The second published of his Scribner’s juvenile works, this very early Heinlein displays his talent for telling a good, hard science fiction story. Modern readers may pass by this communication with little notice, but describing a cell phone in 1948, the year this was first published, was at the time the height of science fiction. Heinlein begins, a candidate for a space program takes a phone out of his bag and calls his father. Mark on Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars at Kaedrin weblog.Ĭheck out more Vintage Science Fiction Month posts at the Little Red Reviewer.As Space Cadet by Robert A.

I appreciate it on an intellectual level, although it does lack the primal allure of a good fistfight (or spacewalk).Īll in all, it is a fine story by a talented storyteller. I want to dance around any spoilers, but it is ultimately diplomacy and tolerance that win the day. He did so in a much less diverse America pre-civil rights movement. Perhaps even more impressively, Heinlein envisions a cosmopolitan Patrol. Heinlein also foresees a kinder, gentler military and the integration of psychology into military evaluation and training. It is remarkable, then, how prescient it is for its view of what human space travel within the Solar System could look like and especially for astronaut training. Space Cadet was published 9 years before Sputnik and 21 years before the first manned Moon landing. (Miles Cameron does a great job at showing the stress this can put on a young person in his book Cold Iron as well.) Matt already thinks about the world in a fundamentally different way and has adopted a very different culture. And Heinlein’s depiction of Matt’s disassociation from his family when he comes home on leave is great. Heinlein is exceptional, though, at showing the military as a honorable institution. It’s also hard to standout in the well-trodden academy sub-genre. But it’s hard for space academy to beat kid refurbishes his own space suit and is kidnapped by aliens as a premise. But Space Cadet opens with Matt getting the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to join the elite Interplanetary Patrol.

Heinlein is prescient scientifically, and morally centered on Truth-so much so that it is easy to take for granted until you remember Space Cadet was published in 1948. Space Cadet both has and hasn’t both aged remarkably well. But, much like HSS-WT, it is richly interwoven with the sort of firm moral instruction that I appreciate as a man, and like to think that I would have benefited from as a boy. There certainly isn’t anything remotely as gripping as the two space suit walks in HSS-WT. But it doesn’t evoke the same kind of visceral gut reaction that Have Space Suit-Will Travel did. I know that Space Cadet is a good book on an intellectual level.

Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein