Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein

A lot of Heinlein’s earlier work was tied up in Juvenile novels for Putnam, and this was one of those. I’m fine with that though. Starship Troopers was one that Putnam didn’t want to publish, breaking the relationship between author and publisher; and that’s a good book, whoever the intended audience was.

However, this one seemed juvenile in the way it engaged meaningful themes: namely, it didn’t. For instance, almost two thirds of the population of Ganymede died at one point, at least 24,000 of 37,000 people. Heinlein dropped that ball like a hot potato:

Like myself, Hank had been outside when it hit, still looking at the line up. The fact that the big shock had occurred right after the line up had kept a lot of people from being killed in their beds—but they say that the line up caused the quake, triggered it, that is, with tidal strains, so I guess it sort of evens up. Of course, the line up didn't actually make the quake; it had been building up to it ever since the beginning of the atmosphere project. Gravity's books have got to balance.

The colony had had thirty-seven thousand people when the quake hit. The census when we finished it showed less than thirteen thousand. Besides that we had lost every crop, all or almost all the livestock. As Hank said, we'd all be a little hungry by and by.

They dumped us back at the Receiving Station and a second group of parties got ready to leave. I looked for a quiet spot to try to get some sleep.

That’s how the whole situation was dealt with. Heinlein allowed a bit more about the main characters’ sister and his neighbors, but the whole episode happened out of nowhere, and went nowhere.

It’s indicative of what I hated about this novel: it read like it was initially serialized in the Boy Scouts of America magazine. Which it was. That’s not inherently a bad thing. But it affected the novel in two ways: first, each chapter had a reference to scouting in it—usually well integrated, but sometimes a little awkwardly shoehorned in there. Second, it also meant that every chapter was its own self-contained thing: this book read like a comic book that slavishly adhered to the twenty-four page pacing. I didn’t know it was serialized when I was going into it, but I guessed it by the time I was done reading it.

Let me go through a couple of examples of placed where Heinlein should have expanded:

1. Two-thirds of the population dies.
2. Evidence of extraterrestrial life is discovered and saves the main characters’ life.
3. The spaceship Mayflower gets a hole in it.
4. The dead woman Anne.
5. The shotgun wedding of George and Molly.
6. The weird way that George and Bill interact.
7. Bill’s offer to go back to earth with his step sister.

As annoying as the pacing and depth was, I finished reading this novel, and even enjoyed parts of it. Primarily, the whole is organized around the nuts and bolts of terraforming: politically, ecologically, physically, the engineering behind it, and the human side of it. What most attracted me was this human side of it. The trip from Earth to Ganymede had some pretty memorable, Heinlein lines.

But then things quieted down and I was almost happy in a miserable sort of way.

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And there I got my first view of Earth from space. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I expected. There it was, looking just like it does in the geography books, or maybe more the way it does in the station announcements of Super-New-York TV station. And yet it was different. I guess I would say it was like the difference between being told about a good hard kick in the rear and actually being kicked. Not a transcription. Alive.

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The people from the Daedalus and the Icarus were supposed to be stowed away by the time we got there, but they weren't and the passageways were traffic jams. A traffic jam when everybody is floating, and you don't know which end is up, is about eight times as confusing as an ordinary one.

So, despite everything that made this a bad novel—it didn’t have a plot so much as episodes, it didn’t have characters because it examined colonization from one sixteen year old boy's point of view instead, and it didn’t have much relatable to a reader who isn’t colonizing Ganymede—the small amount of human interest sections were very welcome. Most of them were also dropped balls but hey, it was a short book and I finished it.

Not his best, not by a long shot. But it was fascinating for me to look back at some of his early stuff and see how it differed with his later stuff.