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Robert Heinlein is one of the classic writers of science fiction; many people began their science fiction reading with a Heinlein novel. (I did—with Space Cadet, a book I picked out at the library when I was about ten.) Probably Heinlein is best known for his 1960s cult-classic Stranger in a Strange Land, which brought the term “grok”—a kind of intuitive understanding that had a spiritual-sexual dimension—into common usage, but I still think his best books are those adventure novels that he wrote for young adults. Even now, when someone asks me to recommend a good book for a twelve- to fifteen-year-old boy who doesn’t especially like to read, I tell them about these, and once I mention them I find myself going back and rereading them myself.

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I’ll never forget Willis, the unlikely hero of Red Planet, who looks like a basketball and has all sorts of well-hidden abilities that come in handy while he and his human pal Jim are dodging various problems at Jim’s boarding school and at the same time trying to save the humans on Mars.

Space Cadet tells the story of a group of boys who become men during the rigors of their first year of training in the Interplanetary Patrol. Heinlein’s portrayal of Venus is imaginative and surprisingly believable.


Along with Willis, my favorite alien is Lummox, the main (nonhuman) character in Star Beast. The Stuart family’s pet, Lummox, was smuggled to Earth following a deep-space mission many years ago by one of John Thomas’s ancestors, and has now grown into an unmanageable metal-eating, rapidly growing but still friendly, very large beast. But whoever thought that Lummox’s own family would someday come looking for its missing relative?

In Time for the Stars, Heinlein deals with space travel and the way it distorts time, as it plays out in the lives of telepathic twins Pat and Tom, who learn that humankind’s forays into outer space are dangerously unpredictable.

Thorby, the main character in Citizen of the Galaxy, was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery; as a teenager he winds up as the adopted son of a legless beggar who is not what he seems.




[Excerpted from Book Lust]