From 1947 through 1958, Robert Heinlein was primarily an author of science fiction aimed at the "juvenile" market, specifically at teenaged boys. Besides two minor novellas serialized in Boys' Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, there were twelve dazzlingly successful novels published as a juvenile series by Scribner's. These dozen novels have proved to be as popular and influential as anything Heinlein ever wrote, all going into continual mass-market reprintings, with several transposed into movie, television, and comic-strip versions. (p. 73)

[These works] form a coherent epic, the story of the conquest of space. Like the tales and sketches Heinlein was publishing in general-circulation magazines, these longer works are optimistic, expansionary, romantic, pulsing with missionary zeal for a colossal human endeavor and also throbbing with a fever to escape from the urbanized, complex, supposedly routinized and imprisoning experience of Earth. The central figures are always boys making their passage into becoming men, emblems of a human race attaining what Heinlein construes to be its maturity in the solar system, the galaxy, and beyond. (pp. 73-4)

The movement is outward bound. The first novel describes the first trip to the moon, the next five are set on and around Venus, Mars, the asteroids, and Jupiter; the ensuing five all involve voyages between Earth and parts of our galaxy beyond this solar system; and the final one climaxes someplace in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, where our race is judged by the composite mind of the Three Galaxies. (p. 74)

The point-of-view character is usually a teenaged boy attempting to enter the adult world and often trying to relate to what he perceives as the even stranger world of females, who sometimes seem to him more alien than the strangest extraterrestrial life forms. The central subject, however, is space travel.

Space travel provides some ideal settings for an author who believes in the primacy of individual or small-group achievements and who wishes to indulge fantasies of escape from the late industrial world. Small heroic groups or individuals may be placed in dramatic situations alone in spaceships or on other planets, where their actions may have great consequences. There is, however, a contradiction, for space travel is the product of an entire highly industrialized, complexly organized society. Unaware of this, early science fiction could ignore it. Hence there was often the spectacle, amusingly archaic to us, of some lone genius inventing and building a spaceship in his workshop and launching it from his backyard. Later, a single industrial corporation could be imagined as the sole creator of a spaceship, of course through the genius of one or two scientists or engineers. By the close of World War II, however, it was fairly obvious that space travel would take the kind of vast, highly socialized efforts that had developed the Nazi V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs or the U.S. atomic bombs. (pp. 74-5)

Many of the boys' books consist of extended tests of endurance, loyalty, courage, intelligence, integrity, and fortitude. They dramatize a personal ethic and pervasive social Darwinism, displaying how and why "fit" types survive while the "unfit"—the sulkers, the weaklings, the whiners, the lazy, the self-centered, the vicious—are eliminated. The first of these books is Space Cadet …, the story of how a boy from Des Moines, Iowa, becomes an officer in the Interplanetary Patrol. (pp. 76-7)

Most of the novel is a detailed account of the training program for Cadets—with emphasis on how the unfit are eliminated. Then comes the big adventure that shows the Patrol in action.

One of the Cadets eliminated as unfit is the son of a big capitalist, Chairman of the Board of Reactors, Ltd. He has his father make him captain of a merchant rocketship that is "transferred to the family corporation 'System Enterprises'" …, and he promptly attacks the peaceful, aquatic Venerians in an ill-fated attempt to exploit precious metals found in a taboo swamp. Our youthful hero and fellow Cadets find themselves having to rescue this greedy antithesis of their own values and establish peaceful relations with the Venerians, "the Little People."

The Venerians introduce what is soon to be a characteristic feature of these boys' books—charming, endearing, delightful space creatures, who often turn out to be at least as intelligent as the Terrans. Until their appearance in Space Cadet, the novel presents an almost purely masculine world, like the unrelieved male world of Rocket Ship Galileo. But all the Little People encountered by the Terrans, including the Venerian rulers and scientists, are female. This encounter with the feminine in an alien form gives a special psychological twist to this book written for adolescent boys.

