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The Rolling Stones is one of Heinlein's most lighthearted novels. It was written primarily for young adults, but it's a good read at any age. The book is about a middle class family, living on the moon as the story begins, in a time when middle class families can buy spaceships about as easily as you or I could buy a large recreational vehicle or a small yacht.
Briefly, the story involves a family--a mother and father, their four children (the twins Castor and Pollux, their annoying elder sister and usually underfoot younger brother), and grandmother Hazel Meade Stone. The twins had the idea of buying a spaceship and flying out to the asteroid belt to make their fortune in space mining ventures. Their father rejected this plan, preferring to send them to Earth for a formal university education. But Grandma Hazel prevailed with more ambitious counsel, and the whole family ended up buying a spaceship and becoming an adventurously nomadic collection of rugged individualists. They flew first to Mars, then to the asteroids, then, as the book ends, further onward.
The Rolling Stones is Heinlein's "family values" novel, with the highest virtue held to be loyalty to one's kin. Grandma Hazel Meade lies under oath and practically vamps a Martian judge, at one point, to save her two grandsons from doing hard time as punishment for trying to sidestep Martian import taxes. Earlier in the family's travels, the usually self-oriented Stone twins endorse the idea that the family should return to the moon, rather than go on toward Mars, because their younger brother (Lowell) seemed to be incurably space-sick. Even father Roger Stone's decision to override the computer and force a launch from the moon in the event of a mechanical glitch is explained as loyalty to the family honor, rather than being a petty manifestation of his own egoism.
The quality of the writing in The Rolling Stones is par for Heinlein--which is another way of saying it would be a masterwork for many another writer. If you want Heinlein without the aspiring sexual scenarios and political red flags, then The Rolling Stones is about as good as you're going to get.
Jerry Neil Abbott
(jna@ix.netcom.com)
The Stone family would certainly qualify as `different' by most standards: grandmother Hazel Meade Stone, veteran of the lunar colony revolution (see The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) who still packs a gun (even if it only dispenses gum); Roger, engineer father who has turned his talents to writing some rather lurid space operas; Edith the doctor, quiet and reserved, but the backbone of the whole family; Meade the 18 year old daughter who seems to mainly fill the function of mother's helper and object of derision by Castor and Pollux, the 17 year old twin mechanical geniuses who have dreams of becoming the shipping magnates of the solar system; and six year old Lowell, who when not beating Hazel at chess or reading minds is very much a pest.
The story is all about their adventures when they decide to pack up from their Lunar home and jaunt around the solar system in an older, carefully fixed up space ship that they buy from a used-rocket-ship dealer. Parts of their adventures are hilarious: the disaster of the Martian flat cats (the model for the Tribbles of Star Trek fame), the events surrounding the twins being arrested on Mars for tax evasion, the brief looks we are given at the `scripts' that Roger and later Hazel write to help fund their travels. And other parts are quite serious: Edith tackling a virulent disease on a nearby tourist ship and Hazel's problems with a jury-rigged rocket-scooter being used to navigate around the asteroid belt. The various family interactions are nicely shown, and the characterizations of Hazel, Castor and Pollux are full-bodied, making the reader really believe in this odd family.
The science presented here is real. Heinlein was always careful with details in this area, and in this one he presents the facts of orbital mechanics, delta-v requirements, and calculations of best possible orbital transfer trajectories. Each of these items has a direct effect on the story line, and Heinlein makes all this real-world stuff go down easily, an aspect of his works that has inspired countless youngsters to pursue careers in science and engineering. His speculations about various planetary conditions, however, while plausible at the time this was written (1952), have since been shown to not be true, so a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required of today's reader and allowance made for its age. Also causing some believability problems are the very limited `computers' shown, and the possible necessity of doing orbital calculations by hand. This is one area where Heinlein (along with almost everyone else) consistently underestimated not just what was possible with computers, but just how fast progress would proceed, making this book (and several others) seem positively ancient.
The lack of an overriding goal or direction for this book does relegate it to more of a pleasant diversion than a significant book, and there is less personal growth for its main protagonists Castor and Pollux than most of the other juveniles have. While humorous and entertaining, it's not the best of his juveniles.
---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
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