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.

+++

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.

A Great & Terrible King by Marc Morris

Historical non-fiction books that I tend towards typically organize around a story: Kon Tiki, The Motorcycle Diaries, Endurance. I rarely read biographies because I’m just not that interested in minutiae of major historical figures. However, when a historical popularizer takes on a biography of a long-dead, often misunderstood English king, and Amazon puts it on sale, I am ready to try again.

Edward I, Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots, was somebody I knew little about. He appeared tempestuous, but rarely; just but vengeful; loving to his wife, always; and effective nine times out of ten. Those couple of mistakes he makes are glaring—freeing prisoners, ignoring his councellors about Gascony, and taxing his subjects too heavily. However, he also had a series of wars to fight that left him broke, so the latter makes some sense.

In building the character of Edward, Marc Morris let’s the events do the talking before filling in the details from primary documents after the fact. The problem with this style of character building is that I’m too often surprised by the actions of the King. Maybe he was a surprising person, but when all is said and done, I feel like I understand Edward I in all of his actions, but that’s the conclusion of the book, and it runs the risk of leaving me wondering through far too much of the book itself. It holds the cards too close to the chest.

But the impetus for holding cards close rests in the narrative style of chronological telling. Morris just runs through Edward’s life, from A to B, then ends the book with a brilliant chapter that briefly weighs up a conclusion based on all the evidence given. Like a pulp author, there are cliff-hangers in many of the chapters and sections within chapters: none more striking to me than ending a chapter with the phrase, “The Devil had assumed a new guise, and his name was William Wallace.” These cliffhangers work for me, as they are often moments of surprise for Edward in his own life: the death of the Maid of Norway, the murder of Comyn, the sudden rise of William Wallace. Why not surprise the readers with what also surprised Edward? It’s a tactic I appreciate in this history book, and one I wish more people employed as it gets me excited for the next chapter.

The writing works well enough—nothing to praise highly, but nothing to call out as particularly bad either. There is one part, near the end, where Morris seems to have discovered the word precocious, but that’s actually the only writing that annoys me.

The focus, or theme of the book appears to deal more with Edward’s role in spending thirty years to set a foundation to what came after. The subtitle of this book—Edward I and the Forging of Britain—sets the tone for the whole. He conquers Wales, and the focus in on the conquering, and not Edward in that situation. He hammers Scotland, but again, the focus is on the attempt, and not the thoughts—though Morris does tend to let Edward’s thoughts into the book, I wanted a little more.

Now, I’m not sure how much of that lack of thoughts is down to lack of access to Edward himself—he’s dead. But still, I knew he liked building things—from his actions, not his thoughts—until way late in the book when Morris gets into some of the specifics: Edward, in his sixties, is deep into the minutiae of designing a wooden fort’s ditch depth.

In all, I finished this book and loved it. I looked forward to reading it every day. And I read it late until my eyes stopped being able to focus. It’s something I would recommend to nerds of this sort of thing, and even people interested in this sort of thing, but not to people uninterested—like I would Kon Tiki or Endurance. I’ll look for another Marc Morris book in the future. Actually, I've already got one picked out.