Note: this will make a lot more sense if you read the first essay in this series, which sets out the premise that I'm exploring here. Caution, many spoilers below.

by Robert Heinlein, 1957, published by Charles Scribner's Sons.

My guess is that Heinlein put more work into Citizen of the Galaxy than most of the other juveniles. His editor, the famously prissy Alice Dalgliesh, said that it was his "best work to date" and it's hard to disagree with her. The book is just remarkably good and not really a juvenile novel at all. The protagonist ages from about nine years old to about twenty in a tight, complex plot. At three hundred pages (and Heinlein says it started out longer and had to be substantially cut), it is one of the longest of the juvies.

The story starts on Jubbulpore, the capital of the Nine Worlds and home of the Great Sargon. This is a society with a faintly Roman feel to it. There are many strata in the society, from slaves, beggars and thieves to merchants, wealthy traders, nobles and royalty. Slavery and slave trading is the accepted norm. Our hero starts out as a slave (who can barely remember his parents, he was taken so young), but is bought, adopted as a son and turned into a beggar. As such, he becomes street smart, at least within the lower classes.

Thorby soaked up a gutter education beyond price. Jubbulpore, capital of the Nine Worlds, residence in chief of the Great Sargon, boasts more than three thousand licensed beggars, twice that number of street vendors, more grog shops than temples and more temples than any other city in the Nine Worlds, plus numbers uncountable of sneak thieves, tattoo artists, griva pushers, doxies, cat burglars, back-alley money changers, pickpockets, fortune tellers, muggers, assassins, and grifters large and small. Its inhabitants brag that within a li of the pylon at the spaceport end of the Avenue of Nine anything in the explored universe can be had by a man with cash, from a starship to ten grains of stardust, from the ruin of a reputation to the robes of a senator with the senator inside.

In most respects, Jubbulpore is a police state, albeit an old-fashioned, pre-Stalin one. There are curfews and travel passes are required for movement in and out of the city. Those caught in real or imagined crime face trials that are anything but fair and dying under questioning is common. Those judged to have committed small crimes are flogged and branded, but those caught a second time are lobotomized and sent to work in the mines. Capital punishment is common and done by public beheading, with the lopped-off head displayed on a pike outside the halls of justice.

Thorby is bought by a poor, one-legged beggar named Baslim (interesting note: when you google "baslim", almost all of the top hits go to pages associated with Citizen of the Galaxy - Heinlein actually invented a new name, but one that seemed natural). Baslim manumits Thorby and adopts him as his son; ostensibly to help him in his begging, but actually to serve as an assistant in his "underground" work. Baslim is actually an undercover agent working to dig up information about the slave trade, so that the Terran Hegemony (of which the Nine Worlds are not a member) can put a stop to it. Baslim hates slavery, and has gone undercover for years to do what he can to get information back to his unit, the "X Corps". Thorby helps him by delivering messages and so forth, but knows nothing about Baslim's true job.

Baslim gives Thorby a somewhat-formal education as well. He drills him in reading and writing in several languages and teaches him a good deal of math. Once Thorby is proficient in reading, most of his education consists of books he reads himself. Baslim also drills into Thorby a series of messages in languages that Thorby doesn't understand. These are to be delivered any one of five captains of trading ships that call at Jubbulpore, if anything happens to Baslim and Thorby has no where to go.

Baslim is indeed caught, although he manages to take poison and deprive them of the fun of questioning and torturing him. Thorby is forced to run (he's wanted for questioning, too) and hides out with some of his street friends. He finds out that one of the captains is in port and delivers the message (which turns out to be in Finnish, a language that captain speaks).

This leads Thorby to his second society. The message asks the captain to take Thorby aboard his ship and treat him as Baslim has treated him (which the Captain interprets to mean that he must adopt him as his son). Baslim has done an enormous favor for the Free Traders (saving a whole ship from becoming slaves, at the cost of his missing leg) and they always pay their debts. Thorby is brought to live amongst the People, as they see themselves.

Here, Heinlein pulls out all of the stops. He invents one of the most odd and bizarre cultures ever committed to paper. But, in this day of the internet and google, we find that it's not invented out of whole cloth. Apparently, Heinlein modeled his culture from that of the Native American Tlingit people of the southeast Alaska coast and the Alexander Archipelago. It's a matrilineal society. The Captain is the boss of the ship in day to day matters, but the Chief Officer, who is the oldest living wife of a Captain, is the Chief Officer. She sets policy and makes the rules. As with the Tlingit, heavy emphasis is placed on family and culture. They have thousands of extra words for expressing kin-relationships. In other words, family relationships are so important to them that they have a single word for relationships like "my maternal foster half-stepuncle by marriage, once removed and now deceased". Thorby has a lot to learn, if he's going to fit in.

