| The Star Beast |
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| 1954 novels | |
| novels by robert a. heinlein | |
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The Star Beast is a 1954 Science Fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a high school senior who discovers that his late father's Extra-terrestrial pet is more than it appears to be. EDITIONS
PLOT SUMMARY John Thomas Stuart XI, one of whose ancestors brought "Cuddlepup" home from an interstellar voyage, has a problem. The pet he inherited has grown to gargantuan proportions; it ate a used Buick and (still worse) destroyed a neighbor's flowers. His mother wants him to get rid of it, and a court orders it destroyed. Johnny's only alternative is to sell his pet to a museum (which would study it to death, if they didn't dissect it immediately). So early one morning he runs away to the hills, riding on his talking pet's back. His girlfriend joins him and suggests bringing the beast back into town; they could hide it in a neighbor's greenhouse. The rest of the novel describes the discovery of the alien pet's true nature, and the diplomatic repercussions of this fact. The humor of the story comes when an awesomely powerful, heretofore unknown alien race appears and demands the return of a lost child of theirs. At first, no one associates the Star Beast, by now larger than an elephant and who can barely talk at an elementary level, with these all-powerful strangers; but it is finally discovered that, indeed, the lost child is the lost "princess" of the strangers. An irony in the story is that from the perspective of the humans, they had a long-lived pet, but from that of the Star Beast, she had grown up over generations raising humans as her hobby, and had no intention of stopping. Heinlein's ability to show that appearance is sometimes not congruent with reality was never better than in this novel, and its ending makes it one of his better works. For supposedly juvenile fiction, it also manages a good touch on the cost of love and loyalty. |
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