According to screenwriter David Gerrold, the show's producers noticed similarities in the two stories and asked Heinlein for permission to use the idea.

A similar concept and plotline appeared later in the Star Trek episode ' The Trouble with Tribbles'.

Heinlein later credited the 1905 Ellis Parker Butler short story ' Pigs Is Pigs' with inspiring the flat cat incident. The novel ends with the family setting out to see the rings of Saturn.Īs with his other novels, Heinlein and his wife Virginia 'spent countless hours in research, fiercely dedicated to getting it right for their readers.' Influences En route, the flat cat and its offspring overpopulate the ship so the family places them in hibernation and later sells them to the miners. In preparation for the asteroid belt, where the equivalent of a gold rush is in progress prospecting for 'core material' and radioactive ores, the twins obtain supplies and luxury goods on Mars to sell at their destination, on the principle that it is shopkeepers, not miners, who get rich during gold rushes. While on Mars, the twins buy their brother Buster a native Martian creature called a flat cat, which produces a soothing vibration, as a pet. The twin teenage boys, named Castor and Pollux after the half-brothers of classical legend, buy used bicycles to sell on Mars, their first stop, where they run afoul of local regulations, but their grandmother Hazel Stone saves them from jail. The Stones, a family of 'Loonies' (residents of the Moon, also known as Luna), purchase and rebuild a used spaceship and go sightseeing around the Solar System. It was published in hardcover that year by Scribner's as part of the Heinlein juveniles. Heinlein.Ī condensed version of the novel had been published earlier in Boys' Life (September, October, November, December 1952) under the title 'Tramp Space Ship'. The Rolling Stones (also published under the name Space Family Stone in the United Kingdom) is a 1952 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A.

怒月 by Robert A. Heinlein