Double Star
by Robert A. Heinlein
Summary
Lorenzo Smythe is a magnificent actor in his own estimation and an unemployed one in everyone else's: vain, broke, prejudiced, and drinking in a bar when a spaceman offers him a job he is too proud to refuse and too poor to turn down.
The job is impersonation. John Joseph Bonforte, leader of the Expansionist party and the most important politician in the solar system, has been kidnapped by opponents days before a Martian adoption ceremony that will make him a member of a Martian nest. If he fails to appear, the insult ends any prospect of Martians receiving full civil rights, and the system goes to war.
So Lorenzo studies the man, walks into the ceremony, and carries it off. Then Bonforte is recovered in poor condition, and the substitution has to continue, through a parliamentary crisis, an election, and considerably longer than anyone intended.
The novel's actual subject is what sustained performance does to a performer. Lorenzo begins as a bigot who despises Martians and finds himself, in order to play a decent man convincingly, having to think like one, until the distinction stops being available to him.
The supporting people are sketched fast and well: Penny, Bonforte's secretary, who is in love with her employer and resents the imitation; Dak Broadbent, the pilot who recruited him; and Bonforte himself, glimpsed only briefly and mostly through the recordings Lorenzo studies.
Around one hundred and ninety pages, tight, funny and warm, with none of the lecturing that dominates the later books.
It is widely considered the best constructed thing Heinlein wrote, and it is the easiest of his novels to hand to someone who has never read him. Best for readers who want a political comedy with real feeling and not one wasted scene.
Historical Context & Significance
Double Star won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1956, the first of Robert A. Heinlein's four in the category, followed by Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. No writer matched that count for decades.
It was serialised in Astounding Science Fiction in early 1956 and is among the shortest novels ever to take the award.
It comes from the most productive stretch of his career, when he was writing the juvenile novels for Scribner's that trained a generation of readers, and it shares their discipline: no digressions, no lectures, a plot that moves.
Heinlein became the first Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 1975 and died in 1988, and the political argument about his work has continued without interruption ever since.