He had to associate five things for each member of the SiSu's company, a face, a full name (his own name was now Thorby Baslim-Krausa), a family title, that person's family title for him, and that person's ship's rank (such as "Chief Officer" or "Starboard Second Assistant Cook"). He learned that each person must be addressed by family title in family matters, by ship's rank concerning ship's duties, and by given names on social occasions if the senior permitted it –nicknames hardly existed, since a nickname could be used only down, never up.

The ship's company is a single clan, but divided into units, a pattern called a phratry in anthropological circles (actually, they are a type of phratry called a moiety, where a clan consists of exactly two units. The two moieties are port and starboard. Men must marry girls from the port moiety, which is made up of girls adopted from other ships. Girls born aboard are adopted out to other ships. This allows the crew of the ship to intermarry with the other ships, which is good from a genetic angle, but it also allows the culture of the People to remain stable.

"You haven't seen ships trade daughters. Girls leaving weep and wail and almost have to be dragged... but girls arriving have dried their eyes and are ready to smile and flirt, eyes open for new husbands. If a girl catches the right man and pushes him, someday she can be sovereign of an independent state. Until she has leaves her native ship, she isn't anybody –which is why her tears dry quickly. But if men were boss, girl swapping would be slavery; as it is, it's a girl's big chance."

The People put themselves above the Fraki, people who live on planets, but an anthropologist traveling in the Sisu to learn their customs puts Thorby right about this:

"I'm a Free Trader. At least that's what Father intended, if I can ever get over my fraki habbits. But I'm not a slave. The People are free. All of us.
"All of you, but not each of you."
"What do you mean?"
"The People are free. It's their proudest boast. Any of them can tell you that freedom is what makes them People and not fraki. The People are free to roam the stars, never rooted to any soil. So free that each ship is a sovereign state, asking nothing of anyone, going anywhere, fighting against any odds, asking no quarter, not even cooperating except as it suits them. Oh, the People are free; This old Galaxy has never seen such freedom. A culture of less than a hundred thousand people spread through a quarter of a billion cubic light-years and utterly free to move anywhere at any time. There has never been a culture like it and there may never be again. Free as the sky... more free than the stars, for the stars go where they must. Ah yes, the People are free." She paused. "But at what price has this freedom been purchased?"
Thorby blinked.
...
"Thorby, you live in a steel prison; you are allowed out perhaps a few hours every few months. You live by rules more stringent than any prison. That those rules are intended to make you all happy –and do– is beside the point; they are orders you have to obey. You sleep where you are told, you eat when you are told and what you are offered –it's unimportant that it is lavish and tasty; the point is you have no choice. You are told what to do ninety percent of the time. You are so bound by rules that much of what you say is not free speech but required ritual; you could go through a day and not utter a phrase not found in Laws of Sisu. Right?
"Yes, but —"
"Yes, with no 'buts'. Thorby, what sort of people have so little freedom? Slaves? Can you think of a better word?"

The culture of the People is meticulously crafted. Heinlein didn't just copy the Tlingit culture verbatim. He threw in diverse other points as needed to create a truly spacefaring culture. You'll rarely see such a good job of world building in any science fiction, much less a juvenile.

You may wonder how I managed to dig this up. Easy: Heinlein uses the proper anthropological names for the groupings in the society: phratry and moiety. Once you have those keywords, you'll find reference to the Tlingit pretty quickly.

Thorby's solid mathematical background allows him to train to operate a fire-control computer. In the event that a raider (raiding for either slaves or loot) attacks the Sisu, it's Thorby's job to track the raider, compute its future position and launch nuclear-tipped rockets to destroy it. It's a job that requires speed, math and a good feel for geometry. Thorby's proudest moment aboard the Sisu is when he burns a raider and saves his ship.

Oh, by the way: Knowing that Heinlein almost never does anything by random chance, I assumed that Sisu meant something. Since the traders aboard the Sisu speak Finnish, I consulted a Finnish-English disctionary to find that Sisu translates to guts in English. This, of course, fits nicely in the story and just goes to show you that, even in a juvenile, Heinlein gives good measure.

Baslim's message, however, hadn't merely told the Captain to "succor him as if you were I", but it had also instructed him to turn Thorby over to authorities of the Hegemonic Guard whenever he found himself at a suitable port, and ask them to treat Thorby as a "distressed citizen" and help him find his identity. Eventually, the Sisu arrives at such a port and Thorby's father turns him over. He's not pleased, but he feels that the debt to Baslim must be paid.

