Between Planets

Between Planets is a juvenile science fiction novel by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein, serialised in Blue Book magazine in 1951 as Planets in Combat and published in hardcover that year by Scribner's as one of the Heinlein juveniles.

The book begins with Don Harvey being withdrawn from his high school in New Mexico for reasons his parents decline to spell out, and with the headmaster's suggestion that they want their son out of a place that is about to become a war zone and where his loyalties would be doubted. At his parents' request Don visits an old family friend, who asks him to carry a ring to his father; security forces then arrest both of them. Don is released and given the ring back once it has been looked at, and he is told that his friend has died of heart failure, a phrase he later works out can be applied to almost any death. He boards a shuttle to a space station in Earth orbit, a transshipment terminal that is also a military base armed with missiles to hold the restive nations below in check, and the novel follows him outward from there.

Heinlein's novels for younger readers of the early 1950s tend to put an unremarkable adolescent into the middle of adult politics, and this one hands its protagonist a courier's task, a colonial question between Earth, Venus and Mars, and a war that is already under way before he has understood the argument.