| Robert A. Heinlein |
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| Born | Robert Anson Heinlein
July 7, 1907
Butler, Missouri, U.S. |
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| Died | May 8, 1988 (aged 80)
Carmel, California, U.S. |
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| Pen name | Anson MacDonald, Lyle Monroe, John Riverside, Caleb Saunders, Simon York |
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| Occupation | Novelist, short story author, essayist, screenwriter |
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| Nationality | American |
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| Period | 1939–1988 |
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| Genre | Science fiction, fantasy |
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| Spouse |
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| Signature |  |
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Robert Anson Heinlein (
;
[1][2][3] July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an
American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers",
[4] he was an influential and controversial author of the genre in his time.
He was one of the first science fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as
The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science fiction novelists for many decades, and he,
Isaac Asimov, and
Arthur C. Clarke are often considered to be the "Big Three" of science fiction authors.
[5][6]
Within the framework of his science fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes: the importance of individual
liberty and
self-reliance, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress
nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices.
Heinlein was named the first
Science Fiction Writers Grand Master in 1974.
[7] He won
Hugo Awards for four of his novels; in addition, fifty years after publication, three of his works were awarded "
Retro Hugos"—awards given retrospectively for works that were published before the Hugo Awards came into existence.
[8] In his fiction, Heinlein coined terms that have become part of the English language, including "
grok" and "
waldo", and
speculative fiction, as well as popularizing existing terms like "
TANSTAAFL", "
pay it forward", and
space marine. He also described a modern version of a
waterbed in his novel
The Door Into Summer,
[9] though he never patented or built one. In the first chapter of the novel "
Space Cadet" he anticipated the cell phone, 35 years before the technology was invented by Motorola.
[10] Several of Heinlein's works have been adapted for film and television.
Birth and childhood[edit]
In 1929, Heinlein married Elinor Curry of Kansas City in Los Angeles,
[14] and their marriage lasted about a year.
[2] His second marriage in 1932 to Leslyn MacDonald (1904–1981) lasted for 15 years. MacDonald was, according to the testimony of Heinlein's Navy buddy, Caleb 'Cab' Lansing, "astonishingly intelligent, widely read, and extremely liberal, though a registered
Republican,"
[15] while Isaac Asimov later recalled that Heinlein was, at the time, "a flaming
liberal".
[16] (See section: Politics of Robert Heinlein.)
California[edit]
While not destitute after the campaign—he had a small disability pension from the Navy—Heinlein turned to writing in order to pay off his mortgage. His first published story, "
Life-Line", was printed in the August 1939 issue of
Astounding Science-Fiction.
[20] Originally written for a contest, it was instead sold to
Astounding for significantly more than the contest's first-prize payoff. Another
Future History story, "Misfit", followed in November.
[20] Heinlein was quickly acknowledged as a leader of the new movement toward
"social" science fiction. In California he hosted the
Mañana Literary Society, a 1940-41 series of informal gatherings of new authors.
[21] He was the guest of honor at Denvention, the 1941
Worldcon, held in Denver. During
World War II, he did
aeronautical engineering for the U.S. Navy, also recruiting Isaac Asimov and
L. Sprague de Camp to work at the
Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in
Pennsylvania.
[citation needed] As the war wound down in 1945, Heinlein began re-evaluating his career. The
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the outbreak of the
Cold War, galvanized him to write nonfiction on political topics. In addition, he wanted to break into better-paying markets. He published four influential
short stories for
The Saturday Evening Post magazine, leading off, in February 1947, with "
The Green Hills of Earth". That made him the first science fiction writer to break out of the "pulp ghetto". In 1950, the movie
Destination Moon—the documentary-like film for which he had written the story and scenario, co-written the script, and invented many of the effects—won an
Academy Award for
special effects. Also, he embarked on a series of
juvenile S.F. novels for the
Charles Scribner's Sons publishing company that went from 1947 through 1959, at the rate of one book each autumn, in time for Christmas presents to teenagers. He also wrote for
Boys' Life in 1952.
Robert and Virginia Heinlein in a 1952
Popular Mechanics article, titled "A House to Make Life Easy". The Heinleins, both engineers, designed the house for themselves with many innovative features.
