Book review: “Farmer in the Sky” by Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1950 Farmer in the Sky has its moments — good and bad. Or, maybe better put, it has its good and bad moments for a reader like me.

One of the good moments is when Bill Lerner and his father George use dynamite and a special stone crusher to grind up the rock surface of Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter, and turn it into a rich, fine powder, the first step in a process of creating soil.

Another is when huge earthquakes rattle the moon, causing massive destruction, knocking the power out and fatally wounding an important character.

And a third is when Heinlein, through his narrator, Bill, discusses ecology and the greenhouse effect decades before they were common knowledge among the general public, much less common subjects of debate.

Bad moments

The novel’s bad moments — for me — included the many times that fifteen-year-old Bill explained all the science he was learning, such as how a human colony came to be established on Ganymede and how it is able to survive there.

In these moments, Heinlein is showing off not only his scientific knowledge but also his ability to envision of the future — to picture, for instance, how space travel will happen, and how weightlessness will be experienced, and how earth’s rising population will be curtailed.

Remember: This novel was written more than a decade before a human being had gotten to the lowest of the low levels of outer space. To be sure, Farmer in the Sky is, in its way, a dazzling act of imagination — a masterly speculation, from 1950, about what life on earth and in space would be like far into the future.

I’ll give Heinlein credit for that.

 

Science lectures

But anyone reading the book seventy-six years after it was written will understand that Heinlein got much of his speculation wrong. That’s to be expected, of course.

What was worse for me, however, was Heinlein’s use of his novel as a thin veil for lecturing the reader on his technological visions.

Although Heinlein described this book as one of his juveniles, it is mainly focused on hard science fiction — i.e., fiction that seriously tries to “see” the future using real, live science.

Back in school, I was one of those kids who daydreamed during the few science lectures I attended.

 

Myth and adventure

I like my science fiction soft in the science and heavy in the myth and adventure. So, there were more than a few places in Farmer in the Sky when my eyes glazed over. I didn’t want to know about calculations and engineering and candles and light-years and stuff like that.

Instead, I wanted the spirit inside the story, such as the moment when Bill‘s father looks at the boulders on the “land” they’ve been assigned to grind up into soil and thinks that one looks like a skull.

And he’s tempted to call the place Golgotha.

That said a lot more to me than yet another pile of scientific theories.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

6.11.26