Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein
Read as part of the Virginia Edition Series, Volume VI.
First published by Doubleday, March 1956.
Serialised in Astounding Magazine, February, March and April 1956.
Virginia Edition published April 2008. Text with minor corrections based on the Doubleday edition.
ISBN: 978 1 897350 089
136 pages
Review by Mark Yon
Here’s the latest reread of Heinlein’s works, as Mark goes through the Virginia Edition series.
“If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman.” (page 1)
Double Star is a tale that begins rather like one of those shaggy-dog stories (“So, this man walks into a bar…..”) but in the end becomes something deeper and more appealing.
Written in three weeks in March 1955, it is quite something quite different to the by-now typical Heinlein juvenile template. Written in the first person, the story tells of down-and-out actor Lawrence/Larry Smythe, also known as ‘The Great Lorenzo’, who meets a man in a spacer’s bar and is offered a job that would use all his talents – to impersonate, in secret, John Joseph Bonforte, former Supreme Minister, leader of the loyal opposition and head of the Expansionist coalition. This sets up what happens in the rest of the novel.
Those readers with a greater reading repertoire outside science fiction may feel that
Double Star is Alexandre Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask but re-written with a Space Age twist, rather similar to Alfred Bester’s science-fictional rewriting of The Count of Monte Cristo as The Stars My Destination (also published in 1956, but in October).
Lorenzo himself is the epitome of an unreliable narrator. Initially coming across as vain, conceited, prone to dramatic gestures and florid dialogue, there’s a lot not to like about the man, at least at first. However the skill of Heinlein as a writer is to turn this character into a person that by the end we quite like, for all his faults.
Generally the tour de force pace of the plot (first meeting to Mars in the first thirty pages!) keeps the reader entertained and doesn’t give them much time to think too much about what is going on. Compared with some of Heinlein’s later work, this is a pleasing difference. Reading these in roughly chronological order, it is quite a shock to read this book published just after The Star Beast and Tunnel in the Sky, his last two juvenile novels. Double Star has moments of shocking violence that would not have been accepted in those earlier books – someone is shot in the face in the first few pages, for example.
In many ways, Double Star is an interesting Heinlein novel in that it is not typical of his work to this point, and in particular the lead character of Smythe is not the usual. He is not a young boy on the cusp of greatness, indeed he is, instead, an older man with a rather unremarkable repertoire on the whole, a jobbing actor without reaching that position of instantly-recognisable celebrity. Lorenzo is also not an expert in mathematics or science, something which most of the leads have been so far.
This is a book that starts with and then maintains a tight focus and gains more as a consequence. Whilst there is an element of travelogue (Earth – Mars – Moon) it is not as explicit as in some of the earlier juvenile novels.
What is important for the lead character and the reader is that Lorenzo grows into his role. Most endearingly, Lorenzo is willing and able (albeit with the help of some hypnotism jiggery-pokery) to change his own viewpoint and values along the way – he goes from hating to accepting Martians, from being determinedly uninterested in politics to running an interplanetary Empire, for example. We also have built in tantalising details – enough but not too much – of Lawrence’s back story and how his relationship with his actor father relates to his current circumstances.
The Martians are also interesting and seemingly unrelated to those of Red Planet and Space Cadet. Described as ‘looking like a nightmare toadstool’ and ‘a thing that looks like a tree trunk topped off by a sun helmet’, it is perhaps not the most elegant of descriptions, nor the most flattering Martian Heinlein’s ever created. (Compare with Willis of Red Planet, for example.) This does change through the novel, however. I was rather amused to read of Smythe at one point being given a Martian ceremonial weapon, a ‘life-wand’, something which these days we might reinterpret as a light-sabre (or, indeed, given Heinlein’s sense of humour, something of a more vulgar nature.)
On a wider scale, there are some interesting points made by Heinlein about politics that raise further questions. Whilst I personally had issues with the point that voters would not notice a replacement/imposter (although there are many conspiracy theories around that suggest that many US Presidents have, including, ironically, ex-actor Ronald Reagan) over such a long time, perhaps more importantly Double Star made me question what Heinlein is actually saying about politics here. One view could be that Double Star gives the impression that all politics and politicians are actually fake, portrayed by actors, and it works. It could also be said that in Double Star Heinlein thinks little of the actual voters by allowing them to be continually lied to by his character for what ends up as years.
Having read the background a little, I can’t help feeling that, despite the admiration Heinlein includes in this tale for the process, it is rather soured by his own personal experiences in politics – something which gave him a rather unpleasant time in his early years – or at least began to question his own personal political beliefs. It is about this time that Heinlein changed his own political view from that of Democrat to something more libertarian, and so such changing personal views are in part reflected in Lorenzo’s volte-face.
Although there are touches of the other tales Heinlein has told (torchships, for example) it is clear that Double Star is Heinlein the writer writing outside his usual Future History, and for adults. Freed of what he was increasingly seeing as the shackles of Scribners and his editor there (Miss Alice Dalgleish), in some ways Double Star shows the early stages of an author let loose, to let his imagination take him where he wanted. Whilst showing many of Heinlein’s stylistic strengths, it also tones down what may be seen as some of his weaknesses.
That’s not to say that there are no faults – there are still dated analogies, rambling monologues and teeth grinding homilies, though less than many and significantly less than Heinlein’s later novels.
And as is rather typical of the time, female characters, whilst present, are not handled too well – Penny Russell is a likeable individual but spends a lot of her time in tears, fainting and having a meltdown over the fact that her love is being portrayed by an imposter:
‘It was clear as scripture that she was a secretary who silently and hopelessly loved her boss, and she resented me with a deep, illogical but natural bitterness. No man can do his best work with a woman constantly around him who despises him.’
It also doesn’t help when statements such as ‘Stow it, Penny, or I’ll spank your round fanny – at two gravities.’ seem to further define her position in the tale. (It doesn’t –quite – but it’s not an ideal point to make.)
When I finished the novel I was left thinking whether this situation was something that would work today in these days of spy satellites, micro and even nano-miniaturisation, drones, selfies and 24-7 media coverage? Probably not. And there are times when this book’s age – remember, it is nearly sixty years old – mean that the plot wouldn’t really work today.
Here we have rooms full of microfiches, slide-rules for calculations and pocket-watches used for timekeeping. The fashions, with clothes all rather impractical shorts and capes, are rather amusing these days, and references to Caruso and Alec Guinness lose their impact over time, although these were not enough to put me off the read too much.
In the big scheme of things, though, these are minor quibbles, and perhaps acceptable given the context of its origin. It could be said that, given their broad similarity and comparable reputation as seminal works of the 1950’s*, Double Star is less stylish than Bester’s Destination novel, but perhaps with warmer, more sympathetic characters. Where Double Star works best it is because it is a more human tale, with fewer ‘big ideas’ but written from the heart, and with characters that readers can relate to and like. Double Star rightly shows the author on a roll.
Double Star was the winner of the first Hugo Award for Best Novel in London in 1957, something which (at least according to the recent biography by William H Patterson, Jr) Robert seems blissfully unaware of until the Award arrived on his doorstop. Much to Robert’s irritation, it was rumoured that fan Forry Ackerman had collected the Award for him on his behalf, a person who by this stage seemed to annoy Heinlein greatly.
It was the first of four Hugos that Heinlein won in his lifetime and, regardless of the issues I have suggested here, is still regarded by many as one of their favourite Heinlein adult novels. Reading it again, here, and despite its occasionally dated view, Double Star showed me why. Though it is not my personal-favourite Heinlein, there’s a lot here for Heinlein fans to like.
Mark Yon, August 2014.
*Both books are in the American Library’s American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary Wolfe.
This..,., essay, is at best sad. I can only be relegated to the bin of history as a thing written by one generation refusing to deal with the realities of another.
Thank goodness RAH won out..