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.