Yesterday my husband and I made the mistake of watching the movie, The Giver. Within 5 minutes, our expectations for the movie were significantly lowered but I insisted on finishing it: I haven’t read The Giver but I had read something else that I thought she had written, when I was a little girl (but now, checking her website and googling what I thought the title was, I realize that she hadn’t written it and it wasn’t called what I thought it was called), and so I wanted to finish the movie. The kindest thing I could say about it was derivative. Of Logan’s Run. Or Anthem. Or We.

So for some reason, I decided it was a good night to re-read Farmer in the Sky. This is one of Heinlein’s “boy’s adventures” space novels. Written in the early 1950’s, these books follow mainly boys – mostly singly or in pairs – as they have adventures in space. This one takes place on Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. It seems to take place in the same “universe” as Red Planet (about Mars) and Between Planet (Venus). Those three seem to play together; then there are The Rolling Stones (a family exploring the asteroid belt), Have Spacesuit Will Travel (boy gets kidnapped by aliens), and Door into Tomorrow (one twin goes to distant space and communicates telepathically with other twin back on Earth). I like these books so much more than his adult books, although Stranger in a Strange Land gives us one of the best words in modern vocabulary: Grok. As in “Do you grok me?”

In Farmer in the Sky Bill, a teenage boy, takes “the new Mayflower” to Ganymede with his father and his new stepmother and stepsister, to become a farmer. Earth, over-populated, has run so short on food that calories are rationed, people live in apartments with TVs instead of windows, but Bill’s high school class can pop down to Antarctica on an afternoon field trip. The book spends a few chapters setting up Bill’s character as they get ready to leave, his fights with his father, his boy scouting activities. Then they shuttle up to the ship – establishing some of the challenges of space travel for Heinlein’s groundling readers – and then he spends an Enterprise-length amount of time describing the Mayflower, the layout, how it works, how the engine works, how the hydroponics work. The boys onboard start the Ganymede chapter of scouts, go to school (more boring stuff about physics and astrophysics), and Bill saves the lives of his 20 dorm-mates when a meteor hits the ship.

When they arrive on Ganymede, the colonists are disappointed to discover that the Ganymede colony isn’t ready for them. The original colonists had arrived on a slow ship, carrying all the materials needed to build homes and buildings and break up the rocks that are the planet’s only natural crop. After creating the soil (creating soil is half the farmer’s job there), got in a few good harvests, expecting the next ship in a few years with more materials, more equipment, and a few colonists. Instead, the company bureaucrats back on Earth sent a faster ship that held ten times as many people as expected, paying customers who took up the space needed for materials and equipment. (Bureaucratic short-sidedness and selfishness are a running theme for Heinlein.) So, anyway, they have no housing for the new arrivals – and, although the colonists can stake a claim on the land, they’ll have to wait for close to two years for the equipment needed to work the land.

Bill works as a hired hand at the home of their new neighbor and learns about farming and raising animals while waiting for the rock-eating equipment to show up. The scouts get together to raise a house for the family, and the neighbor gifts Bill a handful of apple seeds to grow his own trees. They pressurize one of the rooms of the house so Bill’s new sister, whose body it turns out can’t handle the gravity and atmosphere on Ganymede, can join them, and gets some rabbits and chickens, and a milk cow. They all gather around to watch a glorious sunset, made better by a planetary alignment, and Bill wanders down to the pond, reflecting how lucky they are.

And then the earthquake hits.

The house collapses, his sister is injured, the plant controlling the artificial weather goes down, and the temperature quickly drops to negative numbers so low that everyone who survived the earthquake takes refuge in town. 13,000 people die, along with almost all the farm animals, and all the crops. A good chunk of the remaining characters head back to Earth, but the rest hunker down, pull on their big farmer’s overalls, and get to work turning things around.

More happens after that, Bill gets appendicitis, the scouts discover an abandoned alien hanger containing ground and air ships and other technology. And, in typical Heinlein style, Bill decides not to go back to Earth to earn a medical or maybe an engineering degree at MIT or Harvard, but to stay on Ganymede – or maybe be on the first wave of settlers for one of Jupiter’s other moons – and prove to his dad that he doesn’t need some fancy degree to make a success of himself, gol’ darn it!

Say what you like about his politics, Heinlein’s books are awfully fun to read. The parallels with early colonies in the U.S. are clear (and repeated throughout the book) and his predictions about the future are interesting in where they are spot on (microwaves) and where they are off (totally misses climate change). Who hasn’t fantasized every now and then about joining a colony in the sky, where you can be part of creating a whole new world? And he doesn’t pull punches: his sister (stock character that she is) dies; the farmer (“Johnny Appleseed”) next door loses his precious apple tree.

Compare this to the movie, The Giver (here’s hoping the book is better): the only original idea in the whole thing is the old man transferring the world’s memories by holding the boy’s hands. A repressive society that forms after societal collapse, where speech is controlled, and people’s memories have been wiped, their emotions controlled. Yawn. Watch Logan’s Run instead.

So what did I learn from reading Farmer in the Sky? Stand up for yourself. Don’t expect others to do for you what you should do for yourself – and, when people do give you apple tree seeds or put up a house for you, be grateful. Follow the instructions of authority but don’t rely on government to save you.

And don’t go for hikes when you are coming down with appendicitis.