Science fiction is just fiction with science.  That was the argument the guys in my generation made in class when they compared the work of Hardy, Thackery or some other school-board sanctioned novelist to a story they preferred.  Despite the teacher’s efforts to introduce us to the literary gems of previous centuries, these fellows found subtly in the characters of Ray Bradberry and ambiguity in the plots of Isaac Asimov.  Remember, these were the guys who ran home from school each day to catch the last half of Star Trek and Twilight Zone reruns because VCRs, DVRs and streaming had not been invented.  Nerds long before Comic-Con and Big Bang Theory gave them a sense of pride.  I didn’t mind them (victims themselves, they tended to avoid picking on others) but on this point, I thought they were wrong.  English instructors implied that Science Fiction stories were obsessed with machinery and sex and the writers couldn’t see beyond those fixations.  I believed this until I read Podkayne of Mars.   I learned, so help me, I learned.

Podkayne of Mars is a turning point book in the career of Robert Anson Heinlein, one of the three deans of Science Fiction.  Kid-lit was how he got started and one of the few markets then that welcomed SF because these were adventure stories and the hero is usually a boy.  Podkayne Fries is the exception to this rule; she’s an irrepressible girl whose life on Mars is marred only by her pain-in-the-neck little brother, Clark and the fact she can’t travel and see Earth as expected.  Seems the embryonic siblings her parents had kept in stasis were thawed and brought to birth size by clerical error and her mother refuses to travel with three babies.  (I can’t blame Poddy’s Mom; traveling with one kid in nappies was hard enough; three would be impossible.)  The chance to see Earth is rescued when Poddy’s Uncle Tom offers to escort her and Clark himself but everything on the trip implodes after Clark is kidnapped.  It seems that dear Uncle Tom is a high-powered politician and taking these kids on a cruise was his cover story for an ultra-secret diplomatic mission.  Podkayne searches for her brother and for the truth beneath each batch of lies, undismayed by the duplicity of grownups.  Her brother, Clark ends up with the sadder but clearer grasp on reality.

Mr. Heinlein originally submitted this as a “cadet story” (YA had not been identified as a genre at that time) in the early 1960’s.  He had churned out space boy adventure stories for years by then and he wanted Podkayne to be a more complex and sensitive novel for his maturing readers.  The editors hated it.  The characters weren’t simple, the ending wasn’t happy and they wanted changes.  Heinlein managed to keep much of the complexity but he finally rewrote the ending.  Now the original ending is sad but inevitable, in terms of story, and it gives the story needed impact – it feels true.  It also gives the character of Podkayne gravitas.  If a girl is sweet, funny and optimistic when the world’s at peace, that’s not unusual, but if she remains that way in the face of overwhelming evil she’s Anne Frank.  Like Clark, we end up seeing Podkayne as one of Lincoln’s “Angels of our Better Nature” and hoping she’s right about humanity.  Still, none of this works with the revised ending.  It only works if you tell the reader the truth: not every good ending is happy. 

We seem to be closer to this these days although I think most adults underestimate the ability of children to deal with the truth.  They don’t need the gritty details that give us PTSD but they don’t need to be lied to either.  There are few certainties in this world but one of them is that young kids believe what we tell them.  In omitting the truth we disarm them.  And once we lose that trust, it’s gone.  That’s one of the lessons Heinlein teaches in Podkayne of Mars.  It’s science fiction about humanity in real-life .