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double star (robert heinlein, 1956)

“Masks,” James Ensor

Double Star (Robert Heinlein, 1956)

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There’s a Tumblr post that lives on in my memory, but which I can never find when I look for it, where somebody sarcastically describes a certain tendency as people saying, basically, “normalize being normal.” In other words, you know, you feel a bit defensive about doing something “normal” and you make that other people’s problem.

“Normalize being normal” is also beginning to describe my mental relationship to Robert Heinlein, in the sense that he is this enormously popular and beloved writer who I nonetheless feel a bit dangerous for liking to read. I act about Heinlein like somebody who has discovered black lipstick exists: Oh, is this too much for you? Is this too much edge, mom?¹

you wouldn’t get it!!!!!

This time I picked up Double Star because I’ve been reading Jo Walton’s book about the Hugos and she raves about it.² So here we are. She says it’s his best novel, and while I have only read three Heinlein novels, this is certainly the best of the ones I’ve read. Even on the ideas level, which is not really what I am here for, it is smarter than both Starship Troopers and Strangers in a Strange Land.

Total lacking in Double Star is the weird depressed feeling I have previously gotten from reading Heinlein that I am trapped (in the present) living out somebody else’s ossified Heinlein dreams.³ I assume that this is partly because it’s genuinely for children, as opposed to Starship Troopers (only sort of for children) or Stranger in a Strange Land (definitely for adults). Instead, you can just enjoy the part where Heinlein is really, really good at telling stories.⁴

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Double Star is about a washed-up actor (stage name Lorenzo Smythe) who is hired to go to Mars to impersonate a politician named John Bonforte (“former Supreme Minister, leader of the loyal opposition, and head of the Expansionist coalition—the most loved (and the most hated!) man in the entire Solar System”). It’s a one-time thing—the real politician has been kidnapped, but has to keep an appointment, and as long as Lorenzo is a good imitation the only people who can say “he didn’t really make that appointment” would have to confess to kidnapping him.

But then, well, Lorenzo has to keep on impersonating him for one reason or another. As the situation gets more and more dangerous, the actor keeps trying to quit but can’t quite do it. At heart he knows he adheres to one value—the show must go on:

“The show must go on.” I had always believed that and lived by it. But why must the show go on?—seeing that some shows are pretty terrible. Well, because you agreed to do it, because there is an audience out there; they have paid and each one of them is entitled to the best you can give. You owe it to them. You owe it also to stagehands and managers and producers and other members of the company—and to those who taught you your trade, and to others stretching back in history to open-air theaters and stone seats and even to storytellers squatting in a marketplace. Noblesse oblige.

And this show ain’t over.

Images of doubleness and of real fakes are woven through Double Star both on the big levels and the small; in one early scene Lorenzo comments that his cards have “genuine imitation hand engraving.” Lorenzo Smythe is a stage name; his real name is Lawrence Smith. The Martians that Bonforte would like to make citizens in the Grand Assembly operate on a system based entirely around the idea of appropriate and inappropriate behavior. As long as Lorenzo acts appropriately, nothing else matters much; and since Lorenzo’s entire job now is acting appropriately, his interactions with Martians are just one of many where he does what he knows another would be doing in his place. In the case of the Martians, what he is doing is what a Martian would do; in the case of the rest of his life, what Bonforte would do.⁵

When is being a fake bad (as when a minor character we never meet is characterized as a charming “bad ‘un”), and when is being a fake admirable? In an early passage, Lorenzo points out that the biggest challenge in impersonating somebody else is that you are a slightly different person to every individual you know. Later in the book, Penny, Bonforte’s personal secretary, shows him Bonforte’s “Farleyfile,”⁶ where Bonforte has written down details about more or less every person he’s ever met so that he can review it before he sees them. Lorenzo is initially put off by discovering this codification of what he already knew. He objects to Penny: isn’t this a bit “phony”? Wouldn’t Bonforte remember stuff he actually cared about?

Penny says to him: look, this is what Bonforte would remember if he could. But he can’t naturally remember all these things, and even though they seem trivial, they matter a lot to other people:

The point is that top-level men…meet many more people than they can remember. Each one of that faceless throng remembers his own meeting with the famous man and remembers it in detail. But the supremely important person in anyone’s life is himself—and a politician must never forget that. So it is polite and friendly and warmhearted for the politician to have a way to be able to remember about other people the sort of little things that they are likely to remember about him. It is also essential—in politics.

On the other hand, Lorenzo’s initial reaction that Bonforte probably would not need to write down things reinforced by real feelings is vindicated later when it becomes clear a lot of Bonforte’s relationship with another character is not in the Farleyfile, because they are close friends. In any case, I don’t think there’s ever any particular rule that Lorenzo derives or Heinlein proposes about when you’re being a real fake and when you’re being a fake fake. And this element was, for me, part of the fun. There are certainly lessons the intended juvenile audience could learn from Double Star. But there’s not A Lesson. Lorenzo & Co. are doing a lot of lying. Sometimes lying is a way of telling the truth, and sometimes… it’s just lying.

