Post by caucasoididiot on Jul 4, 2011 13:22:53 GMT -5
Independence Day seems a fitting time to launch a thread about Robert Heinlein, often called the Dean of (American) Science Fiction writers. He was hugely influential in the medium and a definite favorite of mine in my youth. Indeed, one of my brushes with greatness involved sharing an elevator with him for two floors.
Well . . . one takes what one can get in the way of greatness.
Anyway, I've been rereading him recently, generally for the first time in years, and wanted to start this thread just to kick around some of my (re)initial reactions.
I began with a few of his novels and novellas, and found him better than I had recollected. He was very much of the American school of SF (which I sometimes feel might better have been called "Engineering Fiction") and once I discovered the sweeping speculations of Europeans like Stapledon or Lem, RAH didn't feel quite as satisfying. This school has also been criticized for weak characterization at the expense of gadgetry (probably somewhat merited in its early stages, though I've read the defence that simple characters were meant not to distract from exceptional worlds). I believe it was Panshin that declared that there were only three protagonists in all of Heinlein, and that furthermore they were the same character at three different life stages.
Thinking back over his works, it's easy to see what one would point to to justify that view, but by chance the first few I picked up seem to be exceptions. The first was Doublestar, whose ham actor turned political impersonator doesn't seem to easily fit that triptych. Next was The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag, my personal favorite of his writings. I suspect that it was written for John Campbell's short-lived Unknown, and makes me wonder just how much was lost when that magazine succumbed to the wartime paper shortage. This one again shows strong characterization, effectively eerie atmospherics and a resolution that calls into question the very nature of reality (this is not the only such example in his works, but remains my favorite).
I went on to a few of his juveniles, and found them enjoyable reading even as an adult. Finding a copy of Starman Jones at a recent library sale was what got me to reading him most recently. I had never owned that one and so didn't remember it as thoroughly as some others. It's essentially a coming of age story, but a well told one. It's "future" now feels rather archaic, what with starships' astrogational computers being programmed in binary with DIP switches and the loss of the book of binary conversion tables a plot point, but one of Heinlein's strengths certainly lay in creating worlds that felt like plausible, organic wholes, even long beyond their prognosticative freshness dates.
That actually brings up an observation I found on some now mislaid blog the other day: that Heinlein had a knack for sounding authoritative (but that that's not the same as being right). The blogger speculated that this was why he remains a somewhat controversial figure and discussions of him often become acrimonious. I was rereading some of his factual articles in Expanded Universe and that's certainly true. Whether on topics of General Semantics, Bridie Murphy, the Limited Test Ban Treaty or the impending space travel boom he always sounded so matter-of-factly and self-evidently right, even when he was shoveling vacuum.
As an aside, it's interesting how he seems frequently to be viewed as a right-winger these days (indeed a Nazi, if you go by Paul Verhoeven), despite having been an active Progressive Democrat. I'm not sure to what degree this was RAH's views changing and how much it was the US political landscape shifting under him. Certainly at that '80s space conference where I saw him his positions on space development and particularly SDI felt pretty Reaganite. Hell, he was even chewing out Jerry Pournelle for not supporting "Star Wars" strongly enough.
Anyway, I recently spent a great deal of time in-flight or waiting to be same, and so took along The Past through Tomorrow, the omnibus collection of Heinlein's so-called "Future History Series." He was neither the first nor the last to do such, but before Stranger in a Strange Land or Starship Troopers it was perhaps this coherent future backdrop to many of his stories for which he was most noted. Heinlein himself seems to have been a little embarrassed over the flap Astounding editor John Campbell made of it, but it was apparently the latter's pushing his other writers to emulate it that led to the likes of City and The Foundation Trilogy. For any who may be unfamiliar with it, there's a description (including the famous timeline) here.
Three quick footnotes on that writeup:
The mysterious "Voorhis proposals" of the timeline is, I suspect, a reference to Congressman Jerry Voorhis, though whether it entails some specific reforms he was advocating I have no idea.
