Have Space Suit—Will Travel
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| Have Space Suit — Will Travel | |
|---|---|
 First Edition cover of Have Space Suit—Will Travel. The suit's "microwave horn" antenna is drawn as though it were an animal horn (instead of the open musical instrument-style horn of real microwave gear). |
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| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Heinlein juveniles |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Scribner's |
| Publication date | 1958 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
| Preceded by | Citizen of the Galaxy |
Have Space Suit—Will Travel is a science fiction novel for young readers by Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialised in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (August, September, October 1958) and published by Scribner's in hardcover in 1958 as the last of the Heinlein juveniles.
Heinlein made good use of his engineering expertise to bring a sense of realism to the story; for a time during World War II, he was a civilian aeronautics engineer working at a laboratory where pressure suits were developed for use at high altitudes.
Have Space Suit—Will Travel was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959.[1]
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
Clifford "Kip" Russell, a bright high school senior with an eccentric father, enters an advertising jingle writing contest for Skyway Soap, hoping to win an all-expenses-paid trip to the Moon. He instead gets an obsolete, but genuine, used space suit. Though a few make fun of him, with the help of sympathetic townspeople, and using his own ingenuity and determination, Kip puts the suit (which he dubs "Oscar") back into working condition.
Kip wants to go into space; he reluctantly decides to return his space suit for a cash prize to help pay for college, but puts it on for one last walk. As he idly broadcasts on his radio, someone identifying herself as "Peewee" answers with a Mayday signal. He helps her home in on his location, and is shocked when a flying saucer lands practically on top of him. A young girl and an alien being (later identified as the "Mother Thing") debark, but all three are quickly captured and taken to the Moon.
Their alien kidnapper is nicknamed "Wormface" by Kip, who refers to the species as "Wormfaces". They are horrible-looking, vaguely anthropomorphic creatures who contemptuously refer to all others as "animals". Wormface has two human flunkies who had assisted him in capturing the Mother Thing and Peewee, a preteen genius and the daughter of one of Earth's most eminent scientists. The Mother Thing speaks in what sounds to Kip like birdsong, with a few musical notations in the text giving a flavor of her language. However, Kip and Peewee have no trouble understanding her.
Kip, Peewee, and the Mother Thing try to escape to the human lunar base by hiking cross-country, but they are recaptured and taken to a more remote base on Pluto. Kip is thrown into a cell, later to be joined by the two human traitors, who have apparently outlived their usefulness. Before they later disappear, one mentions to Kip that his former employers eat humans.
The Mother Thing, meanwhile, makes herself useful to their captors by constructing advanced devices for them. In the process, she steals enough parts to assemble a bomb and a rescue transmitter. The bomb takes care of the most of the Wormfaces, but the Mother Thing freezes solid when she tries to set up the transmitter outside without a spacesuit. Kip nearly freezes to death himself while retrieving her body and activating the distress beacon, but help arrives almost instantly. It turns out that the Mother Thing is far hardier than Kip had suspected. She was not in danger; her body "would not permit" her cells to rupture. Kip, however, having suffered frostbite to the point of requiring quadruple amputation if he were treated on Earth, requires some months of cryopreservation in liquid helium while the Mother Thing's people decide how to treat his injuries.
Kip and Peewee are transported to Vega 5, the Mother Thing's home planet. When Kip awakes, and while he finishes healing, "Prof Joe", a "professor thing", learns about Earth from Peewee and Kip. Once Kip is well, he, Peewee, and the Mother Thing travel to a planet in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, to face an intergalactic tribunal (composed of many races) which judges whether new races pose a danger to member species. The Wormfaces are put on trial first. They promise to annihiliate all species save their own. They are found dangerous, and their planet is rotated out of three-dimensional space without their star, most likely to freeze—though the authorities do not bar them from finding a way to survive (this sort of banning from a society without actual active killing is reminiscent of Heinlein's story Coventry).
Then it is humanity's turn, as represented by Peewee, Kip, Iunio (a veteran Roman legionnaire), and a Neanderthal man. The tribunal decides that the caveman is from a different species, but the trial proceeds without him, since only three samples are required. Iunio proves belligerent but brave in offering to fight in his own self-defense—it is not clear if this is or is not helpful to humanity's cause, but it is not the same type of belligerence as the Wormfaces offered. Peewee's and Kip's recorded remarks about human history are admitted into evidence. In humanity's defense, Kip makes a stirring speech, quoting from Shakespeare's The Tempest and citing the Parthenon as works of art. The Mother Thing and a representative of another race argue that the short-lived species are essentially children which should be granted more time to learn and grow. In the end, the decision is deferred for several half-lives of radium (several thousand years).
Kip and Peewee are returned to Earth with devices and equations provided by the Vegans which suggest how to successfully defend against nuclear war (the Vegans having decided that humans are in danger of self-destruction). Kip passes the information along to Professor Reisfeld, Peewee's father and a world-renowned synthesist (a generalist who makes sense of what more specialized scientists discover). After listening to Kip and Peewee's story, Reisfeld arranges a full scholarship for Kip at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Kip wants to study engineering and spacesuit design.
