Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

Adventure!

Originally a serial, then published in '58, this well-beloved SF has been in the hearts and minds of many YA and adult readers pretty consistently since it came out. It's a toss-up whether people love it more for the good-science lodged right in rip-roaring adventure tale that includes being a space pirate or running on the moon in a space-suit of your own construction from bug-eyed-monsters (BEMs) or whether it's just because there's a delightfully well-written story with equally delightful smart children full of action, gung-ho, bravery, and the willingness to stand up and fight against enormous odds.

Adventure!

This is a re-read for me, and I think I might have judged it too harshly in my youth. Back in the 80's, I really show more didn't have much patience for optimistic YA Americana of the 50's. It felt like so much brainwashing. But today? The pendulum has swung the other way entirely, and such bright-eyed can-do attitude feels as mysteriously heroic as wearing a cape and plucking a crashing airplane out of the sky.

What? Read books for knowledge? Do the calculations yourself? Use duct-tape to jerry-rig mismatching valves to save your young friend from asphyxiation before she runs out of oxygen? Stand up and fight for our species' right to live against impossibly unfair odds against a galactic security council that *rightly* imagines that we're likely going to be a danger to countless alien species? Check, Check, Check, Check.

RAH!

(Robert A Heinlein) RAH! RAH! RAH! ;)

Seriously, when it comes to the nay-sayers, the little Americana-isms like soda-jerks and jingles, it's all part of history, and after so much dystopia, just imagining this brighter Earth is a real treat and a half.

Oh, and Peewee is cute as hell and really spunky.

And no. I don't worry for Kip's mental health. Really. Oscar is *not* an imaginary friend. He has physical substance and he's a sight more useful than Peewee's dolly, thank you very much.

Now where's my short-band radio? I'm suited up and ready to go. :) show less

I seem to have trouble hitting 'enter' on reviews of Heinlein novels, but who cares, cause there's only two types of Heinlein novels: Weird as hell, and totally awesome.

This is the second, with lots of smart 1950s space science about interplanetary travel with flying saucer drives, some really fascinating aliens, brave and capable characters (including a girl. Yay Peewee!). You just have to love how Kip and Peewee never give up, even when kidnapped by horrible bug-eyed monsters, running out of air on the Moon, freezing on Pluto, or representing all of humanity in a mortal trial before the intergalactic UN.

This one is a reread for me. I loved it as a young teen and I still enjoyed it a lot. It's a lot of fun.

Have Spacesuit - Will Travel is more fanciful, less hard-science fictional than other Heinlein juveniles (because of the presence of very advanced alien technology). Our young hero, Kip Russell, doesn't really earn the right to be in these adventures with his hard work, like Matt Dodson did in Space Cadet. He was in the right place at the right moment. In that sense it may be less successful as a coming-of-age tale, but Heinlein makes up for it because Kip matures and gains confidence during his adventures and he was in a position to get in the greatest adventure ever because he had worked so hard to get his spacesuit and get it in show more working order. This is one of the nice messages of this book: if you want good luck you should work for it instead of waiting for it to find you on its own.

Since we get aliens with far-future technology, this story doesn't look as dated as other of these juveniles. We still get a bit of Heinlein's obsession with slide rules, though. That takes me to a conclusion I have reached after reading these books: Heinlein had a curious mind and he loved science, but he did not have a solid understanding of what maths and science are really about, like Asimov did, for example. He had an obsession with actual calculations, when knowing what to calculate is the important bit. He believed that by studying different fields you could almost become an expert in all of them, when it just doesn't work like that. His 50s attitudes can also be noticed in Kip's mother, a very bright student who marries her older professor and seems content to follow him around and be a housewife, and his libertarian attitudes in the occasional dig against taxes from Kip's father.

The dynamics between the main characters works well, particularly between Kip and the bratty little girl who also happens to be a genius, PeeWee. She was young enough that there was no need for the target audience to get distracted with any romantic tension. Then there was the cute, lovable alien, another of Heinlein's favorites, although this one was extremely intelligent and technologically advanced.

The story has three parts: Kip's studying, getting his suit and repairing it; the adventures fighting the baddies; and the healing and trial. All are enjoyable, but the best for me was the trial. I found the amoral idea of justice of that supposedly advanced tribunal quite intriguing.

If you go to the start of this thread, you'll see I started this reading project after reading a discussion on John Scalzi's blog about how his daughter had not liked a Heinlein juvenile he had loved as a boy (Starman Jones). I believe he should have given her Have Spacesuit - Will Travel. Despite some nitpicks it is mental candy: very readable and full of adventure and epic sense of wonder. show less

It's a corker. One of those juvenile books that adults will enjoy too and it would make a splendid movie. Theoretically there is one in the pipelines, but nothing's been heard of it for some years.

