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A review of R.A Heinlein’s “Citizen of the galaxy”

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“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.

Ahead of its time: Robert Heinlein’s “Friday”

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A review of Robert Heinlein’s “Friday“

I first read “Friday” not long after it came out. It remains a remarkable novel, worth reviewing and unpicking even now forty years after its release. It’s a “Cyberpunk” novel published two years before William Gibson published “Neuromancer”; it was environmentally aware decades before the modern movement to environmental sustainability.  It posits a balkanised North America that to this day few if any other authors have dared describe. Its heroine, the female spy of the title, remains a relatively unknown icon of feminine power and ability.

“Friday” addresses racial prejudice and everyday sexism. It addresses police brutality, corruption amongst public employees, and – a favourite theme for Heinlein – the relationship of the individual with the state.  It upsets conventional storybook wisdom and in this respect is years ahead of its time. It would make a cracking film if only someone would write a screenplay for it.

Spoiler alert! Friday Jones, a female James Bond, calls herself a “combat courier”.  She is also an “artificial person”, that is, she is not born of woman, but a genetically enhanced superhuman rather like the characters hunted down by Deckard in “Blade Runner”.  She kills someone she finds following her while passing through an airport in Kenya. Hours later, the Nairobi Hilton is fire-bombed minutes after she checks out. She fails to connect these incidents. Arriving back at base in North America, she settles down for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage: in this world, fossil-fuel driven ground vehicles are not allowed. They are somewhere in what today is the Rust Belt of Illinois and Michigan: the chauffeur notes that “two hundred years ago, all these trees and fields were factories“.

Seconds later she is betrayed by that same chauffeur, captured by the enemy, and interrogated. Heinlein subverts the usual spy genre tropes and puts the obligatory torture scene (from which the hero escapes, as the climax of the book, right near the end) right at the beginning. Torturing a woman also is not normally the done thing. But Friday remains cheerful: she suggests to her torturer that he go and do something which she believes is anatomically possible, for some males…

She’s rescued, and nursed back to health. Her boss, the character in this story representing Ian Fleming’s “M”, sends her on break, and she goes to New Zealand to see her adopted family. Heinlein has always had innovative and unusual (and indeed questionable) ideas about marriage and sex. Friday belongs to a “line” or “group” marriage. Men and women, but in a line, as if for a dance. The difference is, all of the men, maybe 2, 3, 4 or eight men, are married to all of the women. Like Don Henley sings, “this could be heaven or it could be hell”…

All seems well until the “senior wife” in the marriage (the oldest wife and in this case one of the founding members of the marriage) finds out that Friday is an “artificial person”. Friday is summarily divorced. One minute, in the bosom of her family, the next, out on the street.

On the rebound, our heroine has a fling with a handsome Canadian airline pilot. As you do…perhaps. While she is in bed with him, a terrible world event happens, something rather like 9/11 but many orders of magnitude worse. “Black Thursday” or something like that. All airline traffic is stopped. Governments collapse; martial law is introduced; the Four Horseman have a brief canter through the world, and tens of thousands of people die or are imprisoned. Armed police come to the airline pilots house, and there is violence: a policeman lays hands on someone. Friday kills him, and she has to flee.

She spends a long time travelling round what in our world is the continental United States, trying to get back to base and report in to her boss. In this world, the United States has long gone: it is several different countries – the Chicago Imperium; British Columbia, the Republic of California, and the Lone Star Republic.  The story is set in the late fifties – we know this because at one point a lady of a certain age buys a lottery ticket ending in “99”, saying that this is a lucky number – it was the year of her birth. But we don’t know what century – certainly well into the 3rd Millennium. There is faster than light travel and a dozen or so settled planets around different stars. All industry and all vehicles are powered by “Shipstone” batteries, which working in some unknown proprietary way. Commercial aircraft are “semi-ballistic” glide rockets undertaking transcontinental journeys in merely hours. 

A favourite device of Heinlein’s is to see society through its small ads: in this part of the book there are fascinating job adverts: “Tranuranics Golden Division on Planet Golden around Procyon-B wants experienced mining engineers. Five year renewable contract”…the reader is told that the advert omits to mention that humans are unlikely to survive 5 years in the job…

Eventually Friday makes it back to her boss and checks in: he sets her to work on something we take for granted with Google and the internet: completely undirected and unsupervised research. This would have been very difficult to do in 1982 without access to reference libraries of books. After some weeks of this he rings her up in the middle of the night, and asks her “when will the next outbreak of Bubonic plague be?” A voice tells him the answer, and she is astonished to find that the voice is her own. That knowledge is the side-effect almost, the fruit, of her undirected research.  A few days later, her boss, an old man, is dead of natural causes, and she is out of a job.

Friday gets another job eventually – couriering something out to the royal family on The Realm, a fabulously rich and infamously totalitarian space colony. On the starship voyage out there, she becomes aware that she is pregnant and being closely watched by bodyguards everywhere. She works out that the unborn child planted within her is destined to become a royal daughter. She will go into hospital alive, go under anaesthetic for what she thinks is a minor procedure, and that will be the end of her.

With some difficulty, Friday escapes: she jumps ship at a colony world halfway; more by luck and plot devices than her own skill and judgement. She escapes from her bodyguards, disappears into the woods, and settles down to a normal existence as a colony wife, Cub den leader and mother.