I suspect that [Heinlein's] most enduring work will turn out to be the dozen juvenile novels he wrote for Scribner's after the war.

Juvenile science fiction, as a labeled category, begins with Heinlein—though in fact most of the earlier magazine science fiction had been written for youthful readers and censored of anything likely to give offense. There had been new inventions, too, in Tom Swift and the dime novels, but no real futurology. The Heinlein series was a pioneer effort, quickly imitated….

Based on solidly logical extrapolations of future technology and future human history, [the novels] are cleanly constructed and deftly written, without the digressions and the preaching that often weaken the drama in his later work.

What I most admire about them is Heinlein's dogged faith in us and our destiny. No blind optimist, he is very much aware of evil days to come. His future worlds are often oppressively misruled, pinched by hunger, and wasted by war. Yet his heroes are always using science and reason to solve problems, to escape the prison Earth, to seek and build better worlds. (p. 15)

Heinlein never writes down. His main characters are young, the plots move fast, and the style is limpidly clear; but he never insults the reader's intelligence. (p. 16)

Heinlein's heroes are pretty much alike—all competent people. The protagonists of the juvenile novels are born bright, and we see them learning how to do everything. They mature into the all-around experts of his adult fiction and finally mellow into such extraordinary oldsters as Jubal Harshaw and Lazarus Long.

These efficient folk reflect Heinlein himself. [Jonathan] Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels to satirize man's self-important faith in his own reason. Heinlein clearly belongs to the satirized camp, and his people embody the attitudes of the self-confident, reasonable man, the scientist who yearns to know all about the universe and the technologist who toils to control it.

I suspect that this independent individualism can explain Heinlein's often-puzzling bits of irrational mysticism, for example the interludes in heaven in Stranger in a Strange Land and the climactic scene in Starman Jones when Max has a sense of the dead astrogator standing behind his chair to help him guide the lost ship back through the anomaly. Lacking any rational basis for belief in personal immortality, Heinlein and his heroes must either face the inevitability of death or somehow evade it. The long life of Lazarus Long appears to be an evasion, and the flashes of mysticism must be wishful escapes from the rational universe that neither the writer nor his people can finally master.

Actually, I think the supercompetent characters serve Heinlein well. He is no Tolstoy, recording known life. His major motif has always been future technology, treated with some degree of optimism. The theme itself implies people who invent, build, use, and enjoy machines. Technological man has to be rational and competent.

Yet there's a conflict here that I don't think Heinlein has ever fully resolved. As evolving technologies become more and more complex, so does the teamwork needed to support them. Heinlein seems completely aware of this when he is carrying his young protagonists through their education and their rites of initiation, yet he often seems unhappy with the sacrifice of personal freedom that a technological culture seems to require. In The Rolling Stones, for instance, his competent people are in full flight from their mechanized environment. (pp. 16-17)

[In Heinlein's first juvenile novel Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) the] plot is often trite, and the characters are generally thin stereotypes, with none of the colorful human beings and charming aliens soon to follow. Too, the book has dated badly. Anticipating the first flights to the Moon, it's a poor prediction. The rocket builders work almost alone, on a tiny budget, with no seeming need for the vast NASA organization. The villains are Nazis, an idea perhaps not so badly worn in 1947 as it seems today. The spacecraft land horizontally, like airplanes, rather than on their tails. The action stops for science lectures not related to the story. Yet the book is still readable, with Heinlein's familiar themes already emerging. (p. 17)

Space Cadet, published in 1948, is a long step forward. The characters are stronger, and they use more of the wisecracking dialogue that gradually became a Heinlein hallmark. The background is carefully built, original, and convincing, the story suspenseful enough. Set a century after Rocket Ship Galileo, it has few of the discrepancies with history that date the first book….

Here he is already perfecting the Bildungsroman form that shapes the whole series. His heroes are learning, maturing, discovering their social roles. The rite-of-passage pattern shows most clearly when Matt goes home from the Space Academy to find himself alienated from his own past. (p. 18)

Heinlein's intellectual kinship with H. G. Wells appears in the theme of the novel: the idea that common men must be guided and guarded by a competent elite. Like Wells, he is something of a classicist; rejecting the romantic notion that society corrupts, he assumes instead that we need social training to save us. I suppose this feeling was fostered by his own military training. Though stated with most force in Starship Troopers, it appears in such early stories as "The Roads Must Roll," and it becomes a basic premise for the Bildungsroman pattern of the juveniles—a premise often in conflict with Heinlein's own deep sense of romantic individualism. (pp. 18-19)

With Red Planet, published in 1940, Heinlein found his true direction for the series. The Martian setting is logically constructed and rich in convincing detail…. The characters are engaging and the action develops naturally. Here, for the first time, Heinlein is making the most of his aliens. Willis, the young Martian nymph, is completely real and completely delightful. The whole tone of the book is set by the contrasts between the selfish human bureaucrats who exploit the settlers and the courteous and benign Martians who save them.

