Book Review: Double Star

Robert A. Heinlein

1956

Awards: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This is one of Heinlein’s earlier books and is a quick and easy read. It’s not quite as irritating as some of his full-blown Randite treatises, since the libertarian proselytizing is kept to just a moderately annoying level. It also helps that the main character is supposed to be something of an egotistical jerk, so it is no stretch for him to treat the lone female character in typically demeaning Heinleinian fashion.

The book starts with an out-of-work actor, “The Great” Lorenzo Smythe, sitting in a seedy bar on Earth. He is approached by a shady space voyageur, who offers him a role in an unnamed production with a huge salary and no questions asked. Within minutes after Smythe has provisionally accepted the role, he finds himself (a) fending off an attack by tree-like Martians carrying ray guns, (b) helping the voyageur dismember and dispose of the attackers’ bodies, and (c) being smuggled off to Mars in the voyageur’s spacecraft.

It then turns out that Smythe’s mysterious “role” is to impersonate a politician: John Bonforte, the leader of the free-trade, anti-regulation Expansionist Party in the solar-system-wide parliament. The real John Bonforte has been kidnaped but his supporters don’t want to admit that to the media just yet, since he is about to be inducted into a Martian “nest” as a full citizen of Mars, and backing out of the ceremony now could have big consequences for intergalactic politics. They want Smythe to impersonate Bonforte for the induction ceremony.

This is all great up to here. (And at least a little evocative of the plot of the 1993 movie Dave.) But then Heinlein can’t help but reveal his true colors.

Smythe is resistant to the whole impersonation plan at first but eventually, in spite of himself, becomes attracted to Bonforte’s ideals and to the plucky group of Bonforte’s supporters trying to do what they believe is best for all of society.

One of these supporters is Bonforte’s secretary, Miss Penny Russell. Like all women in Heinlein’s books, she is the unattainable ready-for-the-pedestal ideal: at once “lovable” and “incredibly efficient,” young, attractive, and skilled but prone to weeping and breakdowns when her man is hurt. As a reward for being good at her job she gets called “curly top” and “honey chile” by her boss. She is the only female with a speaking role in the book, which ironically may be a good thing since when Heinlein puts more women in his stories they only get more awful.

And, unfortunately, Bonforte’s ideals are pretty much nothing but heavy-handed and unsubstantiated free-market sloganeering. At the one point where Smythe-as-Bonforte is questioned about whether or not his anti-regulation plans really will bring about a better system for everyone, he admits it is unproven and that we basically just have to have faith that it will.

                              

I do have to admit that this book taught me two things about Heinlein’s strain of libertarian philosophy that I didn’t know before. One is that a monarchy can coexist happily with libertarianism. I would have thought that the two were antithetical but it turns out no—in Double Star, there is a constitutional monarchy in addition to the representative parliament, and this suits Bonforte/Heinlein just fine. The king is relatively unmeddlesome and serves primarily as a ceremonial figurehead, as in Britain; the parliamentarians see him as protecting the head of parliament, the First Minister, from irrelevant pomp and ceremony, so he can focus just on running the government.

I also found it interesting that even though Heinlein (via Bonforte) is so obnoxious about women, he is relatively advanced about race (at least as far as alien races go). One of the key planks of Bonforte’s platform is that he wants to bring the “eetees”—the Martians, the Venerians, and the Outer Jovians—into the solar system as full citizens, complete with full representation in the parliament. He compares their disenfranchisement to that of black people in the USA in the 1950s. He pursues this goal in spite of xenophobia from Earth and to the detriment of his own career, saying that he is fighting for certain ethical basics that transcend time and space. To him, wanting the eetees to be full partners is just a logical application of the idea that a completely free-trade, free-travel system with a minimum of restrictions and maximum of participants naturally leads to a better economy for everybody.