Sunday, June 19, 2011

HAVE SPACE SUIT-WILL TRAVEL



Have Space Suit-Will Travel, Robert A Heinlein, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958, 276 pp


The Sunday Family Read


This is another of Heinlein's "juveniles", written for a Young Adult audience. Clifford is a young man who wants to go to the moon. In a tradition that spans Ray Bradbury to Stephen Spielberg, Clifford fools around in his mid-western basement, upgrading a space suit he bought by mail order. For some reason I love that. Imagine FedEx showing up in front of your house to deliver your new space suit!

One day he is trying it out in his backyard and winds up in space. With a ten-year-old girl named PeeWee, her rag doll and an indescribable alien creature known as the "MotherThing." Sometimes Heinlein, for all his technical and moral paragraphs that go on and on, just kills me with his imagination.

Plenty of adventure, humor, suspense and science follow and it is a great Heinlein yarn. I know that Stranger in a Strange Land was published in 1961, just three years later than this one. I found myself wondering how he got from a story like this to a story like that in just three years. I think the "MotherThing" is a clue.


(Have Space Suit-Will Travel is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)




2 comments:

  1. Sounds like a cute book! I love the cover artwork too!

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  2. Thanks Susan. Hey, maybe part of your new life could include book cover artwork.

    ReplyDelete