1955's Tunnel in the Sky takes us to a future Earth jam-packed with
people but rescued from an ongoing Malthusian crisis by the timely
invention of interstellar gates. With access to the hundred thousand
Earth-like worlds1 scattered through the Milky Way, there is enough
room for everyone to spread out while breeding like mice, at least
for a time - I make it about 600 years before all one hundred
thousand worlds are as crammed with people as the Earth is.
There are many interesting ways people can die on worlds like Earth
and to avoid unnecessary recapitulations of Jamestown, Fort San
Juan and Popham, the powers that be, at least in the west, have
mandated survival courses. The final test for the course involves
dropping a class full of kids into a wilderness on some far off
world to see how many come back. It.s like Battle Royale IN SPACE!,
except without the official mandate against team work because the
adults, while sometimes obstructive or casual about risk to teens,
are not out-and-out psychopaths.
At first Rod Walker and his fellow students appear to face only
the usual challenges: finding edible food, avoiding being edible
food and dodging whichever classmate it is who settled on the idea
of hunting their classmates for their useful stuff. Rod enjoys only
mixed success at this: it turns out testing the local food for
edibility by eating it isn't a great idea, the local carnivores
don't quite manage to eat him but they leave scars and the only
reason that Rod survives his encounter with the class sociopath is
that Rod's head is quite astoundingly thick.
There's an unanticipated angle to the test, as the dwindling pool
of kids discover. The test is only supposed to last from two to
ten days before the survivors are retrieved. At the end of the ten
days no gate back to Earth opens and as days turn into weeks it
becomes obvious that if rescue is coming at all, there is no
predicting when it will arrive.
Almost by chance Rod and his chums Jimmy and Jack are the seed for
a community of survivors. As their numbers grow, so does the
complexity of the issues they face, from simple logistics to politics
to defense against the local wildlife. Although this long stay was
never planned for, their training is good enough and the general
good will effective enough that the kids are able to fumble their
way towards a functioning, if primitive, community of sedentary
hunter-gatherers. That process towards a working society is what
this novel is about.
Not to be too harsh on poor Rod but while he's not the dullest
Heinlein protagonist, he may well be the dumbest. In addition to
discovering the hard way that some local plants are purgatives,
narrowly avoiding getting eaten and living through an ambush only
because apparently his head is not a vital hit location, Rod also
fails to notice one of his teammates is a woman despite having
wrestled with her until after he delivers a misogynist diatribe
and after the indefensible nature of the town's location nearly
leads to a total party kill invokes the sunk cost fallacy to justify
not relocating to a superior location.
Sadly, this is marred with the usual Heinleinisms. Not just the
Malthusian models that provide the motivation to race to the stars
but a trained eye can detect subtle differences between how the
American-style pioneers are portrayed:
here each family had its own wagon..long, sweeping, boat-tight
Conestogas drawn by three-pair teams and housed in sturdy glass
canvas square and businesslike Studebakers with steel bodies,
high mudcutter wheels, and pulled by one or two-pair teams.
The draft animals were Morgans and lordly Clydesdales and
jug-headed Missouri mules with strong shoulders and shrewd,
suspicious eyes. Dogs trotted between wheels, wagons were piled
high with household goods and implements and children, poultry
protested the indignities of fate in cages tied on behind, and
a little Shetland pony, riderless but carrying his saddle and
just a bit too tall to run underneath with the dogs, stayed
close to the tailgate of one family's rig.
And how the Asian immigrants are depicted:
The crowd streaming through the pen were Asiatics- Japanese,
Indonesians, Siamese, some East Indians, a few Eurasians, but
predominantly South Chinese. To Rod they all looked much alike-
tiny women with babies on hip or back, or often one on back
and one in arms, endless runny-nosed and shaven-headed children,
fathers with household goods ill enormous back packs or pushed
ahead on barrows. There were a few dispirited ponies dragging
two-wheeled carts much too big for them but most of the torrent
had only that which they could carry.
As well, the justifications for why the American settlers equip
themselves for a 19th century society are not convincing. By choosing
that toolkit, they are limiting their productivity to 19th century
levels, which is going to make ramping up to modern levels of
prosperity that much harder. But Americans are nostalgic for the
19th century.
Part of the justification for sending out low tech colonies is
because interstellar gates are energy-expensive, so contact is only
worth while once the colony has stuff - "food and fissionable
metals" - worth that cost to send back. Leaving aside questions
like "how would you design a system for optimum mass transfer given
short periods of contact", Heinlein then goes on to provide this
colour text:
Ortega's torch ships brought the Solar System within reach.
Based on mass conversion, Einstein's deathless E= MC^2 they
could boost for the entire trip at any acceleration the pilot
could stand.
In his defense, the bit about them having total conversion is more
than a page away from the part about importing fissionables.
Some authors go out of their way to handicap the supporting characters
so the protagonist looks better by comparison but Heinlein didn.t
to that in the juveniles and he certainly didn't do it in this. If
anything, Rod makes everyone around him look better, whether its
Jack proving they are not just in Africa or Bob trying to keep
everyone alive with his rudimentary medical skills. I think my
favourite in this is the ingenious Caroline, who turns out to have
filled a deceptively small duffel bag with Many Useful Things.