At the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard he had met and befriended a chemical engineer named
Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld. After the war, her engagement having fallen through, she moved to
UCLA for doctoral studies in
chemistry, and made contact again.
As his second wife's
alcoholism gradually spun out of control,
[22] Heinlein moved out and the couple filed for
divorce. Heinlein's friendship with Virginia turned into a relationship and on October 21, 1948 — shortly after the
decree nisi came through — they married in the town of
Raton, New Mexico shortly after having set up house in
Colorado. They would remain married until Heinlein's death.
As Heinlein's increasing success as a writer resolved their initial financial woes, they had a house custom built with various innovative features, later described in an article in
Popular Mechanics. In 1965, after various chronic health problems of Virginia's were traced back to
altitude sickness, they moved to
Santa Cruz, California, at sea level, while they were building a new residence in the adjacent
village of
Bonny Doon, California.
[23] Their unique circular California house—which like their Colorado house, he designed along with Virginia and then built himself—is on Bonny Doon Road
37°3′31.72″N 122°9′30.46″W.
Ginny undoubtedly served as a model for many of his intelligent, fiercely independent female characters.
[24][25] She was a chemist, rocket test engineer, and held a higher rank in the Navy than Heinlein himself. She was also an accomplished college athlete, earning four letters.
[26] In 1953–1954, the Heinleins voyaged around the world (mostly via
ocean liners and
cargo liners, as Ginny detested flying), which Heinlein described in
Tramp Royale, and which also provided background material for science fiction novels set aboard spaceships on long voyages, such as
Podkayne of Mars and
Friday. Ginny acted as the first reader of his
manuscripts. Isaac Asimov believed that Heinlein made a swing to the
right politically at the same time he married Ginny.
When Robert A. Heinlein opened his
Colorado Springs newspaper on April 5, 1958, he read a full-page ad demanding that the Eisenhower Administration stop testing nuclear weapons. The science-fiction author was flabbergasted. He called for the formation of the Patrick Henry League and spent the next several weeks writing and publishing his own polemic that lambasted "Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense" and urged Americans not to become "soft-headed."
[27]
Robert and Virginia Heinlein in
Tahiti, 1980.
Heinlein had used topical materials throughout his
juvenile series beginning in 1947, but in 1959, his novel
Starship Troopers was considered by the editors and owners of Scribner's to be too controversial for one of its prestige lines, and it was rejected.
[28]
Heinlein found another publisher (Putnam), feeling himself released from the constraints of writing novels for children, and he began to write "my own stuff, my own way",
[citation needed] and he wrote a series of challenging books that redrew the boundaries of science fiction, including
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
Later life and death[edit]
Beginning in 1970, Heinlein had a series of health crises, broken by strenuous periods of activity in his hobby of
stonemasonry. (In a private correspondence, he referred to that as his "usual and favorite occupation between books.")
[29] The decade began with a life-threatening attack of
peritonitis, recovery from which required more than two years. As soon as he was well enough to write again, he began work on
Time Enough for Love (1973), which introduced many of the themes found in his later fiction.
In the mid-1970s, Heinlein wrote two articles for the
Britannica Compton Yearbook.
[30] He and Ginny crisscrossed the country helping to reorganize
blood donation in the United States, and he was the guest of honor at the Worldcon for the third time at
MidAmeriCon in
Kansas City, Missouri, in 1976. While vacationing in Tahiti in early 1978, he suffered a
transient ischemic attack. Over the next few months, he became more and more exhausted, and his health again began to decline. The problem was determined to be a blocked carotid artery, and he had one of the earliest known carotid bypass operations to correct it. Heinlein and Virginia had been smokers,
[31] and smoking appears often in his fiction, as do fictitious strikable self-lighting cigarettes.
