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Picked this one up as a free audiobook for signing up with Amazon's Audible subscription deal. It's one of the two RAH juveniles I'd never ready (the other being "Podkayne of Mars" which I have no intention of ever bothering with). It's another Full Cast Audio book, which gives it a boost up in my opinion, but it's still hard going.
This mostly has to do with the fact that John Thomas XI is the first really unlikable RAH juvenile protagonist I've ever run into. He's obnoxious to his elders, not particularly smart, and much of the alleged comedy of the book has to do with him threatening to beat the living hell out of the titular character, Lummox, his pet... whatever. Now admittedly Lummox is the size of a small brontosaurus and with a hide so thick John needs to use a pickaxe to tickle him, and he did just destroy half the town inadvertently, but it's still pretty jarring.
OTOH you do have Mr. Kiku, which aside from being an amazing anomaly in RAH's canon (a heroic bureaucrat ?), he also happens to be a black South African in a very high level position in the world government. You have to wonder how on Earth RAH managed to slip that one past his editors in the pre-Civil Rights era.
Random Thought File: On a completely different tangent, I wonder if RAH's jokes about about poor Roger Stone's experience writingThe Scum of the Waste Spaces The Scourge of the Spaceways in The Rolling Stones had any inspiration from his experiences with working with the producers of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet?
This mostly has to do with the fact that John Thomas XI is the first really unlikable RAH juvenile protagonist I've ever run into. He's obnoxious to his elders, not particularly smart, and much of the alleged comedy of the book has to do with him threatening to beat the living hell out of the titular character, Lummox, his pet... whatever. Now admittedly Lummox is the size of a small brontosaurus and with a hide so thick John needs to use a pickaxe to tickle him, and he did just destroy half the town inadvertently, but it's still pretty jarring.
OTOH you do have Mr. Kiku, which aside from being an amazing anomaly in RAH's canon (a heroic bureaucrat ?), he also happens to be a black South African in a very high level position in the world government. You have to wonder how on Earth RAH managed to slip that one past his editors in the pre-Civil Rights era.
Random Thought File: On a completely different tangent, I wonder if RAH's jokes about about poor Roger Stone's experience writing
