Space Cadet
Encyclopedia
Space Cadet is a 1948 science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel by Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...

 about Matt Dodson, who joins the Space Patrol to help preserve peace in the Solar System
Solar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...

. The story translates the standard military academy
Military academy
A military academy or service academy is an educational institution which prepares candidates for service in the officer corps of the army, the navy, air force or coast guard, which normally provides education in a service environment, the exact definition depending on the country concerned.Three...

 story into outer space: a boy from Iowa
Iowa
Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...

 goes to officer school
Officer Candidate School
Officer Candidate School or Officer Cadet School are institutions which train civilians and enlisted personnel in order for them to gain a commission as officers in the armed forces of a country....

, sees action and adventure, shoulders responsibilities far beyond his experience, and becomes a man
Rite of passage
A rite of passage is a ritual event that marks a person's progress from one status to another. It is a universal phenomenon which can show anthropologists what social hierarchies, values and beliefs are important in specific cultures....

. It was published as the second of the series of Heinlein juveniles
Heinlein juveniles
"Heinlein juveniles" are the 12 novels written by Robert A. Heinlein and published by Scribner's between 1947 and 1958. The intended readership was teenage boys, but the books have been enjoyed by a wide range of readers...

.

Plot summary

In 2075, teenager Matt Dodson applies to join the prestigious Space Patrol. After a number of physical, mental, and ethical tests, he is accepted as a cadet. He makes friends with fellow recruits William 'Tex' Jarman, Venus
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...

-born Oscar Jensen, and Pierre Armand from Ganymede
Ganymede (moon)
Ganymede is a satellite of Jupiter and the largest moon in the Solar System. It is the seventh moon and third Galilean satellite outward from Jupiter. Completing an orbit in roughly seven days, Ganymede participates in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with the moons Europa and Io, respectively...

. His first roommate is Girard Burke, the arrogant son of a wealthy spaceship builder. They are transported to the orbiting school ship
School ship
A training ship is a ship used to train students as sailors. The term is especially used for ships employed by navies to train future officers. Essentially there are two types: those used for training at sea and old hulks used to house classrooms....

 PRS James Randolph for further training.

Burke eventually either resigns or is asked to leave, and goes into the merchant service, but the remainder do well enough to be assigned to working Patrol ships. Dodson, Jarman and Jensen ship out on the Aes Triplex. Their first real mission is to help search for a missing research vessel, the Pathfinder, in the Asteroid Belt
Asteroid belt
The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets...

. They find it, but all aboard are dead, the unlucky victims of a fast-moving meteor that punctured the ship when the armored outer airlock door was open. Before the accident, a researcher on the Pathfinder had found evidence that the planet which blew up to form the asteroids was inhabited by an intelligent species, and that the explosion had been artificial. The captain of the Aes Triplex transfers half the crew to the repaired Pathfinder so that they can take the ship and the news of the startling discovery back to Earth quickly. With the remainder (including all three cadets), he continues his patrol.

Then, he receives an urgent message to investigate an incident on Venus. He sends Lieutenant Thurlow and the cadets to the planet's surface. The lander touches down on a sinkhole
Sinkhole
A sinkhole, also known as a sink, shake hole, swallow hole, swallet, doline or cenote, is a natural depression or hole in the Earth's surface caused by karst processes — the chemical dissolution of carbonate rocks or suffosion processes for example in sandstone...

, barely giving the crew enough time to get out before it disappears in the mud. With Thurlow comatose, injured when the lander fell over, Jensen assumes command. He contacts the sentient usually-friendly Venerians, but the entire party is taken captive. They soon find out why.

These particular natives had never seen human beings before, until old classmate Burke showed up in a prospecting ship. He had taken the matriarch of the local clan hostage when she refused to give him permission to exploit a rich deposit of radioactive ores. The locals promptly attacked the ship and killed his crew; Burke managed to send a message for help before being taken prisoner.

Jensen skillfully gains the matriarch's trust and convinces her that they are honorable and civilized, unlike Burke, and the Patrolmen are released. Neither the lander nor Burke's ship is flightworthy. To their amazement, she takes the stranded humans to the carefully preserved Astarte, the legendary first ship to set out for Venus over a century before and thought to have been lost en route. According to the log, the crew perished from disease. With the help of the natives, the cadets recommission the ship and fly it back to (human) civilization at Venus's South Pole colony. Dodson is initially disappointed when they are not treated as heroes—but then he realizes that what they accomplished was simply what was expected of Patrolmen.

Themes

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

 government with a monopoly on nuclear weapon
Nuclear weapon
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. Both reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. The first fission bomb test released the same amount...

s, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. Matt, on a visit home, causes a family argument when his parents refuse to believe that the Patrol—and especially their son—would actually bomb Iowa.

The cadets are expected to renounce their loyalty to their respective countries and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity
Human Race
Human Race refers to the Human species.Human race may also refer to:*The Human Race, 79th episode of YuYu Hakusho* Human Race Theatre Company of Dayton Ohio* Human Race Machine, a computer graphics device...

 as a whole and to the sentient species of the Solar System. They are told the stories of four Patrol heroes/martyrs who exemplify this quality. One of them, Rivera, leaves orders to annihilate his hometown if he is held captive there during negotiations. Heinlein later expanded another of these anecdotes into "The Long Watch
The Long Watch
"The Long Watch" is a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein. It is about a military officer who faces a coup d'état by a would-be dictator....

".

The young, idealistic Matt feels that he should be able, if the need arose, to emulate Rivera and destroy his own Iowa hometown. His father tells him such a "need" would never arise, since the Patrol's cosmopolitan allegiance is little more than a sham and in fact it is controlled by the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and serves its interests. Later, Matt's mentor in the Patrol makes him understand that if such an unlikely dilemma should arise, his commanding officer would lock him in his room rather than expect him to participate in the attack. The mentor uses this scenario to force Matt to confront the personal and political issues involved in the institutional control of atomic weapons in a more mature way.

Written almost a decade before the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and at a time when non-white characters were almost entirely absent from science fiction, the book also explores the theme of racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

, both literally, in discussions of the cosmopolitan racial makeup of the (all-male) Patrol, and metaphorically, in its description of conflict with the Venerians. Venus is described  as intensely hot and (incorrectly, as is now known) swampy, but habitable. The Venerians are at first thought to be primitive, but it is later revealed that they have a high level of technological sophistication, though developed along radically different lines than that of humans.

There is also a subplot revolving around the issue of what it means to be a good soldier. Discouraged by the intellectual demands of his Patrol training, and attracted to the glamor and esprit de corps of the Marines, Matt requests a transfer, but is dissuaded by his mentor. The mentor, dividing human motivations into three types, explains that the Patrol, which has the responsibility of holding the ultimate weapon and keeping overall peace, is manned by a certain sort of person, the man of ideals (its motto is Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
' is a Latin phrase traditionally attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires , which is literally translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?" Also sometimes rendered as "Who watches the watchmen?", the phrase has other idiomatic translations and adaptations such as "Who will...

).
In contrast, the Marines, the service branch who deal with ordinary military affairs, are trained to prize unquestioning loyalty and bravery as the highest ideals, and are deliberately recruited from the type of person who seeks glory and excitement. Matt belongs to the former category. (The Merchant service, by implication, is for a third category; those motivated by economic concerns.)

Critical reception

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson
John Stewart Williamson , who wrote as Jack Williamson was a U.S. writer often referred to as the "Dean of Science Fiction" following the death in 1988 of Robert A...

 characterized Space Cadet as "a long step forward. . . . The characters are stronger [and] the background is carefully built, original, and convincing, the story suspenseful enough." Williamson noted that Heinlein was "perfecting the bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...

form that shapes the whole series."

P. Schuyler Miller
P. Schuyler Miller
Peter Schuyler Miller was an American science fiction writer and critic.-Life:Miller was raised in New York's Mohawk Valley, which led to a life-long interest in the Iroquois Indians. He pursued this as an amateur archaeologist and a member of the New York State Archaeological Association.He...

 gave the book a favorable review as "a first-rate historical novel of the near future," saying "So subtly has the scientific detail been interwoven with plot and action that the reader never realizes how painstakingly it has been worked out."

Adaptations

This juvenile novel inspired Joseph Greene of Grosset & Dunlap
Grosset & Dunlap
Grosset & Dunlap is a United States book publisher founded in 1898.The company was purchased by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1982 and today is part of the British publishing conglomerate, Pearson PLC through its American subsidiary Penguin Group....

 to develop the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet
Tom Corbett, Space Cadet
Tom Corbett is the main character in a series of Tom Corbett — Space Cadet stories that were depicted in television, radio, books, comic books, comic strips, coloring books, punch-out books and View-Master reels in the 1950s....

comic books, television series, radio show, comic strip, and novels that were popular in the early 1950s. Greene had originally submitted a radio script for "Tom Ranger and the Space Cadets" on January 16, 1946, but it remained unperformed when Heinlein's novel was published.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK