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Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
Feb. 20th, 2026 05:04 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
fromtheheartofeurope_feedSecond paragraph of third chapter:
The temperature was rising and the dawn wind was blowing firmly, but it was still at least thirty below. Strymon canal was a steel-blue, hard sheet of ice and would not melt today in this latitude. Resting on it beside the dock was the mail scooter from Syrtis Minor, its boat body supported by razor-edged runners. The driver was still loading it with cargo dragged from the warehouse on the dock.
Published in 1949, this was a book that I greatly enjoyed as a young reader, one of Heinlein’s successful juvenile series. The protagonist is a lad in the human colony on Mars, attending a military boarding school where he discovers a fiendish plot by the Earth-based rulers to destroy the colonists. Aided by his Martian pet, and by the mysterious giant Martians themselves, he gets home via the canals and other Martian tech, raises the alarm and helps his family and the rest of the colony defeat the evil administrators, who are apparently eaten by the Martians.
It’s a very male book; the protagonist and his buddy, and their fathers and a wise old doctor, carry most of the narrative, with some dialogue from mothers and a bratty sister. It’s a very pro-gun book; the colonists’ equivalent of Second Amendment rights are taken as obvious common sense (and of course crucial in the uprising). The colonists’ mission is explicitly colonial; no questions are asked about the fate of the Martians once humans spread out over the planet.
And yet there’s still a very attractive sensawunda about it, a feeling of estrangement from Earth and awe at the ancient mysteries and dangers of a new world, and arid landscapes not quite like the American West. Some of the magic remains for me, though perhaps not quite enough for me to recommend it to readers of the same age as I was when I first read it. You can get Red Planet here.
This was my top unread sf book (though of course I had read it long ago). Next on that pile is Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham.
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