I was going to write to you today about a book I just finished re-reading about El Nino. But I was in the mood for something fun so I’m going to write about this one instead. This book came to mind recently because my sister’s teen kid needed to write a book report about Stranger in a Strange Land which is not one of my favorites – too serious by far for me, but they liked it so we were texting each other about Heinlein’s other books instead of working/paying attention in school.¹

This is one of what I call Heinlein’s boy adventure novels. I keep saying that, and I don’t mean it pejoratively, it’s just what I’ve always thought about them, mainly because the main characters are young men who get to have adventures; with occasional appearances by young women who tend to be focused on their looks and marriage. Heinlein did try to write a book about a young woman having adventures – Podkayne of Mars – and it was, to my grave disappointment, a sad disaster, totally not worth reading. I think he sensed that as he killed her off at the end of the book, good riddance.

Citizen of the Galaxy takes place long after humans have developed space travel and settled other worlds. In a busy spaceport reminiscent of Mos Eisley (although this one came first) on a far off planet, slavery has reemerged and the book opens with an auction where a one-legged, one-eyed beggar is bidding for a feral boy. Everyone makes fun of him but one affluent bidder tosses him a few coins so he can complete his purchase. The beggar takes the boy home with him, cleans him up, and treats him like a son. The beggar, whom the boy soon comes to realize is not just a beggar, educates the boy and teaches him to recognize the various ships that visit the planet by shape, logo, and call sign. He also makes him memorize a short speech in another language and tells the boy, Thorby, that if he is ever in danger, to wait for a particular ship to arrive at the port and speak those words to them.

Several years later,when the beggar is arrested as a spy and the cops start hunting Thorby, he manages to make it to the ship his “father” told him about and seek refuge. The captain of the ship “adopts” him into the ship and he learns the ship’s language, culture, and operations The ship is one of a fleet of nomadic ships that travel independently around the galaxy and meet up periodically for a festival and to maintain genetic diversity by trading crew members to other ships. Several years later, when one of the young women on Thorby’s ship begins considering him marriage material – marriage material, he thinks, I thought she was just a good sport² – she gets transferred to one of the other ships. The captain then has Thorby recite the words he had memorized as a young boy and Thorby realizes that it’s a message in the language he has learned on this ship, the kind of message that starts, “If you’re receiving this message, I am dead. I am calling in the favor you owe me for rescuing people from your clan so long ago. Please take care of this boy and get him back to Earth…”

And then the captain turns Thorby over to the Hegemonic Guard³ to be returned to Earth. Since Thorby doesn’t have any papers, he has to enlist in the guard to get onboard their ship, so he works in the crew while the ship makes its way across the galaxy. He enjoys it so much – and is inspired by the fact that his “father”, as it turns out, was spying on slave traders on the Guard’s behalf – that he decides that, once he gets things settled on Earth, he’d like to join the Guard permanently.

But, when he returns to Earth, he discovers that he is actually the heir to a huge interstellar company, with fingers in many pies. He is taken in by an old friend of the family who is a board member of the company and who has a daughter Thor’s age. But, as the two of them poke around a little – don’t bother your head with such weighty things, my boy – they discover that a) one of the lucrative forms of business that this company is secretly involved in is – you guessed it – the slave trade; and b) the disappearance of Thor and his parents, oh so many years ago, seems to have been engineered by members of the organization.

A proxy battle ensues.

I’m not kidding. In true American fashion, the whole thing is settled by a proxy battle, with members of the board voting their shares against young Thor who owns more than any one of them but not quite, not quite enough to outvote them.

Until the daughter of his nemesis – who has fallen for Thor⁴ and drifts about in the kind of high-fashion clothes that you see in Vogue that no one ever really wears around the house – votes some shares that dear old daddy gave her as a tax dodge or for a future dowry or something.

Okay, I gave the ending away. But you had to see Thor’s triumph coming. And, for this book, the fun is not the plot itself but the way it is told, the places and people that Thor meets along the way. I mean, deep down inside, you knew Luke was going to blow up the Death Star, that Indie would prevail over the Nazi’s, that Jim would prevent Long John Silver from finding the treasure. That Frodo and Sam would somehow manage to drop the ring in Mount Doom and return. That Max will somehow escape the gas-pirates and live to fight another day.

It’s a maxim of a boy’s adventure that the hero always returns from their adventure. While it’s not unusual for SciFi movies to have the hero sacrifice himself and drift endlessly in space or maroon himself on a planet in order to save the ship, stories of this sort don’t kill off the heroes. Heinlein was apparently a big fan of Rudyard Kipling – with whom my acquaintance is slight – and many of the same themes appear in both, as I pointed out to my sister’s kid, in the hopes of encouraging more reading.⁵

I don’t know what it is with kids these days. They loved reading when they were younger but too much exposure to the web has made it hard, they tell me, for them to concentrate long enough to finish reading a book, although they have more luck listening to audio books instead. I’m hoping this is the teenage melodrama that we all indulged in.⁶ I am hoping that since this one seemed to enjoy Heinlein, they will keep reading, mainly because I need something to discuss that I can understand.⁷

So give this one to a teen reader and read it yourself – maybe it will bring you luck around the dinner table. And, even if it doesn’t, you’ll have read a fun book.

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1. Sorry for undermining their education, Sis, I just got carried away. ↩︎
2. See above. ↩︎
3. And did you ever think you’d hear Hegemony used in this context? ↩︎
4. See above. ↩︎
5. There’s also quite a bit of Robert Lewis Stevenson, although no one mentions that. Wikipedia does say this one was also influenced by, of all people, George Bernard Shaw. Hah! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, ye of classical literature who see Heinlein as trash – GBS! If he’s not classical literature, I don’t know who is. Wikipedia, settling arguments for millions. Actually, their entry on the history of SciFi is quite interesting. I mean, we knew Poe and Verne and Doyle – but Jack London? Give the entry a shot. ↩︎
6. Well, at least I did, even if you were more mature for your age which we all are in retrospect although our parents will set us straight if we say that aloud or maybe yours will, mine won’t since they are both dead and my father didn’t pay too much attention when I was that age anyway. ↩︎
7. The rehabbing of ancient Xbox devices being outside my wheelhouse. You reach a point where I. Just. Can’t. SciFi gives us something we both enjoy talking about. ↩︎