Have Space Suit - Will Travel

In my early teens I read science fiction by the truckload, and while I remember many of the "classics" fairly well, I remember the plot, the characters and the pivotal moments of "Have Space Suit Will Travel" in some detail.

That's testament to how much fun this "Young Adult" novel from Heinlein

Show More

stuck with me. I'd recommend it to any kid, though I'd have to read it again to see if it's aged in the interim.

Show Less

""
You see, I had this space suit.
How it happened was this way:
“Dad,” I said, “I want to go to the Moon.”
“Certainly,” he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.
I said, “Dad, please! I’m serious.”
This time

Show More

he closed the book on a finger and said gently, “I said it was all right. Go ahead.”
“Yes ... but how?”
“Eh?” He looked mildly surprised. “Why, that’s your problem, Clifford."
""

This is what got me hooked - well this and the fact that I hadn't read any Heinlein. This is perhaps not the best book to judge him by, considering it is part of his books written for a younger audience, but I liked it and I shall be reading more by him in the future.
It reads like the dream of a young kid coming true - which it is - and more than that, it's worded and described as seen through his eyes. This tone is a perfect fit as he goes through some incredible adventures that might sound like the work of a youngster's crazy imagination. And credit to Heinlein, he does a good job at that, considering he was 50ish when he wrote it in 1958. Here and there it shows its age and the science is a bit iffy, but it quickly goes so far into the "future" that it doesn't really matter anymore.
I liked the characters, they had a lot of personality (even if they fall into somewhat predictable categories) and the whole book was a funny, action packed and very entertaining romp.

Show Less

This is one of Heinlein's "juveniles"--books written for and about teen boys. In this one Kip Russell is trying out a space suit in his back yard when a flying saucer lands--and he gets kidnapped. I like Kip, Peewee, the eleven year old girl genius, and the "Mother Thing" alien they encounter in

Show More

their adventures. Despite it's inclusion by David Pringle in his list of 100 Best Science Fiction Novels, not one of Heinlein's more remarkable tales. It doesn't have one of the more imaginative premise featured in his books and doesn't heft any philosophical weight like his adult novels. I do find amusing the parallels between the tribunal at the end of the book and Q's trial of humanity in the Star Trek: The Next Generation pilot though. This is basically a fun romp, an entertaining and very readable book.

Show Less

Not the best work of Robert A. Heinlein. But then his works were always kind of slow for me. I found it not outdated at all.

I tried to read this through the eyes of the 1950s, but I just couldn't. Perhaps when originally written, describing a space suit might have been exciting. That's largely what the first half of the book consists of, and it really overshadowed any semblance of a plot that would leave you wondering

Show More

what would happen in the larger scheme of things. The second half picked up a lot, but the first half really keeps me from giving this higher than two stars.

Show Less

Kip Russell is working in the soda shop hoping to earn some money for college. He enters the Skyway Soap contest that promises him a trip to the moon, a place he’s always wanted to go. He calculates that he can increase his chances with more entries, so he enters a few thousand. His reward is not

Show More

the grand prize, but a prize nevertheless, a used spacesuit. The spacesuit turns into Kip’s summer before college hobby. He patches it up, uses the air compressor in the garage to pressurize it, adds a few improvements, and takes strolls though the back yard in the evening when the stars are out. It’s not quite like being on the moon, but it’s still fun, and he plans to sell the rebuilt suit back to the manufacturer for some tuition money in the fall. He even gives the suit a name, Oscar.

One late summer evening Kip gets into Oscar for a last walk around the yard. Just for fun he flicks on the radio, tuned to the frequency used by astronauts and calls out. Imagine his surprise when he gets an answer. And not just an answer, the next thing he knows a spaceship crashes in his back yard and out of it stumbles a very unworldly creature. She (Kip later comes to know her as the MotherThing) promptly collapses. Kip rushes over to offer assistance to a fellow astronaut. As he does so another spacecraft lands and out jump two very different aliens. They grab Kip and the MotherThing and hustle them off into their flying saucer. They’ve been abducted by the worst sort of aliens, gangster aliens led by the evil crime boss known as Wormface. The prisoners are joined by a third victim, PeeWee, a spoiled rich, pre-teen girl who, incidentally, is also a genius. Next stop: a frigid cave on Pluto, but it’s not their last stop.

