★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Rocket Ship Galileo
• Author: Robert A. Heinlein
• Year: 1947 (mine was 1981 paperback)
• Pages: 187
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Del Rey / Ballantine Books
• ISBN 0-345-30276-1 (1981 paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

Three high schoolers are toying around with small rockets just for fun when one of their uncles — who happens to be a well-known rocket scientist — shows up and asks if they want to help him make a trip to the Moon. They do the work, prepare their Moon rocket, and make the trip. Only to discover that Nazis have already made it to the Moon and are preparing to fire atomic missiles at the Earth. The four Americans handily defeat the entire platoon of well-trained Nazis and return home heroes.

Though it wasn’t the first novel he wrote, Rocket Ship Galileo was the first novel Robert A. Heinlein published (it was initially rejected because going to the Moon was “too far out”). It didn’t win any awards, but it did sell well enough to establish Heinlein as a reliable novelist, and later saw many reprints.

 

Praise

The story moves quickly, with little extra baggage. The prose is tight and clear. The plot ties together nicely with decent foreshadowing and no mysteries unsolved at the end.

As far as I can tell, the science is sound — based on 1947 science, anyway, and Heinlein’s extrapolations therefrom. Remember, no human would get to the Moon in real life until twenty-two years after this novel came out.

 

Points Off For...

Okay, the three “boy” characters (who were 18 but still counted as minors at the time) are paper-thin, with little to differentiate them from one another. Art is into photography and is only 5‘3”, but Ross and Maurice often sound like the same person to me.

The story requires a huge suspension of disbelief, especially coming from a 2020 perspective, in that we now know how many billions of dollars and thousands of scientists and engineers are required just to get one person into orbit. (Heinlein imagined a near-future in which the UN had expanded on Germany’s V2 rockets, putting wings on them and making unmanned suborbital mail flights; Dr. Cargrave and the boys bought a used model on the cheap and retrofitted it for manned spaceflight.)

(My copy had several easily-caught typos, but it was a fairly late reprinting.)

 

‘For Its Time...’

I found it interesting that Dr. Cargraves and boys were battling literal Nazis in this story, regularly commenting that the “war is over” and that the idea of the “master race” had clearly been debunked. These Moon Nazis were simply a few weirdos who refused to concede World War 2. Fast-forward to today when literal Nazis still exist and hold public marches in United States cities.

As one might expect for a juvenile novel in the U.S. in the 1940s, everyone in the book is white (both the Americans and the Germans), and if anyone’s eyes are mentioned, they are sure to be blue eyes. All the primary characters male, though two women do make appearances early: Art’s mother (Dr. Cargraves’ sister) is a single mom who runs a shop and raises Art alone. And Ross’ mom is a quiet woman who only had one speaking part — to completely override a speech her husband just made and correct him in front of others (and the husband meekly accepted it).

 

Conclusion

This was one of the very first Heinlein books I read in the 1980s — I was probably 13 or 14 at the time. (I think Red Planet was my actual first Heinlein experience, and Space Cadet was my second.) This read-through was very close to exactly how I remembered it, plot-wise, though I didn’t remember that Art’s father had been rescued from a Nazi concentration camp.

If anything, it’s an example of what creative minds were writing at the time, and shows how far off even an educated guess can be.

 

 

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