"The Crazy Years" = 1960s. You hear this asserted a lot, but actually the chart lists "The Crazy Years" as "the sixth decade," which would be the '50s. Oh well, even NASA made that slip in their film documenting the Apollo 11 landing.
Now, regarding the habitability of Mars and Venus assumed in the stories: "One must keep in mind the limited knowledge available concerning the planets at the time the majority of these stories were written, so RAH - as well as many others - should be forgiven false speculations regarding their natures." Well . . . actually, the conditions that Heinlein (yes, and most other SF writers) were assuming had last been considered plausible by astronomers about 1918. While it's true that the likes of E. C. Slipher were arguing for the reality of the Martian canals right up until Mariner flew, the best that could be said for those rosy views of solar system habitability was they hadn't been conclusively disproven but were highly unlikely. Even the hardest SF usually contains a bit of handwaving.
Now, oddly enough, I actually found the Future History a bit disappointing on my return to it. As late as the early '80s I remember its feeling pretty prophetic, what with the rise of the religious right making the Scudder Theocracy feel more futuristic than it had in the religiously dismissive '70s. It felt far less so this time around, whether because the communications revolution now seems glaringly absent (even with one brief mention of a pocket phone) or because human future history seems pretty well restricted to North America. I certainly can't fault Heinlein not addressing these when writing in the '40s (indeed, I could imagine that even if they occurred to him he might have feared opening a future so wide that his audience might feel it was out of touch with their present, thus losing the element of veracity he sought), but from the vantage point of the third millenium the absence of globalization is nagging.
On a related note, it felt less coherent than I recollected. Checking the publication dates, the stories basically fall into two clusters written in '39~'40 and '47~'49. I suspect that I could have divided these pretty accurately without checking. Not only had Heinlein's style noticeably improved, but the first stories were conceived in a prewar future and the latter postwar. Even with quick glosses to add words like "Hiroshima" and "plutonium" to Blowups Happen, he really was forced to retcon huge technological, social and political changes into a pre-existing view of the future, and to my eye now there are some pretty glaring fault lines. Indeed, I can't really see how the likes of We Also Walk Dogs hooks up with any of the rest of it.
But if the metastructure seems to have tarnished with age, I still found a lot of enjoyment in its best components. The Man Who Sold the Moon was probably my favorite among them. This story of a man so obsessed with an impossible dream that he spends his life building both the lever and the place to stand that he might move the world, and the ironic dénouement thereof, is no less exciting and moving for having been outdated even before 20 July 1969. D. D. Harriman is another character that I don't see fitting into Panshin's schema without a shoehorn, and the story's tight speculations on both the technical and non-technical problems of going to the Moon are Engineering Fiction at its best. I rather wish that someone would make a movie of this story, something along the Steampunk line that just treated it as an alternate reality without trying to update it. As an aside, I found my mental image of Harriman becoming Burt Lancaster. That'd be perfect casting (if he weren't dead).
The other high point was If This Goes On--. Apparently retitled by Campbell from Heinlein's original --Vine and Fig Tree--, this is the tale of the destruction of the Scudder Theocracy in "The Second American Revolution." Perhaps it's no accident that, like Man Who SOld the Moon it's one of the longer pieces and thus more fleshed out. Indeed, what dropped it a notch below the other for me was that it was heavily expanded in '49 from its original '40 magazine form, and seemed to suffer from that schizoid future sense that I mentioned earlier.
Now, those two stories fairly well illustrate the two main approaches to Science Fiction. Moon is pretty straughtforward extrapolation. Whether Heinlein realized in '40 that groups like the American Rocket Society, British Interplanetary Society or Verein für Raumschiffahrt were correct in their nutty assertion that manned flight to the Moon was merely an engineering problem, the V-2 had certainly convinced him by '49. The story is thus exploring how something which was a safe bet to come about (even if that was far from generally recognized) would do so.
