Robert Heinlein week

The science fiction master was born July 7, 1907. I read all his books up through 1966's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (his most literary novel) as a kid, then reread them when I was on chemotherapy in 1997, then reread them again early in this decade.

- Sure, the future isn't what it used to be because transportation didn't keep getting faster and cheaper like it had since the invention of the steamship (although Heinlein's 1940 prediction that the 1960s-70s would be known to history as The Crazy Years was on the money.) But Heinlein's books really aren't about the future, they're about mid-20th century America, and that's a country I like a lot. In Heinlein's novels it's always late May 1942 as the shot-up Yorktown limps into the Pearl Harbor drydock while the Japanese fleet heads for Midway.

- There will be a lot of arguments this week over what Heinlein's ideology was. The simple answer is that he was a creative writer, and you shouldn't look for a consistent ideology in his fiction.

- Heinlein had had a lot of unsuccessful careers before he began writing at 32 in 1939, and he loved to explain how things work. He's comparable to James Michener, but with more interesting stories and snappier dialogue. (Heinlein's dialogue style was borrowed from the screwball comedies and film noirs of his time

- Between 1959 and 1966 Heinlein published three books that remain cult novels today. Remarkably, they are worshipped by three almost mutually exclusive audiences: Starship Troopers (military men), Stranger in a Strange Land (hippies and New Agers), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (libertarians).

- Of these three cult books, "Moon" is the best plotted and best written (including Heinlein's most ambitious attempt at a new prose style, which was presumably influenced by the Russian slang in Anthony Burgess' 1962 "Clockwork Orange"). While, for some mysterious (probably hormonal) reason, I love "Starship Troopers" more, this book certainly is the ideal introduction to Heinlein's novels for adults. It's literary merits are all the more surprising considering both it's abundant slam-bang action and it's status as a treatise on libertarianism. Moreover, for a work of ideological propaganda, it is clear-eyed about what you'd have to put up with to live in a libertarian society. Without the government to look after you, Heinlein points out that you'd have to make sure you are on very friendly terms with all your neighbors. Extreme neighborliness is a requirement for a libertarian society (Charles Murray reiterated this point in his "What It Means to Be a Libertarian"). Personally, as a surly introvert, the lack of privacy and the social conformity required to function in a stateless society would get on my nerves so bad, that I'd probably make myself a nuisance to all my neighbors, and no doubt they'd be justified in eventually tossing me out an airlock. So, maybe I don't really want to live in a truly libertarian society. But, it's well worth visiting one in the company of a fascinating mind like Heinlein's.

- It's fun to see recent literary novels like Clockwork Orange show up in Heinlein's books. For instance, 1955's Tunnel in the Sky about how a class of high school students that's marooned on an uninhabited planet get themselves organized so they can survive in a civilized manner appears to be Heinlein's optimistic rejoinder to William Golding's 1954 Lord of the Flies. And the satirical description of the American high school curriculum in 1959's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is prefigured closely in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which was first published in the U.S. in 1958.

- Heinlein's 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land evolved much like Nabokov's Lolita. Both writers began working on their respective scandalous magnum opuses about 1949, figuring that while they weren't publishable at present, American norms were changing fast enough that they would be publishable eventually. Both ended up long and self-indulgent.

- After a fast-paced opening, Stranger in a Strange Land bogs down badly. It reads like a few cokeheads lecturing some credulous potheads on everything under the sun. Still, what a great title it has, maybe the best by any novel ever. The Prophet Abraham's description of himself is borrowed to describe a new prophet, a human raised by Martians, who comes to a satirical America. And one plot detail -- how the First Lady's astrologer was influencing the President -- turned out to exactly foreshadow the situation under Ron and Nancy Reagan!

- Of the wonderful juveniles (books for teenage boys) Heinlein wrote between Rocketship Galileo in 1947 and Podkayne of Mars in 1963, perhaps the most underrated is "Spaceman Jones." Heinlein's spaceship adventures are basically sea stories in disguise (he was a Naval Academy grad and officer until he came down with tuberculosis after seven years), and this is the most explicitly devoted to explaining how life onboard is organized. After a long, fascinating expository main section, it builds to a great action climax. It also features the best of Heinlein's Han Solo characters. (George Lucas borrowed Heinlein's useful structure of having an innocent Luke Skywalker hero for the audience to identify with, a cynical Han Solo to explain how things work, and a wise Obi Wan-Kenobi to explain why they are as they are; but Heinlein didn't follow this scheme rigidly. There's no Obi Wan-Kenobi in "Starman Jones," for instance.)

- Heinlein worshipped H.G. Wells, who was an ardent eugenicist, and Heinlein's 1942 novel Beyond this Horizon is set in a future society organized around genetic engineering. Heinlein eventually stopped making eugenics explicit in his plots, but it's reasonable to read most of the rest of his novels as assuming genetic enhancement as one of the operative technologies of the era: almost all of his books have one or more characters with math skills that are off the charts by present human standards.

- Beyond This Horizon ignores the convention that humans will evolve into hyper-intelligent, 97 pound weaklings, androgynous pencil-necked geeks barely able to hold up their basketball-sized brains, a highly evolved species of altruistic pacifists. But which parents would choose these traits for their children? How could such kids compete for mates? In Beyond, the world is populated by highly intelligent but extremely sexy people straight out of a Hollywood casting call. The men are manly and the ladies lovely. The men are so macho in fact, that no gentleman would be seen without his gun, and duels are fought daily. This book is the source of Heinlein's saying, "An armed society is a polite society."

- The most brilliant, perhaps the most prophetic sci-fi story ever, was "Solution Unsatisfactory," which he wrote in 1940, well before the secret Manhattan Project had begun. In it, Heinlein predicted the U.S. would end the second world war in 1945 by dropping atomic weapons on an Axis city. He went on to predict that the Russians would quickly acquire their own weapons, then use a foolish American disarmament attempt to launch a sneak attack. The U.S. would win the short but apocalyptic war with the Soviets. To prevent anyone from ever again building their own atomic weapons, the U.S. would then set up a global strategic air command, with bombers circling over all the nations of the world, ready to annihilate them if they tried to threaten the monopoly. The man in charge found himself, against his will, to be the effective Dictator of the World. Hence the title, "Solution Unsatisfactory." The sneak attacks the following year on Russia and Pearl Harbor only reinforced Heinlein's views. As it turned out, deterrence worked better than Heinlein expected. But those who think deterrence is now kaput, and that America must take on the role of Dictator of the World, should definitely check out Heinlein's stories from the 1940s.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer