Have Space Suit—Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein

I picked up the audiobook of Have Space Suit—Will Travel because it was a familiar title and I've always intended to read something by Heinlein. I didn't realize until I started it that it was a Young Adult novel, but it was still an enjoyable listen, performed by a full cast and including music and a few sound effects.

The story is narrated by a high school senior/recent graduate named Kip Russell. Kip enters a contest with the intention of winning a trip to the moon, but ends up with the runner-up prize of a genuine space suit. It's not in very good condition but he manages to get it fixed. While taking the suit for a walk outside his house, he messes around with the radio,  pretending to communicate with the callsign "Peewee." Much to Kip's surprise, a girl genius named Peewee had been listening and lands her flying saucer nearly on top of him. Along with a diminutive but maternal alien that Peewee named "the Mother thing," the young protagonists end up on the Moon, then on Pluto, and later on the Mother thing's home planet, repeatedly encountering and escaping from aliens they dub Wormfaces along the way.

One remarkable thing about Have Space Suit—Will Travel is the amount of research Heinlein put in to his descriptions of how the titular space suit helps Kip survive, considering he wrote this novel more than a decade before man actually set foot on the Moon. There are also fairly accurate calculations of distances between planets and how long it would take to reach them. The first couple chapters before Kip gets the space suit made me expect the whole work to be an amusing jaunt, but despite the implausibility of some of the scenarios, the moments when Kip and Peewee have to survive the harshness of space with limited air and water felt suspenseful and realistic.

This book is a little dated by today's sci-fi standards and wasn't intended to be as thought-provoking as some of Heinlein's other work, but it makes for a fun ride.

You can learn more about the author at the website for The Heinlein Society.