PODKAYNE of MARS

I am walking down memory lane, rereading the Heinlein juveniles I so enjoyed in youth. I just finished PODKAYNE OF MARS. My reaction is a firm and enthusiastic meh. This is a fine book for a bookish teen with an afternoon to kill, for the main character is spunky and charming, but a grown-up might get irked (as I did) with the author’s trademark trotting out his personal hobbyhorses, and with the clumsy shapelessness of the narrative. Meh, and I say again, meh. My life is too short, and the pile of books I have to read is too long, and the author did not deliver my book-buying dollar’s worth of entertainment. I liked Poddy, though.

The nicely-bound Science Fiction Book Club edition has both the author’s original ending, and the ending he rewrote at his editor’s direction. I will discuss both endings, so beware

SPOILER WARNINGS! SURPISE ENDING REVEALED BELOW!

A wag once said that Robert Heinlein novels were divided into his early novels, his juveniles, and his seniles. Seniles include his post-STRANGER works, such as I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, NUMBER OF THE BEAST, FRIDAY, CAT WHO WALKED THROUGH WALLS and TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET. The complaints lodged (I think, with justice) against these later works is that they are plotless and meandering, that they read like first drafts, that they dwell on kittens and babies, and, like Asimov wrapping all his early works by unconvincing sleight of hand into one background universe, were self-referencing to the point of self-indulgent.

Well, this complaint leaves out that Heinlein, to his last day, was still a damn fine writer, who could pen a crisp, clear scene, voice a likeable character, or describe a widget or mock a social custom, or wax philosophical, and make it all sound convincing. But he was not a good plot-weaver.

The Seniles listed above lack coherent plot; they have a string of events where nothing happens and nothing is meant to happen, unconvincing and un-engaging climaxes that are not climaxes, and then a point where the narrative stops.

By this definition, I would list PODKAYNE as senile from his juvenile period. In point of fact, almost all Heinlein novels are meandering. When one reads Heinlein’s often-reprinted advice to writers. “A writer writes; never rewrite except at an editor’s suggestion,” one must smile, or perhaps wince. This is the advice of a writer whose strength lies in characterization and style, not in plot. You can tell that Heinlein is winging it. The work reads like each chapter was an impromptu effort, going nowhere, adhering to no outline, and saying nothing.

Here is the so-called plot of PODKAYNE.

On Mars in the future, parents will have the option to put newborn babies into cryogenic suspension. The mother can give birth while she is young and hale, and thaw out her little ones after the couple has made their nest egg, not when they are struggling. This is a perfectly good SF premise. It is a logical application of a realistic technology. A thoughtful SF story would have examined how this technology affected the human lives and struggles of the society shaped or distorted by its use or abuse. PODKAYNE is not a thoughtful SF story.

In this story, Podkayne, a spunky teenage girl who dreams of breaking into the male-dominated field of spaceship piloting, has her travel plans ruined when a clerical error thaws out three of her mother’s babies prematurely. Podkayne and the mother are devoted to the babies, and the teen girl helps out with changing diapers and so on. Unexpectedly, Uncle Tom, an influential elder statesman, salvages the travel plans by blackmailing the cryo lab into paying for first-class tickets aboard the space-liner _Tricorn_ bound for Venus.

The precautions of a space-liner against Solar Radiation storms are described. Certain stuffy matrons of Earth are revealed to be bigots. Podkayne’s ungovernable but brilliant younger brother Clark is suspected of having smuggled contraband aboard. Podkayne persuades Clark to play a cruel prank on the bigots.

Venus. The customs and practices of Venusberg described: it is basically like Las Vegas. Clark wins money at the casino.

Then, in the third to the last chapter, we have the beginning of a plot. Suddenly we are in a spy story! Clark is kidnapped. It is suddenly revealed that Uncle Tom is not traveling for pleasure, but means to go to Some Important Conference. Clark was smuggling, not contraband, but a bomb he intercepted meant to kill Uncle Tom, but the black hats do not want to kill Tom, now they want to pressure him by threatening his niece and nephew, so he will do Something Important at Some Important Conference. Podkayne foolishly follows her captured brother and foolishly get captured, frets while her brother is subjected to some not-very-scary torture, and …

The narrative now shifts to the first-person of the brother, who describes an absurdly easy escape, which consists of shooting one flying thing with a slingshot and killing a fat old lady, but for some reason not clear to me, the brother and sister split up, sneak away from the kidnapper’s lair, and

AUTHOR’S ORIGINAL SURPRISE ENDING

Podkayne is killed when the brother’s bomb goes off. Her pathetic dying words reveal that her heart is filled with love. The sociopath brother befriends a space-fuzzy that Poddy was going back into danger to save, in memory of her.

