“Citizen of the galaxy” is one of the novels referred to as one of Heinlein’s “juveniles”, that is, work aimed at younger readers, what we today might call “YA” fiction. It stands up very well as reading for adults, and remains very readable today, though first published in 1957. I have just re-read it because it is for me what I would call “comfort reading” – easy, relaxing, unchallenging, entertaining. I re-read it because I am aspiring storyteller myself. Re-reading and studying the work of a master craftsman like Heinlein is never going to be a waste of time for anyone claiming to be writer of stories.
“Citizen of the galaxy” is what we call – using a German word – a bildungsroman. The word translates into English as “building up story”. A Bildungsroman follows the life of someone – generally but not always a young person – on their journey from boy to man, from girl to woman, from callow youth to wise and considered adulthood. The hero faces challenges, rises to them and grows up, increasing in moral stature as the story goes on. It is probably the most common storyline or plot in all literature.
Spoiler alert: On a faraway world, a beggar, by some incredible chance, manages to buy a slave boy, and raises him as his own. But the beggar is not what he seems: he is actually an undercover agent working to stamp out slavery. Years later, as the boy grows up, the beggar is found and killed by the police. The youth escapes, and becomes apprenticed to some space merchants – traders travelling between the stars. Later, he enlists in the military, and there his real identity is found. He is the long-lost son of one of the wealthiest families in existence, the owners of vast corporations spread across hundreds of worlds. He is restored to the bosom of his family, where in due course he discovers evidence that his father was murdered, and he himself sold into slavery as a small boy, by people within that web of corporations controlled by his family. Spoiler alert ends
The story is set in a star-flung future centuries from now. Humankind has faster-than-light travel and has expanded out to the stars, inhabiting hundreds of worlds in a volume thousands of light-years across. Some of the those worlds are conspicuously 20th century – Woolamurra, visited by the traders, is clearly Australian. Jubbul, where the beggar lives undercover, sounds very Asian. It has a capital city called Jubbulpore and a language – Sargonese – that “is a kind of Sanskrit”. There’s a loose “Terran Hegemony” centred around Earth, and this represents civilisation. At the edge of this Hegemony, a frontier; beyond it, anarchy and wilderness – plenty of inhabited worlds out there, some inhabited by aliens, others, by men and women.
The action opens at a slave auction in the city of Jubbulpore, the capital of the Empire of Nine Worlds. Heinlein perhaps carries on the implicitly racist attitudes of the 1950’s here; his Terran Hegemony – though this is never stated out loud – is implicitly white, post-American and democratic. His Jubbul, the capital of the Nine Worlds, is literally beyond the pale, over the frontier, uncivilised, and it is implicitly Asian in origin. His traders, when our hero meets them, are Finnish. They are both clannish and inward-looking. It is interesting to see a parallel with Alistair Reynold’s clannish and inward-looking “Ultras” – the traders and starfarers in his “Revelation Space” stories set in the 28th century. Heinlein, in this respect, was an original who generated ideas to be copied.
In this respect of copying, Heinlein has quite openly borrowed the plot of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” for Citizen of the galaxy. A beggar boy is lifted from obscurity and trained in spying techniques; the beggar boy as he grows up discovers his true identity. Heinlein does not even bother to conceal it; indeed, he embraces it. A minor character in Citizen of the galaxy is someone called Creighton. We recall from “Kim” that the shadowy figure who arranges for Kim to be educated and trained as a spy, is a Colonel Creighton.
Heinlein has a reputation for what is called “hard” science fiction. This is not always entirely deserved. In “hard” science fiction the physics and engineering in the stories are robust. Heinlein and his wife reputably once spent a week doing a complex calculation in ballistics (this was before microprocessors, much less calculators, were invented) to provide technical correctness to a single sentence in his juvenile novel “Space Family Stone”. Yet in this juvenile novel we have unexplained inertialess faster-than-light travel.
In this novel we are mostly free of Heinlein’s usual hectoring and lecturing the reader on his politics and moral philosophy. This isn’t “To sail beyond the sunset” or even “Starship Troopers”. Mostly: he does argue that three things will emerge wherever there is a physical frontier. First, traders will range beyond that frontier, buying and selling. Second, there will be bandits and outlaws preying on honest people, and thirdly, slavery will come into being. One might question these assertions. Underlying them though, is a fundamentally American understanding of history, an understanding of history rooted in the idea of there being a frontier – an edge – beyond which there is wilderness.
As a storyteller, and as someone very familiar with Heinlein’s published work, another thing I notice is the re-use of characters and the recycling of set-piece scenes. A few we see cropping up from novel to novel are:
- The ostensibly venal and predatory older man who is actually honest and very helpful to the hero (James J Garsch here, but Jubal Harshaw in “Stranger in a strange land” and Henrik Schultz in “The cat who walks through walls”)
- The naïve but honest youth who somehow fails to see obvious female romantic intent (our hero here and elsewhere in Heinlein’s work)
- The mature lady (a brothel-keeper, a mother-in-law, a senior soldier) with a heart of gold but a stern and forbidding exterior
- The Master of a ship – Heinlein knew ships, whether warships or cruise ships
Set piece scenes?
- Friction between two enlisted men of different rank settled by fighting in the washrooms
- People in the community closing ranks to help someone stay hidden from the police or the authorities
- Policemen being bribed or otherwise “choosing not to notice” what is right in front of them
All in all this is an excellent read, recommendable if you can cope with science fiction at all.
