Here’s my latest re-read of Heinlein’s works. By 1952 we’re well into the so-called Heinlein juveniles – books published that were written by Heinlein predominantly for teenage Boy Scouts. After Between Planets, Heinlein was clearly on a roll, and in demand. The Introduction to this edition, written by Heinlein biographer William H Patterson, talks of his books selling well, and his movie Destination Moon doing quite well, though his work for TV series Tom Corbett Space Cadet had left him rather unimpressed with the business. Using the Hollywood machine for inspiration, and a suggestion by his new wife Virginia Heinlein to write about a pair of red-headed twins, The Rolling Stones was written.Reading Heinlein’s books in (mainly) chronological order for the first time, I am now picking up more of Heinlein’s evolution as a writer. At this point he has become more confident and has begun to develop and reinforce what many would consider ‘the Heinlein voice’. His dialogue has become lively and energetic. His characters have now started to settle into what would become a Heinlein archetype – bright and intelligent, which at times shows that ‘hectoring and lecturing’ that would be apparent in his later work.The Rolling Stones is a story like Between Planets that takes place on a wider canvas – this time, it’s Luna, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, around Saturn – but whereas previous tales have focused around one key character, this time the plot is predominantly about a family.And that’s something I found a tad annoying. It’s strange how my view on this one has changed. I quite happily read this in the 1980’s, without any question of the family dynamic. Now, thirty-odd years later, I find the family setup distinctly trying. We have matriarchal Hazel Stone, grandmother of the family, who seems to rule the roost without question; father Roger, who appears to dampen the annoying overenthusiasm of the younger members of the family by regularly resorting to the ‘I’m the captain of this ship and don’t you forget it’ card, mother Edith, super-mother and doctor, poor put-upon Meade who seems to spend a lot of her time looking after supposedly cute youngster Lowell aka ‘Buster’. (Really!) Lastly we have super-twins Castor and Pollux, two quite irritating but clearly intelligent teenagers who seem to be a prototype for Donald Trump. I found the point that, according to Patterson’s introduction, these two characters were created based on an idea from Heinlein’s new wife, Virginia, rather an issue, and makes me a little concerned with what was to follow in Heinlein’s future work.So this one didn’t start too well for me. Initial impressions are that the characters, which are the centre of the novel, are bright, overenthusiastic and, most of all, just plain annoying. This does improve a little as the novel continues, although it was a major issue for me. These are the first characters in my reread I’ve not quickly got to like.Heinlein is trying to develop his writing repertoire here, using his scriptwriting chops from his experiences on film and television. Much of the book, more than previous, it seems – is dialogue based. There has always been speech in a Heinlein novel, but here the difference is that where before the voice was often focused around one character, here Heinlein tries to give all the different elements a distinct and separate voice. This creates what we now regard with successive usage as the rather typical Heinlein ‘snappy dialogue’, but can at times become just too much.There’s also a lot of technical info-dump here. The Heinleins – Robert and Virginia – spent a lot of time working on this element, trying to get the technical parts right so that readers would get a realistic impression as to what future pioneers would have to do to travel in space in the 1950’s. From the perspective of the 21st century, my view was that such mathematical details were dull and bored the reader. These days, the computer would do it: end of story.For all my gripes, we have here characters that Heinlein will keep returning to in the future. He has used similar archetypes in the past, too – the family of Jim Marlow on Red Planet isn’t that different – but here, the templates are given full rein.These templates also apply to the aliens in Heinlein’s universe too. Whereas before we had the lovable Willis (Red Planet), and the charming Sir Isaac Newton (Between Planets), this time around we have the flat cats – proto-Tribble-like creatures who are bought as a pet but rapidly take over the spaceship. It is perhaps no surprise that it is a flat cat embossed on the front cover of this edition, admittedly with two eyes rather than the three it should have. They are, I’m pleased to say, one of the parts of the book that is still quite endearing, although at the time they were a little controversial. According to Patterson’s Introduction, the asexual nature of the rapidly breeding flat cats caused major disagreements between Heinlein and his editor, Miss Dalgliesh. It was felt that they would cause librarians (a major influence on book sales at this time) some upset.Heinlein’s view of the Solar System as something to be colonised is still prevalent here. Much of the book echoes the expansion of the American West, deliberately so. The frontier-like Asteroid Belt as well as the over-commercialised and rather expensive Mars (I wonder what Jim Marlow and Willis of Red Planet might think?) show us an expansion out towards the stars. It is rather ironic (though no doubt deliberate) that at one point Hazel spends her time in a Western-type drawl, and carrying what she actually refers to as ‘a sidearm’.The other side of the tale is that Heinlein tries to show the reader how complicated – not to say downright dangerous – future space travel could be. Space Family Stone spends a lot of time talking mathematics, showing us how communication could be achieved, and warning of potential dangers such as the transmission of disease. We have reached beyond Earth out into the Solar System, but it is not an easy passage. As a doctor, Edith Stone is in constant demand out on the frontier, which rather keeps her out of the way for much of the plot and allows Hazel to take full rein.Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Clearly what I found entertaining as a teenager is much less so in my middle age. Out of all the books I’ve read to date in this series, this is the one that has (so far) dated worst.Part of this may be that the book is regarded as Heinlein’s first foray into a lighter, more humorous book. Humour, as often said before, is notoriously tricky to get right and intensely personal, so that what one person will find hilarious will leave another cold. I did find it amusing when younger, but now find it staged and clichéd. C’est la vie. The ending is surprisingly weak, reminiscent of the ending of a television episode, ‘to be continued’ – though there are brief glimpses in later books. Hazel Stone, for example, is referred to as one of the key members in the revolution of Luna in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and is in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Lowell/Buster Stone appears in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Castor and Pollux are in The Number of the Beast (but then, most of Heinlein’s characters are there at some point.) It is obvious that Heinlein himself thinks a lot of these people.Admittedly, I may be a little out of step with this one. At its time of publication Space Family Stone was well received. According to Wikipedia, Groff Conklin described the novel as “a thoroughly delightful job”. Boucher and McComas praised it as “easily the most plausible, carefully detailed picture of an interplanetary future we will encounter in any year”. P. Schuyler Miller cited the novel’s “freshness and simplicity,” characterizing it as “a life-size portrait-gallery of real people living in a real world of the future, every detail of which fits into place with top-tolerance precision”.For me, there are parts that are good here, and parts that I think have dated badly, and after the complexity and intensity of Between Planets, The Rolling Stones is a bit of a disappointment. There are parts I enjoyed, but in the end it was a bit of a mixed bag. Whilst I have to applaud Heinlein for trying to push himself with this one, it left me with an enduring impression of ‘tried hard, can do better’.
I have not read this book in a long, long time. It would have been a fast read for me, except I had other things I had to get done. So I guess it was not 'gripping' enough to make me not want to put it down. Which makes sense, on the one hand, as it is a Juvie novel. It was a decent read, I guess. I still enjoyed it.I cannot help but wonder if the Martian cats were the basis for the 'Tribbles' in Star Trek. Finally! There are communications satellites in orbit around the Earth! [even if there are only three of them]Oddly enough, I did not mind the various discussions of mathematics and orbits and transit times and the best way to get to various destinations in the Solar System to be at all boring. Personally, I think those were the some of the best parts of the book! However, I do have to admit they can get a little long in the tooth in some points. Regardless, Heinlein did an excellent job explaining the best route[s] by which traveling to various points in the System could take.Reading about how the family pored over various data inputs and processed mathematical formulas to determine their flight plan was fascinating. In today's 'modern society' one would use computers to determine the best path to take. Yet we read about this family of the future did the astrogation work themselves and then chose the best result of the five of them [Dad, Hazel, Castor, Pollux, and Meade] for the flight plan! Kinda funny that they did it that way. Also interesting because it highlights how much we rely upon computers in today's society to run things [and expect the computers to come up with the proper/correct/actual result].The family is SO dysfunctional! It is nuts! I guess that is what makes the book 'so good' because it is like early Marvel Comics and not early DC [in that the heroes have conflicts amongst themselves and their loves ones as opposed to early DC which had no conflicts] [sorry about the tangent there]. We do not see a loving family like the Hardy Boys, or even Tom Swift [or Rick Brant]. Instead, we see what is supposed to be a family of independent individuals who somehow manage to co-exist peacefully. Leave it to Beaver, it ain't! I honestly feel I am at a loss over what to say for this book. It is about a family's 'adventures' as they travel around the Solar System from Luna to Mars to the Asteroids. It ends with the family leaving for Titan. 'A lot happens', but not a lot REALLY happens. The twins learn some hard lessons, but one cannot help but wonder if they truly 'learned their lessons.' It moves at a decent pace; it is better than 'Farmer in the Sky'; I enjoyed reading it.I used to favor the boys when I was younger. Now, not so much. Whereas before they seemed a little cheeky yearning to be an adult while toeing the line, now they seem obnoxious, rebellious, and negligent. Their sister Meade might as well not have been in the book. Despite her qualifications as discussed in the book [licenses, intelligence, abilities, etc.], Meade is still relegated to the scathing judgement of being 'only a female' and somehow not equivalent to her brothers in stature [even the baby brother gets more time than she does!]. Moreso this time around I truly did feel [some] sympathy for the parents, trying to ride herd on their gaggle of children. At the same time, it was not much sympathy, as they essentially acknowledged throughout the course of the story that the children had been spoiled in their early years. Hazel was just borderline annoying.We see some of the characters later on, in other stories. Hazel actually makes more appearances than the rest, but we do see the Stones in future stories [primarily the 'World as Myth' stories]. [it is kind of 'funny' that 'the moon is a harsh mistress' chronologically takes place BEFORE this novel while being written several years AFTER this novel.] I did chuckle over the message found on the boys' cargo. That was pretty funny. As that 'mystery' was never resolved, I found myself theorizing that Heinlein might have been playing with his final motif at this point; at the same time, he might have included it as a 'throw away line' and ended up using it later to tie this novel into his 'World as Myth' stories.Overall, I enjoyed rereading the book.
