Heinlein's Double Star deserves a second look

Star turn ... The controversial illustration for Heinlein's Hugo-winning novel

After winning the 1956 Hugo award, Robert A Heinlein's Double Star briefly floated back into the public conscience in the year 2000 when it became the centre of the annual "but is really it art?" furore relating to The Turner Prize. One of the nominated pictures, Glenn Brown's The Loves of Shepherds bore such a striking resemblance to the cover illustration of a 1970 UK edition of the book that the original artist was moved to claim for breach of copyright.

The plagiarism issue was murky and complex, but what was clear in all the press coverage at the time was that no one writing knew or cared what Double Star itself was about. Certainly, none of the articles I've read mention the curious coincidence that the book describes an artistic imitation. Whatever your viewpoint on SF, the fact that an award-winning book from a man generally named as one of the genre's founding fathers (alongside Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke) is so little known amongst otherwise knowledgeable cultural journalists says something about the way the genre has been marginalised by the UK press. Now that I've read the book, such ignorance also seems a shame.

The replication in question concerns an egotistical actor who is called in to act as a double for a political leader after the man himself is kidnapped. The actor (The Great Lorenzo) successfully performs a tricky diplomatic mission on Mars and is then called on to encore after encore after it becomes clear that Joe Bonforte - the man he is pretending to be - is unlikely to be able to appear in public again.

So far so simple. The story moves at a sharp pace, helped along by Heinlein's slick prose and the kind of wry good humour demonstrated when he describes the multi-consonant names (Rrringrill) he has ascribed to his Martians as sounding like "a leaking faucet". Yet although it's readable, there's never any escaping the fact that the book is an unashamedly improbable space opera: Lorenzo possesses remarkable powers of self-transformation that are never fully explained, he manages to pick up complex inter-galactic political nuances surprisingly quickly for a supposedly dumb actor and much of the plot hinges upon coincidence and implausible good luck. In short, Double Star is daft. But then, if you're looking for realism, a book with multi-eyed and tentacled Martians is probably the wrong place to look. Besides, Double Star has more to offer than scrupulous realism.

Interestingly, the Turner controversy wasn't the first time the Hugo winner was involved in bizarre legal cases. In 1968, when Charles Hall tried to apply for a patent on the waterbed he thought he had invented, he found he was unable to do so because Heinlein had already described one in sufficient detail in Double Star (and other places). This impressive bit of technological pre-empting sits neatly alongside the fact that the book is generally cited as the first to use the abbreviation "ET" (or at least, eetee). Elsewhere, there are dozens of other inventive ideas, which may not have been realised, but do sound cool. There's real appeal to a sealed off "Hush Corner" noise reduction areas for intimate conversations in crowded bars, for example, while "Bounce Tube" pneumatic transport systems for people might do a lot to improve commuting.

In common with much of the best SF, it's not just the scientific ideas that make this book worthy of investigation. History does too. The political concerns and philosophy that Heinlein chooses to project onto his imagined future also provide an intriguing barometer of his times.

The book's impassioned pleas for understanding and tolerance with regard to Martian culture, for instance, might not make for a subtle allegory, but it is moving given the book's context in 1950s America. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that a few of those impressionable teenage white males who comprised the books original target audience went on to stand with Martin Luther King on the Washington Mall a few years later.

Double Star's crueller political leanings are just as notable. This is the man, after all, who went on to write Starship Troopers and is still frequently derided as a fascist. One of the central planks of Bonforte's political platform is for unfettered free trade, a philosophy that we now know would sweep the world, but was only just starting to take root in the post-war consensus of 1955. And while some of the rhetoric about the power of the markets could have come from Margaret Thatcher, it seems doubtful that the 1955 Heinlein would have envisaged the possibility of a female Prime Minister. Not if Double Star's main female character is anything to go by anyway, since this pretty "child" is that pre-feminist cliché, a pathetic secretary who is pathetically in love with her boss. Meanwhile, the Great Lorenzo might be camp, but the idea of homosexuality in Heinlein's socially conservative futuristic 1950s is never mentioned ...

Such clear cultural reflections make Double Star curiously satisfying when combined with all that over-brimming of invention, cogent political argumentation and the simple fact that the book is fun to read. It might not be much cop as literature - but that doesn't mean it isn't worth preserving.

Next time: Big Time by Fritz Leiber