THE SURPRISE ENDING REWRITTEN AT EDITOR’S SUGGESTION

Podkayne is severely wounded when the brother’s bomb goes off. Her pathetic really badly hurt but not dying words reveals that her heart is filled with love. The sociopath brother befriends a space-fuzzy that Poddy was going back into danger to save, until she gets better. And Uncle Tom criticizes Podkayne’s Mom for being negligent and inattentive.

Let me pause here to say: BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA and wipe tears of scornful laughter from my eyes. Both endings are filled with such cheap manipulative heavy-handedness that a snort of derision is the only just reaction. Why didn’t the author throw in a little blind beggar boy while he was at it? An orphan boy, whose loyal seeing-eye dog has just died in the snow, while the brave lad with quivering lip goes stumbling through the freezing storm, pathetically calling its name! “Scrappy? Where are you? Cheer up, Scrappy! I’ll find you some warm soup to dwink! I pwomise I will!” (sniff, sniff) Awwww, that would’ve been sad too, wouldn’t it have? And then the little boy could be run over by a bus.

Two criticisms: first, the author’s personal hobbyhorses are annoying, introduced with no regard to plot or logic. Second, this book has all the earmarks of being tossed off the top of his head by an author who did not even go back and reread what he wrote in the earlier chapters.

Let us dwell for a moment on the signs which show sloppy craftsmanship, by which I mean signs that Heinlein made it up as he went along, and did not go back to change earlier text to conform with later text.

Stories are about conflict. The plot premise introduced in chapter one is a perfectly good and workable conflict: girl tries to break into a man’s profession. In a real story, this would have defined the story arc: the prejudiced society opposes girl, girl suffers, girl rallies her spirits, and plot ends when girl wins accolades as pilot.

Instead, this plot point was not followed up. Poddy spends the chapters aboard the Tricorn befriending the officers and captain, so that she can study astrogation be allowed to hang out on the bridge. So there is no plot of her using her wits and determination to break the glass ceiling, join the Naval academy, study the hard courses, and overcome the prejudice of a Man’s World. No: we are left with the feeling that Podkayne is interested in piloting only because the author wants a mouthpiece to explain some interesting details about rocketry. Her dream is dropped after a scene where she wonders if perhaps having babies might not be a good thing instead.

Instead, the only conflict in these chapters is from two bigots who appear out of nowhere, and criticize Uncle Tom for reasons that have not previously been established in the plot. Snarky old ladies mock Tom for being black (he was not mentioned as being black in any earlier part of the novel—now he suddenly has Maori blood) and for being from a penal colony (also not mentioned earlier). In other words, the author simply wanted to make a statement against race-prejudice that had not been set up.

Again, the plot arc here could have been like that in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or something. Man oppressed by bigotry, man strives to overcome, bigots are either shamed or enlightened. But no. The anti-racism message just hangs in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing, and the characters voicing the racism are cardboard cutouts, with no hint about what causes or history lies behind it. Welcome to 1963 notions of deep morality.

Another annoying Heinleinism rears its ugly head during the next scene. Heinlein often strikes a pose as being a badass, a realpolitick sort of unsentimental no-nonsense fellow, and his characters follow suit. So here: A radiation storm forces the passengers and crew to take shelter in the axis of the ship, in crowded conditions. One of the two bigots is seen being carried in, her face reddened as if with radiation burns. Podkayne, seeing (what she thinks is) a dead body, now worries that her uncle and brother were caught outside the shelter, and must be dead. Well, in this scene, the author pauses between the girl’s fears for her relatives, to sneer at the corpse of the old woman who said hurtful things about her, and to declare (with an Epicurus-like indifference to human suffering) that one less mouth to feed in the world would not be missed.

Does this strike anyone as a laudable reaction for a teenage girl upon seeing her first dead body during a disaster that killed her family? I am sure that there are girls as cruel and callous as this, but they are not the type I want to read about. A morally healthy person would react with shock and upset, and remember that this person may have family of her own. Not here. Heinlein is too shallow. This lack of forgiveness is not set up in any earlier part of the story, nor does it have any consequences later. She never learns better. Indeed, the author forgets that she is supposed to be a hard-boiled egg. This is the same character who, in another chapter, is so sentimental that she is willing to go back and risk being a-bombed in order to save someone else’s space-pet.

