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Space Cadet par Robert A. Heinlein
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Space Cadet (original 1948; édition 1978)

par Robert A. Heinlein (Auteur)

Séries: Heinlein Juveniles (2)

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2,108227,701 (3.59)50
A young man reports for the final tests for appointment as a cadet in the Interplanetary Patrol, survives the tests, studies in the school ship, and goes on a regular Patrol vessel and encounters danger on Venus.
Membre:clarkba
Titre:Space Cadet
Auteurs:Robert A. Heinlein (Auteur)
Info:Del Rey (1978), 221 pages
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La patrouille de l'espace par Robert A. Heinlein (1948)

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Affichage de 1-5 de 22 (suivant | tout afficher)
I enjoyed this one much more than Rocket Ship Galileo. I think Space Cadet has stood the test of time well. Sure, you get some unavoidable examples of aged technology. Again, the failure to imagine how thoroughly computers would change everything is the main example, although I can't blame someone writing in the 40s for that. Science fiction or not, these are writers, not prophets. There are also many things we know now about the Solar System that were unknown then, so we get native Venusians and humans living there, while we now know that the temperature there is unsuitable for life. In other things, though, Heinlein makes some interesting extrapolations. The book has cell phones, for example, and teaching technology more advanced than anything we have now.

The novel also shows its age in the lack of women in the Space Patrol. It's exclusively a boys' club. On the other hand, the Patrol is international and everyone takes racial integration for granted, which seems normal now but for the time it was written was a bold step. Heinlein tries, and although others will disagree, I won't condemn him for not freeing himself of all the prejudices of his time.

However, what makes this work so well for me is that the writing style does not seem dated at all. The book does provide an optimistic view of the future that awaits young people as they grow up. While nowadays dystopian YA novels are prevalent, and society seems to be ready to screw young people and crush their dreams, in Space Cadet it is assumed that if you work hard and have a good attitude you can achieve success and acceptance, grow up as a person, see the universe and have a positive impact on it. Unfortunately, this may be old-fashioned in our more pessimistic age, but Heinlein works very well with this material...

I really enjoyed the training process Matt and his friends go through. It certainly reminded me of Starship Troopers but without the grumpy political lectures. Heinlein himself was at the U.S. Naval Academy, and it shows. He has a good understanding of how an organization like the Space Patrol would train youngsters to become good officers and what it would expect of them. The Cadets work hard, sometimes their workload seems impossible but never actually becomes so. They grow up and sometimes they have doubts about whether this is the path they are meant to take. I enjoyed how Matt despaired when he couldn't deal with his astrogration course, and how he felt tempted to join the marines instead, an organization also with proud traditions and a high purpose, where he wouldn't have to study so hard. The chat he had with his commanding officer then was quite good.

Another detail I enjoyed was how when Matt went home on leave he found out that he no longer really fit there. He had grown up and, although he of course still loved his family, his old home no longer felt like home.

All in all, the training process was done quite well. There was even normal banter between the teenage friends, which was something I missed in Rocket Ship Galileo. In the last part of the book we get to see Matt & company in action, with their commanding officer conveniently disabled. That part was a bit weaker. The Venusians were kind of interesting, but they sometimes seemed like the stereotypical "good savage" in the presence of colonists.

An excellent coming-of-age story and a good read even 65 years later. ( )
  jcm790 | May 26, 2024 |
review of
Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 7, 2015

Since I joined GoodReads in 2007 & decided to review every bk I read as a sort of intellectual exercise, I've had a rule to not let more of a backlog than 3 unreviewed bks accumulate. By the time I decided to read THIS I had that backlog of 3 & was already in the midst of reading something else. As such, I picked this as easy reading: something that wdn't drain my already endangered intellectual energy.

Heinlein published this in 1948, 5 yrs before I was born. His work was among the earliest SF I read. I've commented on him at least several times before in other reviews. He was important to me as a child but by the time I was in my mid-teens I more or less started to 'outgrow' him.

I was interested to read, in later yrs, Samuel Delaney commenting on Heinlein's non-racist perspective. Heinlein's definitely good for that & this bk demonstrates it well:

"Matt noticed two boys with swarthy, thin features who were wearing high, tight turbans, although dressed otherwise much like himself. Further down the walk he glimpsed a tall, handsome youth whose impassive face was shiny black." - p 7

These are the Space Cadets. Heinlein recognizes that astronauts must be judged on merit alone if the promise of the future is to bear fruit.

"'I welcome you to our fellowship. You come from many lands, some from other planets. You are of various colours and creeds. Yet you must and shall become a band of brothers.[']" - p 36

"Matt nodded. 'I know that they are described as being a gentle, unwarlike race. I can't imagine becoming really fond of them, but the spools I studied showed them as friendly.'