--Vine and Fig Tree-- (sorry, Mr. Campbell, I like that title far better) is more of the speculative "what if?" variety. What if the arts of advertising and propaganda could be codified into a formal, rigorous technology? Would not their practitioners inevitably subsume government? What form would that take in the US? Perhaps religious? How would various Americans react? Indeed, I find the Scudder Theocracy the most interesting idea in the Future History and very much regret that Heinlein never wrote the rest of that trilogy. Stone Pillow was going to be about life under it and the birth of the Cabal which brought it down, while The Sound of His Wings was to be the story of televangelist Nehemiah Scudder's rise to the status of "First Prophet" (this might be argued to presage the communications revolution, but given the likes of Father Coughlin or the aggressive use of radio by Hitler or Stalin, it's not really that speculative). Heinlein once wrote that he hated Scudder too much to ever write that story. A pity.
Anyway, I've rambled on enough, I s'pose. Any thoughts on the man or his writings? Things you love, or love to hate? At the very least, I hope that should you only know him through Project Moonbase I've convinced you that you really are missing out. It is interesting to see little bits of Heinlein peek out of that, but the poor man had been badly Lipperted.
Edit:
Oh, one very important bit I forgot! Something I'd love to see someday is a publication of original and rewritten versions of these stories side by side. One key difference in the '40 and '49 versions of --Vine and Fig Tree-- has to do with the Cabal's actions immediately after toppling the Theocracy. Now, in the '49 version, much is made of there being a plan floated to re-educate the masses to a new, freedom-loving, democratic order through mass hypnosis, and a vehement rejection of this on the basis that it would fly in the face of everything the Cabal stood for. Better that the people should damn themselves back into slavery than be hoodwinked into freedom (that's close to a quote, but I don't remember well enough to include such punctuation).
I was quite surprised to find that--based on some bits I've read on the net over the last few days--the magazine version had this mass-hypnosis used without qualm or question.
Whoa. Bob, I hardly knew yee.
But, I think that that's a dilemma throughout Heinlein's work: a sense that liberty ought to be unlimited, but that without limits the "groundhogs" will pull the natural elites down with them. I think that's a lot of what he was trying to reconcile in the much maligned Starship Troopers. One can agree or not, but if what he advocates there is Nazism then everyone from Jefferson to de Tocqueville to Lenin can fairly be called a Nazi, in my view.
Or you can always go with his Beyond This Horizon society in which everyone is armed and those who can't adapt get burned down early. He was definitely a Darwinist . . .
Well . . . one takes what one can get in the way of greatness.
Anyway, I've been rereading him recently, generally for the first time in years, and wanted to start this thread just to kick around some of my (re)initial reactions.
I began with a few of his novels and novellas, and found him better than I had recollected. He was very much of the American school of SF (which I sometimes feel might better have been called "Engineering Fiction") and once I discovered the sweeping speculations of Europeans like Stapledon or Lem, RAH didn't feel quite as satisfying. This school has also been criticized for weak characterization at the expense of gadgetry (probably somewhat merited in its early stages, though I've read the defence that simple characters were meant not to distract from exceptional worlds). I believe it was Panshin that declared that there were only three protagonists in all of Heinlein, and that furthermore they were the same character at three different life stages.
Thinking back over his works, it's easy to see what one would point to to justify that view, but by chance the first few I picked up seem to be exceptions. The first was Doublestar, whose ham actor turned political impersonator doesn't seem to easily fit that triptych. Next was The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag, my personal favorite of his writings. I suspect that it was written for John Campbell's short-lived Unknown, and makes me wonder just how much was lost when that magazine succumbed to the wartime paper shortage. This one again shows strong characterization, effectively eerie atmospherics and a resolution that calls into question the very nature of reality (this is not the only such example in his works, but remains my favorite).
I went on to a few of his juveniles, and found them enjoyable reading even as an adult. Finding a copy of Starman Jones at a recent library sale was what got me to reading him most recently. I had never owned that one and so didn't remember it as thoroughly as some others. It's essentially a coming of age story, but a well told one. It's "future" now feels rather archaic, what with starships' astrogational computers being programmed in binary with DIP switches and the loss of the book of binary conversion tables a plot point, but one of Heinlein's strengths certainly lay in creating worlds that felt like plausible, organic wholes, even long beyond their prognosticative freshness dates.
