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Time For The Stars

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1956

Published: 2021.10.10

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > Time For The Stars

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry. Cover art by Steele Savage.

★★ (of 5)

 

Summary

The 10th of Heinlein’s juveniles, Time For The Stars is both an adventure yarn and a coming-of-age story. It’s also not strictly “science fiction”, as it heavily involves the pseudoscience of telepathy. After the Long Range Foundation (the LRF, a nonprofit that funds expensive research projects and then reaps huge rewards) discovers that some sets of twins share telepathic abilities, it recruit hundreds of such telepathic pairs to act as communication devices for longrange starships (because radio waves are limited to the speed of light, while telepathy is magically instantaneous).

First-person narrator Tom Bartlett (Thomas Paine Leonardo da Vinci Bartlett) and his twin brother Pat (Patrick Henry Michelangelo Bartlett) comprise one such pair. Though Pat is initially selected for the trip and Tom will stay home as the other end of the communications pair, Pat is injured in a skiing accident and switches out with Tom at the last minute. Tom’s ship, the Elsie (short for Lewis & Clark), accelerates to near the speed of light on the way to each star system on its itinerary, so — due to special relativity — Pat ages several years back on Earth while Tom only ages a few months in the ship. After several such trips (the Elsie’s job is to map out future colony worlds), Pat is too old to continue the telepathic linkup but Tom is magically able to connect with his niece, and then her daughter, and eventually his great-grandniece. At each stop, adventures occur, not to mention shenanigans aboard ship.

The twin paradox was apparently a real thing in physics in the 1910s, with scientists worried that it would upend the entire theory of special relativity. But it turns out that, like most paradoxes, it isn’t actually a paradox (in the sense of a logical contradiction). So the idea of a twin traveling in space and aging differently than his sibling wasn’t original to Heinlein; he just decided to write a story on that framework. I suppose telepathic communication was a handy way to link the twins for storytelling purposes. Otherwise the two brothers would have lived lives entirely disconnected to one another and the novel would be far less interesting as a book for young teens.

 

The Good

You’ve already seen the two-star rating at top, so you know I wasn’t as impressed with this novel as I am with some of Heinlein’s works. But there was some good in it. For example, it again seemed like a lot was crammed into 188 pages. Most of the world-building was implied, but it was clearly thorough enough in the background that it bled through masterfully without taking up much space. Character descriptions were minimal but usually enough to paint a generalized picture of a character. There were basically three acts, leading me to think it had been serialized like some earlier novels (I don’t think it actually was, though). The first third covers Tom and Pat growing up as the extra children in a crowded society that taxes extra children, their participation in the LRF testing of telepathy, and agreement to participate in space exploration. The second act is the beginning of the trip, with Tom familiarizing himself with the ship, crew, and fellow telepaths and also their arrival at the first planet. The third act is the next couple of planets, how things go wrong, and the ending.

It reads quickly and easily, and the interpersonal interactions between Tom and his brother, the various shipmates in the Elsie, Tom’s parents, and so on — all seemed incredibly realistic. (Or very realistic for someone living in the 1950s and imagining the future.)

It also sticks out — for the 1950s sci-fi era — as having a fairly inclusive cast. There are more than a dozen named female characters with speaking roles, including scientists and engineers (though none of the ship’s officers or soldiers were women). And there are people of color, including a Black man, Alfred, who is Tom’s boss on the starship (and Alfred’s telepath partner back home, who is eventually able to communicate telepathically with Tom). There are other characters who aren’t described physically but their names are giveaways that their origins are non-European.

 

Points Off For...

I think the novel fails on many points though, several of which I didn’t see when I first read this in the mid-1980s.

For one thing, it’s a bit shady to pass off telepathy as science — the novel represents itself as science fiction, and even in the 1950s when some pseudosciences were flirting with mainstream popularity they were still known to not actually exist. (More accurately, it would have been known to Heinlein that no actual reliable studies or any evidence of any kind had shown telepathy to be a real thing. Just because someone thinks it would be cool for something like that to exist doesn’t make it so. To me this is different than imagining a future gadget or technological breakthrough.) And telepathy is the groundwork upon which the entire story rests.

I was also bugged by the manifest destiny vibe of the colonial thing they were doing. On the last planet visited by Elsie (SPOILER ALERT), there were sentient, intelligent, organized biological beings who tried to fight off the human exploratory mission. All the characters assumed that humanity would eventually send a larger expeditionary force to wipe out the indigenous “monsters”, and in this novel the author doesn’t seem to mind such a standpoint of human supremacy. (In other novels, he has clearly taken the side of the natives — especially Martians and Venusians, against the bigoted human invaders, but in this one he fell back on the “Western civilization” trope of “it’s self-evident that we’re superior, which is all the proof we need, therefore we should invade and take over”.)

And there were scores of 1950s-era cringe moments that Heinlein appeared to be working to rise above in other novels around this same period but which he seemed to embrace in this book. Like describing a woman early on as shaped “like a sofa pillow” — yes, Tom eventually learns his error when he finds out the woman is a cutting-edge scientist and so he shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but by then the author had already had his fat-shaming fun. Later, Tom tells his great-grandniece to “watch your waistline”, and she assures him that she is doing so. More than one husband in the story is depicted as lording “head of household” over the wife. The only wife who doesn’t always give in is Tom’s mother, but she resorts to emotional manipulation to change her husband’s mind.

And, I think the kicker for me was that the book ended with Tom agreeing to marry his great-grandniece. The idea, of course, is that this relationship is so distant as to not pose a genetic problem. (I’m not a geneticist, but I’m aware that most jurisdictions don’t even prohibit second-cousin marriages, simply because so little genetic material is shared, and a great-grandniece is a fairly distant relation.) My problem with it isn’t the societal taboo against incest, because I’m more of a practical person and can usually see through taboos to find out if there’s a root cause that needs to be dealt with. But as a writer, you have to know that there is a societal taboo, and it seems like a mistake to me to use that as your conclusion to a juvenile book. Perhaps worse than the incest angle (which shows up more in later Heinlein works, I’m aware; I think this was the first one) is the grooming angle. Tom has known this woman since she was a young child and has telepathically communicated with her across the distances since then. Until meeting him in person, she has always pictured him as some old man like Tom’s twin Pat, who she sees regularly and knows in person. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m typically in favor of re-examining old sexual mores and overturning the stupid ones, but I don’t think a good place to start is relationships with relatives or adult-child borderline cases.

 

Conclusion

I remember really liking this book when I first read it as a teen. But all my memories of it were about the starship, the planets they discovered, and the parts where Tom and Pat learn they can communicate with telepathy. In others, I was only enjoying the flashy CGI parts of the story and not paying attention to the story itself — or at least I didn’t remember that much. This read-through was a let-down, for reasons mentioned above, but also because it took fifty-eight pages before anyone got in a spaceship!

 





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