review of
Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 7, 2015

Since I joined GoodReads in 2007 & decided to review every bk I read as a sort of intellectual exercise, I've had a rule to not let more of a backlog than 3 unreviewed bks accumulate. By the time I decided to read THIS I had that backlog of 3 & was already in the midst of reading something else. As such, I picked this as easy reading: something that wdn't drain my already endangered intellectual energy.

Heinlein published this in 1948, 5 yrs before I was born. His work was among the earliest SF I read. I've commented on him at least several times before in other reviews. He was important to me as a child but by the time I was in my mid-teens I more or less started to 'outgrow' him.

I was interested to read, in later yrs, Samuel Delaney commenting on Heinlein's non-racist perspective. Heinlein's definitely good for that & this bk demonstrates it well:

"Matt noticed two boys with swarthy, thin features who were wearing high, tight turbans, although dressed otherwise much like himself. Further down the walk he glimpsed a tall, handsome youth whose impassive face was shiny black." - p 7

These are the Space Cadets. Heinlein recognizes that astronauts must be judged on merit alone if the promise of the future is to bear fruit.

"'I welcome you to our fellowship. You come from many lands, some from other planets. You are of various colours and creeds. Yet you must and shall become a band of brothers.[']" - p 36

"Matt nodded. 'I know that they are described as being a gentle, unwarlike race. I can't imagine becoming really fond of them, but the spools I studied showed them as friendly.'

"'That's just race prejudice. A Venerian is easier to like than a man.'

"'Oz, that's not fair,' Tex protested. 'Matt hasn't got any race prejudice and neither have I. Take Lieutenant Peters — did it make any difference to us that he's black as the ace of spades?'" - p 134

I don't know when portable phones 1st appeared predictively in culture but this 1948 appearance strikes me as prescient: "[']Say, your telephone is sounding.' / 'Oh!' Matt fumbled in his pouch and got out his phone. 'Hello?'" (p 8) & while Heinlein was certainly forward-thinking he was surprisingly off in one prediction:

"USAF Rocket Ship Kilroy Was Here
FIRST TRUE SPACESHIP
1975A.D.
From Terra to Luna and return - Lieut. Colonel Robert deFries Sims, Commanding; Captain Saul S. Abrams; Master Sergeant Malcolm MacGregor.
None survived the return landing. Rest in Peace." - p 9

In actuality, 1969 was the date when the Apollo 11 made it to the moon & all lived on the return landing. Even Heinlein cdn't foresee such a stunning early success!

Heinlein's sense of how human nature works & how it shd be studied is tricky:

"'Excuse me, sir — but what's to keep a person from cheating by peeking?'

"The examiner smiled. 'Nothing at all. Go on to your next test.'

"Matt left, grumbling. It did not occur to him that he might not know what was being tested." - p 16

But Heinlein has ethics, this isn't the Heinlein of human interplanetary soldiers blowing away giant insects, this is the Heinlein of hopeful diplomacy:

"'It is not enough that you be skillful, clever, brave — The trustees of this awful power must each possess a meticulous sense of honour, self-discipline beyond all ambition, conceit or avarice, respect for the liberties and dignity of all creatures, and an unyielding will to do justice and give mercy. He must be a true and gentle knight.'" - p 36

This particular Heinlein strikes me as somewhat hard science:

"Getting the Bolivar from Colorado to the Randolph, and all other problems of journeying between the planets, are subject to precise and elegant mathematical solution under four laws formulated by the saintly, absent-minded Sir Isaac newton nearly four centuries earlier than the flight of the Bolivar — the three Laws of Motion and the Law of Gravitation. These laws are simple; their application in space to get from where you are to where you want to be, at the correct time with the correct course and speed, is a nightmare of complicated, fussy computation." - p 44

His description of a teacher demonstrating how to move around outside the space station in a space-suit with jet propulsion in a relatively gravity-free situation strikes me as well-thought out for 1948:

"'But I don't want to go to the Station; I want to come back to the ship.' The monkey died again; when the convulsions ceased, the sergeant was facing them. He cut in his jet and again counted ten seconds. He hung in space, motionless with respect to the ship and his class and a bout a quarter mile away. 'I'm oming in on a jet landing to save time.' The jet blasted for twenty seconds and died; he moved towards them rapidly." - p 67

I remember Heinlein as being someone who held on to what I think of as post-WWII positivity about military intervention long past its ideological erosion. Perhaps that's unfair to him. In Space Cadet he seems to have a less gung-ho attitude:

"A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behaviour and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalizse original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realised that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.

"The method was the discussion group, made up of youngsters, oldsters, and officers. The seminar leader would chuck out some proposition that attacked a value usually regarded as axiomatic. From there on anything could be said.

"It took Matt a while to get the hang of it. At his first session the leader offered: 'Resolved: that the Patrol is a detriment and should be abolished.' Matt could hardly believe his ears.

"In rapid succession he heard it suggested that the past hundred years of Patrol-enforced peace had damaged the race, that the storm of mutations that followed atomic warfare were necessarily of net benefit under the inexorable laws of evolution, that neither the human race nor any of the other races of the system could expect to survive permanently in the universe if they forsook war, and that, in any case, the Patrol was made up of self-righteous fat-heads who mistook their own trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature." - pp 80-81

Or, maybe, this, too, is a gung-ho attitude insofar as it expresses a belief in the military's being able to be flexible (& replaceable) when that's called for for survival.

