★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Space Cadet
• Author: Robert A. Heinlein
• Year: 1948 (mine was 1978 reprint)
• Pages: 221
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Del Rey (by Ballantine Books)
• ISBN 0-345-26072-4 (1978 paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

Heinlein’s Space Cadet is one of the first two Heinlein books I ever read — probably around 1984. (It might have been the first, but in my memory it could also have been Red Planet, which came out a year later). Along with other Heinlein juveniles and similar books, Space Cadet helped inspire in me a love of “hard science fiction”, as well as science itself.

The plot arc is a relatively simple coming-of-age tale, in which a teenage boy from rural Iowa tries out for the Interplanetary Patrol in the year 2075, goes through a military academy style training, befriends other young men from other places, and becomes a man via a series of trials and experiences. The big finish involves a trip to Venus to put down an uprising.

(A bit prior to my first reading of Space Cadet, I had read a few Tom Corbett, Space Cadet books, and believed them to predate Heinlein’s work — maybe because they were simpler, meant for a younger audience. I later learned that the two concepts were both in development at about the same time, but that Heinlein beat Joseph Greene to the punch. The Corbett TV show didn’t air until 1950, and the books — written by unnamed authors under the psuedonym Carey Rockwell — didn’t appear until 1952. I read at least five of the eight books.)

 

Praise

Unlike Beyond This Horizon (also published in novel form in 1948), this story doesn’t meander. The narrative is tight and well-formed, the exposition brief and in appropriate places.

Though all the main characters are white males (fairly common in sci-fi in the mid-20th Century), they have varying personalities and skills (unlike the flat characters in the earlier Rocket Ship Galileo). Main character Matt Dodson is overly serious and a bit introspective; his best friend Tex Jarman is extroverted and fun-loving; Oscar Jensen seems more grown-up and responsible; Pierre Armand struggles physically and emotionally; and antagonist Girard Burke, a son of wealth, is arrogant and cunning. While mostly archetypes, each has a distinctive background that explains it, and it feels natural rather than copy/paste.

Though it is in a sense “military sci-fi”, Heinlein has structured the Patrol as more of a peacekeeping force in the role of guardian over the Earth and other human settlements in the Solar System. The cadets aren’t trained to be mindless soldiers, but rather thinkers. (Lt. Wong explains this to cadet Dodson on pages 111-112.) The Patrol mostly stays out of human affairs unless called upon in emergencies; mostly they train, study, debate, and inspect the orbiting atom bombs that they control.

For a juvenile novel — especially of its time and so early in Heinlein’s career — there is an impressive amount of subversive messaging, along the lines of questioning the status quo, challenging one’s own deepest beliefs and assumptions, accepting pluralism, and learning to be tolerant of those very different from and foreign to oneself.

And, as is expected with Heinlein works, the science is sound — at least as it was understood at the time. The parts that are “wrong” were guesses about the future — like what would be discovered upon reaching other planets or how quickly humanity would inhabit the rest of the solar system.

 

‘For Its Time...’

Technology: For a book published in 1948, the reader will be surprised to see pocket-sized mobile phones and precooked meals stored in a freezer and reheated in seconds. though other tech predictions were a little off (learning via hypnosis, atomic-powered spaceships, helicopters commonly owned by families, inexpensive high-speed rail transportation in North America, etc.)

Racism: This book was surprisingly forward-looking. For example, the Patrol is very inclusive, and Heinlein takes pains to make this obvious. When Matt first arrives for training, he sees boys who are “swarthy... wearing high, tight turbans” and another “tall, handsome youth whose impassive face was shiny black” (page 8). Tex’s first roommate speaks “Hindustani, I guess it was” (page 23). One cadet mutters “Allah the Merciful” upon seeing a ship crash-land (page 39). The orbital training facility includes “Moslem boys”. On page 70 we meet Matt’s instructor and psychiatrist, Lt. Wong. Later, another Lieutenant, Peters, is Black (page 171). (All the primary characters appear to be entirely white.)

