The Star Beast

"There was a notion hovering in her mind about them, but it would not light... which annoyed her, as she expected her mind to work for her with the humming precision of a calculator and no nonsense, please! Oh, well... breakfast first."

The Star Beast is hardly mentioned these days, and can't really be counted among Robert Heinlein's great works. For one thing its basic "alien pet" plot was merely a re-hash of Red Planet's, which handled the topic in a more lively manner. For another, Heinlein was doing an uncharacteristically bad job on the "show, don't tell" angle, to the point I could swear half of the passages must have been ghostwritten, very heavily edited or rewritten for serialization. Potentially juicy scenes are related second-hand by characters who've just come out of meeting-rooms, other characters drop out of the tale chapter by chapter just as they're getting interesting and climactic face-offs tend to fizzle rather than wind up to a requisite thunderous speech. Even the grand reveal of Lummux' "tumors" was telegraphed a hundred pages in advance - condescending even by "young adult fiction" standards.

Nonetheless, the book's better segments still hold true to the master's flair for cowboy banter and can be highly entertaining as vignettes centering on contests of social rank and influence. It's especially odd that in addition to Heinlein's love of legal drama we get a great deal of bureaucratic drama and much could be made (in light of modern identity politics) of Mr. Kiku, the wheeling and dealing diplomat masterfully holding off a possible apocalypse. But, just as with Tunnel in the Sky, Kiku being black is allowed to linger as a background detail with no bearing on the plot. As it should be, to allow the character to display personal qualities and not simply resolve to a cheap noble savage caricature of idealized underdogs. Neither did he need to be explicitly supplied with a straight white male antagonist, as minority protagonists always are these days.

No, instead of commenting on white-black relations, Heinlein simply made Kiku the African negotiator resolve a conflict against a virulently racist extraterrestrial menace which considered all humans and indeed all galactic species besides themselves, to be subsentient vermin. No further expostulation necessary. You either took the hint, or you didn't.