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Red Planet is a 1949 science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein
about students at boarding school on Mars. It represents the first appearance of Heinlein's idealized Martian elder race concept.
- June 1949, Scribner, library binding, ISBN 0684923017
- September 12, 1977, Del Rey, paperback, ISBN 0345260694
- September 12, 1981, Del Rey, paperback, ISBN 034530277X
- June 12, 1986, Del Rey, paperback reprint edition, ISBN 0345340396
- January 1990, Del Rey Books, paperback, ISBN 0345013883
- December 1, 2000, Robert Hale Ltd, hardcover, ISBN 0709068018
- December 2001, Fictionwise.com, ISBN 159062243X
When an unscrupulous headmaster seeks to prevent the annual migration of families to save the Company money, two boys run away from school to warn their parents. In a foreshadowing of many revolutions against bad authority, an uprising against the company forces retakes the school and effects the needed migration. The crusty Doctor MacRae and the two boys are heroes, but the relationship between one bouncer (kept as a pet) and the boy who "owns" him is the real key to this book. Absent that friendship, the Martians would have exterminated all the human colonists.
The Martians start as bouncers, metamorphose into adults, then continue their life after death as "old ones" (see Stranger in a Strange Land). While living on the physical plane, they inhabit both worlds: the physical and the (unspecified) other.
An animated cartoon series was made, loosely based on this book.
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