Show Less

This was the first book I ever read by Heinlein. It taught me the order of the planets, that "a pint's a pound the world around" (a fact I use rather frequently, almost 45 years later) and that you could study things your school was not teaching. The overall plot is dumb, but Heinlein's books are

Show More

not about the plot. I'd still recommend this to someone beginning to read longer chapter books.

Show Less

Full Cast Audio does a great job in presenting this space adventure story.

I think this is the best of his young adult novels.

Clifford "Kip" Russell wanted nothing more than to go to the moon. Winning a used space suit in Skyway Soap's slogan contest only encouraged his dream. With a head for mathematics and engineering, Kip repaired and enhanced his space suit, nicknamed "Oscar". While taking Oscar for a field test, Kip

Show More

talks to himself over the radio that he had installed in the helmet. He is shocked when another voice answers!

Soon, Kip finds himself guiding a space ship to a tumultuous landing almost directly on top of him. Immediately after, another similar vessel lands beside it. From the first ship, a strange alien creature emerges followed by a small space-suited human. The alien quickly tumbles to the ground. When Kip runs to its aid, he is struck from behind and knocked unconscious.

Later, he awakens aboard one of the vessels on its way to the moon. He finds himself imprisoned with a 10-year-old girl named Patricia aka Peewee. She is a prodigy, but emotionally immature and sometimes frustrating. Her best friend is a rag doll named Madame Pompadour. Kip learns that they've been captured by a beastly alien criminal who, during an interrogation, Kip comes to call Wormface. The criminal and his human henchmen have also kidnapped a benevolent alien that Peewee had come to know as the Mother Thing. This was the creature that Kip had tried to help before being assaulted.

In a series of adventures that spans the galaxy--from Earth to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and back--Kip, Peewee and the Mother Thing explore the surface of the moon and narrowly escape Wormface's secret base on Pluto, nearly at the cost of Kip's life. On Delta Vega, Mother Thing's home planet, Kip is nursed back to health just in time for a trip to Lanador, a planet located in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. There, Wormface and others of his race will be put on trial, but there is something else that Mother Thing cannot reveal.

On Lanador, Kip and Peewee meet two other human "prisoners", a cave-man and a Roman soldier named Iunio. The following day, all four are brought to a vast courtroom of the "Three Galaxies". The Wormface aliens are tried for their crimes...and then the human race itself comes under the microscope with Kip, Pewee, and Iunio as representatives for Earth. The decision: allow the human race to progress or destroy them immediately?

Have Spacesuit—Will Travel is counted among "the Heinlein juveniles", one of a number of books that Heinlein wrote between 1939 and 1958. Heinlein had been rather successful in expressing advanced and enlightened ideas not often found in adolescent stories of the time. I enjoyed Have Spacesuit—Will Travel immensely. It contained a wonderful mix of fast-paced storytelling, fun characters and scientific facts. The science fiction is just that, of course, but the human characters of the story engage in detailed exercises of astronomical calculations and practical engineering that, in modern novels, might be stultifying, but I enjoyed a dose of old-fashioned SF.

Show Less

I have a love-hate relationship with Heinlein's work. Several of his novels, such as this one, are some of my all-time favorite books, but there are others, like Starship Troopers, which leave me cold. Have Spacesuit was one of the very first science fiction novels I read as a child and it holds a

Show More

special place in my heart.

It is the story of an average highschool age male named Kip who has come into possession of an old spacesuit and who dreams of being an astronaut. He makes contact with an intelligent young girl, Pee Wee, who has been kidnapped by thugs and they soon find themselves trapped on frozen Pluto with the kind, yet mysterious, Mother Thing. They escape only to find themselves on trial as representatives of the human species.