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Coda: Dark Woke Heinlein, Contd

In the Starship Troopers post I joked that Heinlein can be sort of Woke In An Evil Way. Indeed he can. I thought about doing a joke score card for Dark Woke here but in the end I found that kind of a depressing exercise (“they want to do Manifest Destiny… but not racist this time…?”). The thing people ding Heinlein for is women, mostly. So how are the women? Or rather, woman: the aforementioned Penny, Bonforte’s faithful aide.

Penny’s fine. She’s competent at her job and loyal. Her initial introduction, as a character who really can’t stand this ersatz version of her beloved boss, is fun:

She looked at me as if she could not believe what she saw but despised it anyhow. “I told them,” she said slowly and scornfully, “that this ridiculous scheme would not work.”

She just doesn’t do much, which is the main problem with her from a “how are the women” angle. She helps Lorenzo learn his part and she wears a perfume called “Jungle Lust.”⁷ She initially doesn’t like him because she’s privately in love with her boss but everybody is kind of in love with Bonforte so that seems neutral. And… that’s about all there is to Penny. She doesn’t go around fainting but she’s also basically there to give him tips and sometimes drive the car.

So I would say Penny is… basically a wash. She’s not really a fetish object unless you have Heinlein’s apparent interest in beautiful competent women who are kind of mean to him. There’s nothing negative or overtly sexist about her character, but she could be replaced with a computer interface without really changing the story.

1. On Bluesky there was recently some drama about the sci fi canon, recommending old books to children, whatever. It was very stupid and there were many “wrong statements” issued but also a lot of dumping on Heinlein. There are many Heinleins and… some of them deserve to be dumped on. Still, I can’t blame these posts for my black lipstick complex because that definitely predated the debate over whether or not it was okay to tell kids to read Heinlein juveniles.

2. Friend of the newsletter

Rich Horton

appears in the book frequently.

3. Nobody is naming their AI Lorenzo Smythe.

4. Here’s a bit from the introduction to my copy (by William H. Patterson), if you want to hate yourself:

He started writing in 1 March 1955, the story falling into place and assembling itself, tick, tick, tick as soon as he had his “Great Lorenzo” character fleshed out in his mind. Three weeks later, he had a tight, clean 55,000-word manuscript that pleased everyone who read it. Ginny was delighted, and it sailed through the proofing and revision process in just three days. Doubleday took it without hesitation, although Robert was unhappy with the Science Fiction Book Club clause they wrote into the contract. (The book club, with its guaranteed sales to its member list, was a good deal for beginning or more marginal writers, but the lower royalty rate they offered for book club sales cut into his net revenues.)

5. Another point which is made in Double Star frequently, though not really overtly, is the ways in which a political cabinet is and is not like a theater troupe. When Lorenzo first tries to back out of the job, in the end he’s ashamed by the thought that he’s not being a trouper; but elsewhere the point is made that Bonforte is and is not one man. As a person of principle and charisma he is essential to the movement he has built, but what goes into Bonforte is many people. That point is made explicitly (“a political figure is not a single man, so I was learning, but a compatible team. If Bonforte himself had not been a decent sort he would not have had these people around him”), but the relationship to theater is not really spelled out.

6. A real thing. Now it makes Double Star kind of retro future, less because we wouldn’t need something like a Farleyfile but because of the idea that we would still call it a Farleyfile and also remember why we called it that. Though Heinlein does sneak in a little joke here. Lorenzo doesn’t quite remember the history right: “Farley was a political manager of the twentieth century, of Eisenhower I believe, and the method he invented for handling the personal relations of politics was as revolutionary as the German invention of staff command was to warfare. Yet I had never heard of the device until Penny showed me Bonforte’s.”

7. Here is Penny’s entire Farleyfile:

I especially enjoyed reading about Penny—the Honorable Miss Penelope Taliaferro Russell. She was an M.A. in government administration from Georgetown and a B.A. from Wellesley, which somehow did not surprise me. She represented districtless university women, another “safe” constituency (I learned) since they are about five to one Expansionist Party members.

On down below were her glove size, her other measurements, her preferences in colors (I could teach her something about dressing), her preference in scent (Jungle Lust, of course), and many other details, most of them innocuous enough. But there was a “comment”: “Neurotically honest—arithmetic unreliable—prides herself on her sense of humor, of which she has none—watches her diet but is gluttonous about candied cherries—little-mother-of-all-living complex—unable to resist reading the printed word in any form.”

Underneath was another of Bonforte’s handwritten addenda: “Ah, Curly Top! Snooping again, I see.”

As I turned them back to her I asked Penny if she had read her own Farleyfile. She told me snippily to mind my own business! Then turned red and apologized.