Instead, he requires them to work through all the issues he identifies, and decides that the entire family will be traveling together.

But he's not going to simply shut them down by saying no. Enter their father, himself an engineer who has also done a stint as a politician, and who knows both the technical and economic practicalities of running a spaceship out to the Asteroids and back.

No, space is hard, far harder than our youthful dreams, even those of very practical engineers doing the landings.Īnd even in the world Heinlein creates, space is harder than young Castor and Pollux realize as they bargain for a spaceship that will let them head off on an Adventure. Now, almost fifty years after the Apollo moonshots, the Zeerust on it seems almost painful. It's a translation of the used car lot to the future, a rather charming 1950's period piece with a speculative element that probably felt quite attainable in the near future for its original audience. They've got a wild idea of going on an Adventure, and they think that they can buy one on the cheap. His spaceships would not be ocean liners or warships translated into space, but realistic spacecraft that would follow the laws of Newtonian mechanics in their launches, landings and orbital transfers.Īs we begin, we have young Castor and Pollux Stone suited up to go on the surface of their native Luna and take a look at some used spaceships. No, it would stay firmly within the Solar System, and as much as possible he would stick to the known science of astronomy and astrophysics. And of course it would be In Space, but not a space opera in which Space is an Ocean and stellar systems are archipelagos of islands. His wife Virginia came to the rescue with the idea of a pair of mischievous twins whose bright ideas would get them into all sorts of trouble, from which they would be rescued by a feisty but eminently practical grandmother. So it was hardly any surprise that he should encounter a rather stubborn case of writer's block, unable to come up with a good idea to even start with. Still, the long history of quibbling editorial interference did not leave him in that good a frame of mind as he sat down to write his next contracted novel for Scribners'. He'd already had several go-rounds with the woman, to the point that he finally took her writing and gave it the same treatment, proving that her continual stream of objections were absurd. However, he was still under the tight editorial rein of the notoriously prudish Miss Dalgliesh, who seemed to see sex in everything, even the most innocuous details of local color. When Heinlein started writing young adult fiction for Scribners', he was already a well-known science fiction writer, having established his reputation with the short stories of his Future History in pulp magazines such as John W.

Robert a heinlein the rolling stones