Why
I Read This Book
I have
several friends who think it’s admirable to read informative books, or possibly
the classics, but think it’s an absolute waste of time to read trashy fantasy
novels.
And
on an intellectual level, I’m inclined to agree with this. And in my more sober and serious moods, I do
my best to steer myself towards serious history books or the classical canon.
And
yet, I must confess, the genre does hold some appeal to me, for reasons I can’t
really rationally explain. (I suppose
the very definition of a “guilty pleasure” is something you can’t rationally
explain.) I have been, and always will
be, a geek at heart, and every now and then I just get this urge to
find some sort of trashy fantasy novel and lose myself in the world of
imagination.
After
recently following some of the trashy fantasy/sci-fi links from Whisky Prajer’s
blog [LINK HERE], I got the urge to set aside some of the history
books I was reading, and go down to my local bookstore and just browse the
fantasy/sci-fi sections until I found something that looked like it would be
just ridiculously fantastic enough to be enjoyable.
Fantasy
books aren’t hard to find these days—even in Cambodia. There are several used bookstores here in Phnom Penh for expatriates
which keep on their shelves all the trashy fantasy books that backpackers bring
with them from their home countries, and then leave behind here once they
finish them.
The
difficulty, though, is choosing the right book to get immersed in. They all have pictures of fantastic beasts or
magical things on their covers. They all
promise a world of fantasy and imagination.
But as fans of the genre know only too well, many of the stories between
these fantastic book covers are disappointing, and some can end up being very
boring.
(In
many ways, browsing through fantasy books is a lot more fun than actually
reading them. I can spend hours standing
in the bookstore, looking at the covers, flipping through each book briefly, and
imagining the world of each book. But
when it comes to actually reading the books cover to cover, I actually get
through very few of them.)
Anyway,
it’s always a gamble to try to choose a book by its cover, but sometimes the
gamble just has to be taken. After
browsing through several books in the fanstasy/sci-fi section, this book caught
my eye as looking suitably promising. The
cheesy artwork and big bubble lettering seemed to promise good-old-fashioned
pulpy fantasy fun. The exotic location and
the magical fairy were also good. And
the back cover sounded interesting enough: “this
is Heinlein’s famous novel of an adventurous Marsgirl on her first space
voyage, her kidnapping on Venus, and her discovery that fairies are neither
imaginary…nor nice.”
I
had read Robert A. Heinlein before—two books which I read 8 years ago now on
Bear’s recommendations: Stranger in a Strange Land, and Starship Troopers If you follow
the above links to read my reviews, you’ll note that I gave both books slightly
mixed reviews. I don’t remember them as
being bad reads, although I do remember that Robert A. Heinlein tended to mix a
lot of talk and preaching into his books—something I’m not always looking for
in escapist entertainment. But at the
same time, I do remember both books as being competently written, so I decided
I might as well give Robert A. Heinlein another go.
The
Review
This is a
funny little book. I’m not entirely sure
what to make of it.
The
first thing to note is that the book cover (both the cover art and the blurb on
the back) completely misrepresent this book.
(I know that’s just par for the course in this genre, so I’m not going
to complain too loudly about it, but I do need to just state it for the
record.)
The
bulk of the book is not about fairies or kidnappings or any of that stuff. In fact, it takes this book a long time
before anything remotely exciting starts to happen. Most of the book is just descriptions of
space travel in the future, or of life in the future space colonies.
The
book is about a teenage girl named Podkayne who lives on Mars. (The book is set in the distant future, when
humans have settled the solar system, and there are human colonies living on
the moon, Venus, and Mars.) She begins
to keep a journal in which she writes all about her life and ambitions.
(Sidenote:
I’d be curious to know what a female reviewer would make of this book. There were times when I thought Robert
Heinlein did a very poor job of imagining the thoughts of a teenage girl, but I
suppose on that subject I’m no more qualified to judge than he is.)
Podkayne,
her younger brother Clark, and her Uncle Tom embark on a journey to see Earth
for the first time. But first, before
seeing Earth, the ship stops over at Venus.
For
most of the book, there’s not really a plot.
It’s just the narrator Podkayne describing what life is like for people
on Mars, then describing what life is like on the space shuttle between Mars
and Venus, then describing what life is like on Venus.
As
with the previous Robert Heinlein books I’ve read, Heinlein is interested in
politics and society as much as with science fiction, so we get a lot of
discussion about how the different societies of Mars and Venus are arranged.
If
I’m making this sound boring, the good news is that Heinlein is a skilled
enough writer that he can just about pull it off. The plot will stall for long periods at a
time, but the prose is quite readable and I found myself still turning the
pages despite my frustration with how unexciting the plot was.
And
then, the last 30 pages out of 176, the book suddenly remembered it had a plot
it needed to get around to, and finally things really began to happen.
****SPOILERS****
So…I’m
not at all sure about what to make about this book’s ending. The prose style was the same as the rest of
the novel, but the pacing and plot seemed like they had come in from a different
book altogether.
And
then at the very end, the book all of a sudden seemed to forget who its
protagonist was, and what the point was.
After the reader has spent so long getting to know the heroine, she’s
just completely disregarded at the end of the book. Her brother gives a quick summary of the
dramatic events at the end, and she’s sidelined from the narrative
completely. And then the book ends with
the reader unsure of whether she’ll even live or die.
While
the heroine has been completely forgotten, the focus of the last couple pages is
all on the brother, and how he has been ruined by the neglect of the
parents. This is something that had not
been a major theme of the book before now, and seemed an odd note to end the
book on.
In
conclusion, I’m not really sure what to make of the end of the book. But the whole thing was a short and pleasant
enough read. I’m not sure I’d recommend
it to anyone, but I wouldn’t not recommend it either.
Update
The Wikipedia
page on this book gives some interesting information (W).
Apparently
this book was at a stage in his career when Robert Heinlein was beginning to
move away from pulpy science fiction, and when this story was originally
serialized in an adventure magazine in the early 60s it caused some friction
between Heinlein and his publisher.
Apparently
the ending Heinlein wanted to publish was with the heroine dying at the end,
and was upset that his publisher made him re-write it because, he argued, in
real life people die.
The
ending with the heroine dying at the end is slightly better than the ambiguous
ending that now stands, because in the current ending it’s not even clear if
she lives or dies, and at the very least, giving the reader some certainty
would have been better than leaving them in ambiguity.
That
being said, although Heinlein’s original ending was marginally better than the
re-written ending, in my mind all of the original problems still stand either
way—it still jars with the rest of the book, and it still abruptly changes
focus.
Noam Chomsky "Thought Control In Democratic Societies"
