Cops patrol and we’re locked in
I finished The Rolling Stones last night. I had forgotten how great Heinlein’s juveniles really were.
This is a book, written in 1952 and intended for children, that predicts air recycling, hydroponic food growth, gravity-assist flight plans and tons of other actual aspects of real space travel. It’s also a really fun story, easy to read and very entertaining. This is the kind of Heinlein I really like and I look forward to reading the other books of this era soon.
The story’s about a family named Stone: the twins Castor and Pollux, their father, mother, sister and baby brother, and their paternal grandmother, all living in a Lunar colony. They’re all pretty high-functioning people; the twins are millionaires from inventing a frost-proof re-breather for vacuum suits, their father was once Mayor, now retired, their mother a well-known doctor. Their grandmother was a founder of Luna City and their baby brother is probably psychic. They’re all a little bored of Luna, and so buy a ship and head to Mars on a family vacation. They have Many Exciting Adventures on the way there, and once they get there. Not wanting to go back to Luna just yet, they instead head off to an asteroid cluster, and then at the end of the book, we find them heading off to Ganymede for an infinite future of Exciting Adventures.
This book also contains one of my favorite Heinlein passages, one I’d remembered from the first time I read this (probably 15 years ago), and I greatly enjoyed reading again. I’ll reproduce it behind the cut:
A reciprocating engine was a collection of miniature heat engines using (in a basically inefficient cycle) a small percentage of an exothermic chemical reaction, a reaction which was started and stopped every split second. Much of the heat was intentionally thrown away into a “water jacket” or “cooling system,” then wasted into the atmosphere through a heat exchanger.
What little was left caused blocks of metal to thump foolishly back-and-forth (hence the name “reciprocating”) and thence through a linkage to cause a shaft and flywheel to spin around. The flywheel (believe it if you can) had no gyroscopic function; it was used to store kinetic energy in a futile attempt to cover up the sins of reciprocation. The shaft at long last caused the wheels to turn and thereby propelled this pile of junk over the countryside.
And finally, I found it very amusing to find that in this book there is a character who advocated the eating of the flesh of one’s deceased loved ones, an important theme in Heinlein’s later work. Of course, in this case, the statement is made by a mad hermit, which I think gives you some perspective on Heinlein’s last writings.
Anyways, now I’m reading Steven Leigh’s Dinosaur World. It’s cool.