Red Planet (novel)

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Image:Red-planet-cover.jpg Red Planet is a 1949 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein about students at boarding school on Mars. It represents the first appearance of Heinlein's idealized Martian elder race concept. The version published in 1949 featured a number of changes forced on Heinlein by the publishers. After Heinlein's death the book as Heinlein originally submitted it, with no cuts or alterations, was printed by Del Rey Books.

1 Plot
2 Connections with "Stranger in a Strange Land"
3 Bibliography
4 External links

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Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

An unscrupulous colonial administrator, Beecher, a relative of the authoritarian headmaster of the Lowell Academy boarding school, Mr.Howe seeks to prevent the annual migration of families to save the Company money. The secret "non-migration" policy is discovered by two boys, Jim Marlowe and Frank Kelley, who find out about the plan from Jim's Martian friend, Willis the Bouncer. Mr. Howe had taken Willis claiming it was against the rules to have pets. When Jim went to get Willis back, he said he wasn't his pet, he was his friend. Howe used this statement to claim that Willis wasn't Jim's property and thus he didn't have to give him back. He was planning on selling him to the London Zoo for a hefty price, but Jim and Frank snuck into Howe's office and rescued Willis before running away from school to warn their parents about the non migration policy.

In the course of their escape Jim and Frank befriend the Martians through a ritual called "growing together", a state of euphoria where the Martians sit and do nothing. They also share water, which is echoed throughout the book that Jim and the Martian Gekko are water friends. While escaping Jim and Frank are transported back to their home in the South Colony by a Martian "subway". Once at the colony, Jim's dad quickly organizes the migration, hoping to catch Beecher without warning and force the migration. They soon reach the boarding school, which they organize as a temporary shelter. Howe locks himself in his office, while Beecher sets up armed guards outside to prevent the colonists from migrating. After two people are killed when trying to surrender, the colonists decide to take action into their own hands and force an uprising. During the night, the colonists sneak out and take control of the human planetary authority and issue a proclamation of autonomy from Earth. The crusty Doctor MacRae and the two boys are heroes, but the Martians present the colonist with an ultimatum: leave the planet. In the end Jim's relationship with Willis ultimately helps save the colony, as the Martians let the humans stay.

It turns out that the bouncer is a larval Martian, and at the end of the story, Jim prepares to give him up so Willis may undergo the pupal stage. Like Podkayne of Mars, there are two versions of the ending, as originally written (and much later published), it is made clear that Willis will not emerge as an adult for fifty years. (this was cut at the request of Heinlein's publishers, as was a discussion in which a character expresses strong views against gun control)

The Martians start life as bouncers, metamorphose into adults, then continue their lives after death as "old ones" (echoed in Stranger in a Strange Land). While living on the physical plane, they inhabit both worlds: the physical and the (unspecified) other.

In 1994, the novel was adapted by Lee Gunther's Gunther-Wahl Productions into an animated miniseries, featuring the voices of Mark Hamill, Roddy McDowall and Nick Tate.

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Connections with "Stranger in a Strange Land"

The life cycle of Martians is the same in both books.

Beecher's disappearance at the "hands" of the Martians is echoed in an incident described in Stranger, in which a xenophobic human similarly vanishes.

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