Talk:Have Space Suit—Will Travel

message: The plot synopsis on Have Space Suit—Will Travel was both incomplete and inaccurate, using incorrect names for characters, not naming several characters, and not giving a complete summary of the books' events. I did my best to summarize the book properly as this is one of my favorite Heinlein novels.
--Parcequilfaut 20:35, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm glad you did, too many of Heinlein's novel summaries are like stubs.  I have made a few minor changes.--Wehwalt 20:46, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. I was doing it blind from memory, I just moved and my copy was in a box. I'll take a look at the others since right now I have nothin' but free time :) --Parcequilfaut 21:23, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Things like plot summaries and synopses are rather childish and quite likely violations of copyrights. What the Wikipedia needs is a genuine book review article, or nothing at all.74.249.79.103 (talk) 05:40, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article Severely Edited 

message: I have twice eliminated what I think is original research relating to alleged technical errors by Heinlein.  This is original research on the editor's part.  And even so, it may be wrong, as, for example, the editor talks about what is "usual for a spacesuit".  Maybe it is usual for today's spacesuits, but how is it usual for the spacesuit in the story?  And how is this anything other than OR?
And the trivia must either be incorporated or eliminated.--Wehwalt 22:16, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: OK OK OK, I agree about the errors section: is this short summary OK? As regards "original research", (as with patent law) surely some exception can be made in cases of "obviousness"?
Anthony Appleyard 07:47, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

text: A comparison to "all real spacesuits" as an 'error', or a lapse on the part of the Author in a book published 2 years prior to any manned spaceflight, is not a valid criticism of the work. It's akin to claiming that Mark Twain made an error when he estimated how long it would take Huck Finn to travel down the Mississippi river, since he 'apparently had no knowledge of gasoline motors', decades before they were in common use or available to the public. Kpulliam (talk) 03:46, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Scuba and all that

message: While I'm not sure I'd call this a theme, I've read that "Have Spacesuit..." in the beginning is an explicit manual on how to get a pre-college education that will get you into Caltech or MIT (which it is indeed, at least from memory when I last read it).  I'm pretty sure there's something citable out there about this, and it would profitably improve the last paragraph of this section. Hga 03:05, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Themes

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BetacommandBot (talk) 06:57, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:Hsswt58.jpg

message: Asimov was third author of a biochemistry text. On the first page of chapter 2 of Have Spacesuit-Will Travel, Mr. Charton loans the hero, Kip, Walker, Boyd and Asimov. This should be taken as praise for Asimov since the story is set in the future from 1958, indicating the textbook was still in use. It would be good to mention that either in Asimov's bio or in this article.--Rich Peterson 99.128.61.101 (talk) 22:05, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: tribute to [[Isaac Asimov]]'s biochemistry text

message: I've been listening to the audiobook of this series, and for the life of me, I can't see a deus ex machina in there. The Mother Thing's affiliation is explicitly stated long before her people show up, and the Vegans don't directly interact with the wormfaces at all; having them show up in response to the beacon that was the purpose of Kit's going outside in the first place doesn't seem to fit the bill of deus ex machina to me, either.157.139.9.155 (talk) 15:09, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The Godlike cyborg "judge" of the interstellar tribunal which takes care of the wormfaces, give humanity the tools it needs to avoid nuclear war, restores Kip and Peewee to home, and generally dusts up and cleans up and even makes sure Kip has a scholarship (indirectly, since it gives him something valuable enough to trade for it) is the Deux Ex Machina. Compare with the "overgod" character Mr. Koshchei (nod to James Branch Cabell) at the end of Job: A Comedy of Justice. SBHarris 06:17, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting; I viewed the "judge" as more of an antagonist, given how much grief it gives Kip and Peewee (and how close it comes to killing off all of humanity). Fair enough, I suppose. 157.139.9.155 (talk) 21:13, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  The near-danger is a ploy. The ancient Martian "god-ancestor" nearly kicks humanity off Mars in Red Planet (a similar wrap-up ending), but ends up not doing it. But this being and the Martians do take care of the badguys and fix the main dramatic tension that drives the rest of the book. Somewhat the same thing. Heinlein had more than one story where the primitives worship a "god" which actually has some godlike powers and is formidable when "awakened." It's rather the sort of "elder-god" mythos (The Sons of the Bird) that Heinlein inherits from Cabal and, of course, Lovecraft. Compare the wormfaces to the Migo in The Whisperer in Darkness. For that matter, compare the Venusian "primitive" culture (with a high tech background) in Between Planets vs. the Venusians in In the Walls of Eryx. SBHarris 21:26, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deus Ex Machina? 

message: Someone who knows the book better than me  might read this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_write_a_plot_summary, and then shorten it. Otherwise, there is currently a lot of good info here.Tlqk56 (talk) 02:03, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not extraordinarily long (779 words), but I'll take a whack at it. Clarityfiend (talk) 03:24, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Today only! 10% off (700 681 words). Clarityfiend (talk) 03:35, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plot Summary Too Long 

message: This looks like nothing more than Original Research.  Find sourced material for the themes of this novel, and cite it properly, please. HammerFilmFan (talk) 22:46, 29 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  removing the 'Themes' section - unsourced for 2 years now 

message: I've known about amateur satellites since 1971, and must have read the book before that, but I've never seen any indication that Project Oscar derives from the name of the spacesuit in the book. I've certainly read back issues of the ham magazines from the early days of amateur satellites, and did read the column that got the idea going.  But no mention of Heinlein's book.  The first amateur satellite went up in December of 1961, the book only came out in 1958, and it took some time for the project to build the satellite and then get launch space.  I doubt there was enough time to influence the project, and since the book was a juvenile, I doubt it was on the reading list of a bunch of older hams who had the ability to arrange launch space.
That said, I don't remember reading anything about how the name was chosen.
Given that, it's an even bigger reach to mention the SuitSat.
Mblack59 (talk) 05:29, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  the Legacy section 

message: In 2005 a book came out that discusses Have Space Suit—Will Travel. Unfortunately, most of it is on page 196, which is not visible in Preview Mode on Google Books, although some of it spills over onto page 197 here: Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science by M. G. Lord
From a review: "During the late 1960s, while M. G. Lord was becoming a teenager in Southern California and her mother was dying of cancer, Lord's father-an archetypal, remote, rocket engineer- disappeared into his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, building the space probes of the Mariner Mars 69 mission." Zyxwv99 (talk) 21:07, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Astro Turf 

message: The notion that the Wright Field and Centerville locations discussed in the novel are in Ohio is not original. This was being discussed among readers of Robert Heinlein when I worked at Wright Field over 30 years ago. The fit for Ohio was so close that I believe most people familiar with the area accepted that these locations were in Ohio the same way that folks accept that Paris is the capitol of France. So, I was somewhat surprised to see the suggestion of the Ohio connection to these locations challenged, I as believed this to be widely accepted. While it is accurate to say that Heinlein did not state in the novel that Wright Field and Centerville were in Ohio (although he does mention Akron), there is sufficent evidence to conclude that these were the most likely locations. BackAlleyBoy (talk) 22:36, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Real World Locations 

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thread_title:  External links modified