For several pages, Matt argues against his father’s “American first” bigotry. Upon visiting home, Matt’s dad insists “After all, it’s our Patrol. For all practical purposes the other nations don’t count.” He reminds his son that most Patrol officers are “from North America” and therefore North America isn’t really under the control of the Patrol. He goes on to say the Patrol only patrols North America because “it would look bad, otherwise”. Though Matt has trouble expressing it (and I know the feeling, having attempted similar discussions with my own father), he tries to make clear that the whole of humanity is equal in the Patrol’s — and Matt’s — eyes.

In the finale, Oscar (who is from Venus) accuses Matt and Tex of “race prejudice” and they respond by immediately becoming defensive and mentioning Lt. Peters (a Black man) — the old “but I have a Black friend!” defense. But Oscar is referring to the natives of Venus, who are entirely sentient, yet Matt and Tex referred to them as “frogs” or worse. Eventually, Oscar convinces them to be more understanding.

The final section involves a businessman (their old classmate Burke) who had attempted to violate the Venus natives’ autonomy in order to profit off radioactive ores he found. The Patrol is entirely against this sort of colonialism and the protagonists arrest Burke and try to set things right with the natives.

Sexism: On the “girls” front, the book was laughable. There are zero women in the Patrol; “girls” are just something that the cadets talk and wonder about. Matt’s mother has trouble understanding “what holds the Moon up” and is scared of technology. His former high school sweetheart “was the sort of girl who never would get clearly fixed in her mind the distinction between a planet and a star” (page 116). Other female characters mentioned are stewardesses, secretaries, “decorative”, and receptionists.

Education: Heinlein wants Patrol officers to be massively, ridiculously educated. Lt. Wong tells Matt just what subjects he’ll be studying, besides mathematics, sciences, and the technical aspects of his job:

“...extraterrestrial biology, history, cultures, psychology, law and institutions, treaties and conventions, planetary ecologies, system ecology, interplanetary economics, applications of extraterrestrialism, comparitive religious customs, law of space... But even those subjects are not your education; they are simply raw materials. Your real job is to learn how to think — and that means you must study several other subjects: epistemology, scientific methodology, semantics, structures of languages, patterns of ethics and morals, varieties of logics, motivational psychology, and so on... A Patrol officer shouldn’t limit his horizons to just the things he is sure to need.”

—page 72-73

(The quoted section above is a precursor, one of many, to Heinlein’s eventual famous quotation from 1973’s Time Enough For Love, regarding specialization and what a human being should be able to do.)

 

Points Off For...

This book holds up surprisingly well — except the fairly obvious parts where Heinlein guessed wrong about what adventurers would find in space (the Moon landing was still 21 years in the future when this was published) — and is surprisingly forward-thinking when it comes to inclusion and tolerance of all types of humanity.

Perhaps its biggest failure was Heinlein’s inability to foresee (or hesitancy to advocate for) the roles that women would and should play in future societies. Some time later, he began to bend in that direction, but not in 1948.

 

Extra

When Dodson uses his leave to visit his family back on Earth, his mother insists that he visit his great-aunt Dora, the elderly family matriarch. Matt’s mom claims, “She’ll want to ask you a thousand questions about everything.” And the following paragraph reminds me way too much of dozens of real-life experiences:

“Aunt Dora had not asked a thousand questions; she had asked just one — why had he waited so long to come to see her? Thereafter Matt found himself being informed, in detail, on the shortcomings of the new pastor, the marriage chances of several female relatives and connections, and the states of health of several older women, many of them unknown to him, including details of operations and post-operative developments.”

—page 116

 

Conclusion

This has to rank fairly high among Heinlein’s works. I still enjoyed it upon re-reading in 2020, almost as much as I did in the early 1980s, and I was surprised by that. Of course, for a variety of reasons, it must take its place in the dust-bin of science fiction’s “early days”, yet I think it still has something to teach us.

 

 

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