Now, Thorby is thrown into his third culture, the military. They agree to look out for Thorby while finding out his identity. It turns out, however, that they don't have a good way to underwrite the price of a galaxy spanning identity search. There just isn't any account to bill it to. The paymaster finds a way, however, they enlist Thorby into the Guard, which means that they can trace his identity as part of his signing up. Since Baslim was a member of the Guard (in a special unit called the "X Corps"), Thorby is happy to join his father's old unit. The unit knows of Baslim's reputation and are happy to have Thorby. Initially, the ID search turns up nothing; it's only when they submit Thorby's footprint (thinking that he was taken as a slave so young that his fingerprints and other ID had never been registered) that they find Thorby's identity. After only a few months in the Guard, Thorby finds himself discharged and on Earth.

It turns out that Thorby is the only heir to a gigantic galaxy-spanning fortune. Thorby, for the fourth time, is thrown into a bizarre new culture: the culture of the exceedingly rich. It's as complicated and confusing for him as the People were. His parents had gone on an inspection tour of some distant holdings of their company, Rudbek & Associates. Along the way their yacht had been hijacked by slavers and neither they nor their child Thorby were ever seen again. Before they had gone on the trip, they had entrusted their holdings to their lawyer, Jack Weemsby, who is still running the business.

Thorby may be just a young man, but he won't be dominated. He refuses to sign papers that "Uncle" Weemsby draws up for him until he understands them, but it's going to take a law degree to get there. He tries at it for a while, but eventually hires himself a lawyer on the sly and starts to investigate. It turns out that "Uncle" Jack has abused his authority to enrich himself and intends to cheat Thorby out of his inheritance. Through legal maneuvering and a proxy fight, Thorby eventually wins back control of Rudbeck & Associates, although running a multi-planet company is quite a lot of work. Thorby also comes across information that Rudbek might be involved selling spaceships to slavers and financing the trade, off on distant planets. He teams up with the X Corps to help by funneling inside information to them.

The book ends with Thorby a slave to his stockholders: working a full day to keep the company on track, least it be subverted by yet another Weemsby and working a full night trying to help the X Corps delve into the slave trade. Really, it's quite a book. The plot moves right along, there is a good deal of action and the characters are memorable.

Obviously, the major theme of the book is slavery, but Heinlein wasn't doing anything as simple as "slavery is bad" here. I think he was pretty sure most of his young readers were well indoctrinated against slavery before he came along. No, he's looking much deeper: into what constitutes slavery and freedom in the first place. In each of Thorby's four cultures, he was, to one degree or another, both free and enslaved. On Jubbulpore, Thorby was sold as a slave and even after Baslim manumits him, he's the slave of his economic status as a beggar and oppressed by a police-state government. During his time with the People, he clearly only enjoys the slightest freedom. While he's in the military, he's mostly free (and this essay makes the claim that this society is closest to a free society of any of them and is used to compare and contrast with the People), but he's still subject to the orders of his superiors. Once he's back on Earth, of course, he becomes the slave of his parent's wealth.

In Between Planets, Heinlein laid out his idea of a free society. Don, the protagonist, says, "I guess I'm not what you would call 'politically minded.' I don't much care about how they run it –except that, well, there ought to be a sort of looseness about it. You know –a man ought to be able to do what he wants to, and not be pushed around." Importantly, note that Don dosen't care "how they run it". Heinlein expected well-educated, determined people to be able to thrive under any sort of government, as long as it has the "looseness" that lets them ply their skills. Now, Heinlein is letting us know about societies that aren't free.

Of course, Heinlein delivers several stinging rebukes against slavery, but his point is deeper. Heinlein slyly avoids the use of race. None of the central characters have any racial characteristics and there is no racial difference between Thorby and any of the other people on Jubbulpore. Heinlein is suggesting, by showing slavery and freedom against a broad backdrop of cultures, that the concepts of slavery and freedom are more complex than mere race. In all of these societies (except, arguably, the one where Thorby is in the Guard) the "looseness" isn't there for Thorby to be truly free. Heinlein is carefully instructing his readers in the many ways that freedom may be lost. Freedom can be lost not only via oppressive governments, but also oppressive social constructs, duties and obligations. I suspect Heinlein threw in the last one because he no doubt felt himself to be a slave to his typewriter on occasion.

But wait, there's more! There's another theme lurking throughout this book: education. Each time Thorby changes cultures, he enters a period of intense education. Only by mastering each new culture does Thorby become successful in it (for he is indeed successful in each, even when he's a slave). The lesson for Heinlein's young readers is clear and it certainly stuck with me as I read this book as a kid: you will only be successful if you become educated and education is largely a matter of continuing, life-long study.

This novel, of all the juveniles, most clearly and obviously supports my thesis that Heinlein was training his young readers to be better engineers and citizens. Here, he comes right out and whacks the reader in the face with that message. Not surprisingly, it's the novel where he most directly sticks to his mission statement where he delivers his best work. This isn't Heinlein's best novel. That title goes, in my opinion to another novel about freedom: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. But this one is right up there with his best.