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, 1947, published by Scribner's.

Most modern reviews rather sneer at Rocketship Galileo and there's no question that it isn't Heinlein's best juvenile. Still, I think a lot of the reviewers are remembering it rather than reading it fresh. I just read it again and it's actually a bit better than I remembered it.

In a nutshell, Rockeship Galileo is the story of three boys who team up with the Nobel Prize-winning uncle of one of them to build a rocketship and go to the moon. When they get there, they encounter Nazis left over from WWII who are intent on bringing back the Thousand Year Reich. Sounds pretty silly doesn't it? Don't worry, though, it's not nearly as bad as I've made it sound.

People who see Rocketship Galileo as "Archie Goes to the Moon" (like the guy I linked to above) are reading the book in a very superficial way. They're also not paying much attention to history or literature. In 1946, the genre of "boys books" was clearly defined by the likes of Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys and so on. Writing is a business and Heinlein was clearly, acutely aware of the facts of his business. As an unproven writer, he could not break into the genre with anything very different from what was already there. If he had produced a more mature work, say Have Spacesuit, Will Travel or Tunnel in the Sky as his first "boys book", it might very well have been rejected. Editors are a conservative lot, they love proven formulas. Heinlein knew this and even wrote to his agent that he had procured copies of other "boys books" and thought that he could follow the formula himself. Once he got published and proved that his books would sell, he could take more risks and stray further and further from the accepted norms.

There is one way that Rocketship Galileo deviates significantly from the formula: the science. Even as a kid, I knew that the people who had written the Tom Swift stories were hopelessly ignorant of science. I put it down to that fact that most of the volumes of Tom Swift that I had were my father's and that they just didn't know as much about science back in the Olden Days. That wasn't the case, however. The people who wrote those books didn't give a rip because they figured kids were too dumb to know the difference. When I finally figured this out, I was slightly insulted and never enjoyed the books quite as well.

Heinlein's had a purpose to writing the juveniles, however, and that purpose was served by putting real science into the books. Rocketship Galileo is chock full of the real thing. The boys, Art, Maurie and Ross, are building model rockets before the uncle even comes along and they're doing it seriously. They measure, they record and they calculate. They scrupulously follow their own safety regulations and they make creative use of their scant means. They know they won't set any records, but they hope to go for some of the "junior prizes".

Once they team up with the uncle, Dr. Cargraves, they are subjected to lectures and examples by Dr. Cargraves. At various times, the reader is exposed to real information about rocketships, cyclotrons, electronics, physics, nuclear elements, radioactivity and orbital mechanics. The facts were all correct for their day and most of them are still correct today. Heinlein dangles the science in front of the reader, knowing full well that teenagers are sponges for facts. The message all through the book is loud and clear: "you can do this stuff, you can learn it if you try."

This is where Rocketship Galileo is the exact opposite of Tom Swift, whose message to readers is "indulge yourself in lots of action and thrilling supposition." It's no coincidence that Heinlein follows the formula for "boys books" almost exactly, but deviates in one big way. That was his plan from the start –he had a generation to raise, an audience to create.

There is also a small thing that would become one of Heinlein's repeated themes in the juveniles. "Morrie", as Maurice Abrams is called, is clearly jewish. His father with the German word ordering speaks (Just like Yoda of Star Wars fame, which is really odd). This is almost trivial today, after all, who cares? This wasn't the case in 1946, however, when Jews were somewhat exotic (most Americans outside of the larger cities hadn't ever met a Jew) and faintly distasteful. Heinlein believed strongly in all sorts of tolerance, however, and we'll see it come out again and again in the juveniles.

Heinlein's juveniles were successful because he understood kids. Somehow, he sensed that they wanted the facts; they wanted real possibilities more than they wanted Tom Swift's nuclear jetmarine that could both fly in the air and dive underwater. From the start Heinlein was an educator who dressed his serious lessons up with plot and exotic scenery. As we'll see many times in this series, it wasn't just science that he would be teaching. We'll see all sorts of life lessons, relationship lessons and moral lessons. Even though these things made his books much harder to write (even Rocketship Galileo, called "Archie Goes to the Moon" by its detractors, is full of stuff that took endless hours to research), Heinlein took his job seriously and put in the extra effort. This only makes sense if you figure he had a plan from the start.

Trivia and Interesting Asides

The first edition of Rocketship Galileo was illustrated by Thomas Voter. The illustrations are black and white lithographs and it would be interesting to know the process by which they were created. They aren't nearly as good as the illustrations that Clifford Geary would later do for the other juvenile novels. They tend to illustrate the mundane rather than the fantastic, as if the illustrator couldn't quite wrap his head around the science fiction aspects of the book.

It's easy, by the way, to tell a first edition of Scribner's. Called the "Scribner's A" by book dealers, it was a small capital "A" placed underneath the copyright block. My first edition was bound as a library edition, so I don't have the book jacket art. You can see it around on the web, however. The cover art shows more imagination than the inside art.

Rocketship Galileo is still in print, as are all of Heinlein's juvenile novels and unlike almost every other series of "boys books" from that era. You can see its publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.