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Heinlein

Science fiction has developed at least one critical form all its own: the an - notated anthology. Traditionally SF magazine editors prefaced each story by a punchy, two- or three-line blurb. Collecting their own tales in volume form, SF writers from Sturgeon to Le Guin have stolen the blurb’s position for brief, informative paragraphs about their tales—understandable in a writing field with no formal tradition, at least at its outset, of biography, history, or criticism. A good deal of SF history is buried in these blurbs. Perhaps the most important historical document in this form, ranking only beside Peter Nicholls and John Clute’s Science Fiction Encyclopedia, is Judith Merril’s more and more heavily annotated Best SF of the Year volumes, running from 1956 through 1967. (Arguably the form reaches its extreme in my own book, The American Shore, which in a sense is an anthology containing a single story by Thomas Disch [“Angouleme”], preceded by ten pages of editorial blurbs and followed by two hundred pages of afterwords.) Four of the seven following essays were written as introductions to works of the writers they deal with—although only two were actually used as such. All seven took their occasion to develop ideas that play through all the pieces in this book, as they wrestle with the problem of the individual SF writer, the specific SF text.

And this is their blurb.

Robert A. Heinlein was born July 7, 1907, and grew up principally in Kansas City. At Annapolis, where in 1929 he graduated twentieth in a class of 243, he excelled in fencing. Some of this sword-fighting expertise was to go into the experience of “Oscar” Gordon, the hero of his 1963 novel Glory Road.

Science fiction’s history is littered with prodigies, from Asimov and Silverberg to Brunner and Gawron—all of whom published their first work before age twenty. Heinlein did not begin publishing science fiction (nor, one suspects, did he seriously consider writing it) until 1939, when he was thirty-two years old and Thrilling Wonder Stories sponsored the contest that also seduced Alfred Bester into the SF precinct. (The prize? Fifty dollars.) This comparatively late start begins Heinlein’s career on a pattern more like that of Ursula K. Le Guin, or even—in another pulp field—Raymond Chandler. Heinlein’s energy, output, and consistent quality are even more remarkable, then, since it is during the period between eighteen and thirty years of age that most science fiction writers are garnering the dozen to three dozen novels and dozens of short stories that will fill out their bibliographies, before, sometime in their middle thirties or later, they settle down to a series of concerted efforts to make the SF novel into what they believe it should be. Heinlein is the originator of, among other things, the term speculative fiction, which held brief currency in the middle ’60s, when it was resurrected by Michael Moorcock and the other writers around the British SF magazine New Worlds. (Heinlein had first used the term in a 1951 guest-of-honor speech at a world science fiction convention.) There is little one can say about the man—by and large a very private person—that suggests the import of his work to the SF genre.

Heinlein’s influence on modern science fiction is so pervasive that modern critics attempting to wrestle with that influence find themselves dealing with an object rather like a sky or an ocean. In many respects Heinlein’s limits are the horizons of science fiction. The bulk of his most influential work was done largely before any academic scholarship in the field got its methodological legs fully under itself in the ’60s. And that bulk is large. To come to terms with Heinlein one must be prepared to examine deeply over twenty of his more than forty published volumes; nor does this mean slighting any of the rest. Basically, however, what he has provided science fiction with is a countless number of rhetorical figures for dramatizing the range of SF concerns. These are the rhetorical turns that still provide most SF readers with the particular thrill that is science fiction’s special pleasure: a fact about a character (her race; his gender; whether or not someone happens to be wearing clothes) that current society considers of defining import is placed at such a point in the narrative that it not only surprises the reader, but also demonstrates how unimportant such concerns have become to this particular future world; a historical reference is casually dropped that lets the reader know that some present historical trend has completely reversed; another reference, made by a character, suddenly reveals that the future world has completely misinterpreted or forgotten some historical fact that is a commonplace of our world, and the fallibility of “history” is pointed out. These are Heinlein’s.

Heinlein’s first published story, “Life-Line,” embeds, Dos Passos– like, a collection of newspaper headlines, telegrams, and court transcripts within its narrative in order to tell its tale. The story’s specifically sciencefictional accomplishment is the image of the branching pink vine with which it effects its major informative exposition. Rhetorical variety was a concern for Heinlein from the beginning. But it was in later works that he was to add to this received rhetoric a whole new battery of his own creation. And every SF writer, when negotiating some particular expository lump, must feel in competition with Heinlein’s purely informative skill—one of his hallmarks from the outset.

