Robert A. Heinlein

First edition of this early Heinlein work, aimed at a younger audience and setting up themes that would carry through into Stranger in a Strange Land.

• Robert A. Heinlein (American).
• Illustrations by Clifford Geary (American).
• New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949.
• 212 pages.
• Four large black-and-white illustrations.
• Bound in original black cloth binding with red lettering with original price-clipped red pictorial dust jacket, fore-edge machine deckle, red pictorial endpapers of a map of Mars and an informational note about the planet.

“With Red Planet... [Robert A. Heinlein] came fully into his own as a writer for teenagers,” notes The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction; the Encyclopedia praises the work’s well-constructed narrative and “carefully worked-out technical detail” (555). In many ways, Red Planet is the direct ancestor of Heinlein’s classic Stranger in a Strange Land. This title establishes tropes that would later be used in Stranger, such as the importance of water and the ultimately deathless Martian people, as well as a general distaste for established institutions. A bright copy. “An Earthling has no good way to estimate the age of a Martian, yet Jim had the unmistakable impression that this Martian was very old – older than his father, older even than Doc MacRae.” 

John Clute and Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.