"'That's just race prejudice. A Venerian is easier to like than a man.'

"'Oz, that's not fair,' Tex protested. 'Matt hasn't got any race prejudice and neither have I. Take Lieutenant Peters — did it make any difference to us that he's black as the ace of spades?'" - p 134

I don't know when portable phones 1st appeared predictively in culture but this 1948 appearance strikes me as prescient: "[']Say, your telephone is sounding.' / 'Oh!' Matt fumbled in his pouch and got out his phone. 'Hello?'" (p 8) & while Heinlein was certainly forward-thinking he was surprisingly off in one prediction:

"USAF Rocket Ship Kilroy Was Here
FIRST TRUE SPACESHIP
1975A.D.
From Terra to Luna and return - Lieut. Colonel Robert deFries Sims, Commanding; Captain Saul S. Abrams; Master Sergeant Malcolm MacGregor.
None survived the return landing. Rest in Peace." - p 9

In actuality, 1969 was the date when the Apollo 11 made it to the moon & all lived on the return landing. Even Heinlein cdn't foresee such a stunning early success!

Heinlein's sense of how human nature works & how it shd be studied is tricky:

"'Excuse me, sir — but what's to keep a person from cheating by peeking?'

"The examiner smiled. 'Nothing at all. Go on to your next test.'

"Matt left, grumbling. It did not occur to him that he might not know what was being tested." - p 16

But Heinlein has ethics, this isn't the Heinlein of human interplanetary soldiers blowing away giant insects, this is the Heinlein of hopeful diplomacy:

"'It is not enough that you be skillful, clever, brave — The trustees of this awful power must each possess a meticulous sense of honour, self-discipline beyond all ambition, conceit or avarice, respect for the liberties and dignity of all creatures, and an unyielding will to do justice and give mercy. He must be a true and gentle knight.'" - p 36

This particular Heinlein strikes me as somewhat hard science:

"Getting the Bolivar from Colorado to the Randolph, and all other problems of journeying between the planets, are subject to precise and elegant mathematical solution under four laws formulated by the saintly, absent-minded Sir Isaac newton nearly four centuries earlier than the flight of the Bolivar — the three Laws of Motion and the Law of Gravitation. These laws are simple; their application in space to get from where you are to where you want to be, at the correct time with the correct course and speed, is a nightmare of complicated, fussy computation." - p 44

His description of a teacher demonstrating how to move around outside the space station in a space-suit with jet propulsion in a relatively gravity-free situation strikes me as well-thought out for 1948:

"'But I don't want to go to the Station; I want to come back to the ship.' The monkey died again; when the convulsions ceased, the sergeant was facing them. He cut in his jet and again counted ten seconds. He hung in space, motionless with respect to the ship and his class and a bout a quarter mile away. 'I'm oming in on a jet landing to save time.' The jet blasted for twenty seconds and died; he moved towards them rapidly." - p 67

I remember Heinlein as being someone who held on to what I think of as post-WWII positivity about military intervention long past its ideological erosion. Perhaps that's unfair to him. In Space Cadet he seems to have a less gung-ho attitude:

"A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behaviour and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalizse original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realised that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.

"The method was the discussion group, made up of youngsters, oldsters, and officers. The seminar leader would chuck out some proposition that attacked a value usually regarded as axiomatic. From there on anything could be said.

"It took Matt a while to get the hang of it. At his first session the leader offered: 'Resolved: that the Patrol is a detriment and should be abolished.' Matt could hardly believe his ears.

"In rapid succession he heard it suggested that the past hundred years of Patrol-enforced peace had damaged the race, that the storm of mutations that followed atomic warfare were necessarily of net benefit under the inexorable laws of evolution, that neither the human race nor any of the other races of the system could expect to survive permanently in the universe if they forsook war, and that, in any case, the Patrol was made up of self-righteous fat-heads who mistook their own trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature." - pp 80-81

Or, maybe, this, too, is a gung-ho attitude insofar as it expresses a belief in the military's being able to be flexible (& replaceable) when that's called for for survival.

"'I know, I know — you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but to prevent fighting, by every possible means. The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men.

"'With the development last century of mass-destruction weapons, warfare became all offense and no defense, speaking broadly. A nation could launch a horrific attack but it could not even protect its own rocket bases. Then space travel came along.