The concept that a necessary and socially acceptable violence rises as leisure rises was an idea first presented in science fiction in Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon (1942). This has been a continuing attribute in the presentation of science fiction’s alternative societies ever since. A writer like Joanna Russ uses such an idea both in an unpleasant picture of Earth, in And Chaos Died, and in an idyllic picture of the planet Whileaway, in The Female Man. This is an example of the kind of thinking that separates the science-fictional presentation of alternative societies from the schematic utopian thinking of the nineteenth century and before. I believe it was Damon Knight who first traced out for me, in a 1966 conversation during my first Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference, some of the influences Heinlein’s novella “Gulf” (1949) has exerted on everything from James Bond (“Gulf” is the model for the SForiented espionage tale) to an almost distressing number of things in my own work that I had inadvertently lifted from it! In “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies—” Heinlein singlehandedly almost exhausted the time-paradox story. David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself presents itself as a virtual homage to the Heinlein tales. Any time-tangled narrative has to be compared with them. That such comparisons are usually so invidious is the main reason such tales are now almost extinct.

Heinlein’s novels have inspired a small bibliography of novel-length responses, from Dickson’s Soldier, Ask Not and Anderson’s Trader to the Stars, through Panshin’s Rite of Passage and my own The Fall of the Towers, to Haldeman’s The Forever War. And if Joanna Russ did not read James Blish’s critique of Heinlein’s metaphysical system in Stranger in a Strange Land shortly before beginning And Chaos Died, I’ll bite my gerbil. (That critique is contained in an October 1961 essay by James Blish, collected in The Issue At Hand, as by William Atheling, Jr., Chicago: Advent, 1964.) In all these works, the writers have taken on the social arguments Heinlein has posed in books like Starship Troopers and tried to wrestle with the contradictions as they have seen them. That these novels date from 1960 to 1974 (and include two Nebula/Hugo winners) gives some indication of how relevant Heinlein’s arguments continue to appear—especially to those who disagree with them!

In 1961 Heinlein published what bids fair to be the most popular SF novel ever written: Stranger in a Strange Land. Blish’s discussion (under the William Atheling, Jr., pseudonym and referred to above) remains to my mind the most balanced evaluation of the book.

The novel that followed it, in 1963, Glory Road, has probably received less attention than any other Heinlein work of comparable size and ambition. This is even stranger when one considers that it is one of Heinlein’s most formally satisfactory novels. The long didactic passages that for some readers mar the later novels (e.g., I Will Fear No Evil or Time Enough For Love) had put in only a comparatively brief appearance in the second half of Starship Troopers; they are almost wholly absent here. The ending involves as grandiose a peripeteia as seen in any Heinlein novel since Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and is far more naturally and believably brought off. And there is a psychological veracity in Oscar’s response to his change of fortune that gives the book a character interest well beyond the earlier book, for all of Citizen’s considerable excellence.

To say, however, that Glory Road was simply overshadowed by the success of Stranger in a Strange Land is to indulge a certain disingenuousness. A twenty-one-year-old reader when the novel was first serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under a lush Ed Emsh cover in forest greens gilded with sunlight, I remember the hostility with which the young SF readers among my acquaintances responded to it—the same readers who had had little except praise for Stranger. For a sense of that ire, the reader can check the scant page in which Panshin dismisses the novel in his Heinlein in Dimension (Chicago: Advent, 1968—though written at least five years earlier). Considered work on Heinlein is still rather scarce, which makes Panshin’s book—about as one-dimensional a critique as one can imagine—useful if only by default.¹ But Panshin’s truly energetic critique of Heinlein is his own Nebula award-winning novel Rite of Passage, in which real critical passion is sublated by a truly creative mimesis.

It is interesting to note what this ire was not caused by. It did not generate over the opening sociological fantasia on security and pacifism. We read this today simply aware that it misses the feel of the early ’60s about as widely as is possible. But Heinlein’s basic assumption—that those who didn’t want to fight in Vietnam were the same young men who were after suburban security and two cars in the garage—was offered, I think, more as a logical speculation. Like nine out of ten such speculations, it was simply wrong. (Those who questioned the war were, by and large, the same people who were questioning the suburban ideal. Those who accepted that ideal were largely the ones who accepted the war. If there were a few people who fitted Heinlein’s description, they simply were not the significant portion “Oscar” seems to think they were.) But in 1963 Heinlein’s explanation was easier to accept—if only as science fiction.