What do You think about The Rolling Stones (2005)?
Castor and Pollux Stone may be the most entertaining twins in sf for the reader, but it's hard to imagine why their parents didn't strangle them at birth to preserve their own sanity. Ever since the adults (Luna Founding Father grandmother Hazel Meade Stone, mother Dr. Edith Stone, and father Roger Stone, engineer, former mayor of Luna City, and screenwriter) let their guard slip long enough to let the twins invent something genuinely useful (the frostproof rebreather valve) these native-born Lunatics have been scheming to repeat the accomplishment—at least the money-making part of it—with the not very well thought-out goal of eluding adult control before they've learned enough caution to keep themselves alive, out of debt, and out of jail. When their latest caper involves an attempt to buy a spaceship and launch their own trade expedition to the asteroid belt, grandmotherly and paternal restlessness morphs the scheme into a family tour of the planets, starting with Mars and possibly stretching to include the rings of Saturn.Castor and Pollux of course do not let up on their money-making schemes, and figure out that they can buy used bicycles cheap on Luna, fix them up on the way to Mars, and sell them to prospectors there for a fraction of the price of new bikes shipped from Earth's much deeper gravity well, while still making a huge profit.They do not, of course, ask themselves why no one before them has been smart enough to come up with this idea, and that's a recurring theme as the Unheavenly Twins wreak hilarious havoc across the solar system, with brushes with jail, bankruptcy, and assorted mayhem.(One very funny episode will seem oddly familiar to anyone whose age and background caused them to encounter the original Star Trek first. However, Heinlein's flat cats predated the tribbles by about fifteen years.)Great fun.
—Lis Carey
When I was about 9, someone gave me a stack of old Boy's Life magazines. Since I was starved for words in a row, I worked my way through them, first for the jokes and cartoons, and then for the stories. The Rolling Stones was serialized in Boy's Life and it's absolutely typical for its time period. Chock-full of technical detail and the working-out (and failure) of entrepreneurial schemes by its teenage protagonists, it lacks characterization or much character development. Theoretically, the father of the family is a main character, but he's mostly a cipher, there to make final decisions-- but otherwise managed wholesale by his family. The most vivid characters are the grandmother, Hazel, a first generation Luna settler, and the (somewhat cardboard) youngest child, Lowell-- both of them stock vivid characters but still fun. The twins, Castor and Pollux, are pretty much interchangeable but their lust to invest their cash and make a profit is shown to be tempered with family feelings at times. The mother is again a cardboard character but her devotion to her Hippocratic Oath not only gives her a separate focus but allows her to have a separate existence from the family-- unusual for the time and place. The sister is of course minimized (if she's such a lousy cook, why doesn't someone else take over) but at least she's learning astrogation and her grandmother grouses that she could easily get a job in a commercial firm if they weren't so blame anti-woman. Which makes this a step up from the usual science fiction of its day-- clearly the author had actually interacted with women. (However, there is a lot of concern about the daughter having access to marriageable men at the right age... even though Castor and Pollux start out the story as fifteen, and Meade is not much older-- but they encounter literally no girls their age.As an adventure story in which very little actually happens except a lot of math-- and modern readers, as the afterward points out, will be baffled by this because the ballistics computers Heinlein is basing his navigation systems on are not as smart as a modern engineering calculator-- it actually reads pretty well. Heinlein here is developing his standard characters and their standard interactions-- and his standard swindles based on far older tropes. (He even tells us so, in the characters of Captain Stone and Hazel Stone, who are writing the scripts for a broadcast serial, The Scourge of the Spaceways.) And yet there are funny touches (as usual lifted from older literature and with the serial numbers filed off, new parts added, and burnished up), such as the Martian Flat Cats-- which are just as amusing in their new guise as they were in their older ("Pigs is Pigs) and new ("The Trouble with Tribbles") guises.This edition has a nice little afterward discussing the science and technology bases of the work.
—Jennifer Heise
The family Stone goes Rolling across the solar system to see what they can see. Tough and wise Grandma Hazel, Captain and Doctor Stone, daughter Meade, irascible twins Castor and Pollux, and baby Lowell have all kinds of interesting adventures in space. Despite the excess of mathematics and ballistics, this is a very readable and exciting tale. Taking place a few decades after the revolt of Luna in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, we are able to infer how the Free State has matured, and also become a place where pioneering souls are anxious to strike out from. Except for Meade, who doesn’t have much of a storyline, the family is full of interesting characters with strong personalities. Also, I really really want a Martian ‘Flat Cat.’ (I recommend you read “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” prior to this.)
—Emily