In Red Planet …, the endearing creature is Willis, a bouncy and affectionate little pet who turns out to be a Martian in its first stage. Willis is attached to James Madison Marlow, Jr., who lives with his family on Mars in the South Colony, "a frontier society."… (pp. 77-8)

The novel is about growing up. Jim becomes a man. Willis prepares to metamorphose into a mature Martian. The colony issues a Proclamation of Autonomy modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Human society itself seems youthful compared with that of the Martians, who outgrew space travel millions of years ago. The general relevance of the theme of growing up is enunciated by a character found in many of Heinlein's novels, a warm-hearted old curmudgeon serving as the author's mouthpiece (and probably deriving from young Robert's memories of his grandfather, Dr. Lyle), in this case a grizzled doctor acting as Jim's true mentor…. (p. 78)

[The novella] "Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon" … [focuses] on the heroism, self-sacrifice, and resourcefulness of people conquering the new frontier of space. Here the two heroes are Boy Scouts, one from Earth and the other from the moon, trapped in a lunar cave, sharing their last cylinder of air, and persevering to survive. (p. 79)

[In Farmer in the Sky] the new frontier theme [becomes] the whole story.

These pioneers embark on spaceships named the Mayflower and the Covered Wagon to convert Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons, into a world fit for terrestrials. Bill, the young narrator, and his family do not tarry long in the "frontier town" …, but move to become "homesteaders" … on the virgin soil, or rather virgin rock that they must convert to soil.

Heinlein, who began life as a boy in rural Missouri, here projects an imaginary future that resurrects one of the most cherished symbols of the American past, the family farm, with its combination, at least in the ideal, of cooperation and independence. "You can't do it alone" and "Pioneers need good neighbors" … are mottoes of these people, but the symbol of Bill's manhood is becoming "a property owner, paying my own way."… (pp. 79-80)

[Between Planets] was published first as a serial in an adult magazine … demonstrating that there is no clear demarcation of Heinlein's "juvenile" fiction. The novel's youthful protagonist, Don Harvey, embodies the next stage in the outward-bound movement of this space epic. Born in space, his parents both scientists who move from planet to planet, Don proudly claims, "'I'm a citizen of the System'."… Swept up in an interplanetary struggle, he moves toward a discovery of his true identity, one that makes homesteading on Ganymede as humdrum as life in the corn belt, for he is the true spaceman:

He knew now where he belonged—in space, where he was born. Any planet was merely a hotel to him; space was his home.

                                        (pp. 80-1)

In lurid contrast to this soaring freedom spins the decadent planet Earth. As the story opens, Earth is on the verge of the war predicted toward the end of Farmer in the Sky. New Chicago is "a modern Babylon," a "Sodom and Gomorrah" displayed in a chapter entitled "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" (the biblical handwriting on the wall)….

The Terran Federation itself has become the instrument of interplanetary colonialism and exploitation…. This generates, as in Red Planet and, later, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, an anti-colonial revolution modeled on the original American Revolution. (p. 81)

The last of the series kept within the confines of the solar system is The Rolling Stones … a novel glorifying the outward-bound Stone family, "a crew of rugged individualists" …, all geniuses…. Tiring of life on the moon, the Stones buy their own used spaceship and zip off for a two-year voyage of sightseeing and commerce to Mars and the asteroids, slipping in and out of scrapes all the way.

The episodes are structured like a serial, and seem intended to contrast with the science-fiction TV serial [the Stones] write collectively as they wander along. Heinlein has achieved one of the main objectives of the first half of his juvenile space epic: making the moon, Mars, and the asteroids as familiar and ordinary as Missouri. The TV series, The Scourge of the Spaceways, moving of course toward an inevitable confrontation with the Galactic Overlord, is thus a parody of the kind of science fiction Heinlein himself is pointedly not writing, at least not at this time. Yet the last paragraph of The Rolling Stones shows this domesticized spaceship, like its creators, preparing to move out from the tamed frontiers near Earth toward the ends of the solar system and beyond…. (pp. 82-3)

Starman Jones … is the story of a midwestern farm boy who becomes an astrogator. The young hero moves from the wretched loneliness of an orphan trapped on a dismal Earth to the glorious loneliness of guiding ships through space….