[edit] Themes
Like Heinlein's other juveniles, Have Spacesuit-Will Travel is a well-constructed adventure story, but compared to many of them, it takes a more philosophical approach, examining what is noble and ignoble about the human race through a varied cast of characters that includes humans, aliens, and even a cave-man. The "What is man?" theme is also explored in another of his juveniles, The Star Beast, but there the tone is more comic and ironic, whereas Have Space Suit—Will Travel is heroic, and sometimes even tragic.
A further theme, familiar in many Heinlein novels and directed to the age group the novel targets, is the notion that vast journeys begin with but a single step. Kip wants to go to the Moon "right now", but he is taught that while luck may happen, laying the groundwork and being prepared is better.
The story is very much a coming-of-age story, and coincides with Kip's social maturity. At the start of the novel, Kip is a loner, with few apparent close friends—no one helps him with Oscar, and the only named contemporary is an antagonist. By the end of the novel, Kip has not only identified with, and advocated for, the human race, but has the gumption to stand up to a bully and throw a milkshake in his face.
As in a number of other Heinlein novels, Spacesuit winds up in a Deus ex Machina ending in which a vastly superior Being, or race of beings, appears to set everything right, and save the protagonist and humanity from certain death and seemingly inescapable threat. Interestingly, there is a suggestion in the novel that humanity itself is a lost offshoot of what are called the Old Race, a main contributor to the collected galactic civilization which saves humanity from the aliens.
[edit] Technical errors
- On page 27, Heinlein makes several errors about the effects of various breathing gases in a spacesuit, including listing some hazards caused by pressures experienced in scuba diving but not by spacemen:
| ... oxygen ... Mix an inert gas with it, because pure oxygen can cause a sore throat | This hazard does not happen at 200 millibars partial pressure, which is the typical oxygen pressure in a spacesuit |
| or make you drunk | This effect is actually caused at over 4 or 5 atmospheres depth pressure by nitrogen narcosis |
| or even cause terrible cramps. | This is oxygen toxicity and happens at over 1 atmosphere partial pressure of oxygen. |
| Use helium, which doesn't. ... | Helium causes bends, worse than nitrogen, but it does not cause narcosis. |
Kip's statement "Don't use nitrogen (which you've breathed all your life) because it will bubble in your blood if pressure drops and cripple you with "bends." is strictly true; if mixing gases other than oxygen are used, the spaceman will need gradual slow decompression when changing from air to the 200-250 millibars partial pressure of oxygen in the suit. However, as noted, this problem is not helped by use of helium over any other inert gas. Helium is in fact not used in modern spacesuits, as it would serve no purpose.
This work was written before manned space flight, though rebreathers had been in use a long time (for diving and in unbreathable atmospheres on land) when this book was written. Yet Heinlein disregards the importance of rebreathers in spacesuits and similar systems. The reason for having an "open circuit" in Heinlein's suit is that Heinlein recognizes the need to rid the suit of metabolic heat in some situations. Thus, in the book, most of the oxygen or heliox is used/wasted in cooling the suit, instead of using only enough of it for metabolic reasons. Using rebreather technology with a more efficient system for cooling (such as the water-evaporator system used in modern spacesuits exposed to full sunlight), is never considered by Heinlein.
On page 32 Kip uses "vandalize" incorrectly for "cannibalize" to mean taking parts from other equipment.
[edit] Legacy
An Amateur Radio satellite, dubbed SuitSat was launched from the International Space Station in February 2006. This was an obsolete space suit with a ham radio transmitter inside it. Since the advent of ham satellites in 1969, each has always been known as Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio -- OSCAR.
[edit] Editions
- 1958, Charles Scribner's Sons, hardcover
- 1970, Ace Books, paperback
- 1971, NEL, paperback, ISBN 0-450-00729-4
- 1977, Ballantine, paperback, ISBN 0-345-26071-6
- May 1, 1977, MacMillan Publishing Company, hardcover, ISBN 0-684-14857-9
- July 12, 1981, Del Rey, paperback, ISBN 0-345-30103-X
- May 12, 1985, Del Rey, paperback, 256 pages, ISBN 0-345-32441-2
- July 1, 1987, Hodder & Stoughton General Division, paperback, ISBN 0-450-00729-4
- June 1, 1994, Buccaneer Books, hardcover, ISBN 1-56849-288-X
- October 1, 1999, Sagebrush, library binding, ISBN 0-613-13639-X
- July 2003, Del Rey Books, hardcover, ISBN 0-613-94907-2
- July 29, 2003, Del Rey, paperback, 240 pages, ISBN 0-345-46107-X
- December 1, 2003, Full Cast Audio, cassette audiobook, ISBN 1-932076-39-5
- December 1, 2003, Full Cast Audio, cassette audiobook, ISBN 1-932076-40-9
- December 1, 2003, Full Cast Audio, CD audiobook, ISBN 1-932076-41-7
- February 8, 2005, Pocket, paperback, 256 pages, ISBN 1-4165-0549-0
- The cover for one of the French editions (Presses Pocket, 1978) is by noted sci-fi illustrator Jean-Claude Mézières
[edit] See also
- Spacesuits in fiction, which has a separate section devoted to the suit in this novel.
[edit] References
- ^ "1959 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. http://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_year_index.asp?year=1959. Retrieved 2009-07-27.
[edit] External links
- Have Space Suit - Will Travel at Worlds Without End
