- Chapter 1

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# Introduction

### by William H. Patterson, Jr.

In the summer of 1949, Robert Heinlein was depressed over the fate of his screenplay of Destination Moon. His producer, George Pal, was talking about converting his sober "documentary of the future" into a musical comedy, complete with a chorus line of Moon Maidens. It probably wasn't Pal's fault: it was the money man he had found, ex-studio head N. Peter Rathvon, who was trying to make it safer and more "familiar" to moviegoing audiences. Hollywood, Heinlein found to his regret, operated by the Golden Rule: He who has the Gold makes the Rules.

There was just no point in hanging around Hollywood for the train wreck: when his contract was up at the end of September, he would just quietly slink home to Colorado Springs, tail between his legs. His own gold was running out, and he needed to do some commercial fiction writing to keep things going. In a way, that was an encouraging thought: he still had a career, even if not in Hollywood.

His new wife, Ginny, took him to Ojai, where he had put himself back together two years earlier, when his previous marriage collapsed. They could have a working vacation, away from the Hollywood mess, while he got organized. He had a standing order from Boy's Life magazine for a longish story; now he just had to come up with an idea. Ginny suggested instead that he consider doing another juvenile novel.

The fight over Red Planet earlier in the year, with heavy censoring by his juvenile editor at Scribner's, left a sour taste in his mouth, and he probably wouldn't have considered doing another boys' book for them under any other circumstances. But Ginny urged him to think about it—and suggested that he had set Red Planet on Mars, so for this one he should go a step farther out, to Ganymede, a large moon of Jupiter. He decided to kill two birds with one typewriter and do a Boy Scout story set on Ganymede during the early days of terraforming. He would write the novel and then cut it to 20,000 words for a Boy's Life serial.

Ginny threw herself into the project, writing a dense, one-page explanation of how to take sterile rock and turn it into black earth, capable of growing anything. And that formed the core of the story of Farmer in the Sky ("Satellite Scout" in the Boy's Life cut): an interplanetary Boy Scout becoming a man as he learns the trade of farming on Ganymede—with sundry bits of subversive "life-wisdom" thrown in to please himself (though such things did not please the librarians who bought his books). He was able to introduce his boys to the complex and fascinating subject of ecology, leading from that to Darwin's ideas of "evolutionary filters" driven by the depressing population equations of the economist, Malthus, who had influenced Darwin so decisively.

These books were giving an entire generation some of the hard ideas they would need to grow their future, but Heinlein knew, as his editors and his librarian-customers apparently did not, that young people like the challenge that these "subversive" ideas provided and would grapple with them as their parents would not. Heinlein's boys—and girls—were the ones who would shape the next generation, because of the ideas he gave them, to become their own.

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Framed