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"Have Spacesuit Will Travel" by Robert A. Heinlein Length: 8 hours and 3 min. ISBN: Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

I don’t know if it’s fair to write a review of a book that I couldn’t finish but I won’t let that stop me… :-)

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Heinlein. He was recommended to me a long time ago and, not knowing what to read first, I randomly picked up Number of the Beast. What an awful book! It felt like Heinlein’s characters were so full of themselves that they spent most of their time in “witty” and “erudite” dialog (I’m using quotes to denote sarcasm :-)

Unfortunately, it appears that I’d picked possibly the worst of Heinlein’s novels to start with. A number of years passed and, when friends heard my tale of Heinlein woe, they quickly recommended The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which is an excellent book (audio book review to follow!)

Recently, I tried listening Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. It’s the story of a youth (Kip Russel) who wins a spacesuit in a lottery, repairs it over the summer, is abducted to the moon by aliens, meets a 10-year old girl genius named Peewee, and (presumably) the two of them save the Earth from said aliens.

This book is nowhere near as bad as Number of the Beast. However, the same annoying repartee is there between Kip and Peewee, the long pretentious debates, etc. I just couldn’t finish it. I do however commend the producers of the audio book for making the most of this medium: different actors perform the parts of Kip, Peewee, and some of the minor characters; and a few sound effects are thrown in for good measure.

I wouldn’t recommend this book to an adult but I’ve noticed that many of Amazon’s reviewers who rave about Have Spacesuit Will Travel read it in their early teens. So if you know a smart teenager who’s into science and science fiction, this may well please them much more than it did me.

Tags: have spacesuit will travel, heinlein, science fiction, audiobook