Have Space Suit has no weak points. Entertaining (some great one-liners), the science sounds plausible - not saying it is, I wouldn't know - but one could imagine a young boy reading this and being inspired. I hope that last sentence is wrong and that girls read this too. The narrator is a teenage boy fresh out of high school. His side-kick is an 11 year old female genius, greatly admired and relied upon by the narrator. There is absolute equality. Important also is 'The Mother Thing', seemingly all knowing and all good.

I wouldn't exactly say show more this makes the book a model of female emancipation in the science world.

rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2017/11/20/have-space-suit-will-trav... show less

Fun, if improbable juvenile coming of age tale. Our hero is thrown into the middle of lunar intrigue and gets to virtually save humanity from extinction. I second Heinlein's call for more generalists who can see beyond the sillinesses of the specialists.

Clifford "Kip" Russell wanted nothing more than to go to the moon. Winning a used space suit in Skyway Soap's slogan contest only encouraged his dream. With a head for mathematics and engineering, Kip repaired and enhanced his space suit, nicknamed "Oscar". While taking Oscar for a field test, Kip talks to himself over the radio that he had installed in the helmet. He is shocked when another voice answers!

Soon, Kip finds himself guiding a space ship to a tumultuous landing almost directly on top of him. Immediately after, another similar vessel lands beside it. From the first ship, a strange alien creature emerges followed by a small space-suited human. The alien quickly tumbles to the ground. When Kip runs to its aid, he is struck show more from behind and knocked unconscious.

Later, he awakens aboard one of the vessels on its way to the moon. He finds himself imprisoned with a 10-year-old girl named Patricia aka Peewee. She is a prodigy, but emotionally immature and sometimes frustrating. Her best friend is a rag doll named Madame Pompadour. Kip learns that they've been captured by a beastly alien criminal who, during an interrogation, Kip comes to call Wormface. The criminal and his human henchmen have also kidnapped a benevolent alien that Peewee had come to know as the Mother Thing. This was the creature that Kip had tried to help before being assaulted.

In a series of adventures that spans the galaxy--from Earth to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and back--Kip, Peewee and the Mother Thing explore the surface of the moon and narrowly escape Wormface's secret base on Pluto, nearly at the cost of Kip's life. On Delta Vega, Mother Thing's home planet, Kip is nursed back to health just in time for a trip to Lanador, a planet located in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. There, Wormface and others of his race will be put on trial, but there is something else that Mother Thing cannot reveal.

On Lanador, Kip and Peewee meet two other human "prisoners", a cave-man and a Roman soldier named Iunio. The following day, all four are brought to a vast courtroom of the "Three Galaxies". The Wormface aliens are tried for their crimes...and then the human race itself comes under the microscope with Kip, Pewee, and Iunio as representatives for Earth. The decision: allow the human race to progress or destroy them immediately?

Have Spacesuit—Will Travel is counted among "the Heinlein juveniles", one of a number of books that Heinlein wrote between 1939 and 1958. Heinlein had been rather successful in expressing advanced and enlightened ideas not often found in adolescent stories of the time. I enjoyed Have Spacesuit—Will Travel immensely. It contained a wonderful mix of fast-paced storytelling, fun characters and scientific facts. The science fiction is just that, of course, but the human characters of the story engage in detailed exercises of astronomical calculations and practical engineering that, in modern novels, might be stultifying, but I enjoyed a dose of old-fashioned SF. show less

""
You see, I had this space suit.
How it happened was this way:
“Dad,” I said, “I want to go to the Moon.”
“Certainly,” he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.
I said, “Dad, please! I’m serious.”
This time he closed the book on a finger and said gently, “I said it was all right. Go ahead.”
“Yes ... but how?”
“Eh?” He looked mildly surprised. “Why, that’s your problem, Clifford."
""

This is what got me hooked - well this and the fact that I hadn't read any Heinlein. This is perhaps not the best book to judge him by, considering it is part of his books written for a younger audience, but I liked it and I shall be reading more by him in show more the future.
It reads like the dream of a young kid coming true - which it is - and more than that, it's worded and described as seen through his eyes. This tone is a perfect fit as he goes through some incredible adventures that might sound like the work of a youngster's crazy imagination. And credit to Heinlein, he does a good job at that, considering he was 50ish when he wrote it in 1958. Here and there it shows its age and the science is a bit iffy, but it quickly goes so far into the "future" that it doesn't really matter anymore.
I liked the characters, they had a lot of personality (even if they fall into somewhat predictable categories) and the whole book was a funny, action packed and very entertaining romp. show less