"The Monster from Earth's End" by Murray Leinster

After Farmer in the Sky Robert then published a decidedly more adult novel, The Puppet 

Masters. However, he was still with a Scribner’s contract to publish one juvenile novel a year, and so returned to the world of young adult SF with this novel.

Things in Heinlein’s own world had moved on a little since his last sojourn to his future Solar System, and this change is partly reflected in this novel. Though a juvenile novel, and one of a series designed for Scouts (a predominantly male teen audience), Heinlein had found a voice through his Destination Moon movie scriptwriting and The Puppet Masters. It is possible that Heinlein was starting to outgrow such a setup.

The background to Between Planets is a more sophisticated one. Having travelled to Venus, Mars and Ganymede in previous juveniles and examined the importance of freedom and pioneering characteristics, Between Planets sets up a situation where the main protagonist is between different territories. His loyalties are less black-and-white than in previous novels, because his conscience is also transitory.

Like Red Planet, Between Planets is a tale of colonial revolt. Such a situation was to some degree forewarned in Farmer in the Sky, when Bill Lermer was involved in a discussion that suggested that the continued human expansion and colonisation of the Solar System would eventually lead to war.  As William H Patterson points out in his Introduction to Between Planets, “This time he (Heinlein) would turn Space Cadet inside out, he decided: Instead of a young man deliberately preparing for war, this story would be about a young man surprised and overtaken by war.”

Here, in Between Planets, we see the culmination of that ‘progress’, with an independent colony (Venus) demanding liberation from the original home planet, each world accusing the other of taking advantage of their status. Of course, not all of this is entirely relevant (at first) to our hero of Between Planets, Don Harvey.  Don begins the novel at school on Earth. On his recall to Mars, Don (with a father from Earth and a mother from Venus) finds himself in the middle to a deteriorating situation between the two planets. Whilst visiting a family friend before lift-off, Don is arrested. He is eventually released, but his family friend, Professor Jefferson, dies of heart failure whilst under arrest.

Don then travels to an Earth orbiting space station en-transit to Mars. Whilst there, a raid by Venusian colonists takes over the station. Many travellers are returned to Earth, whilst Don claims Venusian citizenship in the hope that from Venus he can then travel to his parents on Mars.

Once on Venus, Don finds that, due to the current interplanetary fracas, his Earth-money is worth nothing. Communication with his parents is impossible. He is forced to get a job and try and earn the credit needed to pay for passage to Mars. When the Federation of Earth invades Venus, Don finds himself as an enlisted guerrilla fighter for the Venusians, but with a bigger part to play in events than he realised.

On finishing this book, my first thoughts were that this was the most exciting YA Heinlein novel I’ve read so far. It’s an entertaining combination of espionage and thriller, with a Space-Age setting. Whilst some of its information is now sadly out of date (farewell, jungle-swamp Venus!) I was able to still read this without losing my sense of disbelief.

The book itself is a strange concoction of old-world imagery combined with future-age optimism, even from the hindsight of 2013. We have this from the first page, when Don is out riding a pony in New Mexico whilst managing communication with what we would now call a mobile phone. The receipt of a ‘radiogram’ could now be seen as an email.

This combination of things the reader recognises with things they don’t runs throughout the novel. It is perhaps to be expected with a novel over 60 years old. In the 1950’s, as now, the purpose of Science Fiction was often seen by many at that time to predict the future, and as we know now some ideas work, whereas others don’t.

What I did find interesting was relating parts of this to Heinlein’s own background, and his movement in the series to more adult concerns. Between Planets shows a world where the teen-hero is clearly growing older. Whilst Don is initially rather naïve, he finds that he has to grow up fast and get a grip on bigger issues. The school part may be based on his Naval training; as a sign of his growing maturity, Professor Jefferson takes Don to a night club (and possibly strip joint?) on his visit to New Chicago. By the end he is clearly an adult.

Heinlein’s view on a World Authority is also interesting here as well. Like in Red Planet and Space Cadet, worldly governments (or at least the Interplanetary Bureau of Investigation) don’t seem to be working that well – regimented, even dictatorial, they seem to employ methods that are not the ideal – arresting people to be tortured and such like. “Any government that gets to be too big and too successful gets to be a nuisance”, one of the characters say. Perhaps the message here is one often given as a result of WW2,  that it is up to the people of the future like Don, as part of the new order, to put things right. Space is truly the new frontier, and as such should be unshackled by previous terrestrial confines.

We also get those Heinlein-esque touches that are becoming recognisable as I read the series again. Professor Jefferson is another older mentor character that seems to fit the Jubal Halshaw/Lazarus Long template we will see again later. It is here that we are introduced to the key Heinlein idea of ‘paying it forward’ that will become a standard in later years. Between Planets also has an alien character with nearly as much charisma as Red Planet’s Willis, that of Venusian dragon Sir Isaac Newton (who will briefly reappear in The Number of the Beast.)  One of the spaceships is named Glory Road, a title to reappear as a novel title a decade later.

If any criticism can be made of Between Planets, it is perhaps that most of the ideas here are not new, even in the 1950’s. But the execution of the tale, the plotting and the ideas throughout are what we would now count as typical Heinlein. Although the ending of the novel does rather depend upon one major invention, in most other ways Between Planets is a complete world away from the slam-bang space-operatics of early SF writers like Edmond Hamilton or E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith. Whilst we’re not talking stylistic and literary acrobatics such as in Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (1951-52) or Algis Budrys’s Rogue Moon (1960), we are reading here solidly written, engaging and entertaining tales, storytelling in as straightforward a manner as possible but with enough depth to go beyond the impossibilities of pulp SF.

Between Planets is a book that is more complex than I remembered it to be, yet entertaining enough for the teenage reader.  It shows a writer developing his craft further and clearly on an upward trajectory. We are now at the point where Heinlein’s skills in storycraft are reaching universally recognised status. As we enter an era seen as one of SF’s greatest, Between Planets shows that Heinlein deserves to be seen as one of the most entertaining and inspiring SF authors of that time. (Mark Yon, SFFworld)