In 1980 Robert Heinlein was a member of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, chaired by
Jerry Pournelle, which met at the home of SF writer
Larry Niven to write space policy papers for the incoming
Reagan Administration. Members included
Buzz Aldrin, General Daniel Graham, rocket engineer Max Hunter, North American VP and Space Shuttle manager George Merrick, and other aerospace industry leaders. Policy recommendations from the Council included ballistic missile defense concepts which were later transformed into what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative by those who favored it, and "Star Wars" as a term of derision coined by Senator
Ted Kennedy. Heinlein contributed to the Council contribution to the Reagan "Star Wars" speech of Spring 1983.
Asked to appear before a
Joint Committee of the
U.S. House and
Senate that year, he testified on his belief that
spin-offs from
space technology were benefiting the infirm and the elderly. Heinlein's surgical treatment re-energized him, and he wrote five novels from 1980 until he died in his sleep from
emphysema and heart failure on May 8, 1988.
At that time, he had been putting together the early notes for another
World as Myth novel. Several of his other works have been published posthumously.
[32]
After his death, his wife Virginia Heinlein issued a compilation of Heinlein's correspondence and notes into a somewhat autobiographical examination of his career, published in 1989 under the title
Grumbles from the Grave. Heinlein's archive is housed by the Special Collections department of
McHenry Library at the
University of California at Santa Cruz. The collection includes manuscript drafts, correspondence, photographs and artifacts. A substantial portion of the archive has been digitized and it is available online through the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archives.
[33]
|
| This section is outdated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (April 2013) |
Heinlein published 32 novels, 59 short stories, and 16 collections during his life. Four films, two television series, several episodes of a radio series, and a board game have been derived more or less directly from his work. He wrote a screenplay for one of the films. Heinlein edited an anthology of other writers' SF short stories.
Three nonfiction books and two poems have been published posthumously.
For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs was published posthumously in 2003;
Variable Star, written by Spider Robinson based on an extensive outline by Heinlein, was published in September 2006. Four collections have been published posthumously.
[20]
Over the course of his career Heinlein wrote three somewhat overlapping
series.
Early work, 1939–1958[edit]
Heinlein began his career as a writer of stories for Astounding Science Fiction, a highly respected science fiction magazine, which was edited by John Campbell. The science fiction writer
Frederik Pohl has described Heinlein as "that greatest of Campbell-era sf writers".
[34] Isaac Asimov said that, from the time of his first story, it was accepted that Heinlein was the best science fiction writer in existence, adding that he would hold this title through his lifetime.
[35]
Alexei and Cory Panshin noted that Heinlein's impact was immediately felt. In 1940, the year after selling 'Life-Line' to Campbell, he wrote three short novels, four novelettes, and seven short stories. They went on to say that "No one ever dominated the science fiction field as Bob did in the first few years of his career."
[36] Alexei expresses awe in Heinlein's ability to show readers a world so drastically different from the one we live in now, yet have so many similarities. He says that "We find ourselves not only in a world other than our own, but identifying with a living, breathing individual who is operating within its context, and thinking and acting according to its terms."
[37]
The opening installment of
The Puppet Masters took the cover of the September 1951 issue of
Galaxy Science Fiction
The first novel that Heinlein wrote,
For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (1939), did not see print during his lifetime, but Robert James tracked down the manuscript and it was published in 2003. Though some regard it as a failure as a novel,
[12] considering it little more than a disguised lecture on Heinlein's
social theories, some readers took a very different view. In a review of it,
John Clute wrote: "I'm not about to suggest that if Heinlein had been able to publish [such works] openly in the pages of Astounding in 1939, SF would have gotten the future right; I would suggest, however, that if Heinlein, and his colleagues, had been able to publish adult SF in Astounding and its fellow journals, then SF might not have done such a grotesquely poor job of prefiguring something of the flavor of actually living here at the onset of 2004."
[38]
For Us, the Living was intriguing as a window into the development of Heinlein's radical ideas about man as a
social animal, including his interest in
free love. The root of many themes found in his later stories can be found in this book. It also contained much material that could be considered background for his other novels, including a detailed description of the protagonist's treatment to avoid being banned to
Coventry (a lawless land in the Heinlein mythos where unrepentant law-breakers are exiled).