The aliens and robots of science fiction are commonly interesting only as symbols of human traits and feelings, and Heinlein makes his extraterrestrials an important part of the symbolic structure. Sometimes they are antagonists; those in Starman Jones and Time for the Stars can stand for the hostility of untamed nature. But more commonly they are neutral or friendly, and they often serve as teachers for the maturing heroes.

The essential action of the Bildungsroman is the process of conflict and growth that replaces native animal traits with social behavior. In Red Planet, the Company and its minions stand for the primitive self, the Martians for society. Like society itself, they are old but timeless, wise, bound by custom and tradition. Some of them are ghosts, transcending individual death as society does. (p. 19)

Farmer in the Sky, published in 1950, is a hymn to the pioneer. The sky frontier is on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, but the plot parallels the familiar history of the colonization of America—the torch ship that carries the settlers from Earth is named the Mayflower.

As a novel of education, the book shows the creation of a rugged individualist. Heinlein uses point of view of unified action that covers half a billion miles of space and a good deal of time, letting Bill Lermer tell his own story in a relaxed, conversational style. Bill is a Scout—the novel was serialized in Boy's Life—and Scout training helps to build his competent self-reliance. The contrasting characters are the incompetent misfits who expect society to solve their problems.

The story has a harsh realism unusual for a juvenile. The migrants leave the overpopulated Earth to escape hunger and the threat of war. They struggle to survive on a world never meant for men. More than half are killed by a destructive quake. They meet no friendly aliens, though, near the end, Bill and his friend discover a cache of machines left long ago by a mysterious space visitor. Not very important in the story, this incident does give the reader a welcome break from the grimly hostile setting. (p. 20)

Between Planets, published in 1951, moves the series still further from its juvenile origins toward grown-up concerns. Though we meet the space-born hero while he is still a schoolboy in New Mexico, at the end of the novel he is a combat-tested fighting man with marriage in view. (p. 21)

Though some of the action is pretty traditional space opera, the characters are ably drawn and Heinlein closes the novel with a vigorous statement of his unhappiness with "the historical imperative of the last two centuries, the withering away of individual freedom under larger and [ever] more pervasive organizations, both governmental and quasi-governmental." (pp. 21-2)

The Rolling Stones, published in 1952, displays an inevitable craftsmanship. The narrative is episodic and nearly plotless, a fact that Heinlein emphasizes with the contrast between the lives of his protagonists and the events of the melodramatic adventure serial they are writing about the Galactic Overlord. Discarding most of the standard devices for suspense, he is still able to compel the reader's interest in his lively people and their almost aimless wanderings from Luna City to Mars and the Asteroids and on toward Saturn … and "the ends of the Universe."

They are the Stone family, ranging in age from the apparently immortal Grandmother Hazel, through the teenaged "unheavenly twins," Castor and Pollux, down to Lowell, the infant genius who can already beat his grandmother at chess. (p. 22) The Stones leave Luna City in a secondhand spaceship, with no motives except an impatience with social restraints and an itch to see the universe. With the father in command, as captain of the ship, the family becomes once more the fully independent social unit.

Here, I believe, Heinlein is dramatizing a personal concern that is also a dilemma of our technological world. Advancing technology not only asks competent people to master special skills, but it also asks for smooth cooperation. The increasingly complex division of labor requires a social discipline strong enough to prevent sabotage and acts of terrorism, to restrain the power grabs of narrow selfish interests, to unite workers and managers, to fuse the elite and the mass. The protection of the world machines requires a painful sacrifice of personal freedom which I think Heinlein is reluctant to accept.

But The Rolling Stones, unlike such later works as Farnham's Freehold, carries its thematic burden lightly. It is a delightful romp through space, brightened with such terms as the Martian flat cats, which multiply like the guinea pigs in Ellis Parker Butler's famous funny story ("Pigs is Pigs"), until the money-minded twins find a market for them in the meteor-mining colony.

Much of the effect comes as usual from the sense of an accurately extrapolated future background, with all the new technologies given an air of commonplace reality. The used spaceship, for example, is bought from "Dealer Dan, the Spaceship Man," who is drawn after today's used-car salesmen. Though the meteor miners use radar and rocket scooters, they live like forty-niners. (p. 23)

Starman Jones, published in 1953, is a classic example of the Bildungsroman pattern and perhaps my own favorite of the series. Max Jones is a poor, hill farm boy faced with the hard problem of finding the place he wants in a closed society. With Heinlein's reasonably consistent future history moving on, the old torch ship Einstein has become the starship Asgard, now equipped with Horst-Conrad impellers that can drive her at the speed of light and beyond, to jump her across the light-years through the congruences of a folded universe. Max wants to be a starman, but his way is barred by a rigid guild system that has no room for him.

