When I got a Newfoundland dog many years ago there was never any doubt that his name would be Lummox.\u00a0 Because that is the name that Heinlein gave to his star beast.\u00a0 When we meet Lummox, he\u2019s living in the backyard of John Thomas Stuart XI.\u00a0 He\u2019s lived there for over a century under the present owner\u2019s father, grandfather and great grandfather.\u00a0 Over the course of his tenure he\u2019s grown from about the size of a chihuahua to something larger than an elephant.\u00a0 He\u2019s equipped with eight legs and an appetite for a menu that ranges from rude neighborhood dogs to a Buick automobile.\u00a0 His personality is friendly, enthusiastic and energetic but his discipline and attention to his master\u2019s orders are decidedly inconsistent.\u00a0 And for a creature with such an imposing size he has the voice of a baby girl.<\/p>\n
Johnnie and Lummox are best friends, almost brothers, and even though his mother doesn\u2019t share his feelings for the beast his girlfriend Betty is on their side.\u00a0 So, when Lummox gets into trouble for going off reservation and busting up a lot of stuff, Johnnie and Betty do everything in their power to save Lummie from the clutches of the unsympathetic local sheriff who wants to have Lummox terminated as a public menace.<\/p>\n
Heinlein weaves together the two threads of Lummox\u2019s past and present to provide a future that wouldn\u2019t have been guessed at the start of the story.\u00a0 Mixed in with this is the story of Mr. Kiku, the Under Secretary of the Department of Spatial Affairs and his fear of snakes.\u00a0 Heinlein builds up the little constellation of characters in the Department very nicely and gives us his ideas about how the permanent career bureaucrats in a government department interact with the political appointee that supposedly manages them.<\/p>\n
And this is a typical Heinlein trait.\u00a0 He likes to build up little self-consistent \u201cworlds,\u201d like Westville, the small town where Lummox lives or the Department of Spatial Affairs.\u00a0 In another book you\u2019ll find that the small-town people act and talk a lot like the people in Westville in this story.\u00a0 I\u2019m guessing that these small towns were like the small towns in Missouri that Heinlein remembers from his childhood.\u00a0 And his descriptions of life on a space ship in several of his books comes from his own experience of shipboard life in the U. S. Navy.\u00a0 Likewise, his ideas of government bureaucracy came from his experience as a government employee.<\/p>\n
And throughout we get to know Johnnie and learn about his struggle to weigh loyalty to his friend against fighting insurmountable odds. He is the Heinlein young man character who has been raised to respect authority, is socially conventional, polite and honest.\u00a0 But he runs smack dab into the injustice of the bureaucratic machine.\u00a0 In the ensuing turmoil he discovers that a man sometimes has to break the rules to do what\u2019s morally right and protect his own.\u00a0 And mixed in with this is his relationship with his overprotective and domineering mother and his hyperactive and ambitious girlfriend.\u00a0 This is another part of his growth as he finally asserts himself against these women jockeying for control of his life.<\/p>\n
In this book Heinlein creates a few extraterrestrials types.\u00a0 And he provides both sympathetic species and other less friendly from a human perspective.\u00a0 And this lack of empathy allows for a plot device that has since been \u201cborrowed\u201d by the makers of the movie \u201cMen in Black.\u201d\u00a0 See if you notice it when you read the book.\u00a0 But the most interesting extraterrestrial is Lummox and Heinlein\u2019s description of Lummox\u2019s internal point of view is highly entertaining.\u00a0 From my experience as the owner of a Newfoundland I found the beast\u2019s motivations for some of his mistakes extremely familiar and plausible.<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t ruin the story by giving away any surprises.\u00a0 They\u2019re too good.\u00a0 I would call this one of Heinlein\u2019s most original novels and definitely highly successful as entertainment.\u00a0 Once again, highly recommended for young and old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I got a Newfoundland dog many years ago there was never any doubt that his name would be Lummox.\u00a0 Because that is the name<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,237,242],"tags":[68,92,2031,2033,38,1355,711,265,2032],"class_list":["post-7997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-book-review","tag-heinlein","tag-heinlein-juveniles","tag-lummox","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-robert-a-heinlein","tag-science-fiction","tag-the-star-beast"],"yoast_head":"\n