[citation needed]
Heinlein as depicted in
Amazing Stories in 1953
It appears that Heinlein at least attempted to live in a manner consistent with these ideals, even in the 1930s, and had an
open relationship in his marriage to his second wife, Leslyn. He was also a
nudist;
[2] nudism and body
taboos are frequently discussed in his work. At the height of the
Cold War, he built a
bomb shelter under his house, like the one featured in
Farnham's Freehold.[2]
After
For Us, The Living, Heinlein began selling (to magazines) first short stories, then novels, set in a
Future History, complete with a time line of significant political, cultural, and technological changes. A chart of the future history was published in the May 1941 issue of
Astounding. Over time, Heinlein wrote many novels and short stories that deviated freely from the Future History on some points, while maintaining consistency in some other areas. The Future History was eventually overtaken by actual events. These discrepancies were explained, after a fashion, in his later World as Myth stories.
Heinlein's first novel published as a book,
Rocket Ship Galileo, was initially rejected because going to the moon was considered too far out, but he soon found a publisher,
Scribner's, that began publishing a Heinlein
juvenile once a year for the Christmas season.
[39] Eight of these books were illustrated by
Clifford Geary in a distinctive
white-on-black scratchboard style.
[40] Some representative novels of this type are
Have Space Suit—Will Travel,
Farmer in the Sky, and
Starman Jones. Many of these were first published in serial form under other titles, e.g.,
Farmer in the Sky was published as
Satellite Scoutin the
Boy Scout magazine
Boys' Life. There has been speculation that Heinlein's intense obsession with his privacy was due at least in part to the apparent contradiction between his unconventional private life and his career as an author of books for children, but
For Us, The Living also explicitly discusses the political importance Heinlein attached to privacy as a matter of principle.
[41]
The novels that Heinlein wrote for a young audience are commonly called "the Heinlein juveniles", and they feature a mixture of adolescent and adult themes. Many of the issues that he takes on in these books have to do with the kinds of problems that
adolescents experience. His
protagonistsare usually very intelligent teenagers who have to make their way in the adult society they see around them. On the surface, they are simple tales of adventure, achievement, and dealing with stupid teachers and jealous peers. Heinlein was a vocal proponent of the notion that juvenile readers were far more sophisticated and able to handle more complex or difficult themes than most people realized. His juvenile stories often had a maturity to them that made them readable for adults.
Red Planet, for example, portrays some very subversive themes, including a revolution in which young students are involved; his editor demanded substantial changes in this book's discussion of topics such as the use of weapons by children and the misidentified sex of the Martian character. Heinlein was always aware of the editorial limitations put in place by the editors of his novels and stories, and while he observed those restrictions on the surface, was often successful in introducing ideas not often seen in other authors' juvenile SF.
In 1957,
James Blish wrote that one reason for Heinlein's success "has been the high grade of machinery which goes, today as always, into his story-telling. Heinlein seems to have known from the beginning, as if instinctively, technical lessons about fiction which other writers must learn the hard way (or often enough, never learn). He does not always operate the machinery to the best advantage, but he always seems to be aware of it."
[42]
1959–1960[edit]
Heinlein decisively ended his juvenile novels with
Starship Troopers (1959), a controversial work and his personal riposte to leftists calling for President
Dwight D. Eisenhower to stop nuclear testing in 1958.
"The "Patrick Henry" ad shocked 'em," he wrote many years later. "
Starship Troopers outraged 'em."
[43]
Starship Troopers is a coming-of-age story about duty, citizenship, and the role of the military in society.
[44] The book portrays a society in which
suffrage is earned by demonstrated willingness to place society's interests before one's own, at least for a short time and often under onerous circumstances, in government service; in the case of the protagonist, this was military service.
Later, in
Expanded Universe, Heinlein said that it was his intention in the novel that service could include positions outside strictly military functions such as teachers, police officers, and other government positions. This is presented in the novel as an outgrowth of the failure of unearned suffrage government and as a very successful arrangement. In addition, the franchise was only awarded
after leaving the assigned service, thus those serving their terms—in the military, or any other service—were excluded from exercising any franchise. Career military were completely disenfranchised until retirement.
The name
Starship Troopers was licensed for an unrelated, B movie script called Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine, which was then retitled to benefit from the book's credibility.