"'The space-ship is the perfect answer in a military sense to the atom bomb, and to germ warfare and weather warfare. It can deliver an attack that can't be stopped — and it is utterly impossible to attack that space-ship from the surface of a planet.'" - p 87

I found the description of astronaut training to be successfully claustrophobic. As I've probably written many times before, I was once a research volunteer for space station preparatory living in which behavior modification techniques were tried for keeping the astronaut mentally & physically stimulated in a restrictive environment. I enjoyed it. I'm not so sure I'd enjoy actually being isolated from this planet:

"Matt found himself thinking about Des Moines in a
late summer evening... with fireflies winking and the cicadas singing in the trees, and the air so thick and heavy you could cup it in your hand. Suddenly he hated the steel shell around him, with its eternal free-fall and its filtered air and its artificial lights." - p 82

Then again, Heinlein's realistic depiction of the myopic downsides of social-life-on-Earth help make the more visionary space patrol life seem attractive by contrast:

"Aunt Dora had not asked a thousand questions: she had asked just one — why had he waited so long to come to see her? Thereafter Matt found himself being informed, in detail, on the shortcomings of the new pastor, the marriage chances of several female relatives and connections, and the state of health of several older women, many of them unknown to him, including details of operations and post-operative developments." - p 92

"The Aes Triplex using an economical 'Hohmann'-type*

"*Hohmann, Dr. Walter—The Attainability of the Celestial Bodies, Munich, 1925. This pioneer work in astrogation written long before the flight of the Kilroy Was Here, remains the foundation work in its field. All subsequent work is refinement of basic principles set forth by Hohmann." - p 118

I'd never heard of Hohmann but I figured that he's an actual historical figure & not made up by Heinlein so I looked him up online: "In his spare time he devoted to celestial mechanics calculations, and in 1920 he published his book "Die Ereichbarkeit der Himmelskörper" (The Attainability of the Celestial Bodies). He developed basic principles and created advanced tools necessary for the conquest of space. His ideas were taken up for the Apollo program and the Voyager spacecraft (for example). Today he is considered a pioneer of space travel." ( http://www.att-essen.de/walter_hohmann_uk.html ) Heinlein nailed that one.

In the end, I was surprisingly impressed by this bk. Sometimes when I read something I find its influences deep w/in me already - at the core of myself. I don't think I read this when I was a kid but I certainly absorbed similar subtextual lessons from Heinlein from other bks of his. There's courage, imagination, & ethics that I can still identify w/ today. ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
You’d probably pass this one up because of the title, but you’d be wrong. Yes, a lot of the plot is predictable, but it there is something interesting going on besides the regular academy and coming-of-age stuff. The Space Patrol is in charge of a global deterrent, orbiting nuclear weapons. The folk on the ground are so used to peace that even talking about the bombs is impolite. Could we make a lasting peace out of Mutually Assured Destruction? What kind of guardians would we need to make that work? The chill of the cold war spawns a bit of hope.

Heinlein’s Space Patrol has a lot in common with Doc Smith’s Galactic Patrol, but without the all-knowning Arisians to keep them on course. This time, it is all up to the humans.

Of course, Ender’s Game is the best space cadet novel of all time, but I think it is a lot stronger if you know which direction a space cadet story is supposed to go. There are always a couple of cadets who don’t make the grade because they aren’t moral enough, but we don’t expect them to be psychopaths. Space Cadet stands on its own, but if you haven’t read Ender’s Game, you now have another reason to read Heinlein first. ( )
  wunder | Feb 3, 2022 |
Although a little dated, the story moves well. It is a perfect story for youths. Adventure, friendships, and pull yourself up by the bootstraps situations. Love it! ( )
  GlenRH | Jul 26, 2021 |
Like the other stories in Heinlein's "Scriber Juveniles" series our protagonist is an 18 year old boy who just graduated from high school. This time he's a guy who has decided to join the army. Except in the future of 2043 the Army is called the Patrol and their job is to stop war from happening (though superior fire power of course).

I struggled with how to rate this one because the idolization of national service is always dangerous, particularly for young people, and even more disturbing from someone many believe to be one of the forefathers of libertarianism.

But the story was good. I particularly liked the character of Tex and the never seen character of his uncle brodie. Great comedy. ( )
  fulner | May 30, 2021 |
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Nom de l'auteurRôleType d'auteurŒuvre ?Statut
Heinlein, Robert A.auteur principaltoutes les éditionsconfirmé
Borchert, BernhardArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Breese, AlanArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Davies, Gordon CArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
di Fate, VincentArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Freas, KellyArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Geary, Clifford N.Artiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Lacroix, ClaudeArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Meltzer, DavisArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Muray, JeanTraducteurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Nagel, HeinzTraducteurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Roch, HerbertTraducteurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Stephan, KarlArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Sweet, Darrell K.Artiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
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A young man reports for the final tests for appointment as a cadet in the Interplanetary Patrol, survives the tests, studies in the school ship, and goes on a regular Patrol vessel and encounters danger on Venus.

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