Heinlein and Robinson: _Variable star

Heinlein, Robert A., and Spider Robinson. Variable star. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2006. ISBN 0-765-31312-X.

Summary: A smart, musically talented, underachieving college student discovers that his girlfriend's family is immensely wealthy and wants him, upon marrying into the family, to become an unscrupulous capitalist, or, failing that, to father one. He manages to escape this appalling fate by emigrating; since the novel is set in the future and posits space travel and an active effort to colonize planets around other stars, he can escape irreversibly and finally by enlisting as a colonist. Most of the book concerns conditions aboard the transport vessel, which is expected to take twenty years to reach the colony even if everything goes well.

Not everything goes well, however; the ship's drive fails during the voyage, and shortly after that the colonists are further demoralized by news of a global catastrophe back on Earth. The plot of the book, which has been moseying aimlessly along for a hundred pages, now kicks into overdrive, and the protagonist's ingenuity, physical training, insight, and emotional integrity are tested in rapid succession by the unexpected consequences of the disasters.

In 1955, Robert Heinlein wrote a detailed outline, including character sketches and backstories, for a book that he never wrote. A fragment of this outline (the first seven pages, of an unknown total) was discovered after his death. His executors invited Spider Robinson to write a novel from the outline. Variable star is the result.

The characters and the setting are more Heinlein's than Robinson's; the plot and style, except perhaps for the slow-then-fast pacing, are more Robinson's than Heinlein's. The most questionable plot decision is the global catastrophe, which I think Heinlein would not have considered acceptable to his audience, and which he himself would have disliked. In an afterword, Robinson tries to justify his decision by quoting a speech that Heinlein gave, near the end of his life, arguing for funding for space exploration by suggesting that, if humanity inhabited many planets, it could survive the catastrophic destruction of one of them. My guess is that, although Heinlein was willing to toy with this idea in a speech, he would not have made it a key plot development in a popular novel.