[45] The resulting
1997 film, written by Ed Neumeier and directed by Paul Verhoeven, had little relationship to the book, beyond the inclusion of names and other superficial traits. Fans of Heinlein were critical of the movie, which they considered a betrayal of Heinlein's philosophy, presenting the society in which the story takes place as fascist.
[46] Christopher Weuve, an admirer of Heinlein, has said that the society depicted in the film showed only a superficial resemblance to the society that Heinlein describes in his book. Weuve summed up his critique of the film as follows. First, "while the Terran Federation in
Starship Troopers is specifically stated to be a representative democracy, Ed Neumeier decided to make the government into a fascist state ... Second, the book was multiracial, but not so the movie: all the non-Anglo characters from the book have been replaced by characters who look like they stepped out of the Aryan edition of
GQ... Third, there is real element of sadism present in the movie which simply isn't present in the book."
[47]
Likewise, the
powered armor technology that is not only central to the book, but became a standard subgenre of science fiction thereafter, is completely absent in the movie, where the characters use
World War II-technology weapons and wear light combat gear little more advanced than that.
[48] According to Verhoeven, this, and the fascist tone of the book, reflected his own experience in the Nazi-occupied
Netherlands during World War II.
[49]
In fact, Verhoeven had not even read the book, attempting to after he bought the rights to add to his existing movie, and disliking it: "I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring...It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing".
[50]
Middle period work, 1961–1973[edit]
Heinlein's novel
Podkayne of Marswas serialized in
If, with a cover by
Virgil Finlay
From about 1961 (
Stranger in a Strange Land) to 1973 (
Time Enough for Love), Heinlein explored some of his most important themes, such as individualism,
libertarianism, and free expression of physical and emotional love. Three novels from this period,
Stranger in a Strange Land,
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and
Time Enough for Love, won the
Libertarian Futurist Society's
Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, designed to honor classic libertarian fiction.
[51] Jeff Riggenbach described
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as "unquestionably one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century".
[52]
Heinlein did not publish
Stranger in a Strange Land until some time after it was written, and the themes of free love and radical
individualism are prominently featured in his long-unpublished first novel,
For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress tells of a war of independence waged by the Lunar penal colonies, with significant comments from a major character, Professor La Paz, regarding the threat posed by government to individual freedom.
Although Heinlein had previously written a few short stories in the
fantasy genre, during this period he wrote his first fantasy novel,
Glory Road, and in
Stranger in a Strange Land and
I Will Fear No Evil, he began to mix hard science with fantasy, mysticism, and satire of organized religion. Critics William H. Patterson, Jr., and Andrew Thornton believe that this is simply an expression of Heinlein's longstanding philosophical opposition to
positivism.
[53][verification needed] Heinlein stated that he was influenced by
James Branch Cabell in taking this new literary direction. The penultimate novel of this period,
I Will Fear No Evil, is according to critic James Gifford "almost universally regarded as a literary failure"
[54] and he attributes its shortcomings to Heinlein's near-death from
peritonitis.
Later work, 1980–1987[edit]
After a seven-year hiatus brought on by poor health, Heinlein produced five new novels in the period from 1980 (
The Number of the Beast) to 1987 (
To Sail Beyond the Sunset). These books have a thread of common characters and time and place. They most explicitly communicated Heinlein's philosophies and beliefs, and many long, didactic passages of dialog and exposition deal with government, sex, and religion. These novels are controversial among his readers and one critic,
Dave Langford, has written about them very negatively.
[55] Heinlein's four Hugo awards were all for books written before this period.
Some of these books, such as
The Number of the Beast and
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, start out as tightly constructed adventure stories, but transform into philosophical fantasias at the end. It is a matter of opinion whether this demonstrates a lack of attention to craftsmanship or a conscious effort to expand the boundaries of science fiction, either into a kind of
magical realism, continuing the process of literary exploration that he had begun with
Stranger in a Strange Land, or into a kind of literary metaphor of
quantum science (
The Number of the Beast dealing with the Observer problem, and
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls being a direct reference to the
Schrödinger's cat thought experiment).