Good science fiction mixes the known and the new—in more formal terms, it recognizes that we can perceive and respond to those items that can somehow attach to the mental structures we already possess. Heinlein gives us exciting novelties enough in Max's universe, but not without his usual deft preparation. We see Max slopping the hogs and feeding the chickens before he runs away from an intolerable "step-stepmother" and her insufferable new husband to look for his way to the stars.

For all his social handicaps, he has several things going for him: a genius for math, an eidetic memory, a friend named Sam…. Sam is an older man, a figure who neatly complements Max in the role-finding pattern of the novel. Once an Imperial Marine, he has lost his social place because he lacks Max's moral strength. Now a colorful conniver, whose entertaining speech tag is his habit of mixing familiar proverbs, he gives his life at the end of the book in full atonement for his social faults. (pp. 23-4)

Aboard the Asgard with forged papers provided by Sam, [Max] is always in a precarious position, his social status always in jeopardy, yet he learns to make the most of social opportunity. At the end, when all the other qualified astrogators are dead and the tech manuals and tables are missing, it is Max alone who can take command and pilot the ship through the new congruity, back to galactic civilization.

With its bold symbolism, the book makes a universal appeal. We are all born lonely individualists; we must all make the same struggle, often hard and painful, for a foothold in society. Though there is unlikely coincidence and occasional melodrama in Max's story, such faults don't matter. The novel is a fine juvenile, but also something more. It reflects hopes and fears we all have known.

Star Beast, published in 1954, is vastly different from Starman Jones but equally outstanding. (pp. 24-5)

[Star Beast] is a wildly delightful comedy grown from Heinlein's continual concern with the able individual in conflict with incompetent pretenders. Most of the fun comes from our anarchistic joy in the successful defiance of rigid social norms and the stupid people who attempt to enforce them. The victims of this satiric exposure range from the Westville city officials to the bumbling politician who is Mr. Kiku's nominal superior. (p. 25)

[The] devastating shots at society and its leaders imply the same reservations about popular rule that H. G. Wells often expressed. Near the end of the book, Mr. Kiku says that the government "is not now a real democracy and it can't be." Majority rule might be good, "But it's rarely that easy. We find ourselves oftener the pilots of a ship in a life-and-death emergency. Is it the pilot's duty to hold powwows with the passengers? Or is it his job to use his skill and experience to bring them safely home?"

But the book is no sermon. Though this familiar theme is stated with force enough, it isn't allowed to spoil the fun…. (pp. 25-6)

Tunnel in the Sky, published in 1955, lacks the mad fascination of Star Beast, though it is built on a wonderful story idea. Life has now become lean on the crowded future Earth, but the star gates are opening on new planets all across the galaxy. Since some of these are dangerous, the schools teach survival. Rod Walker is a high school senior who is dropped with his classmates on an unfriendly new world for a survival test. When a nova explosion disables their gate, the young people are left on their own.

Though the situation is much like that in [William] Golding's Lord of the Flies, the development is vastly different. In Golding's book, we watch civilization dissolve into savagery; Heinlein's heroes, before they are rescued, have begun to plant a vigorous new civilization. Golding is a classicist, I think, distrusting the human animal; Heinlein, though half a classicist in making the social adaptation of the naive individual the subject of the whole series, is still I think somehow a romanticist at heart, rejoicing in competent individualism and conceding no more than he must to society.

Another novel of education, Tunnel in the Sky begins with both Rod and his teacher uncertain that he is ready for the survival test. On his upward way to leadership in the accidental colony, he must learn to cope with human rivals as well as with an unkind environment. Yet, though the book sometimes seems to have been planned as a parable of man and society, the theme is blurred. The ending strikes me as arbitrary; with the star gate reopened, the young people simply abandon their social experiment.

The problem, I suspect, is another unresolved conflict between Heinlein's romantic individualism and his awareness of the social discipline required by a technological culture. The best writing is in the first half of the book, in which Rod's competence for survival is being developed in conflicts with savage nature and savage-seeming human beings. The latter chapters, in which he is establishing social relationships within the new culture, seem oddly flat and hollow. He avoids sex relationships in a hardly normal way—though his behavior here may have been only Heinlein's concession to his juvenile editors.

In any case, the book simply fails to live up to its initial promises. We are told in the opening that man, "the two-legged brute," is the most dangerous animal in the universe, "which goes double for the female of the species." The first half of the book supports that assumption, but then the human menace fades, leaving only the wilderness planet with its less-than-human threats.

