jpsnowytree 's review for:

Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

3.0

---

Science fiction written in 1950, this is an imagining of life on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. In 1950 they could see Ganymede with a telescope and understood what spaceflight would be like, but it was still years before Sputnik. Yet they understood what spaceflight would entail given the distances, realistic G forces and time. Heinlein imagines ships that can fly in air shuttling people to and from interplanetary ships that only go in vacuum. What makes this interesting to read in 2013 is that the science fiction is entirely mechanical -- there's no mention of information technology at all. There are no smart phones, no cell phones, no internet, no games, no movies -- no screens nor entertainment at all. Instead there's space travel and terraforming another world, but when someone wants to know something they look it up in a book. This book was written for young adults and the teenage narrator's life is robustly simple, with a lot of hard work, rewarding meals and maybe a little music before bed. It's worth a read, but these days it's like sci-fi and history combined.