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Tunnel In The Sky

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1955

Published: 2021.07.29

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > Tunnel In The Sky

 

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

★★★ (of 5)

 

Summary

One of Heinlein’s juveniles, this is the story of a survival test gone wrong. In a future distant enough that humanity is using teleportation “gates” to walk from one planet to another in an instant, and in which the Earth is dangerously overcrowded, one desired occupation is that of professional colonist. Main character Rod Walker is taking the high school version of a college course called Advanced Survival, the final of which is an actual test of survival skills. Students are sent through one of the Ramsbotham gates to an uninhabited planet and tasked with survival. They’re supposed to be picked up within a few days, but in the case of Rod’s class’s test, the pickup never happens — the students from several classes are stranded on an alien planet for much longer than they’d anticipated.

Once the students are stranded, the reader is quickly reminded of Golding’s Lord Of The Flies, which was published one year earlier. The obvious similarity is: a group of minors is stranded away from civilization and must attempt to govern themselves — along with the themes of humans as social animals, preferred forms of government, and the struggles of young people coming to grips with adult responsibilities. The differences, however, are just as obvious: these are high school and college age students rather than pre-adolescent children; these are boys and girls, men and women, rather than Golding’s boys-only group; Heinlein’s characters are from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds rather than entirely British; all of the characters have been fully trained in survival tactics and theory (it’s the class they’re in, after all) unlike Golding’s silly and incompetent children.

Tunnel In The Sky is written in third person voice, but the narrator only has access to Rod’s point of view throughout.

 

The Good

The story seems mostly realistic, given the backstory and circumstance. Though only a handful of characters are fully fleshed out, care is taken to show differing personalities among the survivors. (All of them, by necessity, have the same motivation.)

More so than most of Heinlein’s juveniles, this one recognizes the existence and competence of people who aren’t white males. Fully half of the main characters are women and they get as much page time as the men, if not more. Rod’s older sister Helen (a soldier) figures strongly in the early chapters. Once the students are stranded, Rod encounters “Jack”, who turns out to be Jacqueline — wearing body armor under her clothes to hide her shape and protect her from the universe’s most dangerous predator: man. Once Jack pairs off with another boy, Rod finds friendship and protection with a strong Black woman, Caroline who regularly pushes back against assumptions about females being the “weaker sex”.

Speaking of Caroline being Black, there is a camp that says Rod is also Black. Not only did Heinlein apparently say it overtly in a letter (source), but there are implicit clues in the text. For one thing, most of the other survivors in the camp expect Rod and Caroline to end up with one another — which seems like a racist assumption by today’s thinking (if he was indeed Black), but at the time would have been a clue to readers that Rod probably isn’t white. Further, when someone in the story needs Rod, they ask Caroline, or when someone needs Caroline, they ask Rod. One final clue is when asshole character Jock McGowan needles Rod verbally, he refers to Rod as “cholo”, strongly indicating that Heinlein did not see his main character as white.

What is explicitly stated is that various characters in the book cling to widely differing religious belief systems, including Islam, Mormonism, and even Monism. One boy is a Quaker. This makes sense of course, given that the Ramsbotham gates have made international travel as easy as walking across the street. (Rod lives in Arizona but attends school every day in New York City, for example.)

Some of the strongest parts of the story for me — especially when I first read it as a young man — were Rod’s conflicts with other characters, always older boys/men. The emotions of fear and embarrassment show throught clearly. Sometimes they other guy beats Rod by being bigger and stronger, and sometimes (as with Grant Cowper) Rod is defeated by a silver tongue and an extra couple of years of education. But each time, the conflict resonated with me thoroughly.

Points Off For...

The pacing is off in this one, compared to other Heinlein works of the same time period. It seems to jerk involuntarily and unpredictably back and forth between fast-paced action and nothing happening. It also seems at times as if several different stories were happening and Heinlein wasn’t sure which one to track down. For example, there’s a mostly unrelated sub-storyline about Rod’s dad having a medical problem and going into a time-stasis for a couple of years, hoping a treatment will be available when he rejoins the timeline. This requires Heinlein to explain that Rod’s mom is joining the dad in the time-stasis and that Rod’s sister assumes parental responsibility for him — a bunch of distracting add-ons.

Further, my edition (the 1977 mass market paperback) was sloppily edited. In several places, it looks like two or three sentences were mangled together and no one bothered to sort them out. Once or twice a verb tense is just wrong or a word is missing.

And I want to complain about one bit of logic that seemed fatally flawed, regarding the “gates” that allow quick and easy interstellar travel. One of the whole planks supporting the need for the Advanced Survival class, and the fact that colonists are sent through the gates with relatively primitive gear (wagons, knives, draft animals, etc.) is the fact that there isn’t yet infrastructure on these new planets to support advanced technologies. The gates can only be held open so long (and every second is expensive), so the colonists don’t carry through anything that requires an advanced civilization to support it. Heinlein obviously needed a reason to carry out his fantasy of a horse-and-cart style colonization, and that’s the one he provided. My problem with it is that a civilization advanced enough to invent and maintain these teleportation gates would also be expected to invent and produce more advanced colonial gear — solar panels, for example (which Heinlein predicted in one of his 1940s short stories) and rechargeable batteries. Mini-factories or robotic mining and smelting equipment. Any of these things could roll through the gates when the wagons and cattle went through, and no reader would bat an eye, but then he wouldn’t have had the excuse to hold the survival classes and tests that were the core of the story.

Conclusion

Like most of the Heinlein juveniles, I enjoyed this one (for the third time!), but it’s not perfect. Weirdly, though I’d read it twice before, I only remember the parts about being stranded on the planet, and so the entire first quarter of the book felt entirely new. However, the main storyline is quite memorable and I’ve never forgotten the scenes of Rod and his friends trying to build a new civilization on a new planet.

 





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