Double Star

by Robert Heinlein
Rating: ***




I'm not a fan of Robert Heinlein*. This is not an aversion born of ignorance. Prior to the Hugo Project, I've read some of his short stories, most memorably "The Roads Must Roll" (I also heard the X Minus 1 radio broadcast of the same), and two of his novels: Job: A Comedy of Justice and Stranger in a Strange Land. The former I picked up because somewhere I came across a quote from it and found the quote sufficiently interesting to read the entire novel. The line in question was, "I had no objection to calling Armageddon by the name 'Ragnarok.' ... But Loki? Ask me to believe that a mythical demigod of an ignorant, barbarian race has wrought changes in the whole universe? Now, really!" Stranger in a Strange Land I found far less enjoyable; I stopped reading it sometime shortly after the protagonist starts to really dig in to setting up a religion around himself. I'll talk about the reasons why later, doubtlessly, as Stranger is the 1962 Hugo winner.

(Incidentally, there are two other Hugo books that I've stopped reading partway through in the past: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Originally, looking over the Hugo list, a part of me was dreading returning to these three books. And also to reading a book called Cyteen. The thought of going back to them doesn't give me pause anymore, though. I've read They've Rather Be Right. They don't get any worse than that. When Jo Walton wrote his series for tor.com called "Revisiting the Hugos," he decided to skip right over They'd Rather Be Right, which is universally regarded as the worse Hugo winner, claiming "I don't know if the book deserves this reputation because I have not read it, because when absolutely everybody tells me that the jar contains marmelade all the way down, I don't feel compelled to take the lid off." While I've only barely started my own Hugo Project, I think I can confidently say that everyone is right. None of the other books will be that bad. And I got through every bloated preachy paragraph. I can handle Stranger's weirdness or Left Hand's dullness. I don't quite recall why I stopped reading Yiddish; I think I wanted a lighter read and had a hard time getting into it.)

One of my main problems with 1956's Hugo winner, Double Star, was that Heinlein was clearly trying to make his protagonist unlikable-in-a-likable-way in the beginning, and he fails. (My other main problem was the cover illustration. Just a terrible cover.) Oh, Lawrence Smith (a.k.a. Lorenzo Smythe) is hard to like. He's pretentious, smarmy, whiny, cowardly, conniving, and a whole lot of other adjectives that make it difficult—but not impossible—to have a compelling character. But Heinlein couldn't pull off making the reader like him in spite of these flaws. You can have a terrible human being as a nearly addictive protagonist, but you need other qualities to balance it all the flaws. Or you need to have the flaws be so exaggerated that they cross over from being pathetic to being amazing. 


Smith has no redeeming qualities. At least not at first. He's just some poor sap who might make an entertaining side character in another book, but isn't cut out to be in the lead role. In fairness, this problem gradually lessens throughout the novel, and this makes sense, and fleshes out the character far beyond the Generic Male Protagonist that Heinlein seems fond of; but, honestly, it's so annoying in the beginning that I'm not sure it was worth it.

Smith is an out of work actor, who at the start of book uses his last coin to try to begin to sucker someone out of a lot more money. His target is interested in kidnapping him, so it's a little hard to feel sorry for the would-be mark. Smith is quickly conscripted into assuming the role of Bonforte, a prominent politician who was, himself recently kidnapped. This kidnapping, however, would most likely spark a war between Martians and the human empire.

Yes. There are Martian. They carry around ray guns. There are also Venusian and Jovians. Much of the early part of the book takes place on a rocket. It's science fiction from the '50s. There are going to be a lot more Martians and rockets before we finish. We're going to see flying saucers and alien invasions of various flavors. There'll be telepaths, post-apocalyptic earths (usually of the post-nuclear war variety), extradimensional beings, robots, monsters and every other trope from science fiction worth naming. For the most part, these books handle them well.
Anyway, thanks to Smith's impersonation, a war in averted. This is only halfway through the book, though. In a move surprising to no reader, Smith is forced to keep up his impersonation for various reasons. In time he takes on more and more of the characteristics of Bonforte, and in the process becomes a better person and a less grating narrator. Which is nice, but by that point the narrative runs out of steam, and just sort of coasts to a finish. There's no sense of urgency in anything that happens past the initial impersonation, and no real doubt that Smith will somehow be unable to continue pulling off a performance he mastered. Things keep on happening, but there's just no reason why the reader should care about the. The world that Heinlein builds is an interesting one, but parts of the book just seem like a lecture on the politics of a future empire, framed around a bit player in the history of that empire. It's not a bad book, but it's not Heinlein's best. It has a well-developed protagonist, but nothing interesting for him to do past the midpoint. I'm still not a big fan of Robert Heinlein.