Of course, the old woman is not actually dead, nor is the family, nor is anyone hurt. In other words, this was all false alarm and Chinese fire drill, with no real fire: emotions provoked for the sake of emoting, not to serve the plot or show any character development. Sound and fury signifying nothing.

A final annoying Heinleinism. In addition to the obligatory lecture from the Baby Boomer generation on the evils of racism, we also get to hear about the glories of the sexual revolution. Podkayne sniffs when the Evil Bigots demean a woman for being promiscuous. Poddy thinks: “Well, I hope she had fun!” As if skipping from man to man in one night stands is anything but empty and pathetic. Riiiiiiight. Good lesson for teenage Podkayne. Maybe she can grow up to be a Space Tramp, too, and work in a casino in a skimpy dress. Whoring is honest labor, ain’t it?

Same hobbyhorse trots out again, when we get to Venusberg. We find that people do not get married here, that the Company does not see any profit in seeing to it that the young men get monogamously hitched up and care for the children they father. (No link between male violence and unmarried lusty young bachelors, right? Of course right.) Instead, a sexual free-for-all is allowed, where anyone gets married by any ceremony he prefers, for any time, duration, or number of partners he prefers. Maybe Heinlein did not think that babies sometimes appear when people have sexual intercourse? That babies must be cared for, preferably by both parents, preferably who love each other and have vowed same? I guess that notion was too abstract to come to his attention. Or too squaresville, daddy-o. Welcome again to 1963 notions of deep morality.

Need I really say here that a town run entirely by profit-hungry corporation that otherwise is utterly libertarian, and has no law aside from what is needed to protect customers, would also have been an interesting society for a serious science fiction speculation about how different laws and customs affect human lives and hopes and suffering? Need I say here that none of these issues are addressed? Venusberg is backdrop, that’s all.

But no. Let me retract. I have to admit that I am being unfair. The main character notes the sexually libertarian nature of Venusberg, but she does not necessarily approve. She wonders at the pornography and gambling, and the loose living makes her uneasy. Here is where Heinlein’s juveniles are usually better than his later books: he is not preaching sexual revolution here, as he does in, say STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, or, mostly blatantly of all, in GLORY ROAD. Because the main character’s more reserved Martian upbringing caused her to blench at the libertarian libertinism, Heinlein should not be accused of trotting out his hobbyhorse, as I have done here. He merely intends it for background. Were it not that I have grown wary (and weary) of repeated Heinlein preaching over many a year, I would find nothing objectionable here.

So strike that last complaint from the record. Now let us return to complaining about sloppy craftsmanship.

When they reach Venus, there is a bit of business with Podkayne and a handsome young man whose father owns the casino-planet: nothing comes of that either. His appearance could have been replaced in the plot with any other event without any change to anything that happens before or after, such as a chariot-race, or a robot-rampage, or a marriage, or a funeral, or a short fat halfling throwing a magic ring into a volcano. If the plot had been about space piloting, Casino Boy could have helped her (or prevented her) get into the academy; or if it had been a romance, he could have romanced her; or if it had been a spy story, he could have been spying on her. Nope. Nothing here. Move along.

Aha! Plot sighted in Chapter Eighteen! Uncle Tom is on a Secret Mission to go to a Really Important Something-or-other and the Black Hats are trying to stop him. He “explains” that he risked traveling in “secret” with his niece and nephew to throw off suspicion, but now he regrets that the Black Hats might be menacing them. Except he was not really traveling in secret, was he, since he was traveling under his own name? Why didn’t Tom phone in his Really Important Speech, or travel wearing a moustache?

And if he actually had letters from his government, why did he have to blackmail the cryo lab into footing the bill for his travel? Don’t governments normally pay for their ministers plenipotentiary to travel? And since the ship was going to the Conference any way, why would the Black Hats have been fooled because he was traveling with family? Don’t diplomats travel with family?

The author tries to retrofit the idea that Clark was smuggling something, by now having there have had been a bomb aboard, which the Black Hats handed over to Clark, and which Clark did not tell to police, or Uncle, or the Captain. Stupidly enough, the other agent of the Black Hats aboard the ship also was not told about the bomb. Lamely, the author has a character speculate that maybe the agent did not know what her Black Hat bosses had planned, or maybe there were two groups. Or maybe the author was lazy: he wrote the scene where Clark smuggled something aboard, and only later made up what it was.

Lazy, because the author expects us to believe that the Black Hats meant to smuggle the bomb aboard by getting a kid picked at random work out the plan of how to do the smuggling for them.

