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The Rolling Stones

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1952

Published: 2021.05.07

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > The Rolling Stones

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★★ (4.4 of 5)

 

Summary

Also published in a condensed, serialized version as Tramp Space Ship in Boys’ Life magazine, The Rolling Stones is about a Moon-based human family and their decision to buy and refit a spaceship so they can travel around the Solar System.

The novel seems to be set in the same universe/timeline as 1948’s Space Cadet (the Patrol and its orbiting missiles are mentioned), as well as some later books. For example, one of the main characters here, grandmother Hazel Stone, is a 12-year-old girl in 1966’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and goes by the pseudonym Gwen Novak in 1985’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Stone and her twin grandsons Castor and Pollux also appear in 1980’s The Number Of The Beast, though that book concerns itself with multiple timelines or universes, thus connecting all the others.

The title is drawn from the old proverb “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, a phrase explicitly referred to in the text. (Note that this novel’s 1952 publication predates the 1962 naming of the English rock band, Bob Dylan’s 1965 song, the 1967 founding of the American pop culture magazine, and the 1971 writing of the Motown hit about papa’s occupation. However, Muddy Waters’ single Rollin’ Stone came out in 1950.) Here is the relevant text in the novel, in the midst of a Stone family argument over the ship’s name:

“Rubbish! We thrive on trouble. Do you want to get covered with moss?”

“What’s ‘moss’, Grandma Hazel?” Lowell demanded.

“Huh? It’s... well, it’s what rolling stones don’t gather.”

Roger snapped his fingers. “Hazel, you’ve just named the ship.”

—page 52

 

The Good

Though classified as one of Heinlein’s juveniles, this book felt more mature to me. Like most of the other juveniles it has teenage boys as main characters and there are elementary descriptions of the science and technology necessary for space travel (as Heinlein imagined space travel, years before space travel existed), but there are elements of Heinlein’s later adult novels and very little of the story (other than the boys’ continuing education) is related to adolescence. The adult characters don’t seem so strange and far away; the reader is given insight into Hazel Stone’s thinking and sometimes sees scenes from the perspective of Stone’s adult son Roger. I think it has the best of both worlds and few of the downsides of either.

I also quite enjoyed the third-person narrator’s asides about various topics — I recall some of these playing a small part in forming my world perspective when I was an adolescent. A good example is the narrator’s three-page monologue about technology. Here’s a small sample:

“Every technology goes through three stages: first a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final proper design therefrom.”

—pages 52-53

The story moves quickly, the writing is clear, and the characters well-differentiated. The scenes of family interaction felt realistic — more so than the wooden, cliched conversations from some earlier books. There are cute and ongoing family-style jokes (such as the older twin referring to the younger one as “Junior” and the latter calling the former “Grandpa”), realistic interactions with the youngest sibling, and quite the cast of one-scene characters met during the Stone family’s travels.

There’s a tear-jerker near-death scene near the end, involving the grandmother and little boy, followed almost immediately by a heartwarming ending — in which the family decides not to return to Luna after all, but to head to Saturn instead.

 

Points Off For...

I couldn’t find anything specific to dislike about this novel; it simply didn’t cross the line into “masterpiece” territory.

 

For Its Time...

What dates this book is mostly technology descriptions. Though far-fetched and futuristic sounding in 1952, it missed (as did all other sci-books of the time) the chance to predict computerization and miniaturization. So Caster and Pollux do their school lessons with “spools” and the ship’s autopilot is a mechanical, analog computer. Radar tracking and course plotting are done by humans.

On the sexism front, someone must have talked to Heinlein between his previous books and this one; suddenly the women characters resemble real people. Gone are the plastic, babyish stereotypes of women seen in earlier stories. When Castor and Pollux first arrive home after the introductory chapter, their father is introduced as “Mr. Stone”, while their mother is “Dr. Stone”. The grandmother, Hazel, is an accomplished engineer and one of the heroic founders of Luna City (a reference that Heinlein used to write The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress some years later). Though the dad, Roger (Mr. Stone) is clearly intelligent, he is often outwitted by both his wife and his mother. The four-year-old, Lowell, plays chess with his grandmother Hazel, who can visualize the board in her head and name her moves over the radio while Lowell looks at a real board. Hazel is also an expert negotiator, getting the ship from a scrapyard at a price lower than either Mr. Stone or his sons would have managed. (One notable exception to all this is the assumption that cooking and child-rearing is always done by women, but this is something that still lingers in many modern novels too — not to mention real life.)

Hazel Stone even has a short monologue about why she didn’t stick with engineering when she was younger, including:

“I saw three big, hairy men promoted over my head and not one of them could do a partial integration without a pencil. Presently I figured out that the Atomic Energy Commission had a bias on the subject of women no matter what the civil service rules said.”

—page 22

One cringe-worthy item of note: When Hazel notices her son (and later her grandsons) shying away from some daunting task, she taunts him by calling him “sissy”. (I assume it was quite common at the time; it was still in regular use during my own childhood in the 1970s.)

 

Conclusion

Since I started reading Heinlein’s books in order of original publication date, this one is my favorite so far (though it wasn’t among my favorites when I first read it).

 





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