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The Star Beast

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1954

Published: 2021.06.26

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > The Star Beast

 

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

★★★★ (of 5)

 

Summary

One of Heinlein’s juveniles, this isn’t quite a coming of age story (since the boy in question doesn’t come of age during the novel and isn’t truly the main character), but is a story of loyal friendship across racial lines while also being a story about diplomacy, cross-cultural relations, and good government. One editor (Groff Conklin) called it “one of Heinlein’s most enchanting tales” and critic Damon Knight (also the author of the renowned To Serve Man) said, “This is a novel that won’t go bad on you.”

It opens with Lummox, an extraterrestrial pet that vaguely resembles an eight-legged dinosaur, justifying to itself a desire to eat the neighbor’s rose bushes, and consequently starting a heap of trouble both for itself and for its “owner” Johnnie — John Stuart Thomas XI. Lummox, being a few hundred years old, of course has a different viewpoint: to him (or her, as we later learn), it is the series of John Thomas Stuarts that are the pets. But Lummox and Johnnie are only the main characters of parts of the story. Other parts are dominated by Henry Gladstone Kiku, the Federation’s Permanent Undersecretary For Spatial Affairs and his various associates, most notably Sergei Greenberg, who work through a series of distractions, obstacles, and surprise events to smooth things over when it turns out that Lummox is a VIP member of a very old and powerful species which has now sent a warship to recover its lost young one.

 

The Good

Heinlein managed to cover several major themes in this story without laborious narration or stilted dialog — the actions and conversations all feel relatively natural, from the red-faced country cop intent on killing Lummox to the stifling overparenting of Johnnie’s mother, from Betty Sorenson’s badly masked flirtations and casual mental domination of the men around her to the political machinations that Mr. Kiku assembles in the second half. As the story goes through one twist and turn after another, it isn’t until later that the reader realizes she has been forced to consider tolerance for vastly different cultures and types of people, the value of deliberation and democracy versus the efficiency of a powerful bureaucrat who doesn’t answer directly to the people, and the differences between various types of antagonists: those who can be safely ignored, those who must be dealt with swiftly and brutally, and those who can be turned into friends with the proper diplomacy. How Heinlein pulled this off in 253 pages is beyond me.

Though several of the characters here are relatively flat archetypes (the not-too-bright but xenophobic and violent police officer, the shallow but convivial politician who is interested in power but not in doing any of the work, etc.), this book nonetheless includes a few of my favorite Heinlein characters. Lummox, the titular star beast, is young for her species and therefore thinks like a toddler, which can force some hilarious situations given her immense size, strength, and relative invulnerability to attack by puny humans. (They put her in a steel cage, but steel is like a sugary snack to her.) One can’t help but enjoy the relative innocence that Lummox conveys, and admire her undying loyalty to her pet Johnnie — and Johnnie’s fierce repayment of that loyalty. Another character, Mr. Kiku, has always stood out in my mind. Though acutely aware of the dangers of intolerance (he is a Black man), he can’t help feeling nauseous around certain extraterrestrials. He tries both pills and hypnosis to help him get past this, but in the end it is working alongside one of them (the extremely talented translator Dr. Ftaeml) and developing a mutual respect that clears his mind of prejudice. Near the end, there is a powerful scene where Kiku is cold so Dr. Ftaeml offers his coat and calls Kiku “my friend... my brother”, and Kiku insists that Ftaeml share the coat with him. (I can’t say for certain, but Kiku might have been the Black man I ever read as a main character in any book.) And Betty Sorenson, though not given quite the space in the text that she deserves, stands out for being an independent thinker who spends most of her time a step or two ahead of everyone else and thinking up witty barbs about men (“You know how men are — nervous and skittery.”) She is also self-emancipated from her parents for reasons that shocked Johnnie when she explained in a whisper (the reader never learns exactly what happened, but it sounds bad), thinks men would look better wearing makeup, and holds other incredibly futuristic opinions.

Points Off For...

I found very little to criticize about this novel. Early on, there were a few rough patches with perspective-switching. Heinlein, especially in his juveniles, tended to stick with one character’s perspective and tell the story through that person’s eyes, but in this book, the omniscient third-person narrator starts with Lummox’s perspective, switches to that of Johnnie, then Kiku, Greenberg, Chief Dreiser, and back through the first three several times. Perhaps Heinlein didn’t have the practice for this sort of thing, but anyway it felt awkward, almost as if two different stories were being told early on — one about the adventures of Johnnie and Lummox and the other about the political implications of various relations with extraterrestrial species. It smoothed over after a while, once the stories began to intertwine, but I did get the distinct feeling that Heinlein began these as entirely separate stories and only later found a way to work them into one book.

For Its Time

Inexplicably, I read (amateur) reviews that criticized the “sexist” nature of this book, always referring to a handful of Johnnie quotes. To get such an impression, I think one must only read those few quotes from Johnnie, ignoring all the surrounding text. For one thing, Betty regularly corrects Johnnie’s clearly mistaken notions about women. For another, Johnnie often contradicts himself when saying these things (and the things he says are often couched in ridiculous ways, as if the author was making it obvious that these aren’t his own notions but those of a silly boy).

Somehow, with everything else happening, Heinlein managed to squeeze in a conversation about Lummox’s species having more than two sexes (six, I think), and that “we need more words” to describe them. This felt awfully forward-thinking to me, especially when combined with other gender-bending ideas found in the book, like Betty’s ideas on men wearing makeup, women proposing to men, Lummox being treated as male for the first half of the book but then the narration switches once the humans learn that Lummox isn’t male, and so on.

Given recent (and ongoing) national conversations about overly violent policing — especially in the context of racism and/or xenophobia — the bits with Chief Dreiser in this novel were poignant. Dreiser won’t call Lummox anything but “that beast”, even after it’s shown that Lummox can talk, tries to kill Lummox without authorization (he tries poisoning, then drowning, to no avail), and makes various threats against Johnnie for trying to stop this violence.

Perhaps the biggest theme here, though, was racism and its close cousin xenophobia. The book was published in 1954, the year of Brown v. Board Of Education (and the reactionary formation of the White Citizens Council), so it was a topic on the collective national mind at the time. By having sympathetic main characters represent the “other”, and through direct statements, Heinlein was here taking a stand. In the book, there is a group of bigots known as the “Keep Earth Human League”, a direct reference to the “Keep [name of town] White” groups forming all over the country at the time. Heinlein also makes it clear that “North America” is simply a subsector of the Federation. Even while the story revolves around fear of the other, Heinlein uses this background political landscape to show how silly nationalism and divisions among humans really are. Just one big human race. But beyond that, the best people in the book refer to nonhumans as “people” while the worst characters in the book refer to the ETs as “creatures” or slurs related to their appearances. One more thing: in the end, it wasn’t the awesome white humans who saved the day, it was Mr. Kiku and Lummox — through sheer force of character, dedication, and loyalty to the principles of cooperation and nonviolence.

Conclusion

This was a fun read, once I got past the early jarring perspective switches, and the book is filled with some of my favorite Heinlein characters. But it also has a lot to say, and couldn’t help but have had a positive effect on its readers along those lines.

 





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