That actually brings up an observation I found on some now mislaid blog the other day: that Heinlein had a knack for sounding authoritative (but that that's not the same as being right). The blogger speculated that this was why he remains a somewhat controversial figure and discussions of him often become acrimonious. I was rereading some of his factual articles in Expanded Universe and that's certainly true. Whether on topics of General Semantics, Bridie Murphy, the Limited Test Ban Treaty or the impending space travel boom he always sounded so matter-of-factly and self-evidently right, even when he was shoveling vacuum.
As an aside, it's interesting how he seems frequently to be viewed as a right-winger these days (indeed a Nazi, if you go by Paul Verhoeven), despite having been an active Progressive Democrat. I'm not sure to what degree this was RAH's views changing and how much it was the US political landscape shifting under him. Certainly at that '80s space conference where I saw him his positions on space development and particularly SDI felt pretty Reaganite. Hell, he was even chewing out Jerry Pournelle for not supporting "Star Wars" strongly enough.
Anyway, I recently spent a great deal of time in-flight or waiting to be same, and so took along The Past through Tomorrow, the omnibus collection of Heinlein's so-called "Future History Series." He was neither the first nor the last to do such, but before Stranger in a Strange Land or Starship Troopers it was perhaps this coherent future backdrop to many of his stories for which he was most noted. Heinlein himself seems to have been a little embarrassed over the flap Astounding editor John Campbell made of it, but it was apparently the latter's pushing his other writers to emulate it that led to the likes of City and The Foundation Trilogy. For any who may be unfamiliar with it, there's a description (including the famous timeline) here.
Three quick footnotes on that writeup:
The mysterious "Voorhis proposals" of the timeline is, I suspect, a reference to Congressman Jerry Voorhis, though whether it entails some specific reforms he was advocating I have no idea.
"The Crazy Years" = 1960s. You hear this asserted a lot, but actually the chart lists "The Crazy Years" as "the sixth decade," which would be the '50s. Oh well, even NASA made that slip in their film documenting the Apollo 11 landing.
Now, regarding the habitability of Mars and Venus assumed in the stories: "One must keep in mind the limited knowledge available concerning the planets at the time the majority of these stories were written, so RAH - as well as many others - should be forgiven false speculations regarding their natures." Well . . . actually, the conditions that Heinlein (yes, and most other SF writers) were assuming had last been considered plausible by astronomers about 1918. While it's true that the likes of E. C. Slipher were arguing for the reality of the Martian canals right up until Mariner flew, the best that could be said for those rosy views of solar system habitability was they hadn't been conclusively disproven but were highly unlikely. Even the hardest SF usually contains a bit of handwaving.
Now, oddly enough, I actually found the Future History a bit disappointing on my return to it. As late as the early '80s I remember its feeling pretty prophetic, what with the rise of the religious right making the Scudder Theocracy feel more futuristic than it had in the religiously dismissive '70s. It felt far less so this time around, whether because the communications revolution now seems glaringly absent (even with one brief mention of a pocket phone) or because human future history seems pretty well restricted to North America. I certainly can't fault Heinlein not addressing these when writing in the '40s (indeed, I could imagine that even if they occurred to him he might have feared opening a future so wide that his audience might feel it was out of touch with their present, thus losing the element of veracity he sought), but from the vantage point of the third millenium the absence of globalization is nagging.
On a related note, it felt less coherent than I recollected. Checking the publication dates, the stories basically fall into two clusters written in '39~'40 and '47~'49. I suspect that I could have divided these pretty accurately without checking. Not only had Heinlein's style noticeably improved, but the first stories were conceived in a prewar future and the latter postwar. Even with quick glosses to add words like "Hiroshima" and "plutonium" to Blowups Happen, he really was forced to retcon huge technological, social and political changes into a pre-existing view of the future, and to my eye now there are some pretty glaring fault lines. Indeed, I can't really see how the likes of We Also Walk Dogs hooks up with any of the rest of it.
