It may seem odd to include a 1950’s Science Fiction novel written for “juveniles” in a survival discussion.
It’s not.
From the time I first read it as a young boy to today, more decades later than I care to think about, this has easily been one of my favorite books. It has a special place in my heart, and I’ve long ago lost count of how many times I’ve read it.
To understand that you have to know that Heinlein never wrote “down” to his juvenile readers. He wrote exactly as he did for an adult readership, but simply omitted any romantic interest. He not only wrote as he did for adult readers, but he always wrote for very intelligent readers, which is one of the things that make him stand out as an author, then and now. To understand everything Heinlein writes about and refers to in passing one may need to stretch a bit, and probably do some research. It pays.
This is a story of a high-school survival class in the future, when mankind is colonizing many other worlds, so it’s a serious requirement for many careers in that colonization. Here’s what he faces:
“TEST CONDITIONS: (a) any planet, any climate, any terrain; (b) no rules, all weapons, any equipment; (c) teaming is permitted but teams will not be allowed to pass through the gate in company; (d) test duration is not less than forty-eight hours, not more than ten days.”
The terms are serious. It is a SURVIVAL test, which means that one way to fail is to die, and apparently that happens routinely. That as part of a high-school curriculum may be unimaginable to many in our hyper-protective culture today, but it predicted trends in current science fiction (which may be in part a backlash against that hyper-protective culture). Ruthless tests are familiar territory for readers and viewers of The Hunger Games , Battle Royale and their imitators. Heinlein made it clear in the book that in this future overpopulation is a huge problem, and of course as a consequence people, human lives, are devalued as a commodity… and the course is only required for off-world careers. so it is different than The Hunger Games or Battle Royale in that at least the participants are volunteers, and the test is intended to be a man-against-nature conflict, not humans deliberately pitted against each other.
The protagonist is one Rod Walker, who has the advantages of some outstanding guidance from both his instructor and his older sister, but ends up in a much larger survival situation than he was prepared for.
It’s also a tremendous story of hope, and, I think, a conscious rebuttal to Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a then-recently-published novel wherein a group of young schoolboys in a survival situation degenerate into savagery. Heinlein’s characters are not like that. Whether more realistic (I’m naive enough to think so) or not, his high-schoolers may have little enough material to work with but have the entirety of their educations to draw on, and it’s shown in believable detail that rather than devolving to animal-pack behavior they’re capable of boot-strapping a civilization.
Would that our education system did nearly as well.
The book does not end when the immediate threats to survival do, nor do the challenges the protagonist faces. There is a “re-entry” phase that is painful to experience even vicariously, and reminds me of a similar section of the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, and some of my own experiences… but also like Cast Away, the story actually ends on a much more hopeful note.
This is a book I proudly recommend to those that I think are capable of appreciating it, sadly a decreasing number in this time of decreasing literacy, the age of “TL;DR” minds.
It was a huge influence on me personally, and I think on others. It. It’s hard to convey now how sluggish the flow of information was back then, and how little information actually flowed, but at some time after reading the book I became aware of the Outward Bound program, an early and perhaps the first “survival school” or “outdoor adventure training”. As in the book, the training was followed by a “solo” survival test of left alone on an island for three days.
Tunnel in the Sky had already fired up my imagination along those lines, but being very young and isolated in the suburbs, not within walking distance of much of anything, with no way to earn money and unable to drive myself out of the isolation, everything I did was then at the whim of my parents. I campaigned vigorously to get them to at least consider sending me to Outward Bound, and although they pretended to weigh the pros and cons, I’m sure they never took the possibility seriously for a second. Thus frustrated, as soon as I was old enough I started a very long long history of camping, and then backpacking, and then preparedness of various types, all of which were completely alien to the way in which I was brought up. I had no experience to start with, no knowledge and no guidance, only a driving interest that came in part from this book.
Aside from the influence on me personally Outward Bound spurred forth an entire industry, today such schools number in the thousands, and the once almost non-existent public interest in “survival” as a subject is now apparent on almost any supermarket magazine rack and all over the web in all forms possible. It’s become almost a cultural obsession. If Tunnel in the Sky did inspire Outward Bound then I think it can take some indirect credit for everything that followed, and I think it is deserved.
Nor is that the only way in which Robert Heinlein was prescient here- at one point during Rod’s preparation we are treated to the description of something that sounds a great deal like a hydration-pack reservoir, a “Camelback” or similar, in a book published in 1955. It also contains the earliest reference I’ve seen to the “body armor” in the modern sense. As far as Science Fiction, the title “tunnel” (the Ramsbotham Gate) seems suspiciously like a Stargate, among others.
There’s been a lot of discussion in more recent years as to whether Rod Walker was intended to be African American. I understand that there’s some evidence of that. It never occurred to me in reading it several times growing up, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me then, even though at one point the question of whether he has some romantic attachment to a Zulu girl comes up in the novel. In the extreme isolation of the New England suburbs of that time I had hardly encountered African Americans at all… I didn’t really encounter that many people of any kind, outside of school hours. Reading it as an adult, I can see that it’s a definite possibility. My own guess, and it’s only a guess, is that he himself either vacillated on the point or deliberately decided to make the issue vague. Heinlein was known for not believing in describing his characters, thinking that it would only interfere with a reader’s ability to identify with them, so this approach is not at all out of character. I see that there have even been two editions of cover art of an audio book version, one depicting Rod as of African descent and one not. Aside from being a trivia question I have to say that it makes absolutely no difference to the book itself… and that is, I think, as it should be.
From time to time I’ve idly thought of things that I might do in my lifetime that would make a broader, longer-term impact for the good of mankind. I personally think that it’s critical that we get human colonies off-planet, because right now we have all our eggs in one basket and there WILL be future major extinction events, whether in a million years or a million nanoseconds we don’t know… but guys with real resources like Elon Musk and Richard Branson are already working on that. I’ve thought that maybe there are things I could do personally to inspire people and help them learn to value freedom, independence, and competence, if nothing else as foundations for happiness, as Heinlein himself did, but I am no Robert Heinlein. Often the thought occurs to me, though, that one could do far, far worse for posterity than to buy a few hundred copies of this book and get them into the hands of young people, if it could be done without being intercepted and pilloried by the PC Police.
I think of this book as at least one of the seeds that “rebooted” Baden-Powell‘s vision of making soft, modern youth (which were then generally far tougher than today’s standard) more difficult to kill when things get tough.
Highly recommended. If you have any interest in survival and haven’t read it, you’re depriving yourself.
As always… watch out for stobor!
– Robert the Wombat