. Fries; any thinking person would have suggested that he was the one who chose not to stay home and rear the children.

Anti-Racism

One huge bonus in the book was its anti-racism stance — this alone forced me to add a point to my original one-star rating.

Poddy had noticed when she boarded the spaceship that the Terran passengers on the trip were “a little bit stand-offish” — she chalked it up to “we were like new kids in a strange school”. But she eventually learned it was due to racism. See, Mars and Venus hadn’t been colonized and populated with only white people. Both planets got plenty of people from all over Earth, with Venus getting mostly the poorer sort who would take any job they could get and Mars getting a lot of convicts. Over time, those populations thought of themselves as “of Venus” or “of Mars” instead of from their various ancestral homelands or ethnicities from Earth. Poddy herself is of mixed ancestry, including at least three that are mentioned: Swedish, Maori, and “Asiatic” (now the word is considered offensive in most circles, but that’s what’s in the book). One day she was studying in the ship’s lounge (unnoticed in a corner) when she overheard two white women from Earth complaining of those “dreadful people” — referring to humans from Mars. “They’re all criminals”, another one chimed in. One says of Tom Fries: “that big black savage” — which made Poddy so angry she thought of murdering the women. (Poddy explains to the reader that the Maori ancestry is much more evident in Tom than in herself.) One of the women suggests something illicit about Poddy’s relationship to her uncle, referring to her as “the niece — or so they claim”. Another says: “And mixed blood is the Very Worst Sort” and the first complains: “we shouldn’t be forced to associate with them”. One of the women refers to Poddy and her family as “those creatures” and claimed to have nearly fainted when she first saw them seated at the Captain’s table.

Poddy didn’t know what to do about what she’d overheard, so she told her brother. Clark left without a word. Later, one of the women became ill and turned a bright red, while the other turned bright yellow. Poddy eventually learns that Clark had sabotaged their washcloths with photographic dye as a way of getting back at them. She secretly approves of his methods.

The entire exchange fit seamlessly into the story — didn’t seem forced in — and was an excellent stance to take as civil rights movement gained strength in the U.S. (This book was first published as a serial, that first section coming out in late 1962, which was before the “I Have A Dream” speech, before the infamous church bombing in Birmingham, and before many other well-known 1960s civil rights events.)

 

Conclusion

This was not among the Heinlein books I read as an adolescent; I don’t think I heard of it until some time in my late 20s (late 1990s) when I began collecting all the Heinlein books I could get my hands on. So I don’t really have a nostalgic attachment to it like I do with many of the others — this was only my second reading of the novel. Whether I would have liked it as a teen is up for debate; chances are I probably would have.

Regardless, for reasons mentioned above (poor writing, over-the-top sexism, plot unexplained and undescribed), I count it among my least favorite Heinlein books. And I honestly don’t care which ending is attached to it — though I agree with many who say (1) the author’s original ending is more fitting with the rest of the story, and (2) an editor/publisher’s place is never to replace entire parts of a book but rather to offer tweaks, corrections, and/or suggestions. The book simply isn’t that great or compelling, and Heinlein’s stated explanation is sexist to the point of absurdity.

The (very strong) anti-racism stance was impressive, but not enough to save the rest of the book.

 





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