Have Space Suit - Will Travel; Space Cadet, by Robert Heinlein

[rachelmanija]

Have Space Suit - Will Travel was my favorite Heinlein when I was a kid, and it generally holds up. It’s very bright and cheerful and likable, except for the genocide

Comments

[mystcrave]

I think Space Cadet is the book where the main character stops to pull a cell phone out of his backpack and answer it? Very mundane until you consider that it was published in 1948. Some of his other books around that time had computers doing automated searches for specific news, cars with "heads up" displays showing driving routes/weather/news info, microwave ovens used for cooking.
Are you reading "The Rolling Stones"? That was one of my favorites.

[tool_of_satan]

He wasn't always great with that sort of thing, though. E.g., Starman Jones, most of the plot of which relies on computers being pretty much just as they were when the book was written, or possibly even more primitive than that.

[mystcrave]

True. Isn't Starman Jones the one where they only got home because the protagonist had memorized the flight path calculations or something? And they were using slide rulers instead of computers? This is what's fascinating about Heinlein. He's such a mix of prescient visions and time-bound cliches. He's stuck in this sort of Wilsonian idealism that won't discount eugenics and yet he can imagine alternative families and utopian military dictatorships. He can write a "yellow peril' tale like "The Day After Tomorrow" and yet sum up the universality of human experience. I think he thought he was going to live forever, like Lazarus Long.

[adrian_turtle]

And then they all get tried by creepy genocidal aliens. Even when I was eleven, I found this part strange and unsettling. This go-round, I noticed two things which escaped me then: as Earth is on trial using four completely random people as its representatives, the three evil Wormface aliens could be just as unrepresentative of their species.

Phil Foglio and Nick Pollata recognized this scene as absurd, as well as creepy, and spoofed it to good effect in Illegal Aliens (which also makes fun of late-cold-war politics, and includes a Universal Translator that renders certain exclamations as, "by the Prime Builder's waste products!") It's dated, in some ways, but I think you might like it.

Teenage Kip wants to go to the moon, but he has no money. His father encourages him to practice self-reliance and study advanced math from textbooks. (A recurring theme in all three of the novels I’ve read so far is that a normally intelligent person should be able to do types of math I’ve only ever heard of in Heinlein novels.)These are all very