Sullivan, C. W., III. Heinlein's Juvenile Novels: A Cultural Dictionary.

Van Riper, A. Bowdoin

Sullivan, C. W., III. Heinlein's Juvenile Novels: A Cultural Dictionary. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing Company, 2011. 182 pages. Softcover. ISBN: 978-0-7864-4463-2. $40.00.

Robert A. Heinlein is by far the most written-about figure in the history of American science fiction. Alexei Panshin's Heinlein in Dimension, the first book-length critical study, appeared in 1968, and a steady stream of others followed, ranging from the openly admiring to the ferociously critical. C. W. Sullivan III comes in Heinlein's Juvenile Novels: A Cultural Dictionary neither to bury Heinlein nor to praise him, but to illuminate the methods he used in his fourteen novels for young-adult readers. Heinlein, as part of his postwar campaign to break out of the pulp-magazine ghetto, wrote twelve "juveniles" for publisher Charles Scribners' Sons between 1947 and 1958, and two more for G. P. Putnam's Sons afterward. The earliest of the works were straightforward "boy's adventure" tales, but the later volumes--notably Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and Have Spacesuit--Will Travel (1958)--are often counted among Heinlein's best novels, enjoyable by adults and children alike.

The texts of Heinlein's juveniles are filled with offhand, unelaborated references to people, places, and events from Earth's actual history, interwoven with fictional details to create a sense of verisimilitude. The texts--and particularly the dialogue--are also filled with expressions that, though familiar to the books' original readers, are obscure today. Sullivan's Cultural Dictionary sets out to explicate both. It includes a brief introduction outlining the history of Heinlein's juveniles, and an appendix summarizing their plots (as an orientation for those who may not have read them all, and a refresher for those who read them long ago), but its core is a series of paragraph-long glosses on the cultural references that Heinlein uses. Each entry includes a notation of where (book and chapter) the term appears, and an explanation of its meaning; some include brief discussions of how and why Heinlein uses the term. Terms for which Sullivan could not find an explanation are segregated into a second appendix.

The organization of the book is, to put it charitably, curious. The entries are listed exactly as they appear in the original texts, presumably for the benefit of readers working directly from those texts. One unfortunate side effect of the system is that individuals are alphabetized more or less randomly by their family name, given name, or title. Marie Curie (listed under "Madame Curie") thus shares a page with Madame Pompadour, while "Admiral Lord Nelson" is followed in rapid succession by [Emilio] "Aguinaldo" and "Albert Einstein." The absence of an index, a detailed table of contents, or a comprehensive system of cross-references means that searching for a particular name can easily involve checking under four or five different letters.

Breadth of coverage is, by far, the book's best feature. There are entries for the namesakes of the spaceships in Starship Troopers (1959) and the Boy Scout patrols in Farmer in the Sky (1950); the origins of Sam Anderson's mangled proverbs in Starman Jones (1953) and the exotic period slang of Rocket Ship Galileo (1947); the meaning of arigato, the significance of Kipling's poem "Danny Deever," and the recipe for a mint julep. Cultural references that stand front-and-center in their respective works--the title of Have Spacesuit--Will Travel as a play on the television Western Have Gun--Will Travel--get their due, but so do a throwaway line about "Marquis of Queensbury Rules" in The Rolling Stones (1952) and the membership of a minor character in Tunnel in the Sky (1955) in an all-female military unit called the "Amazons." The only obvious omission is the names of planets and stars: a deliberate (if regrettable) choice on Sullivan's part, explained in the introduction.

Breadth, unfortunately, is not matched by depth. The Comedy of Errors is listed as a play by Shakespeare, and left at that. The "Admiral Lord Nelson" entry notes his victory (and death) at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, but not his nationality (English) nor the significance of that victory (precluding a French invasion of England), much less his larger role in the defeat of Napoleon or his status as Britain's greatest military hero. The entry for Atomic Energy Commission neglects to specify that it was an agency of the United States government rather than a non-governmental organization like the present-day International Atomic Energy Agency. The entry on the 1950s epithet "parlor pink" inexplicably omits its derivation from "red" as a synonym for communist, and that on the poem "The Death of the Bon Homme Richard" helpfully connects it to Revolutionary War naval hero John Paul Jones but neglects to mention that the poem itself existed only in Heinlein's imagination. The entry on "build a better mousetrap" does not relate it to Ralph Waldo Emerson's perennially misquoted observations about the rewards of ingenuity, and the gloss of a quote about placing one's body "between home and war's desolation" overlooks the fact that only a few words distinguish it from the fourth verse of The Star Spangled Banner.

