The Star Beast

Robert Heinlein The Star Beast (1954)
Having got back into the habit of picking up second hand Heinlein if there's something interestingly weird on the cover, I continue to be surprised at how many of them turn out to be juvies. I suppose there might be an argument that most science-fiction is for kids, but it's not an argument I'm interested in having, and at least when Heinlein was writing for the kiddies, he mostly managed to keep the stories free of wife-swapping and the like.

Anyway, I've generally enjoyed his children's books - the only major variance from his regular work usually being the presence of at least one plucky yet studious schoolboy busily having an adventure. This is an odd one in that it's thicker than usual - about one-hundred and twenty pages worth of story expanded to more than twice that length. The Star Beast is a family pet, a sort of eight-legged dinosaur which talks in a voice resembling that of a little girl. His name is Lummox - although he later turns out to be approximately female - seems about as intelligent as a talking canine sidekick in a cartoon, but then turns out to be a stranded representative of an extremely alien and advanced race whose intelligence is of such development that we don't even recognise it. Lummox also eats metal, and gets into trouble as quirky pets tend to do in this sort of story, and all of those pages which we probably didn't need are thus occupied with droning legal conversations about who owns Lummox, how we negotiate with his race, and so on and so forth. Thus something which might have translated fairly well into animated Disney - at least back in the day when Disney had some charm - becomes something of a route march through page after page of barely consequential yacking with so little descriptive seasoning that much of it may as well have been written as a movie script.

Well, whatever you may say about Heinlein, he writes well in lively sentences and is conspicuously capable of spinning a yarn; so it's easier to appreciate what The Star Beast does well than it is to dwell on a few incidences of droning.