Show Less

Another one of Heinlein's cozy novels I really enjoyed as a teenager. Not very serious, but extremely enjoyable and at times also funny.

First, a caveat: I'm not a science fiction fan and read this classic Young Adult novel because it is part of the local library district's All Pikes Peak Reads program. Given that, this was a fun read. Kip, a boy in high school, wants to go to the moon, now a tourist destination, and so enters a

Show More

soap contest for a trip. When he gets a used spacesuit, he makes it functional and practices moving in it. From there, his adventure begins. It includes a whirlwind of a young girl called PeeWee, the planet Vega, the Mother Thing, and wormfaces.

Written more than 50 years ago, the story was entertaining. Part of it was dated and part not. I thought it was interesting how much Kip loves his slide rule, something most kids have never seen. (Unfortunately, I remember it well but not fondly.) I think this is a good read for fans of science fiction who would like to read the best of how it used to be.

Show Less

This seemed more like a "Heinlein for Teens" book than some of the others I've read/listened to.

There was more "science" in this book than I've seen in his sci-fi. Talking about the distances between planets and other heavenly bodies can be pretty dry (although I kind of liked it).

An experiment: I'm trying to understand the popularity of Heinlein. I'm not sure this was the right book to start with (I've also read, long ago, Stranger in a Strange Land), but I'd seen enough references to it to be curious.

Pro: A breezy, often funny, occasionally insightful writing style. A nice

Show More

change from the sometimes-ponderous tone of (to borrow a term) the lately somewhat grimdark SF.

Con: Characterization? What characterization?

Pro: Lots of stuff happens. This stuff is easy to understand.

Con: Much of that stuff is silly. An alien species puts the entire human race on trial, using two modern kids, a Roman soldier, and a Neanderthal as defense? Umm...

I guess this was a "juvenile," so I shouldn't fault it too much for its simplicity. It was published into a different environment. But... blah.

Next up: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? Time Enough for Love? Maybe I should jump right into Starship Troopers before I give up on this experiment with disgust?

Show Less

I first read this book at the suggestion of a librarian in grade school. It was great then and when I recently took it for another spin it did not disappoint. It got me started on a lifelong love for SF and reading. Thank you librarians!

One of my favourite Heinlein novels. The story is engaging, interesting, amusing, intelligent, and "sweet". A highly intelligent and technically talented young man, Kip Russell, restores a space suit he won in a contest.

Wearing the suit (a test walk) he is kidnapped by an even younger girl (who is

Show More

even smarter than he is), flying a "flying saucer", which she stole from a group of bad, advanced aliens, who are hiding on the Moon, who wish to invade the Earth, and had kidnapped her, whom she had escaped from. They are both re-captured by these aliens (or at least their human lackeys), returned to the Moon, and then on to Pluto.

The two youngsters manage to escape again, with the help of a good, advanced alien (the mother thing), who then transports them to a planet orbiting Vega, then to the Small Magellanic Cloud (!!!). Here both the bad aliens and then humans are put on trial. The bad guys are exterminated (Heinlein), but humanity is given a C pass, to be examined again to determine if that are a threat. From here out young heroes return to the Earth.

A fantastical story, made real by Heinlein's superb writing ability, and his talent for making a story come to life. I recall the first time I read the novel, I could picture myself on that long, hard, march across the Luna surface. Great stuff.

Show Less

An experiment: I'm trying to understand the popularity of Heinlein. I'm not sure this was the right book to start with (I've also read, long ago, Stranger in a Strange Land), but I'd seen enough references to it to be curious.

Pro: A breezy, often funny, occasionally insightful writing style. A nice

Show More

change from the sometimes-ponderous tone of (to borrow a term) the lately somewhat grimdark SF.

Con: Characterization? What characterization?

Pro: Lots of stuff happens. This stuff is easy to understand.

Con: Much of that stuff is silly. An alien species puts the entire human race on trial, using two modern kids, a Roman soldier, and a Neanderthal as defense? Umm...

I guess this was a "juvenile," so I shouldn't fault it too much for its simplicity. It was published into a different environment. But... blah.

Next up: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? Time Enough for Love? Maybe I should jump right into Starship Troopers before I give up on this experiment with disgust?

Show Less

Kip is a high schools senior that is highly motivated to go to the Moon. He enters a contest to win a trip there and doesn’t win but does receive a used space suit. The contest does offer him the chance to sell it back to them for a cash prize which he is thinking about even as he spends time

Show More

refurbishing the suit and wearing the suit as much as he can. The afternoon before he is ready to give it up an alien attacks him as he is giving radio signals to a ship trying to land on Earth. So begins Kips adventures on the Moon and beyond with only his wits and a partnership with PeeWee a girl genus kidnapped while on the moon and the Mother Thing, an alien from a different race than the one that has taken PeeWee and now Kip.

I may have been the wrong age to read this, but Kip kept getting under my skin. He starts out as kid floating though school until his dad sets him down to explain that his school isn’t that great and he will have to self-educate himself if he really wants to go to the good schools. As an audio book it got a bit tedious listening to all the science formulas being spoken out but that is more on a problem with the audio than the book. In the end it wasn’t a book for me even though I’ve read and enjoyed lots of his other books.

Show Less

I feel like there is a weird bias when analyzing Heinlein’s work and this book in particular.

I never really got that the Competent Man in Heinlein books was presented as the norm. It was always the protagonist or the protagonist's mentor, characters who can be expected to be exceptional in some

Show More

way. There were always people beyond reclamation, but Jubal and Lazarus always tried to elevate people around them. They thought everyone should be competent while knowing not everyone was and also that some were determined to not be competent.

I am one of those neckbeards that took that message but not in the way some people might suggest. I set out from a very young age to have the broadest set of skills and knowledge I could acquire while also acquiring sufficient depth on a few of them to be able to have a career. While this has resulted in more hobbies and unfinished projects than I can count, the unexpected benefits have more than paid off in both reduced cost of living by being able to make and maintain a lot of my own stuff myself and also through finding novel solutions by bringing unusual experience to problem solving in my various jobs. Additionally, I never got the general disrespect of academia Heinlein’s books have. I got the disrespect of excessive academia, totally divorced from practicality. But there was clear respect for people who had to be specialized to the exclusion of general competence when it was clear that was necessary to apply sufficient brain-power to the problem being considered. There wasn't time for such people to develop general competence. Those people were to be funded and protected, not disrespected.

Almost no Greek character is free of hubris. Odysseus got cursed by Poseidon all because he bragged to the blinded Cyclops and told him his real name. Theseus got locked in Hell for trying to kidnap Persephone. Perseus was an idiot to agree to hunt Medusa in the first place and had to be helped out through divine intervention or he never could have done it. Heinlein is just carrying the torch so to speak.

If you want to know the more idealistic side of Heinlein’s ‘competent man’ in his young-adult stories, track down this one and ‘Citizen of the Galaxy’. They’re probably two of his best YA novels and can show how these ideas play out.

Maybe I am alone in this.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Show Less

One of the best ever juvenile sci-fi books ever written!

Badly dated and the writing just isn't good enough to justify reading it again. There are Heinlein books that I'm l re-reading nearly 50 years later and still enjoying, but I gave up on this one after four chapters.

Adolescents save the world with American gumption and can-do attitudes. Not my favourite Heinlein.

The story line is unique and is a series of imaginative events. The story has a semblance of intellectual contect but in reality is somewhat ridiculous. The evaluation of the human race by the Vegans and the logic provided by the Mother-Thing and others is theoretically a moral evaluation that

Show More

basically comes down to a let's wait and see before we destroy all humans is weak. Although I am fond of the author's works, I cannot give a strong recommendation for this book.

Show Less