Book Review: Have Spacesuit--Will Travel by Robert Heinlein
Clifford "Kip" Russell wanted nothing more than to go to the moon. Winning a used space suit in Skyway Soap's slogan contest only encouraged his dream. With a head for mathematics and engineering, Kip repaired and enhanced his space suit, nicknamed "Oscar". While taking Oscar for a field test, Kip talks to himself over the radio that he had installed in the helmet. He is shocked when another voice answers!
Soon, Kip finds himself guiding a space ship to a tumultuous landing almost directly on top of him. Immediately after, another similar vessel lands beside it. From the first ship, a strange alien creature emerges followed by a small space-suited human. The alien quickly tumbles to the ground. When Kip runs to its aid, he is struck from behind and knocked unconscious.
Later, he awakens aboard one of the vessels on its way to the moon. He finds himself imprisoned with a 10-year-old girl named Patricia aka Peewee. She is a prodigy, but emotionally immature and sometimes frustrating. Her best friend is a rag doll named Madame Pompadour. Kip learns that they've been captured by a beastly alien criminal who, during an interrogation, Kip comes to call Wormface. The criminal and his human henchmen have also kidnapped a benevolent alien that Peewee had come to know as the Mother Thing. This was the creature that Kip had tried to help before being assaulted.
In a series of adventures that spans the galaxy--from Earth to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and back--Kip, Peewee and the Mother Thing explore the surface of the moon and narrowly escape Wormface's secret base on Pluto, nearly at the cost of Kip's life. On Delta Vega, Mother Thing's home planet, Kip is nursed back to health just in time for a trip to Lanador, a planet located in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. There, Wormface and others of his race will be put on trial, but there is something else that Mother Thing cannot reveal.
On Lanador, Kip and Peewee meet two other human "prisoners", a cave-man and a Roman soldier named Iunio. The following day, all four are brought to a vast courtroom of the "Three Galaxies". The Wormface aliens are tried for their crimes...and then the human race itself comes under the microscope with Kip, Pewee, and Iunio as representatives for Earth. The decision: allow the human race to progress or destroy them immediately?
Have Spacesuit—Will Travel is counted among "the Heinlein juveniles", one of a number of books that Heinlein wrote between 1939 and 1958. Heinlein had been rather successful in expressing advanced and enlightened ideas not often found in adolescent stories of the time. I enjoyed Have Spacesuit—Will Travel immensely. It contained a wonderful mix of fast-paced storytelling, fun characters and scientific facts. The science fiction is just that, of course, but the human characters of the story engage in detailed exercises of astronomical calculations and practical engineering that, in modern novels, might be stultifying, but I enjoyed a dose of old-fashioned SF.
