Book Review; Tunnel in the Sky

I'll admit to being something of a Heinlein fan, but I'm not an apologist. I've read some of his stuff that just plain wasn't good, or seemed a little bonkers. His latter works as he started slipping come to mind.

Tunnel in the Sky, thankfully, is not one of those. If you can get past some of the 50's style "Jee Whilicers" dialogue, it's got a good plot with solid characterization. It's vintage Heinlein, a good adventure romp with plenty of self-sufficient philosophy thrown in.  It's a page turner, but damned it's short. I got through it in a couple days worth of spare time.

I suspect that if the book was ever made into a movie, the same troupe of racists would trot out their arguments on why the talent scouts stubbed their toe, just like with the character "Rue" in the Hunger Games movie. The main character, "Rod", is indeed black. If the reader can't suss that out of the book, they need to burn their high school diploma and give their state a refund on their public education, because obviously it didn't take.

Anywho.

My edition is on the Kindle, so as expected there were relatively few grammatical and spelling errors. There were some, but not many folks are going to jump on a half-century old book with both feet and complain about it. At least, not too much.

One of my favorite things about reading Heinlein is that he expects his readers to be well read. It had been about a decade since I read through Kipling's verse, but I had to trot out a copy to get a reference about "The Truce of the Bear". After a refresher, the comment made perfect sense. At some point I'll get a full copy of the Five Nations and review it, but for now Google worked fine.

My one real gripe with the book is that I don't think that the side characters were very well fleshed out. There were five or six characters that I knew intimately by the end of the book, but there were literally dozens of toss-away characters, that I knew were toss-away characters but expected a little bit more than a window treatment from Heinlein. Didn't get it, no joy. Boo, hiss. Heinlein knew better, of course, but I suspect that his real focus was on the ordeals of nation building. I can't blame him for that, but I still blame him for losing track of characters.

I really liked Tunnel in the Sky, but of course nothing is perfect. Since liked this one just a touch less than "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", so in keeping with that this book rates an 88 out of 100 on my reviewing scale. Not bad, not bad at all.