Rod is the character who delivered one of Heinlein.s funnier lines,
in the process showing sometimes narrators are unreliable. On
discovering that his sister is marrying his teacher:
Rod did so, remembered to shake hands with the Deacon. It was
all right, he guessed, but- well, how old were they? Sis must
be thirtyish and the Deacon. why the Deacon was old- probably
past forty. It did not seem quite decent.
But he did his best to make them feel that he approved. After
he thought it over he decided that if two people, with their
lives behind them, wanted company in their old age, why, it
was probably a good thing.
I am sad to say I only noticed how funny that is well after after
I stopped being a teenager.
Many people believe that Rod is black. The actual evidence is
somewhat equivocal: Rod says Caroline, who is African, looks a bit
like his sister. Aside from that, there's not a lot of physical
description in this book.
The Heinlein Society's Frequently Asked Questions about Robert A.
Heinlein offers this bit of evidence:
The evidence is slim but definite. First and foremost, outside
of the text, there is a letter in which RAH firmly states that
Rod is black, and that Johnny Rico is Filipino. As to the text
itself, it is implied rather than overt. RAH often played games
with the skin color of his characters, in what I see as a
disarming tactic against racists who may come to identify with
the hero, then realize later on that they have identified with
somebody they supposedly hate. He does this in a number of
different places. Part of this may also have to do with the
publishing mores of the time, which probably would not have
let him get away with making his main character black in a
juvenile novel. The most telling evidence is that everybody in
"Tunnel" expects Rod to end up with Caroline, who is explicitly
described as black. While that expectation may seem somewhat
racist to us today, it would be a firm hint to the mindset of
the fifties, which would have been opposed to interracial
marriages.
Sadly, not only did Heinlein have a proven track record of
misremembering his own work (as shown by his confusion over whether
the text of Starship Trooper supported the assertion that voting
rights could be earned with non-military services) but Tunnel is
pretty clear, at least to my eyes, that that the kids in it have
no problems with mixed race marriages. Caroline is a bit put out
that "M" marries Margery Chung because Caroline had her eye on him.
While in real life names are not a reliable guide to ethnicity, in
fiction they often are. Caroline is African, Chung seems to be of
Chinese descent and it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion
either one of the Caroline + M or Chung + M would be an interracial
marriage. I guess M could be both African and Chinese but that only
moves the interracial marriage in question up a generation and back
to Earth.
Since the majority of Americans didn't come to see mixed race
marriages as acceptable until the mid-1990s, forty years after this
book was written, that minor bit of business was pretty daring on
Heinlein's part.
Rod's ongoing reluctance to have anything to do with women is kind
of interesting. A lot of Heinlein juveniles, that could be put down
to the conventions of the genre but in this the kids are explicitly
pairing off and the later appearance of babies strongly suggests
they are having sex with each other. Not Rod, though. And then
there's this line:
"Just like his father," Jimmy said proudly. "Kisses women only."
Which kind of suggests that not all the men kiss women only. I
think the facts support the idea that Rod just doesn't have sexual
urges at all and being as thick as he is, has a hard time wrapping
his mind around why other people do.
While women get to be as competent as the men . even pushing back
when the men try to "protect them" - I am sad to say that as usual
with Heinlein marriage pretty much back burners all non-baby
ambitions they have. Oh, well. Having all women Amazon units was
pretty progressive for the 1950s and so is eschewing the idea the
women would be too squeamish to get their hands bloody.
One of the recurring themes in Heinlein of this period is the
vanished civilization and this book has two: one native to this
world and a reference to Selenites. Where the locals went is a
mystery and because the community never moves into the abandoned
cliff dwellings, not one that gets any serious effort to solve. I
don.t think it.s an attempt to evoke myths Americans had about the
empty frontier. I wish more had been done with this part of the
book.
Another recurring theme in Heinlein's young adult novels - one that
will be of particular importance in Citizen of the Galaxy - is
being forced to chose between incompatible goals. Rod's decision-making
process never takes much time so he is firmly resolute when it
comes to deciding whether to stay in Cowpertown or accept an offer
of rescue. Rod is just one person in an entire community, which
lands him in another situation that comes up from time to time in
Heinlein, which is how to gracefully handle not getting one's own
way. In fact, Rod gets hit with that one a few times and as much
fun as I have mocking his intelligence, he does show an awareness
of when stubbornness is not his ally.
While the world building is sometimes shaky, and his efforts to
transcend the prejudices of his time often fall short, there are
some nice bits to this. Readers interested in trying it for themselves
may buy it in a variety of formats, although I got bored before I
managed to find a mass market or a trade I was 100% sure is still
in print.
1: Which means only one star in a million has a planet where humans
can walk around, which in turn means the average distance between
any two of them should be something like 500 light years?Hope the
people on the sublight starships that get mentioned early on brought
books for the trip.
--
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