*The first time I started writing this review, that was as far as I got. I toyed around with the idea of leaving it at that.

"Let this 'We' be the title of my records."

Most of my memories of my brother J growing up involve literature in some way or another. He's ten years older than me, and I was always sort of struck with awe at that things that he did. He ran an underground newspaper with his friends in high school. He wrote poetry, and printed and distributed collections of his works with titles like, "The Pot of Goldfish at the End of the Rainbow." Each stapled-together book would come with a hand-drawn cover illustration (by the author, of course), done in pastel crayons, and coated with hair-spray, so that the pigment wouldn't rub off on whatever it touched. He has an advanced degree in poetry (I was there in Amherst for his graduation), and has been working on a novel for the last few years. Most of the gifts that he gives to other people are books. Probably my favorite one that he's given me has been The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry (who, presumably, was a prospector who turned to writing as a way to support himself after realizing he could no longer make it panning for gold, the rivers having been depleted). He's turned me on to other books that I've loved, too; Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and American Gods are the two that stand out sharpest in my mind.

For reasons I won't get into, I found myself today looking for a Christmas present for J. I had an hour to kill at the local thriftstore, and was browsing through the mass of books people have discarded over the years. For the most part, the books were arranged by binding rather than subject matter, so you'd see books on how to become a millionaire next to the fourth book in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, which was just a few books down from a pulpy sci-fi book with a scantily clad cyborg on the cover and a young-adult historical fiction novel with the unsettling title, My Brother Sam Is Dead. (I've given instructions that this book will be delivered to my surviving siblings upon my death, preferably early enough that it will inform them of my passing.) Unsurprisingly, I didn't find anything there that I felt Joe would appreciate. The book I was looking for, I explained to V, would need to be considered a work of classic literature that is all but completely unknown. 

While searching through the thrift store, something triggered a memory of a book I read and loved once, during my senior year of high school. I had come across it while reading the book Science Fiction: History—Science—Vision by Rabkin and Scholes. I find myself coming back to that book a lot, thinking over my personal reading history. It put me on to my favorite author, Karel Čapek, and inspired me to read a greater range of science fiction starting with Frankenstein and moving on to H.G. Welles and Poe, then on to John W. Campbell and the authors he cultivated. It also lead me to the book We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

History described We as the prototypical dystopian novel, that would go on to directly inspire 1984 and foreshadow Brave New World. I found the book profound when I read it, so much so that I decided to perform it for speech and debate competitions. This involved trying to condense the book's plot down to ten minutes while still maintaining the soul of the book. It was my first attempt to do such a thing, and it didn't go over well. I could never stay within the ten minutes. Key sections of the plot were missing, and I stuck in poetic passages that didn't make sense out of context. My inexperienced performance and inability to create distinct voices for several characters* mashed all of these problems together into an unstoppable boulder of mediocrity, rolling downhill and picking up speed as it heads towards elimination from the tournament. But I digress. 

While pasting the speech together, I would usually have the book pressed down flat to the page that I wanted as I copied the words to a computer. Between this and frequent re-readings, the cover fell off of my first copy of the book within a year. After this happened, I kept that book bound together with rubber bands for sentimental reasons, and decided to get a more durable edition. I found a used library-bound edition from the late '80s, and figures that it would be a good replacement. It was only after the book arrived that I realized I had overlooked a crucial factor: the translation was grating compared to the version I had spent six months memorizing. The first copy I owned was a reprint of Clarence Brown's 1993 translation; this new copy was from Mira Ginsburg's 1972 translation. I don't have either book in front of me now; they're both boxed up in the basement of my parents' house, if I'm not mistaken. And I can't remember why it is that I disliked Ginsburg's translation so much. But I know that I thought it made the book weaker than Brown's version.

