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On the day he should be celebrating his birthday, Jamey Barlowe and his sister Melissa are awakened in the middle of the night to find themselves whisked off to the one place where they might be safe. There's been a political coup in the United States, and their father is a public figure on the wrong side. With pursuit closing in, Jamey and Melissa are loaded on to a shuttle and launched. They're on their way to the Moon.

That's the set-up for Apollo's Outcasts, a young adult novel from Allen Steele. It features, in addition to the political background, adventures on the Moon, a budding romance, and young people being forced to confront the responsibilities of adulthood in dramatic fashion, the standard stuff of many a YA novel. But for long-time science fiction readers, one aspect of Apollo's Outcasts stands out above all others. Apollo's Outcasts isn't just a near-future young adult novel, it's a Heinlein juvenile YA novel, and that invokes a tradition that takes many grown-up SF readers back to the golden age of their youth.

There are certainly plenty of the qualities that make up a Heinlein juvenile in Apollo's Outcasts. The basic situation of a teen forced to discover his or her self in a new environment recalls everything from Farmer in the Sky to Citizen of the Galaxy. And the bits of fascination with the details of technology in between the adventure and character study are right out of the Heinlein playbook. But the Heinlein stories that Apollo's Outcasts are closest to are three short stories from the ostensibly adult The Past Through Tomorrow future history series, "The Black Pits Of Luna," "It's Great To Be Back," and "The Menace From Earth." It's the focus on the details of daily life in a new land, and the sense that some people will adapt to the new conditions and some won't that also fleshes out the story of Apollo's Outcasts, and give the novel its closest connection to Heinlein.

That's all good for those of us who grew up reading all those books when we were about the same age as the characters, the question is will Apollo's Outcasts find a readership among those who are teenagers and young adults now? There's no doubt the prose is solid and the characters understandable and real. The political set-up is handled with enough detail, and close enough to current events, to make up a convincing set of bad guys, and the action and battle scenes are up close and personal. Let's hope that's enough for Apollo's Outcasts to find a sizable audience. It would be good to see a classically-styled space adventure competing with all the near-future apocalypses and vampire fantasies that dominate the market for young adult novels.

Apollo's Outcasts has given reviewer Greg L Johnson several places to add to his fictional map of the Moon. Greg's reviews have appeared in publications ranging from The Minneapolis Star-Tribune to the The New York Review of Science Fiction.