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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heinlein was having fun with this one., 11 Jun 1997
By A Customer
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)
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