Scott's Reviews > Red Planet

Another Heinlein juvenile, another curious blend of work by a virtuoso visionary and his unfortunate co-author the cheating hack.

THE GOOD: Heinlein's early treatment of his Martians (the ones used nearly two decades later in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND) is excellent. These guys are subtle and weird and so far beyond earth norms that every interaction with them is fraught and puzzling. Also, while you can see prototypical versions of many of his stock characters (crusty old Dr. MacReady is a stripped-down and far less annoying Jubal Harshaw), their excesses are restrained by the better sense of the people around them.

THE BAD: All the tension of the heroic stand-off with murderous forces of authority is defused when everyone in the ranks of that authority turn out to be cowards, simpletons, paranoids, and gross incompetents. Heinlein loved to stack his decks like this, and it does him no more credit here than it did anywhere else. Also, the treatment of gender is blindingly awful, even for 1948, especially for Heinlein. Boys in Martian society are accounted men when they can carry guns; girls are considered adults when they can cook and help with babies. You'd think a guy who could write something as mind-bendingly weird as Heinlein's Martians could apply some of that mental plasticity to an examination of the women of his own species.