From the Bookshelf: Rocket Ship Galileo
Oct. 23rd, 2008 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt seems to be "conventional wisdom" among science fiction fans that the very first "juvenile" novel Robert A. Heinlein wrote is more or less the least of that series. In some ways, when I look at how the very first paragraph of "Rocket Ship Galileo" refers to the "chums" of the first character named, I can wonder if there's something to that general opinion... but, while I can also wonder if this might offend the pricklier Heinlein fans, I can read it and enjoy it by not taking it completely seriously.
There's something simply fun about the idea of a nuclear scientist, a type specimen "Heinlein individual" who can needle less-developed individuals towards enlightenment, getting an idea of how to apply atomic power to rocketry (jetting zinc vapour out of a thorium "pile") and enlisting the help of three teenaged rocket-builders who'll work for nothing to convert a surplus suborbital cargo rocket and take it on the very first trip to the Moon. I suppose that the three teenaged characters do seem a bit indistinguishable when their family backgrounds aren't being touched on, but perhaps it's settings and action that drive the story, and the "suspension of disbelief" that keeps everything moving works in some certain fashion for me. For that matter, once the foursome touches down and discovers Nazi remnants have beaten them there, that just adds to the strange charm. (The book, copyright 1947, still seems to inhabit a brief interlude of optimism between the end of the Second World War and the declaration of the Cold War; the Soviets are a presence but not threatening.) Before that action, though, I perhaps spent a moment or two contemplating how the first words spoken after setting asbestos-soled boot on the Moon's surface are "Okay, kid?" and "Swell!"; it's left to the last teenager out to say "It's the bare bones, the bare bones of a dead world." (He turns out to be more right than he'd imagined.) I also noted, though, that when both the American and the United Nations flags are raised, they're wired up to keep from hanging down the flagpole.
There's something simply fun about the idea of a nuclear scientist, a type specimen "Heinlein individual" who can needle less-developed individuals towards enlightenment, getting an idea of how to apply atomic power to rocketry (jetting zinc vapour out of a thorium "pile") and enlisting the help of three teenaged rocket-builders who'll work for nothing to convert a surplus suborbital cargo rocket and take it on the very first trip to the Moon. I suppose that the three teenaged characters do seem a bit indistinguishable when their family backgrounds aren't being touched on, but perhaps it's settings and action that drive the story, and the "suspension of disbelief" that keeps everything moving works in some certain fashion for me. For that matter, once the foursome touches down and discovers Nazi remnants have beaten them there, that just adds to the strange charm. (The book, copyright 1947, still seems to inhabit a brief interlude of optimism between the end of the Second World War and the declaration of the Cold War; the Soviets are a presence but not threatening.) Before that action, though, I perhaps spent a moment or two contemplating how the first words spoken after setting asbestos-soled boot on the Moon's surface are "Okay, kid?" and "Swell!"; it's left to the last teenager out to say "It's the bare bones, the bare bones of a dead world." (He turns out to be more right than he'd imagined.) I also noted, though, that when both the American and the United Nations flags are raised, they're wired up to keep from hanging down the flagpole.