I have not read all of Heinlein’s work or even most of it. Here it’s that the game of politics is “the only sport for grownups.” He’s not young, but like the hero and heroines of many a Heinlein juvenile, he learns a lesson. He’s one of Heinlein’s Competent Men except his area of competency happens to be acting, and he’s quite devoted to the art and ethics of his profession.

It’s the voice of the conceited Smythe that saves this story and makes it quick and quite enjoyable. Soon, bodies are being cut up and being fed into the hotel oubliette, and Smythe is on his way to Mars. But his refusal is interrupted by an armed man and Martian. They want the Empire to include aliens, to not repeat “the mistakes the white subrace had made in Africa and Asia”. Our hero and narrator, Lorenzo Smythe, unemployed “Pantomimist and Mimicry Artist Extraordinary”, turns down a pitch to impersonate leader of the Expansionist Party. That’s because it’s yet another version of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. Sure, it all seems vaguely 19 th century with an Empire ruled by a constitutional monarch, King Willem of the Habsburg lips and Windsor nose. Sure, the story starts in Missouri (maybe) and goes to Mars and the Moon, but the settings usually have the exoticness of a beige office cube or, to be exact, of the many rocket ship staterooms where most of the action is set.

Sure, there are Martians and Venerians and Outer Jovians, but the last two are never on stage and the first isn’t very alien. David Nordley’s “The Fountain” from the June 2013 Asimov’s Science Fiction. This one I read because it was a Heinlein I hadn’t read and is explicitly referenced in G.

Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein