Double Star is the book where Robert A. Heinlein won his first Hugo, and it’s the one that surprises people who only know him for the big sermon novels. It’s short, it’s fast, and it’s mostly a character study of a vain, out-of-work actor who gets handed the biggest part of his life and then can’t take the costume off. It ran in Astounding in February, March and April of 1956, came out from Doubleday the same year, and took the 1956 Hugo for Best Novel, only the third time that trophy had been given out. I’d put it near the top of the early winners for sheer readability, and the plot is worth walking through in real detail because the whole thing depends on how one lie snowballs.
The world is a tidy one. Humans have settled the Moon, Mars, Venus and the moons of Jupiter, and the Solar System runs as a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarch, governed from a capital on the Moon. Mars has its own native, non-human people, and they’ve only recently been admitted to citizenship, which is a sore spot for plenty of humans who’d rather they hadn’t been. On one side you’ve got the Expansionists, led by the great orator John Joseph Bonforte, who want the Martians treated as equals. On the other is the Humanity Party, which holds the government and wants humans in charge.
A bar, a spaceman, and a job nobody should take
Our narrator is Lawrence Smith, who performs as “The Great Lorenzo” (the book mostly calls him Lorenzo Smythe), and when we meet him he’s broke, sitting in a bar and hoping to hustle a drink out of whoever walks in. What walks in is Dak Broadbent, a spacer and an Expansionist Party man, who starts talking about an acting job. Lorenzo doesn’t want to be told the details, and when he’s pushed on it he turns the offer down. That would be the end of it, except that violence finds them: an armed man and a Martian jump the pair of them, both attackers end up dead, and Lorenzo is suddenly an accessory to cleaning up bodies (they get fed into the hotel’s disposal) in a way he never signed up for. Dak has him where he wants him.
They lift off for Mars, and somewhere in transit Lorenzo learns exactly who he’s meant to be: Bonforte himself, the politician he personally can’t stand. Bonforte has been kidnapped, and everyone suspects fanatics tied to the Humanity Party. The timing is the point. He was due to be formally adopted into a Martian nest, a ceremony that matters enormously to Martian culture and would cement the human-Martian alliance, and if he doesn’t show, the whole thing sours into a possible war. So the plan is simple and awful: have an actor stand in, get through the ceremony, and hope Bonforte turns up before anybody looks too closely. Lorenzo, who’s also a bit of a bigot about Martians, has already been dragged too far into it to walk away, and he says yes, more or less against his own better judgment.
Bonforte’s inner circle takes him in hand, and they’re a lovely little cast. There’s Penny Russell, the politician’s devoted personal secretary; Dr. Capek, the physician; Roger Clifton, the political operator; and Bill Corpsman, the press man who runs the daily machinery of the office and who’s not thrilled about a stage actor in the boss’s chair. Lorenzo studies recordings of Bonforte until he has the walk and the voice down, and he goes through hypnosis to cure his gut-level Martian prejudice, because you can’t stand at that ceremony sneering at the people who are adopting you. The trick with any impersonation story is making the actor’s craft feel like real work, and Heinlein does. Lorenzo’s professionalism, his stubborn “the show must go on” streak, is the thing that carries him through.
Playing the part, then becoming it
The ceremony goes off. Lorenzo gets through the adoption, and the Martians accept him as Bonforte, which is the first real victory of the book. Then the other shoe drops: the real Bonforte is found, and he’s in terrible shape, drugged and chemically brainwashed by the kidnappers, so wrecked that he can’t appear in public for months. That’s the moment the job stops being a weekend gig. The Expansionists can’t afford to reveal what happened, so Lorenzo has to keep playing a man who’s alive but out of sight, and he’s stuck with the part.
He digs into it. Bonforte kept enormous files on everyone in politics (they call them the Farley files), and Lorenzo uses them to work rooms he has no business working, learning names and grudges and who owes whom. Somewhere in the middle of this he stops mimicking Bonforte’s opinions and starts having them. Then comes the big speech, delivered across the whole Solar System, where he lays out what the Expansionist philosophy actually is, that humans and non-humans are equals and the government’s job is to act like it. It lands so hard that the Humanity Party government falls apart and resigns.
Emperor Willem, the constitutional monarch on the Moon, summons him to form a caretaker government. And here Heinlein does something great. The Emperor and the real Bonforte are old friends, so Willem sees through Lorenzo almost immediately, and instead of blowing it all up, he tells him to keep going. It’s a terrific scene, and Jo Walton, writing about this book for Tor.com, singles out exactly that quality, the way the novel makes parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarchy look like a fun system to live in, coming from a writer who was proudly American.
Not everybody stays on board. Corpsman starts to clash with him, and when Lorenzo takes him off the candidate list for the Grand Assembly, Corpsman quits and goes to expose the fraud. It doesn’t work, because when the fingerprints are checked they match Bonforte’s official records, so as far as the world can prove, Lorenzo is the man. Which is one of those small, perfect Heinlein details: the con is now, legally and biometrically, true.
The ending, and why it’s the right one
The Expansionists win the election in a landslide. And in the moment of victory, the real Bonforte dies, from the aftereffects of his kidnapping and drugging. Now the coalition leans on Lorenzo to stay in the role permanently, and the book goes quiet while he decides. The last section reveals that the story we’ve been reading is a journal Lorenzo wrote years before, and that twenty-five years on he’s still Bonforte. He’s married to Penny. He carries out Bonforte’s ideals for real, and he says he now remembers Bonforte’s early life better than he remembers his own. It’s poignant, and it’s a touch eerie, and you get the sense that Lorenzo the actor is the one who really died.
Some reviewers wanted more from that last turn. One complaint you’ll see is that the novel stops right when the “who am I now?” question gets serious and never digs into it, and that the Martians drop out of the plot after the early chapters. I get that, and I still think the restraint works, because the point is what he does and not what he says about it. The quality of the change is clear on the page: Lorenzo starts out a snob and ends up a man who’d defend a Martian’s vote in front of the whole system, and he never notices himself crossing the line, which is what makes him an unreliable narrator in the best way.
Why it won, and whether it holds up
Double Star is basically Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda moved to the planets, the old story of a commoner who takes a king’s place, and that’s a fair description that doesn’t do the book justice. What Heinlein adds is the politics. He makes rival parties, back-room deals and election maths feel real, and he gives the impersonation a moral question about whether playing a good man for long enough makes you one. James Blish praised Lorenzo as a fully independent human being, and that’s the hook: the book lives on him, not on the rockets.
It holds up better than most of its neighbours. Writing on Locus about a re-read of the book, one reviewer noted that its endurance comes from focusing on one character rather than the tech, which means the dated details barely matter. You can see the 1956 Hugo listing for yourself in the Hugo history, and in 2012 it was picked for the Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s. That’s a lot of mileage for something you can finish in an afternoon.
If you want Heinlein at his most argumentative, my post on Starship Troopers covers the book that took the Hugo four years later, and it’s a very different animal, all citizenship and drill sergeants. The other big Hugo winner from this stretch of the list is A Canticle for Leibowitz, which couldn’t be further from Double Star’s clean parliamentary optimism. And for the Heinlein that got the counterculture excited, there’s my earlier take on Stranger in a Strange Land, which I’d read after this one, to see how far the same writer could swing.