Getting back to today, I called up the largest used book store in the county to see if they have a copy of the book. After some confusion over the author (Yevgeny can be anglicized to Eugene, and Zamyatin could be spelled Zamiatin), they informed me that they did indeed have a copy, with a translation by Gregory Zilboorg. To my recollection, I'd never heard the name before, so I decided to go in to check it out. When I got to the store, I skipped to my favorite chapter in the book, the one whose opening lines I had forcibly kept in my speech even though it didn't advance the plot whatsoever. From memory, Brown's Record 32 begins, 

     "Do you believe that you will die? Yes; man is mortal, I am a man, ergo...No, that's not what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind, but with your body? Actually felt that the very fingers holding this page will one day be yellow, and icy?... 
     "No, of course not. And that is why, up to now, you haven't thrown yourself from the tenth floor to the pavement. It's why you've gone on eating, turning pages, shaving, smiling, writing.
     "It is the same—yes, exactly the same—with me today."

Eighteen-year-old Sam found these lines incredibly profound, so much so that 26-year-old Sam can remember them with ease, despite having not read the book in at least seven years. The same passage from Zilboorg's translation (you can see it in it's entirety here) reads, 

     "Do you believe that you will die? Oh, yes, "Man is mortal; I am a man; consequently .. ," No, not that; .I know that; you know it. But I ask: Has it ever happened that· you actually believed it? Believed definitely, believed not with your reason but with your body, that you actually felt that someday those fingers which now hold this page will become yellow, icy? ...
     "No, of course you cannot believe this. That is why you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement before now; that is why you eat, turn over these pages, shave, smile, write.
     "This very thing, yes, exactly this is alive in me today."

Looking at the two side by side, I will admit that I like the the "alive in me today" better than "we me today" in the concluding line of the passage. On the whole, though, I think that Brown's translation has a number of advantages; most notably that having the five activities in the second paragraph as active verbs ("eating, turning pages, shaving, smiling, writing.") makes them feel more immediate, which underscores the point of the passage. Another thing came to mind a while ago, just before I started writing this post. Zilboorg has the narrator responds to the flippant answer that "I know that; you know it," which is quite different from Brown's "I know that you know that." On a whim, I checked the original Russian text. (I took Russian classes in college, in large part because of this book.) Sure enough, the original line is «я знаю, что вы это знаете». Word-for-word, this translates to "I know, that you it know;" more fluidly, it translates to "I know that you know that." Zilboorg misses the meaning on a rather straightforward phrase. 

I can't really say how well his translation compares to the original text beyond this; I've forgotten enough Russian that a sentence more complex or advanced than "I know that you know that" (one standard verb with two declinations, and a handful of pronouns) completely baffles me. I will say one more thing about Zilboorg's translation: the omnipresent, oppressive government that dystopias love so much is called, in We, "One State." Or, at least it was in Brown's and Ginsburg's translation (I think Brown may have actually called it "OneState"). Zilboorg calls it "United State." This is closer to the original Russian (at least according to my favorite Russian-to-English translation site; again, I've forgotten nearly everything), but has the connotation of being one letter away from the United States, which completely changes the feel of the book. This is a pretty big thing. Big enough that I might not want to give J this copy of the book.

Yikes. Looking over Zilboorg's translation just now to make sure I got "United State" right, I saw that he calls the head of the United State "the Well-Doer." Ginsburg and Brown have enough sense to call him "the Benefactor," which has the advantage of not sounding silly. Dictators cannot have silly names in dystopias. It just cannot be done. 

*Actually, I think I may have narrowed it down to three. I couldn't come up with three separate voices. 