Earth, now the center of an interstellar empire, has become a prison without hope, a rigidly structured society made up of three classes—the rich, a labor aristocracy organized into feudal guilds, and a semislave proletariat transported to the colonies as contract labor, "convicts and paupers."… (p. 83)

Only two alternatives to all these rigid structures are suggested. One is Heinlein's lost world of the frontier and the unspoiled American wilderness to be found on the planet Nova Terra, whose "comfortable looseness" seems like "anarchy" to Max, as Sam [a roguish, but heroic, picaro] describes it…. (p. 84)

The other alternative appears first as Sam is painting this idyllic picture, when Max interrupts to say, "'I don't want to get married.'" Sam responds. "'That's your problem.'" The girl who woos Max for half the book, concealing her own intelligence so as not to scare him off, ends up marrying another after Max rejects her. At the end, Max has chosen the lone, loveless, unfree, heroic life of the starman.

The Star Beast … is the only novel in the Scribner's series that takes place entirely on Earth. The action revolves around a creature from remote space, an eight-legged, brontosaurussized, fully omnivorous, lovable monster known as Lummox, the backyard pet of John Thomas Stuart XI, a teenager in a small Colorado town. (pp. 84-5)

As in Red Planet, there is a parallel between the growing up of the endearing space creature—in this case Lummox begins to sprout arms—and the growing up of the teenaged male protagonist. (p. 85)

In Tunnel in the Sky … an overpopulated Earth sends streams of colonists through special time-space gates directly to thousands of new planets. (p. 86)

Leaders are necessary to guide the way into these new environments where the race must "kill or be killed, eat or be eaten."… The final examination for these future leaders is to be sent alone on a survival test to "ANY planet, ANY climate, ANY terrain" with "NO rules, ALL weapons, ANY equipment."… This fantasy of the individual overcoming a strange natural environment through his own ingenuity and fortitude is not some aberration peculiar to Robert A. Heinlein; it is a fantasy central to the bourgeois historical epoch, recurring insistently in the novel from its classic form in [Daniel Defoe's] Robinson Crusoe through its most incisive parody, J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island.

In Tunnel in the Sky, Heinlein attempts to reconcile this vision of extreme individualism with his belief in social cooperation. Here too he is working with myths familiar to bourgeois society, for he is dramatizing the fantasy of free individuals, "naked against nature," coming together of their own volition to form human society. The youths placed on a strange planet for their final test in survival are stranded there when a supernova disrupts the gate through which they are supposed to return to Earth. Gradually they come together, creating a society formed by individuals capable of survival but needing the interrelations necessary for authentic human development. By the time Earth has re-established links with the planet, these young people have established the complete pioneer colony—including square dances.

Heinlein's ideology sharply contrasts with that of a book published the previous year, William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Golding, considered a "liberal," shows a group of proper English boys who, stranded on an island, quickly degenerate into savage, sadistic, warring beasts, supposedly demonstrating that war and all other evils of the human race are just an expression of our essential nature. In Tunnel in the Sky, the few uncooperative bullies get their lumps and are exiled from society; Heinlein, in these books written for boys during this period, projects an underlying faith in the potential of the human race and in the inherent qualities of individuals, at least those in his interchangeable categories of "leader" and "survivor."

The young protagonist, Rod Walker, the first leader of the pioneer society and later its trailblazer, embodies the extreme form of the outward-bound man…. He is oblivious to the advances made by all girls, ranging from the rugged Zulu to the petite French lass whom he mistakes for a boy during the days the two live together in a cave. At the very end, we see him astride his horse, dressed in fringed buckskins, leading a pioneer wagon train, now as "Captain Walker headed out on his long road."

The self-denying psychology of the spaceman is the central focus of Time for the Stars …, which purports to be an autobiographical narrative written as psychotherapy under the advice of a starship's psychiatrist. The narrator, Thomas Paine Leonardo da Vinci Bartlett, communicates telepathically and instantaneously over the rapidly growing distances of space and time with his identical twin brother back on Earth, Patrick Henry Michelangelo Bartlett. Pat, a cocky, brash, cheerful go-getter who bosses and bullies his twin, had seemed the better candidate for going into space, and he had originally gotten himself selected over the moody, introspective, self-defeating Tom…. As the twins grow apart from one another in all ways, Tom gradually becomes aware of his own identity and the peculiarly self-effacing psychology Heinlein projects as an essential tool in the conquest of space.

Once again we receive a heavy lecture on the sanctity of authority and the dangers of democracy, summed up in the motto, "The Captain is right even when he is wrong."… As we saw in The Star Beast, this message applies to nations and planets just as much as it does to spaceships. So Tom discovers that "it was more important to back up the Captain and respect his authority than anything else" …, a message wildly contradictory to Heinlein's professed love of near-anarchic "looseness" and freedom. (pp. 86-8)

The central theme of Citizen of the Galaxy … is slavery and freedom. The novel moves inward from a remote part of the galaxy toward Earth and upward through many social classes. These tours take place through the experiences of Thorby, a boy maturing into a man, seeking his roots, his identity, and his family, as he completes a rags-to-riches saga that takes him from the very lowest role in the galaxy to the very highest. (p. 90)

Thorby is … adopted into the extended matriarchal family of a "Free Trader" spaceship, which gives us a fine tour through different civilizations as well as Heinlein's most incisive exploration of the contradictory nature of bourgeois freedom. Dr. Margaret Mader, an anthropologist studying the structured tribal society of the Free Traders, who call themselves "the People" and refer to everybody else as subhuman "fraki." explains to Thorby that when he was adopted into the spaceship's extended family he thereby became another kind of slave. She admits that they "enjoy the highest average wealth in history" because "the profits of your trading are fantastic."… The freedom she concedes they have is the ideal freedom implicit in the bourgeois quest—and in Heinlein's fiction….

The People are free to roam the stars, never rooted to any soil. So free that each ship is a sovereign state, asking nothing of anyone, going anywhere, fighting against any odds, asking no quarter, not even cooperating except as it suits them. Oh, the People are free: this old Galaxy has never seen such freedom….

But the price of this "'unparalleled freedom … is freedom itself,'" for the Free Traders must submit themselves to a code of customs, rules, and hierarchical order "'more stringent than any prison,'" telling them precisely what they can and cannot do within the metal bounds of their free spaceships. (pp. 90-1)

[The novella "Tenderfoot in Space"] suggests that Heinlein is nearing the end of his engagement with boys' stories. In this truly juvenile tale of a Boy Scout who moves with his dog to Venus, the dog turns out to be the hero and the only competent scout.

Have Space Suit—Will Travel …, the twelfth and final novel in the Scribner's series, soars through and beyond our galaxy to a trial of the human race, conducted by a million-year-old composite mind, to determine whether we should be annihilated as a threat to the survival of wiser and more mature races. Contrasted to this cosmic drama, but playing a crucial role within it, is the life of Kip Russell, a high-school senior from Centerville, who works in the local drugstore, yearns to go to the moon, and narrates his breathtaking travels. (pp. 91-2)

[Kip] teams up with an eleven-year-old girl genius, who demands that he "'quit being big and male and gallantly stupid'" …, and "the Mother Thing," an intergalactic policewoman from a race of superbeings. The Mother Thing—"around her you felt happy and safe and warm" …—is the ultimate embodiment of maternal protection, cherishing our young hero and heroine and interceding at the intergalactic trial to save our youthful race.

The trial is the climax of the novel and the Scribner's series. Our race is represented by a Neanderthal man, ultimately determined to be a "cousin" rather than an ancestor, a brutal Roman legionnaire whom Kip, unlike the judge, admires as a "tough old sergeant" who "had courage, human dignity, and a basic gallantry," and the two youngsters. The court condemns human history as unmitigated evidence of inherent ferocity…. The Mother Thing offers two defenses. She argues that no race can "'survive without a willingness to fight.'" But her main argument is that we are mere children, both as a race and because we are short-lived "'ephemerals'" who "'all must die in early childhood.'" Since we "'all are so very young,'" we should be given "'time to learn'": "'Toward evil we have no mercy. But the mistakes of a child we treat with loving forbearance.'" Through this vision we see that the entire juvenile space epic is Heinlein's version of the human epic, the story of the childhood of a race, best symbolized in the lives of children becoming adults as they grow into a role in the galaxy. (pp. 92-3)

In 1959, Heinlein's fabulously successful career as a juvenile author came to an abrupt end…. [Starship Troopers], perhaps his most controversial book …, marks the end of this period in his career. (p. 110)

Starship Troopers displays the superelite force designed to fight the permanent wars necessary to fulfill Earth's manifest destiny in the galaxy. And the Terran Federation, the society employing this force, is ruled entirely by veterans of this elite military machine and its non-combatant auxiliaries.

