Title: Have Spacesuit - Will Travel
Author: Robert A. Heinlein
Published: 1958 by Charles Scribner's Sons
ISBN: 0-684-14857-9

I have long meant to read some good science fiction but just never gotten around to it. My wife is out of town for 5 weeks so I guess now's a good time. TV just bores me to death any more and the Gamecube gets old after a few hours. So I dropped by the library and picked up a classic Heinlein novel. I figured I should start with a good one, and it definitely was.

It's the tale of a boy, Clifford, who yearns to visit the moon. He enters a contest to win a trip but gets second prize which is a space suit. Being an enterprising lad, he figures it will be easier to get into space if his space suit is fully functional so he spends all his time fixing it up exactly to the original specification.

Wouldn't you know it, a spaceship drops by just as he's running around in his space suit and he's swept away on a whirlwind adventure around the universe. He gets caught up in a plot to destroy the earth and has to save the day. Lucky for us it works out pretty well, but I'm sure you assumed that.

My favorite part of the book was seeing what the future looked like in the 1950s. Clifford leaves home without his slide rule and laments about how useful it would be. He had to rig up his black and white TV so that he could watch the contest results. At one point he is impressed by the color displays that the alien spaceships have and declares that Earth will certainly have them in another twenty years. And he is especially impressed when Mother Thing creates a "stereo telephone the size of a pack of cigarettes." Wow.

Even funnier, though, are the excerpts that show how dangerous it was in the 50s. He talks about how great the space suit is because it's insulated with asbestos. It may be warm, kid, but you're in for a surprise. And during the contest results a TV commercial tells us that "carcinogenous factors [are] unknown in Coronets, the safe Safe, SAFE smoke with the true tobacco flavor." I'm not certain if he was trying to point out the folly of the commericial or not, but it's great to know that somebody at the time sure thought that way.

The writing is great, very easy to read and exciting right up until the end. The conclusion was a little boring to me but not bad. In fairness, it's pretty hard to put a cap on such a great story so I'll give him a break. I will definitely be reading some more Heinlein.