There's a reason Heinlein was one of science fiction's three Masters, and novels like this are one of them. Written apparently as a YA adventure, it tells the story of a young man suddenly thrust into a war between Earth and its colonies on Mars and Venus. Plot and characters are pretty straightforward, but Heinlein's genius was creating a future world where the technology works and is taken as commonplace by the characters, even as the reader is bogged down in gee-whiz and slowly coming to the conclusion that it could indeed work just that way.

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