Got that? Let us paint the picture in our minds, dear readers:

The shifty-looking spies in their trenchcoats have their suitcase nuke, they drive to the spaceport, and they hang out in a corner smoking cheap euro cigarettes until they see the nephew of the elder statesman, their target, walk by, whom they approach with a package, saying, “Child! We will pay you money, much money, to smuggle this unmarked package aboard your ship. When and how and by what means you get it aboard are up to you, because we believe that teenage boys can smuggle things aboard ships with no difficulty. Verily, our whole plan revolves around this idea. Getting an adult to do it is out of the question. Giving it to someone not related by blood to our target is out of the question. We will not advise you; the means are yours to chose. Yes, that was our plan. Fu Manchu helped us make it up. Do not open the package, or hold it near a Geiger counter.”

And the plan would have worked too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling teenager! He opened the package and looked at it. Gee, even a mastermind could not have forseen that twist!

The author is too lazy to make up a new character, so now evil spy lady is one of the old crones from the ship. Which makes no sense for reasons given above. The plan is to tell the Uncle to do something or other at the Important Thing, and then kill the kids anyway. Because we are evil. Except that a teenage boy can outsmart us and nuke our hideout. With our bomb we gave him.

During this whole time, our main character had no plot function, nowhere to go and nothing to do once she gets there. So, without any rhyme or reason, the author kills off the girl for a cheap moment of pathos. Or (rewritten version) severely wounds her.

So not only are the chapters unconnected, with no plot logic to tie them together, the scenes within the chapters have no plot logic connecting them. Example: Escape attempt. Poddy screams to trick fat old spy lady into coming into her cell: brother jumps spy lady and breaks her neck. At this point, the kids are home free. They have spy lady’s gun and, they are alone in the hideout; as far as they know, no one is coming, because spy lady (described as an expensive no-nonsense professional!) works alone. Pinhead the native goon Clark shoots. The place is not examined for a phone to call the cops or anything. Clark and Poddy split up to elude capture, but the plot has not established that there is anyone looking for them. Clark laments that he had no time to go back and disarm the bomb, but he had time, since all the Black Hats were dead.

The rewritten ending is no different, except now there is an added bit where Uncle Tom chews out Poddy’s parents for letting the Mom have a career. But, in every scene in the beginning of the novel where the Mom had to choose between career and family, she chose family. It explicitly says that the Fries live in more humble circumstances that they would otherwise, because they want to have many kids. This is a moral that is tacked onto the tale with no rhyme or reason, and is especially stupid since Poddy’s death (or severe wounding) was caused by spies that Uncle Tom foolishly lead to them, or, to be precise, by the sociopath brother setting off a nuke for no reason when Poddy went back to save a space-smurf for no reason. Was Mom supposed to prevent Poddy from going on a pleasure cruise?

Please note that each and every one of these complaints could have been cured by Heinlein rewriting his first chapter or two to set up what would happen in the last chapter or two. The Dean of SF was just too lazy to do it. It could have taken him maybe two afternoons, maybe a week:

If the point of the story was supposed to be that Mothers should stay home barefoot and pregnant, then the working Mom should have been shown ignoring Podkayne, and refusing to help her when she needed help.

If the plot was supposed to be a spy thriller, the spies (or the McGuffin sought by the spies) should have been introduced in chapter one.

If this was supposed to be a Coming of Age story, Podkayne should have been shown as immature at the beginning, and coming into command of herself at the end. Instead, this is the opposite of a coming of age story: at the beginning Poddy has a long-term goal toward which she works with grown-up determination, and at the end of the plot she gets herself caught because of childish stubbornness, and dies because, in a fit of childish sentimentality, she disobeys the First Rule of the Movie ALIEN: Never Go Back For The Cat.

So, for a book with no plot, written by a lazy author with no outline “who does not rewrite except at the editor’s suggestion” it is a fairly meh effort. On a scale of one to ten, I give it a meh.

The one bright spot is Poddy. Despite being trapped in a lame plot, I still like her. I like the character. It is not a complex portrayal, but Podkayne comes across as a nice, likeable kid, bright, good-natured, sense of humor, with a certain amount of spunk and determination, and when the chips are down, she pitches in and helps out and does not complain.

If you think it is easy to write a character and make her likeable, just look and see how many books with unlikeable characters there are out there. It ain’t easy, brother. Books with likeable female characters are more often seen these days than back in the 50’s, but they are still rare. Rare enough, that when I read John Barnes’ somewhat negative and subversive ORBITAL RESONANCE, the spunky young female character in that book, Melpomene Murray, reminded me of only one person: she was Podkayne.