From the Bookshelf: Rite of Passage

After reading "Rocket Ship Galileo," I worked my way through all of Robert A. Heinlein's other "juvenile" science fiction novels. Unfortunately (or not), I never quite got around to posting thoughts about any of them: by the time I had made any sort of effort to marshal my impressions of "Space Cadet" (it seems somehow unfortunate that a lot of smirking connotations have been loaded into that phrase nowadays, because I can't see how they could have come from the book itself), I was already well into "Red Planet," and things sort of went on from there... However, after finishing "Podkayne of Mars" (which was the first time I'd ever read that book), I moved on to one other book by a different author which the front flap of the dust jacket of my Science Fiction Book Club copy nevertheless suggests to be "in the Heinleinian tradition"... For me, though, Alexei Panshin's "Rite of Passage" can seem as much a response to Heinlein's works (or certain of them) as an homage to them.

Alexei Panshin says as much himself in an online essay. For my own part, I can contemplate how Mia Havero, who lives on a vast starship (travelling between the colonies established after Earth's self-destruction and trading bits of knowledge for raw materials) and is approaching her fourteenth birthday when she'll be dropped off to survive on one of those colonies for a month, finds questions instead of certainties starting with her study of various ethical systems and ending with her own experiences and winds up critiquing her own culture even as she joins it. I do have to admit, though, that on a different level the book's prose does feel a little less memorable than the Heinlein works I've just read, its story more a series of things that happened than the driving tale of the single most important event in someone's life (to date)... although I can also see that as a sort of "realistic" touch. (Mia happens to mention that nobody on her Ship seems able to write a novel.) In any case, after the somewhat affected style of "Podkayne of Mars," my reactions aren't completely one-sided.