Review: The Star Beast (spoilers)

[jeriendhal]

Summary: John Thomas Stewart XI is a pretty normal kid living in North American some time in the future. He's got a nice girlfriend, his mom is a bit of pain, he's looking forward to college, and he's even got a pet, Lummox. Mind you, Lummox is an alien star beast the size of a tractor trailer that's two hundred years old and eats Buicks, but he's really a sweetheart.

Now if only he had kept out of the neighbor's rose bushes...



The Star Beast comes in the middle of RAH's YA cycle of books, but it feels more like one of his adult novels. In theory the focus characters are Lummox and John Thomas, but I can't help but get the feeling that Bob was bored with the pair of them early on and decided to devote most of his attention to the marvelous Mr. Kiku and his staff at Spacial Affairs. Mr. Kiku, who happens to be a sixty-year old bureaucrat who is kind, polite, attentive to his work, and will cut you off at the knees if you ever try to interfere with his authority. Who plays Russian Roulette with Lommox's kin when they come a calling to retrieve their lost child and threaten to atomize the Earth if they don't get him/her back, refusing to blink at their threats.

Oh, and he happens to be a highly educated, very powerful African man, in a book published in 1954, when there were lynchings of blacks going on in the South and elsewhere. The mind boggles at how RAH rammed that character past his editors, given some of the changes he was forced to make in other books.

Unfortunately watching Mr. Kiku play people in a way that would make Cordelia Vorkosigan worry about her chances, is probably the best part of the book. Other bits are staged with remarkable clumsiness. The initial confrontation with Lummox's people is done entirely off screen, reported to Mr. Kiku through a subordinate, as is the revelation that Lummox and they are the same people, despite massive differences in appearance.

There's also a missed opportunity for drama with John Thomas' controlling mother,. In a modern YA book there would probably be a scene where he finally tells her off and informs her she can't control his life anymore. Not here. At best we get a conversation between her and Mr. Kiku, where her motivations are made a bit clearer, but he basically tells her to put up or shut up.

Overall, it was an okay read, but not the best RAH YA book he's ever done

Comments

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

I like the conversation between Mr. Kiku and the young lady at the end where he discusses Lummox's real purpose. :-) A few of the other scenes. I basically re-read a few scenes - a lot of the others, as you indicate, are pretty deadly.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

RAH got away with a whole lot of subtexts in that story -- if you move your POV to Lummox's race then they're coming to rescue a long-lost royal princess who was kidnapped by alien space monsters when she was a baby.

There's also Lummox' "hobby" which is only mentioned after the reader discover she is a female. She has been raising John Thomases...

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Anything with John Thomas' mother tended to make me wince, especially when he refused to really stand up to her. And the bits with Betty were almost all gold. Though there was the bit with her taking part ownership with Lummox that makes me think RAH meant to make more of a big deal about John Thomas selling Lommox than what ended up occuring in the book.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

John Thomas' name tended to make me unfairly smirk through the whole book, alas. And yes, Lummox's folk were entirely justified in demanding her back, if a bit heavy handed.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

The story goes that Heinlein's editor for his YA books was somewhat prudish and strait-laced and the John Thomas reference was slipped past her deliberately. Someone else managed the same thing with a side-reference in a book to a "ball-bearing mousetrap" meaning a tomcat.

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

that's beautiful :D

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I think getting a boy being rude to his mother would've been much harder to get past the editors than an important black man.

[estokien.livejournal.com]

I remember the book with fondness, but not much specificity from my own days as a juvenile, but my school library didn't exactly abound with Science Fiction books when I was in 4th grade.

I also kind of recall that the best part about a lot of the Heinlein Juvies was when they would manage to visit Venus and see the advertisements in a land where false advertising carried the death penalty.