"'I know, I know — you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but to prevent fighting, by every possible means. The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men.

"'With the development last century of mass-destruction weapons, warfare became all offense and no defense, speaking broadly. A nation could launch a horrific attack but it could not even protect its own rocket bases. Then space travel came along.

"'The space-ship is the perfect answer in a military sense to the atom bomb, and to germ warfare and weather warfare. It can deliver an attack that can't be stopped — and it is utterly impossible to attack that space-ship from the surface of a planet.'" - p 87

I found the description of astronaut training to be successfully claustrophobic. As I've probably written many times before, I was once a research volunteer for space station preparatory living in which behavior modification techniques were tried for keeping the astronaut mentally & physically stimulated in a restrictive environment. I enjoyed it. I'm not so sure I'd enjoy actually being isolated from this planet:

"Matt found himself thinking about Des Moines in a
late summer evening... with fireflies winking and the cicadas singing in the trees, and the air so thick and heavy you could cup it in your hand. Suddenly he hated the steel shell around him, with its eternal free-fall and its filtered air and its artificial lights." - p 82

Then again, Heinlein's realistic depiction of the myopic downsides of social-life-on-Earth help make the more visionary space patrol life seem attractive by contrast:

"Aunt Dora had not asked a thousand questions: she had asked just one — why had he waited so long to come to see her? Thereafter Matt found himself being informed, in detail, on the shortcomings of the new pastor, the marriage chances of several female relatives and connections, and the state of health of several older women, many of them unknown to him, including details of operations and post-operative developments." - p 92

"The Aes Triplex using an economical 'Hohmann'-type*

"*Hohmann, Dr. Walter—The Attainability of the Celestial Bodies, Munich, 1925. This pioneer work in astrogation written long before the flight of the Kilroy Was Here, remains the foundation work in its field. All subsequent work is refinement of basic principles set forth by Hohmann." - p 118

I'd never heard of Hohmann but I figured that he's an actual historical figure & not made up by Heinlein so I looked him up online: "In his spare time he devoted to celestial mechanics calculations, and in 1920 he published his book "Die Ereichbarkeit der Himmelskörper" (The Attainability of the Celestial Bodies). He developed basic principles and created advanced tools necessary for the conquest of space. His ideas were taken up for the Apollo program and the Voyager spacecraft (for example). Today he is considered a pioneer of space travel." ( http://www.att-essen.de/walter_hohmann_uk.html ) Heinlein nailed that one.

In the end, I was surprisingly impressed by this bk. Sometimes when I read something I find its influences deep w/in me already - at the core of myself. I don't think I read this when I was a kid but I certainly absorbed similar subtextual lessons from Heinlein from other bks of his. There's courage, imagination, & ethics that I can still identify w/ today. ( )

You’d probably pass this one up because of the title, but you’d be wrong. Yes, a lot of the plot is predictable, but it there is something interesting going on besides the regular academy and coming-of-age stuff. The Space Patrol is in charge of a global deterrent, orbiting nuclear weapons. The folk on the ground are so used to peace that even talking about the bombs is impolite. Could we make a lasting peace out of Mutually Assured Destruction? What kind of guardians would we need to make that work? The chill of the cold war spawns a bit of hope.

Heinlein’s Space Patrol has a lot in common with Doc Smith’s Galactic Patrol, but without the all-knowning Arisians to keep them on course. This time, it is all up to the humans.

Of course, Ender’s Game is the best space cadet novel of all time, but I think it is a lot stronger if you know which direction a space cadet story is supposed to go. There are always a couple of cadets who don’t make the grade because they aren’t moral enough, but we don’t expect them to be psychopaths. Space Cadet stands on its own, but if you haven’t read Ender’s Game, you now have another reason to read Heinlein first. ( )

Although a little dated, the story moves well. It is a perfect story for youths. Adventure, friendships, and pull yourself up by the bootstraps situations. Love it! ( )

Like the other stories in Heinlein's "Scriber Juveniles" series our protagonist is an 18 year old boy who just graduated from high school. This time he's a guy who has decided to join the army. Except in the future of 2043 the Army is called the Patrol and their job is to stop war from happening (though superior fire power of course).

I struggled with how to rate this one because the idolization of national service is always dangerous, particularly for young people, and even more disturbing from someone many believe to be one of the forefathers of libertarianism.

But the story was good. I particularly liked the character of Tex and the never seen character of his uncle brodie. Great comedy. ( )

Heinlein, Robert A. Space Cadet. 1948. Tor, 2005.
Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet is where the subgenre of an academy for spacefarers begins. You can draw a direct line of influence from Heinlein’s Matt Dodson to Star Trek’s Wesley Crusher. Heinlein was optimistic about the development of nuclear-powered single-stage rockets and artificial gravity. His navigators and pilots fly their ships by hand, without the benefit of a computerized autopilot. No one at the time predicted the laptop. We have less than 60 years to make a permanent presence in space on Heinlein’s schedule. Modeled on a coast guard, they search for lost ships and police interplanetary trade. There are aliens on a tropical Venus and pirates in the asteroid belt, both of which are credible given the world he has built and the science of the time. Character drama is simple. Heinlein’s highly competitive teenage cadets must learn to subordinate their egos to a higher cause and work together as a team using all their ingenuity. Space Cadet is still enjoyable after all these years. ( )