Recently there has been some debate about whether Starship Troopers is as militaristic as it seems, and Heinlein himself disclaims any militaristic intentions. But to argue about whether or not Starship Troopers glorifies militarism would be as silly as arguing about whether or not "My Country 'Tis of Thee" glorifies America. Militarism shapes the speech and sets the tone of all the characters, including the narrator-hero; militarism animates every page; militarism—together will imperialism—is the novel's explicit message. What we must probe is not the quantity of militarism in Starship Troopers but its special quality. For Starship Troopers expresses its own time, and gives a striking vision of times to come. (pp. 111-12)

Starship Troopers imagines and applauds a future in which the imperialism of Earth has become virtually cosmic. (p. 112)

In Starship Troopers, the social organization created and ruled by service veterans has proved to be the most efficient of all forms of human society, allowing a unification of the peoples of Earth and an extension of the Terran Federation deep into the galaxy. But at the time of the action, this powerful state built upon a combination of voluntary self-sacrifice and cooperation has met what may be its match—"the Bugs," a hivelike society of arachnids, every bit as tough and just as expansionary as Heinlein's humans. Like the slugs of The Puppet Masters, the Bugs of Starship Troopers are obviously extrapolations from Heinlein's conception of twentieth-century communism. They embody "a total communism."…, "they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive."… So the society of cooperating individuals is now locked in struggle with the communist hive for total control of the galaxy.

Heinlein makes explicit connections between this vision of a struggle for galactic control and his vision of the twentieth-century struggle for global control…. And just as Heinlein imagines … the Russians, joining in an alliance against the utmost in human communism, the Chinese hordes, he projects another humanoid race, "the Skinnies," more communistic than humans but less communistic than Bugs, who switch from being allies of the Bugs to become our allies in the final showdown. (pp. 117-18)

The deepest emotional experiences in Starship Troopers all have to do with the relationships among the men in the Mobile Infantry. The psychological climax comes in the concluding passage of the novel. Throbbing with intensity, this passage reveals a new human order, as the female Captain of the ship prepares to deliver a father and son who have switched places, leaping to sow death and destruction to the words and tune of a song from World War II…. (pp. 119-20)

If we were to continue beyond [the conclusion] in the same direction we would arrive at a man who is both his own father and his own mother, whose mission in life is to recruit himself into military service, and who can love only himself because he is the only real being in the world. And this summarizes that other work published by Robert Heinlein in 1959, at the end of this period in his career, "All You Zombies—."

"All You Zombies—" is Heinlein's most ingenious short story, and, I think, his finest…. A fitting climax to Heinlein's mastery of the short-story genre, "All You Zombies—" recapitulates and integrates many of his most significant themes and leaves us with a brilliant vision into the tangled contradictions at the heart of his achievement. (p. 120)

[There are] some deep similarities and differences between Starship Troopers and "All You Zombies—." Just as the novel glorifies militarism, the short story exposes its hollow core. Just as the novel revels in death and destruction, the short story seeks to evade and escape the horrors of war and the history that Heinlein perceives in the future. (pp. 122-23)

Instead of the "freedom" of voluntary self-sacrifice and cooperation presented by Starship Troopers, "All You Zombies—" presents a deterministic maze that leads nowhere but to a series of holes in a dike constructed to hold back the flood of history. Instead of the intense passion that binds the Troopers of the Mobile Infantry to each other, to their mission, and to their glorious history and future, "All You Zombies—" offers us the loveless solipsism of the ultimate narcissist, the self-created individual spinning out webs of fiction in which he wanders alone, not even believing in the existence of his audience.

In 1959, the New Frontiers of Robert Heinlein's juvenile space epic seem to have become lost. He leaves us to choose between a hymn to a corps of elite destroyers and the inverted agony of a lonely officer of a Bureau designed to save us from our time. (pp. 123-24)

H. Bruce Franklin, in his Robert A. Heinlein: America As Science Fiction (copyright © 1980 by Oxford University Press, Inc.; used by permission), Oxford University Press, New York, 1980, 232 p.