Shallowness in the entries is doubly frustrating when the material being omitted would deepen the reader's understanding of Heinlein as a writer. Sullivan's definition of "Coventry" as a place rather than a mode of punishment (the British idiom "sent to Coventry" describes one who is being systematically shunned) nods in the direction of Heinlein's 1940 short story about a future penal colony without ever actually mentioning it. The entry for "Caisson Song" cites it as the basis for the official (though virtually unknown) U.S. Army marching song "The Army Goes Rolling Along," but not as the basis for "The Road Song of the Transport Cadets" in Heinlein's 1940 story "The Roads Must Roll." Two entries note that Farmer in the Sky references a song and a character from Heinlein's short story "The Green Hills of Earth" (1947), but neither points out that the two stories take place in different, incompatible fictional timelines. The entry for "de Camp joints" mentions that Heinlein worked with fellow engineer and science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II, but not that they were designing high-altitude pressure suits for pilots: forerunners of the spacesuits in which the fictional "de Camp joints" are used.

The curious thinness of many entries is compounded by frequent, glaring factual errors. The entry on "acey deucey" notes correctly that it is the name of a card game, but the version popular in the United States Navy and Marine Corps (presumably the one that ex-naval-officer Heinlein has the space marines playing in Starship Troopers) is a variant of backgammon. "Good night" in Brazil is not the Spanish "buenas noches" but the Portuguese "boa noite," and Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operetta The Mikado (mentioned in the entry for "Lord High Executioner") premiered not in 1845 but in 1885. The errors in entries on scientific subjects are particularly frequent and particularly troubling, both because they are more subtle and because--in writing about science fiction--the science matters. Marie Curie discovered the element radium but not the phenomenon of radioactivity; jet-assisted takeoff (JATO) units, despite their name, were solid-fuel rockets that did not run on jet fuel; and "Joe," the guidance system in Rocket Ship Galileo, is not a computer (as Sullivan implies in the "ENIAC" entry) but an electro-mechanical autopilot. The statement that the Greenwich Meridian is "not as accurate as an atomic clock," is a misleading apples-to-oranges comparison of a reference point with a measuring device. The book's sloppiness reaches its nadir in the entry for Einstein's famous equation E = [mc.sup.2], which gets the equation's typography wrong (erroneously capitalizing M and C) and then describes it, incorrectly, as "the basis for the nuclear reaction." The entry goes on (again incorrectly) to describe the "twin paradox" at the heart of Time for the Stars (1956) as an outgrowth of the equation, conflating the special and general theories of relativity in the process, and states that the slowing of time with increasing velocity is "speculation" (50-51), despite multiple experimental confirmations of such time dilation since the 1970s.

The intended audience for this slim volume is difficult to pinpoint. Readers of Heinlein's juveniles--even dedicated, adult readers--in search of a quick explanation for otherwise inexplicable terms like "Schiaparelli" or "soda jerk" are more likely to turn to their favorite internet search engine than to keep a specialized $40 book on hand. The entries themselves, however, seem pitched to precisely that audience: They assume too rudimentary a level of cultural knowledge to be of use to professional scholars (who, presumably, already know that Christopher Columbus was a Genoese navigator, Valley Forge a winter encampment for Washington's army, and Lockheed an aircraft manufacturer), and they say too little about the details of their subjects to spark a careful reader's awareness of echoes and resonances beyond those that Sullivan points out. Specialized, scholarly reference books must--in an age where online search capability is available on every desktop and virtually every mobile phone--offer readers depth, insight, and authoritativeness beyond what is available for free. Heinlein's Juvenile Novels: A Cultural Dictionary fails, on multiple counts, to rise to that standard.