Double Star

Double Star is a science fiction novel by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein, serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in three parts in 1956 and published as a book the same year. It was his first Hugo Award for Best Novel.

The solar system of the novel is colonised as far out as the moons of Jupiter and governed by a parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy seated on the Moon, and the native Martians have recently been admitted to citizenship. Politics is therefore a matter of holding a coalition together, and John Joseph Bonforte leads the Expansionist coalition, which is out of office but expected to return at the next election.

Lorenzo Smythe, whose stage name is the Great Lorenzo, is a gifted and unsuccessful actor down to his last coin. What he agrees to, believing it is a small engagement, is to stand in for Bonforte after the politician is kidnapped by his opponents, and he finds himself on Mars impersonating a man whose opinions he does not share at all while his employers search for the real one.