On the Order of Things

As I mentioned earlier, initially I was planning on reading all sixty Hugo winners in chronological order. This did not last past the first book. I quickly realized that being a Hugo winner doesn't guarantee that a book will sell well decades later, or even be considered important enough to be found in the local library. 1955's Hugo went to They'd Rather Be Right, which (as far as I can tell) was out of print from 1958 to 1981. After a brief and baffling resurrgence, it hasn't been in print since 1992. My local library didn't have a copy of it, nor did the local used book store. I didn't bother checking chain book stores; seemed like a waste of time. Fortunately, a town by some measures a tenth the size of my hometown has a library surprisingly well-stocked in old sci fi. The interlibrary loan said that it would take up to three weeks to get the book. I couldn't just abandon the Hugo Project so early on, so I decided to just skip Right for the moment, and go on to 1956's winner. I had hope that that would be the only deviation from the timeline I encountered, but it was not meant to be. I finished 1956's and was a good way into'57's Hugo winner before Right came through. And in the meantime, fearing similar breaks, I ordered 1965's and one of '66's Hugo winner through interlibrary loan, figuring that I might get them by the time I'd plowed through the earlier winners. It turns out that books on interlibrary loan cannot be renewed, and have a fifty cent a day late fee. The books came when I was still trudging through They'd Rather Be Right and, with their rather strict deadline, it made sense to read them in order of return date rather than publication order. So here's how I'm going to go through these:

1953: The Demolished Man
1956: Double Star
1959: A Case of Conscience
1955: …They'd Rather Be Right
1966: …And Call Me Conrad
1965: The Wanderer [currently reading]
1958: The Big Time [Not sure what happened to this one. I guess that'll be my next read.]

The Hugo Winners

I should probably put this in at some point:

1953: The Demolished Man — Alfred Bester
1955: They'd Rather Be Right — Mark Clifton & Frank Riley
1956: Double Star — Robert A. Heinlein
1958: The Big Time — Fritz Leiber
1959: A Case of Conscience — James Blish
1960: Starship Troopers — Robert A. Heinlein
1961: A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller Jr.
1962: Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert A. Heinlein
1963: The Man in the High Castle — Philip K. Dick
1964: Way Station — Clifford D. Simak
1965: The Wanderer — Fritz Leiber
1966: Dune — Frank Herbert
1966: …And Call Me Conrad — Roger Zelazny
1967: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress — Robert A. Heinlein
1968: Lord of Light — Roger Zelazny
1969: Stand on Zanzibar — John Brunner
1970: The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin
1971: Ringworld — Larry Niven
1972: To Your Scattered Bodies Go — Philip Jose Farmer
1973: The Gods Themselves — Isaac Asimov
1974: Rendezvous with Rama — Arthur C. Clarke
1975: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia — Ursula K. Le Guin
1976: The Forever War — Joe Haldeman
1977: Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang: A Novel — Kate Wilhelm
1978: Gateway — Frederik Pohl
1979: Dreamsnake — Vonda Mcintyre
1980: The Fountains of Paradise — Arthur C. Clarke
1981: The Snow Queen — Joan D. Vinge
1982: Downbelow Station — C. J. Cherryh
1983: Foundation's Edge — Isaac Asimov
1984: Startide Rising — David Brin
1985: Neuromancer — William Gibson
1986: Ender's Game — Orson Scott Card
1987: Speaker for the Dead — Orson Scott Card
1988: The Uplift War — David Brin
1989: Cyteen — C. J. Cherryh
1990: Hyperion — Dan Simmons
1991: The Vor Game — Lois McMaster Bujold
1992: Barrayar — Lois McMaster Bujold
1993: Doomsday Book — Connie Willis
1993: A Fire Upon The Deep — Vernor Vinge
1994: Green Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson
1995: Mirror Dance — Lois McMaster Bujold
1996: The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer — Neal Stephenson
1997: Blue Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson
1998: Forever Peace — Joe Haldeman
1999: To Say Nothing of the Dog — Connie Willis
2000: A Deepness in the Sky — Vernor Vinge
2001: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — J. K. Rowling
2002: American Gods — Neil Gaiman
2003: Hominids — Robert J. Sawyer
2004: Paladin of Souls — Lois McMaster Bujold
2005: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel — Susanna Clarke
2006: Spin — Robert Charles Wilson
2007: Rainbows End — Vernor Vinge
2008: The Yiddish Policeman's Union — Michael Chabon
2009: The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
2010: The Windup Girl — Paolo Bacigalupi
2010: The City & The City — China Mieville
2011: Blackout — Connie Willis