But if the metastructure seems to have tarnished with age, I still found a lot of enjoyment in its best components. The Man Who Sold the Moon was probably my favorite among them. This story of a man so obsessed with an impossible dream that he spends his life building both the lever and the place to stand that he might move the world, and the ironic dénouement thereof, is no less exciting and moving for having been outdated even before 20 July 1969. D. D. Harriman is another character that I don't see fitting into Panshin's schema without a shoehorn, and the story's tight speculations on both the technical and non-technical problems of going to the Moon are Engineering Fiction at its best. I rather wish that someone would make a movie of this story, something along the Steampunk line that just treated it as an alternate reality without trying to update it. As an aside, I found my mental image of Harriman becoming Burt Lancaster. That'd be perfect casting (if he weren't dead).
The other high point was If This Goes On--. Apparently retitled by Campbell from Heinlein's original --Vine and Fig Tree--, this is the tale of the destruction of the Scudder Theocracy in "The Second American Revolution." Perhaps it's no accident that, like Man Who SOld the Moon it's one of the longer pieces and thus more fleshed out. Indeed, what dropped it a notch below the other for me was that it was heavily expanded in '49 from its original '40 magazine form, and seemed to suffer from that schizoid future sense that I mentioned earlier.
Now, those two stories fairly well illustrate the two main approaches to Science Fiction. Moon is pretty straughtforward extrapolation. Whether Heinlein realized in '40 that groups like the American Rocket Society, British Interplanetary Society or Verein für Raumschiffahrt were correct in their nutty assertion that manned flight to the Moon was merely an engineering problem, the V-2 had certainly convinced him by '49. The story is thus exploring how something which was a safe bet to come about (even if that was far from generally recognized) would do so.
--Vine and Fig Tree-- (sorry, Mr. Campbell, I like that title far better) is more of the speculative "what if?" variety. What if the arts of advertising and propaganda could be codified into a formal, rigorous technology? Would not their practitioners inevitably subsume government? What form would that take in the US? Perhaps religious? How would various Americans react? Indeed, I find the Scudder Theocracy the most interesting idea in the Future History and very much regret that Heinlein never wrote the rest of that trilogy. Stone Pillow was going to be about life under it and the birth of the Cabal which brought it down, while The Sound of His Wings was to be the story of televangelist Nehemiah Scudder's rise to the status of "First Prophet" (this might be argued to presage the communications revolution, but given the likes of Father Coughlin or the aggressive use of radio by Hitler or Stalin, it's not really that speculative). Heinlein once wrote that he hated Scudder too much to ever write that story. A pity.
Anyway, I've rambled on enough, I s'pose. Any thoughts on the man or his writings? Things you love, or love to hate? At the very least, I hope that should you only know him through Project Moonbase I've convinced you that you really are missing out. It is interesting to see little bits of Heinlein peek out of that, but the poor man had been badly Lipperted.
Edit:
Oh, one very important bit I forgot! Something I'd love to see someday is a publication of original and rewritten versions of these stories side by side. One key difference in the '40 and '49 versions of --Vine and Fig Tree-- has to do with the Cabal's actions immediately after toppling the Theocracy. Now, in the '49 version, much is made of there being a plan floated to re-educate the masses to a new, freedom-loving, democratic order through mass hypnosis, and a vehement rejection of this on the basis that it would fly in the face of everything the Cabal stood for. Better that the people should damn themselves back into slavery than be hoodwinked into freedom (that's close to a quote, but I don't remember well enough to include such punctuation).
I was quite surprised to find that--based on some bits I've read on the net over the last few days--the magazine version had this mass-hypnosis used without qualm or question.
Whoa. Bob, I hardly knew yee.
But, I think that that's a dilemma throughout Heinlein's work: a sense that liberty ought to be unlimited, but that without limits the "groundhogs" will pull the natural elites down with them. I think that's a lot of what he was trying to reconcile in the much maligned Starship Troopers. One can agree or not, but if what he advocates there is Nazism then everyone from Jefferson to de Tocqueville to Lenin can fairly be called a Nazi, in my view.
Or you can always go with his Beyond This Horizon society in which everyone is armed and those who can't adapt get burned down early. He was definitely a Darwinist . . .