Nor was the ire caused by the locker-room style descriptions of “liberated” sex—with its downright British fixation on spanking. This tends to strike the contemporary reader as about as close to smuttiness as the “traveling-salesman banter” (James Blish’s all too accurate cut in the above-mentioned article [The Issue at Hand, p. 71]) that Heinlein frequently uses for dialogue can get. To understand the context fully, however, one must remember the absolute printing restrictions of the time, which forbade both four-letter words and any but the coyest references to the actuality of sex. In 1963 the word shit’s one occurrence on the soundtrack of a film (Shirley Clarke’s The Connection) rendered it a cause célèbre that could be seen only at private showings; and the realistic street dialogue of a commercial film like The Brinks Job (1978), at which no one even raises an eyebrow today, would have been unthinkable. Both the pulp tradition and the printing restrictions gave a certain valorization to such attempts at ribaldry; and the audience of 1963 was probably more prepared to take Heinlein’s message of cultural and sexual pluralism on the terms in which it was offered.

No, the ire, as I remember it, was specifically at the novel’s fantasy superstructure. And it is precisely this fantasy superstructure that allows the novel the flexibility to achieve the formal excellence of which I have spoken.

Young Galahad (aka Evelyn Cyril Gordon) is pricking o’er the plaine of life when, on the Isle de Levant, he runs into She Who Must Be Obeyed and her grandson, Alberich-cum-Sancho Panza, all three of whom then journey down the Yellow Brick Road until, after a bit of hedonistic horseplay and a variety of dragon slaying, they are to the Dark Tower come. After a climactic swordfight with Cyrano de Bergerac himself (“I was sorry I hadn’t asked him his name. He seemed to think I should know it.” Glory Road, p. 199), the Egg of the Phoenix is rescued (who was that Russian sorcerer in The Firebird who kept his deathless soul in an egg…?) and returned to its rightful place at Center. Irony subverts archetype; and the message of the book, spelled out in the final eighty pages with surprising didactic restraint, is: A hero is as much a function of his environment as of his own personality.

Science fiction? Every bit of it.

There’s an only somewhat post-Einsteinian explanation for the whole thing, involving 20 parallel universes and a theory of government that sounds suspiciously like Jeffersonian democracy with a liberal dose of “go with the flow” thrown in: provide a father figure (male or female, it doesn’t matter) who reserves the right to kill—in case one ever forgets He is the Law—and who hears all but generally remains silent about it; then let patriarchal transference take care of the rest. (Was Blish the first to note, in the essay already quoted from, what a “thoroughgoing Freudian” Heinlein was?)

The ease and energy about Glory Road suggest an author in a pleasant state vis-à-vis his own creative power. Heinlein mentioned to me, in the single conversation we have ever had (long distance, about a proposed motion for an SFWA business meeting at a forthcoming world SF convention in Phoenix, in 1978), that the Lady Vivamus is lovingly modeled after his own fencing sword. Bravery, the novel tells us, is facing what you’re afraid of—not what X, Y, or Z happens to fear. And a hero who functions in one kind of situation may be very out of place in any number of others—if not a real pain in the neck.

For the younger reader, the encounter with Heinlein’s vision of cultural pluralism (which, judging from the Shavian epigraph, is clearly one of the book’s major points) may still provide a certain kind of revelation. If it falls a little flat with the more sophisticated reader, it is only because so many other Heinlein novels (and Heinlein-inspired novels) have brought the message home with such richness.

There is a sort of underlying voice I hear all through Glory Road. What this voice has to say maintains my interest in the novel. It is not the voice of the hero—through which all the other voices of the novel as well as the narrative are presented. It is a voice that carries a high degree of joyous abandon, and must seduce anyone who wonders how such enterprises as SF novels get done. “Look!” it seems to say, if not sing. “This is no more serious than a feather, nor will it ever be! Now that is where all your real energy must go! All right, stand back! Now see the beautiful pattern the two together make! Note how delightful the play between them!” The writer in us (whom I equate, here, with the maker of formal patterns)—rather than the politician, the psychologist, the sociologist, or any other of those referential folk who must be there in the writer to make sure the formal patterns the writer comes up with do not resonate simply and solely with the less pleasing aspects of life and literature (these folks’ role is that of critical guide, not creator)—must be delighted before such joy.

Without the body of Heinlein’s work, Glory Road might have been more appreciated for this quality of joyous invention. We might have been able to see it as a “slight” work that was nevertheless endlessly fascinating for reasons that endlessly defied definition—rather the way we tend to regard the works of, say, Cordwainer Smith. Because, however, there is such a body of Heinlein work about which, whatever else one may say about it, “slight” is the last word that comes to mind, many readers would rather put the problem out of mind, I suspect, and ignore the book as an anomaly or dismiss it as simply “uncharacteristic.”

But the fascination remains, and through the years I have met a number of readers and writers who have found themselves its victim.

Finally, it is because the book so emphatically pitches its fascination at this level that it generated that ire in the first place. Orlando is acceptable from Virginia Woolf: the rest of her work is pretty rarefied, too. But would it be acceptable from George Eliot, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë…?

The novel after Glory Road was Farnham’s Freehold, in which Heinlein again took on the full load of topicality and referentiality—and it proved to be for many readers his most distressing novel. Glory Road produced ire and was finally ignored; Farnham’s Freehold has sustained an almost continual attack. This is not the place to examine that attack in detail. Suffice it to say that what distresses one about the Heinlein argument in general, when it is presented in narrative form, is that it so frequently takes the form of a gentlemanly assertion: “Just suppose the situation around X (war, race, what-have-you) were P, Q, and R; now under those conditions, wouldn’t behavior Y be logical and justified?”—where behavior Y just happens to be an extreme version of the most conservative, if not fascistic, program. Our argument is never with the truth value of Heinlein’s syllogism: Yes, if P, Q, and R were the case, then behavior Y would be pragmatically justifiable. Our argument is rather with the premises: Since P, Q, and R are not the situation of the present world, why continually pick fictional situations, bolstered by science-fictional distortions, to justify behavior that is patently inappropriate for the real world? And Heinlein’s unerring ability to see precisely how the real world would have to be changed to make such conservative behavior appropriate begins to suggest that his repeated use of science fiction to this end represents what existentialist critics used to call “bad faith.” One assumes Heinlein’s answer to this argument is simply that the science-fictional parts of the distortion, at any rate, are possible in the future, if not probable; we must be prepared.

Well, Marx’s favorite novelist was Balzac—an avowed Royalist. And Heinlein is one of mine. A basic tenet of Heinlein’s philosophy has been quoted by Damon Knight in his fine introduction to the “Future History” stories (“Future History” is Campbell’s term, not Heinlein’s) The Past Through Tomorrow; this is a good place to set it out because it contours a good deal of the quibbling one is likely to get into over Heinlein’s “politics”:

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, nor fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

Heinlein and I might well quibble over what constitutes “hoodwinking,” or what one’s social responsibility to the “hoodwinked” is; still, if you put Heinlein’s statement up and asked me to sign, I would. Clearly, then, there is an agreement—a tribute to the man who, as much as any writer while I was growing up, taught me to argue with the accepted version.

The novel after Farnham’s Freehold was The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which once again won for Heinlein the approbation of the general readership: it also won him his fourth Science Fiction Achievement Award, more informally known as the “Hugo,” at the 1967 World Science Fiction Convention. In the dozen years since Moon appeared it has come to be regarded by many as the novel expressing best Heinlein’s most characteristic strengths. Passionate and iconoclastic, it balances social portraiture with didacticism and headlong narrative in about equal measures. If one had not read any Heinlein at all—and I suppose that’s still possible—Moon makes a very good introduction if one wishes to catch him in his major mode. My own feeling, however, is that to encounter Heinlein significantly, one must be prepared to take on the seven novels running from Double Star (1956) through The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), as well as all the shorter works contained in The Past Through Tomorrow (copyright 1967; it contains stories and novels written between 1939 and 1962). Only then will we have a proper acquaintance with the writerly concerns and patterns that will allow us to appreciate fully what is deeply serious in the dozen “juvenile” novels, what is profoundly inventive in some of his more ephemeral earlier works, or what is patently authentic in the more recent didactic ones. This seems to me the only way to cut up the sky (or the ocean) Heinlein’s work makes over (or around) the whole of contemporary science fiction.

And within it all, Glory Road maintains a delicacy, a bravura, and a joy that not only are notable, but clearly consign it to his heptology of major SF novels—central, in its time of writing, range of themes, and variety of narrative organization, to the continuing Heinlein enterprise.

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 1979

1. Later critical assessments by Alexei Panshin (in collaboration with his wife, Cory) are both more insightful and more lively. Heinlein in Dimension finally dies the death of plot synopsis after plot synopsis, coupled with a rather undergraduate insistence on explaining exactly what is illogical in the plot of each one. The essays on Heinlein contained in SF in Dimension are something quite else; the closing consideration, on (among other occasions) Heinlein’s most recent book, The Number of the Beast, included in the Second Revised & Enlarged Edition, is a fine piece of work. (SF in Dimension, Second Edition—Revised & Enlarged, Chicago: Advent, 1980.) Currently the best full-length critical study of Heinlein, by far, is Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction, by H. Bruce Franklin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). It is a sympathetic approach to Heinlein that also manages to be historically sensitive, politically sophisticated, and informed on the subject of science fiction’s distinctive history.