Space Cadet
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Space Cadet is a 1948 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein about Matt Dodson, who joins the Space Patrol that keeps the peace in the solar system. The story at first appears to be a fairly imaginative and remarkably detailed exercise in translating the standard military-academy story into outer space: a boy from Iowa goes to officer school, sees action, and becomes a man. The book, however, goes on to explore some surprisingly sophisticated ethical issues through adventures that are much less military than one would expect.
Adaptations
This juvenile novel inspired Joseph Lawrence Greene of Grosset and Dunlap to develop the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet comic books, television series, radio show, comic strip, and novels that were popular in the early 1950s. Greene had originally submitted a radio script for "Tom Ranger" and the "Space Cadets" on January 16, 1946, but it remained unperformed when Heinlein's novel was published.
Editions
- June 1948, Scribner, library binding, ISBN 0684124289. Later editions of the hardcover and all the paperback and SFBC editions have a glaring omission in Chapter 17
- August 12, 1978, Del Rey, paperback, ISBN 0345260724
- February 12, 1982, Del Rey, paperback, ISBN 0345306317
- October 12, 1985, Del Rey, paperback, ISBN 0345333977
- October 12, 1987, Del Rey, paperback reissue edition, ISBN 0345353110
- June 1, 2003, Thorndike Press, hardcover largeprint, ISBN 078625484X
- Four Frontiers, Science Fiction Book Club: June, 2005, ISBN 0-7394-5345-0 (four Heinlein juvenile novels, including Space Cadet)
Summary and discussion
The Patrol is entrusted with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. Matt, on a visit home, causes a family spat when his parents refuse to believe that the Patrol (and their son) would actually bomb Iowa. In the 1950s there was a great deal of discussion in the popular press of the idea that satellites in outer space could be used for bombing the surface of the earth, and this book was in fact on the leading edge of this speculative current.
While in fact no bomb-carrying satellites were ever constructed, the politics involved in Matt's quarrel with his family are still highly relevant.
Space cadets are taught that they should renounce allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and even wider, to all of the sentient species of the Solar System. They are offered four heroes/martyrs whom they should seek to emulate.
One of these, Rivera, had ordered the nuclear bombing of his own hometown (presumably the capital of an unnamed Latin American country) because the dictator in power there was doing something unspecified which posed a risk grave enough to justify such a drastic action. The bombing also claimed Rivera's own life, at his specific order. (Some may say that Rivera took the easy way out, and that it would be difficult for a sane person to go on living after having done such a thing).
The young, starry-eyed Matt feels that he should be able, if need arises, to emulate Rivera and destroy his own Iowa hometown with his family and friends in it. But his father tells him such a "need" would never arise, since the Patrol's cosmopolitan allegiance is little more than a sham and in fact it is controlled by the United States and serves its interests. Later, Matt's mentor in the Patrol more than half admits that it is indeed so.
Written almost a decade before the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and at a time when nonwhite characters were almost entirely absent from science fiction, the book also explores the theme of racism, both literally, in discussions of the cosmopolitan racial makeup of the Patrol, and metaphorically, in its description of conflict with the Venerians. The Venerians are at first thought to be primitive, but we later learn that they have a high level of technological sophistication, developed along radically different lines than that of humans. Matt and his friends avert possible war with the Venerians with some deft cultural maneuvering when a former schoolmate provokes the otherwise peace-loving matriarchical society of Venus.
There is also a subplot revolving around the issue of what it means to be a good soldier. The Patrol is meant to be a kind of thinking person's military organization, as contrasted against the Marines, who are trained to believe in unquestioning loyalty and bravery as the highest ideals. Discouraged with the intellectual demands of his training for the Patrol, Matt requests a transfer to the Marines, but is dissuaded by his mentor.
See: http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/works/articles/flightofspeculation.html