Name: Have Space Suit Will Travel
ISBN: 9780450038549

What Hacker News says

kstenerudOct 2024

Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)

Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)

Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)

The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)

Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)

Frankenstein (Shelley)

Brave New World (Huxley)

Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)

Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)

A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)

The Machine Stops (Forster)

Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

Starship Troopers (Heinlein)

The Jungle Book (Kipling)

Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)

The Republic (Plato)

Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)

Ringworld (Niven)

The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)

The Hobbit (Tolkien)

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)

The Odyssey (Homer)

The Man who Would be King (Kipling)

The Pearl (Steinbeck)

Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)

A Scanner Darkly (Dick)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)

Dracula (Stoker)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)

The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)

The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)

A Christmas Carol (Dickens)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)

Watership Down (Adams)

Gulliver's Travels (Swift)

Animal Farm (Orwell)

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netman21Jan 2020

As an author I am encouraged by all the great responses here. In addition to writing a book a year I read about 50. My question for OP: How do you learn anything if you are not reading books? Sure, you can learn a lot about a subject online. When I write a book I spend about 6 months reading everything I can find (including books). Then I organize what I have learned and present it (I hope) in an easy to absorb manner. A reader can learn everything I know about a subject in 4-6 hours. Want to learn about the Cold War? Read Gaddis' seminal book on it. Want to learn about WWII? Read Winston Churchill's five book series that won the Nobel prize for literature? Civil War? Shelby Foote. If history is not your thing what about biography? There are biographies of practically every founder of great tech companies. (Jobs, Gates, Musk). How about ideas? Malcolm Gladwell (Tippingpoint), Michael Lewis (Mondeyball). Or maybe break into reading with fiction. Give yourself a present of the complete Lord of the Rings. If you liked the movies be prepared to love the books. If you hated the movies, no problem, the books are far better. OR science fiction. Read all of Heinlein's books for young adults. Start with Double Star then read Have Space Suit Will Travel. A Door Into Summer speaks to any engineer. Tunnel In the Sky is the classic survival story. When you are hooked on Heinlein read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; it only takes a chapter to get used to his interesting take on what English of the future will sound like.

I hope you are encouraged by all the great reasons listed in the rest of the comments. I for one live to read!

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jelliclesfarmFeb 2019

I think his views on nudity would have been the least offensive. Example..To Sail Beyond The Sunset was really weird and awkward in so many ways but at the same time, it is a book that I have read and re read many times. He certainly empowered many young female readers..but at the same time, there was also Friday which dealt with the difficult subject of rape. He was a feminist no doubt but he also had some antiquated ideas (like women’s role in society l and the glorification of procreation). He was a femininist without doubt.

My favourite wrt his treatment of gender is I Will Fear No Evil. Was he sci fi writer or writer of social commentary? He was a legit sci fiction writer and one of my favourites is All You Zombies where he deals with the paradox of time travel and ideas like when you are your own grandparent was definitely different. His juvenile series (Have Space Suit, Will Travel) were all benign enough for young kids without any ‘corrupting’ thought seeds and upsetting parents. His stories about parallel worlds and lives could be said to border on metaphysical. His all encompassing free love themes might have been scandalous and pornographic at his time altho it might merely invite eye rolling or nervous dry laughter now.(I don’t know..I can only imagine how it was in those times)

You are right about his contradictions but he had lived long enough to see waves of changes in society. (I might be wrong about the timeline of his various works pre and post 1950s) He was a military man and likely was always a libertarian. And likely an atheist. He was also from an entirely different era. But this theme was always to question authority and not accept what’s handed to you..and always strive for freedom as a personal goal. As a girl, that was important to me and to be able to place freedom over everything else.

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bentleyNov 2025

> I missed my slipstick. Dad says that anyone who can’t use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate and should not be allowed to vote. Mine is a beauty—a K&E 20″ Log‐log Duplex Decitrig. Dad surprised me with it after I mastered a ten-inch polyphase. We ate potato soup that week—but Dad says you should always budget luxuries first. I knew where it was. Home on my desk.

Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)

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dctoedtOct 2020

> By rotating the craft to point opposite the direction of travel and actuating the engine again.

IIRC, one of Heinlein's juvenile novels referred to this as a skew-flip maneuver; I was quite impressed reading about it at about age 12, several years after its publication date.

[Just remembered the title: Have Space Suit - Will Travel, a play on the title of the TV show Have Gun - Will Travel]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_Space_Suit%E2%80%94Will_T...

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jiggawattsMar 2020

I keep thinking of the story "Have Space Suit—Will Travel", except it now it is "Have Welders—Will Construct Space Craft". What SpaceX is doing is both crazy complex rocket science, yet it's also quaintly pedestrian. It makes space feel more accessible to me.

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