Rocket Ship Galileo

"They were headed skyward, out and far."

 

They're gonna fight Space Nazis! In space!

 

Having missed out on reading the so-called Heinlein Juveniles as a juvenile, I initially hesitated picking them up in my thirties. Luckily, for the most part, the 'young adult' slander doesn't stand up to a comparison of Heinlein's writing to anything that passes for mature popular entertainment, either then or now. Start with anything with a laugh track and work your way to reality TV, with a stopover in FiftyShades-ville, all set to a soundtrack of dime a dozen 'oooh baby baby I love you baby' pop songs. Aside from their consistent viewpoint of a clever young small-town lad exploring the universe, these novels are more thoughtful, more scientifically literate and more transgressive than a Star Wars audience can stomach.

Rocket Ship Galileo, though, stands as a noteworthy exception deserving of its 'juvenile' condemnation, more similar to his loosely affiliated boy scout story A Tenderfoot in Space than the wider collection in its plot and moralistic simplicity. Written in 1947 at the very start of Heinlein's career, it also mirrors By His Bootstraps in displaying far more outside influences than the author's own personal style. The gentleman scientist cobbling together his own means of transport to the moon can't help but recall Jules Verne, as does the cannon-like phlebotinum of atomically-volatilized zinc to justify a rocketship the size of a recreational vehicle with no necessary infrastructure, none of the mad scramble for funding tying together the more realistic plot of The Man Who Sold the Moon.

 

The rest is fairly generic, with space nazis as blatant stand-ins for desperados or pirates (substitute "terrorists" in the present day) and the three eager young space cadets' personalities overlap to the point you'll be confounded in recalling which one of them has the camera and which one's the pilot and which one... is also there. (Was he the one working the radio?) The grand reveal of a long-dead Lunar civilization (unlike the similar moment handled as a heroic denouement in Farmer in the Sky) is here just glossed over as a de rigueur Scie Fie gimmick, immediately forgotten in favor of duking it out with the aforementioned Space Nazis in space. The supposedly moon-shaking realization that moon craters come not from meteorites but from a long-ago nuclear war comes across as gratuitously paranoid for Heinlein, usually reluctant to trade verisimilitude for drama or treat worthy topics as shock value one-liners.

Still, though much like For Us, The Living this early effort remains of interest only to Heinlein's established fans, it contained enough germs of his future style to remain recognizable. Written in the immediate memory of the threat of Nazi rocketry, with the ENIAC as front page news, it peaks somewhere around the story's midpoint, after the initial western themes of defending their rocket-ranch from banditos and before getting bogged down in a by-the-numbers conflict with Space Nazis in space. Scenes of the first test flight, their voyage, the initial moon landing and base camp sneak in a few technical details on interplanetary courses or line of sight for broadcasting, and emulate old adventure stories not only in their cheesy worst but their hopeful best. The boys' dogged insistence on braving death to go where no man has gone before, the grand old theme of physical and intellectual exploration by personal agency and independent enterprise, captured that feeling you might more recently find fictionalized in Kerbal Space Program, when one of your launches breaks out of atmosphere, shedding the clinging, oppressive pull of gravity second by second: freedom.