Well, since we’re on a classics streak, after the Soviet Those Who Survive it’s time to talk about Robert A/ Heinlein’s novel Orphans of the Sky.
Originally, the book was written as two separate parts, published independently as novellas in Astounding Science Fiction magazine back in 1941: Universe and Common Sense. Only twenty years later, in 1963, were the two novellas published together as a single work under the title Orphans of the Sky. Russian readers know the book as Stepsons of the Universe, as it was rendered as Stepsons by its first Russian translator, Yuri Zarakhovich.
For Soviet readers, the novel was first published in Zarakhovich’s translation in 1977 (incidentally, the year I was born), serialized across five issues of Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) magazine. I don’t know the exact reason, but for that magazine publication Zarakhovich produced an abridged translation. Nevertheless, it was this version that became the canonical one for many years and continued to be reprinted right up until 2003. Only in 2003 did a complete Russian translation of the novel appear, by Elena Belyaeva and Alexander Mityushkin. Neither of them were professional translators, yet their work still received an award. In addition to restoring the full text, they also slightly revised some terminology that had become “familiar” over decades of reprints of Zarakhovich’s version.
But none of the later translations ever dared to change the title. Even if not entirely literal, the more beautiful in Russian Stepsons of the Universe has firmly stuck to the novel in Russian and will likely remain so forever.
But all of that is just background. What is the book actually about? By today’s standards, the plot may seem like something we’ve heard a hundred times before.
Somewhere in deep space, a colony ship is traveling onward. Everything seemed to have been carefully planned, but at some point a rebellion broke out aboard the ship. Part of the crew killed off almost the entire command staff, declared themselves the new leaders—and then something went wrong. Because a revolution never comes without consequences. As it turned out, the new “commanders” either didn’t really know how to run the ship, or didn’t particularly want to. And the ship’s systems, designed to be foolproof, never anticipated that the crew would be foolish enough to start a war inside the vessel itself.
So the ship keeps flying—but far longer than originally planned. Generations of its inhabitants no longer remember that they are traveling anywhere at all, or that anything exists beyond the hull of the ship. At some point in the past, a group of outcasts was driven to the far decks, where—whether due to combat damage or simply the passage of time—radiation levels were too high, and mutants began to be born. “Normal” people have no love for mutants; such children are thrown into the energy converter immediately after birth. But on the periphery of the ship, mutants survive. They regularly raid the normal settlements and farms of the inner levels, and there they have come to be known as muties.
A young inhabitant of the “proper” part of the ship named Hugh aspires to become a Scientist. But Scientists here are not those who are the smartest — they are the ones who give orders, while everyone else listens with their mouths open. They also get to take a couple of wives, a first and a second; the wives will be given names later, if they manage to fit in (yes, blatant sexism — though the failed colonists don’t know such a word). The core intrigue is that at some point Hugh begins to doubt that the doctrine is correct. The muties, whom he ends up captured by, tell him all sorts of heretical things — and back them up with fairly convincing arguments. Like: the Captain isn’t real! Meaning, he has no idea what a captain is actually supposed to do. And that, in fact, the ship is flying through space.
From there begins a struggle for power — over who is the greater heretic — as well as an irrepressible desire to finally fulfill the mission laid down generations ago: to steer the ship toward its destination and eventually land on a distant planet.
Yes, today there are countless works with similar plots. But we should not forget that this novel is already 82 years old. The very idea that, over generations, people could lose sight of their true purpose, fall into a semi-feral state, turn titles into a kind of cargo cult, and reduce their functions to a mere struggle for power — that idea is excellent and lends itself to a fascinating psychological experiment. The problem is that in the hands of a 34-year-old Heinlein, it turns into more of an adventure novel, with only a light veneer of science.
In those years (and for many decades afterward), it was popular to depict mutants as people with numerous visible deviations from a normal human being. In reality, mutations of that kind are rare and, for the most part, nonviable. Yet two-headed, four-armed mutants appeared in the works of many authors.
Beyond that, the story relies on some very strong assumptions. Yes, the ship was built to be “foolproof,” capable of functioning autonomously for generations even if people forgot how to operate it. But it could not reach its ultimate goal—landing and sustaining life on a planet—entirely on its own. And here, against the backdrop of swashbuckling clashes with a hint of The Three Musketeers, Robert Heinlein opts for simplification. The protagonists are unbelievably lucky. They manage to figure everything out from books (they have not forgotten how to read, though if they had manuals with pictures—or better yet, video tutorials—knowledge would have been passed on far more easily). They make mistake after mistake, yet fortune constantly favors them—for instance, the airlock does not open and eject them all into open space. Moreover, they somehow figure out how to land a shuttle on a planet. And this despite the fact that just “yesterday” they knew nothing about the existence of space, planets, or even the rules of operating something as simple as a bicycle, let alone complex spacecraft.
All in all, one could go on for quite a while listing such narrative flaws; for a modern reader, they really do come across as naïve. But we should not forget how old the book is — and the fact that it was one of the pioneers of its genre.
That said, even when comparing this novel to Heinlein’s other works, it feels far from the best choice for introducing a reader to his writing. Although it is quite possible that more serious works of his simply would not have made it past Soviet ideological censors at the time.
When I read the book as a child, it became one of my absolute favorites. But my adult self no longer shares that enthusiasm. Yes, it is a classic — but by today’s standards, I cannot give it a high rating. Too many authors after Heinlein have explored the same theme far more deeply.
Even here, though, Heinlein raises several important questions. What does a society become once it no longer remembers its origins? How will people reinterpret the knowledge left behind by their ancestors (essentially turning it into a religious cult filled with allegories and dogma)? How will they invent criteria for dividing the world into “us” and “enemies”? And how will they resist anything that might threaten the familiar status quo? All of this, in fact, exists in the world around us today. There is no need to board a spaceship or sacrifice several generations to see it. It simply would have been more interesting if Heinlein had chosen to develop precisely these aspects in greater depth.
P.S. Heinlein later mentioned this lost ship in several of his subsequent books, even referring to its descendants. Although I personally cannot quite grasp how a settlement could realistically emerge from just four to six people without degenerating almost immediately—not to mention the fact that they had no real understanding of how to survive on any planet at all, let alone an alien one.
My rating: 3/5