Yet the book is far from bad. The setting, as always, is solidly done. We feel the pinch of want on the overpopulated Earth and we understand the history and the working of the planetary gates that have made migration an alternative to war. (pp. 26-7)

In Time for the Stars, published in 1956, Heinlein drops back in history to an age when the torch ships are first venturing beyond the solar system to find room for teeming humanity on new planets. Traveling at less than light-speed, the explorer ships take many years for each crossing between stars, and few of them return.

The plot builds from the idea that telepathy, existing most often between twins, can cross interstellar distances with no time lag. Often in science fiction psionics becomes a wild card allowed to wreck all story logic, but here Heinlein limits and explores it in a completely believable way. (p. 27)

Citizen of the Galaxy, published in 1957, is a sort of epilogue to the whole Scribner's series. The other books, taken together, tell an epic story of the expansion of mankind across the planets of our own Sun and the stars beyond. All that is now past history. The plot action begins off the Earth, in the tyrannic Empire of the Nine Worlds, and carries us on a grand tour of galactic cultures already long established. (p. 28)

As the story of a young man's education and self-discovery, this clearly fits the classic juvenile pattern…. The opening is gripping; the old beggar and the slave boy compel our sympathy; the several settings are detailed with Heinlein's usual captivating skill; the whole novel still reads well.

Yet, for all its ambitious scope, it has major faults. The jumps from one setting to another break it almost into a series of novelettes…. Too, I miss the new technologies that add so much genuine wonder to the other books. With the conquest of space already complete, however, I see no real need for new inventions here, and I suppose Heinlein's interests were already shifting from the physical to the social sciences, from gadgets to cultures—the culture of the Free Traders is certainly an anthropologist's delight. In the next novel, anyhow, he comes back to physical science, with one last completely fascinating gadget.

Have Space Suit—Will Travel, published in 1958, brings the series to a highly satisfying climax. The novel opens on a near-future, very familiar Earth. The hero is Kip, another bright and likable boy, who tells his own story in his own breezy style. He wants to go to the Moon, and things begin when he tries for a free trip offered in an advertising giveaway and wins a badly used space suit.

Again we have the rite-of-passage pattern but done with unusual love and verve. Kip's world is convincingly familiar: he reads National Geographic and attends Centerville High and works after school as a soda jerk. His story moves fast. Though he packs it with simplified scientific fact and with philosophic ideas picked up from his individualistic father, he never stops to preach.

The space suit is the essential gadget. It's worthless junk when Kip receives it from the satirized sellers of soap, but he rebuilds it in time to become involved, along with an eleven-year-old girl genius, in a melodramatic space adventure. The girl, Peewee Reisfeld, has been caught by a gang of evil, worm-faced aliens who have also captured the Mother Thing, a furry and appealing creature who is a sort of galactic cop. There is a good deal of routine space opera in the plot action that carries us stage by stage to the Moon, to Pluto, to the Mother Thing's home on Vega V, out to the capital of the Three Galaxies in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and finally back again to Earth. With Heinlein's zest and his fine detail, however, the stereotypes are well disguised. Peewee and the Mother Thing are likable people, and the story still holds me.

At the crisis, Kip and Peewee find themselves the spokesmen for the human race before a high court that has already exterminated the worm-faced villains and now charges humanity with being too savage and too intelligent, therefore too dangerous to be left alive. The trial becomes a test of Heinlein's symbolic competent character, perhaps of his own philosophy. (pp. 28-30)

The happy outcome, after an appeal from the compassionate Mother Thing, is that humanity is placed on probation and Kip and Peewee are returned to Earth. Kip is a soda jerk once more, but now with the nerve to toss a chocolate malt into the face of a boy who has bullied him…. The series couldn't have had a finer conclusion.

Following the same story-of-education pattern, [Starship Troopers] traces the making of a starship soldier. In contrast to Have Space Suit—Will Travel, however, it is a dark, disturbing novel, set in a time of vicious space war and devoted to glorification of the fighting man. (p. 30)

Considering the Scribner's books as a group, we can claim for them a major role in the evolution of modern science fiction. Certainly they gave many thousand young readers, and thousands not so young, a delightful introduction to the genre. Built on sound futurology, they still make a fine primer for the new reader. The best of them are splendid models of literary craftsmanship, with more discipline and finish than most of Heinlein's other work. Revealing significant conflicts and shifts of thought, they are relevant to any survey of his whole career.

If their generally optimistic vision of space conquest is not so popular now as it once was, one reason is that we have almost abandoned our real space programs, giving up our grand designs to probe too often into festering "inner space." Our loss of faith in our future and our science and ourselves will surely become a global tragedy if it is not recovered. These books have a spirit too great to be forgotten. They need to be read again. (pp. 30-1)

Jack Williamson, "Youth Against Space: Heinlein's Juveniles Revisited," in Robert A. Heinlein, edited by Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg (copyright © 1978 by Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg; published by Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc., New York; reprinted by permission), Taplinger, 1978, pp. 15-31.