Most of the novels from this period are recognized by critics as forming an offshoot from the Future History series, and referred to by the term World as Myth.
[56]
The tendency toward authorial self-reference begun in
Stranger in a Strange Land and
Time Enough for Love becomes even more evident in novels such as
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, whose first-person protagonist is a disabled military veteran who becomes a writer, and finds love with a female character.
[57]
The 1982 novel
Friday, a more conventional adventure story (borrowing a character and backstory from the earlier short story
Gulf, also containing suggestions of connection to
The Puppet Masters) continued a Heinlein theme of expecting what he saw as the continued disintegration of Earth's society, to the point where the title character is strongly encouraged to seek a new life off-planet. It concludes with a traditional Heinlein note, as in
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or
Time Enough for Love, that freedom is to be found on the frontiers.
Posthumous publications[edit]
Spider Robinson, a colleague, friend, and admirer of Heinlein,
[60] wrote
Variable Star, based on an outline and notes for a juvenile novel that Heinlein prepared in 1955. The novel was published as a collaboration, with Heinlein's name above Robinson's on the cover, in 2006.
A complete collection of Heinlein's published work, conformed and copy-edited by several Heinlein scholars including biographer
William H. Patterson has been published
[61] by the Heinlein Trust as the "Virginia Edition", after his wife.
Heinlein's books probe a range of ideas about a range of topics such as sex, race, politics, and the military. Many were seen as radical or as ahead of their time in their social criticism. His books have inspired considerable debate about the specifics, and the evolution, of Heinlein's own opinions, and have earned him both lavish praise and a degree of criticism. He has also been accused of contradicting himself on various philosophical questions.
[62]
As Ted Gioia notes:
[Heinlein] has been accused of many things—of being a
libertine or a libertarian, a
fascist or a
fetishist, pre-Oedipal or just plain preposterous. Heinlein's critics cut across all ends of the political spectrum, as do his fans. His admirers have ranged from
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the founder of
American Atheists, to members of the
Church of All Worlds, who hail Heinlein as a prophet. Apparently both true believers and non-believers, and perhaps some agnostics, have found sustenance in Heinlein's prodigious output.
[63]
Brian Doherty cites William Patterson, saying that the best way to gain an understanding of Heinlein is as a "full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won't continue, as they are." He says this vision is "at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America. Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so."
[64]
The critic
Elizabeth Anne Hull, for her part, has praised Heinlein for his interest in exploring fundamental life questions, especially questions about "political power—our responsibilities to one another" and about "personal freedom, particularly sexual freedom."
[65]
Politics[edit]
Heinlein's fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, however, began to espouse
conservative views. After 1945, he came to believe that a strong
world government was the only way to avoid
mutual nuclear annihilation. His 1949 novel
Space Cadet describes a future scenario where a military-controlled global government enforces world peace. Heinlein ceased considering himself a Democrat in 1954.
[66]
Heinlein considered himself a libertarian, but in a letter to Judith Merril in 1967 (never sent) he also described himself as a
philosophical anarchist or an "autarchist"
[67]
Stranger in a Strange Land was embraced by the
hippie counterculture, and libertarians have found inspiration in
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Both groups found resonance with his themes of personal freedom in both thought and action.
[52]
Heinlein grew up in the era of
racial segregation in the United States and wrote some of his most influential fiction at the height of the
US civil rights movement. His early juveniles were very much ahead of their time both in their explicit rejection of racism and in their inclusion of protagonists of color—in the context of science fiction before the 1960s, the mere existence of characters of color was a remarkable novelty, with green occurring more often than brown.
[68] For example, his second juvenile, the 1948
Space Cadet, explicitly uses aliens as a metaphor for minorities. In his juvenile,
Star Beast, the
de facto foreign minister of the Terran government is an undersecretary, a Mr. Kiku, who is from Africa.
[69] Heinlein explicitly states his skin is "ebony black", and that Kiku is in an arranged marriage that is happy.
[70]
In a number of his stories, Heinlein challenges his readers' possible racial preconceptions by introducing a strong, sympathetic character, only to reveal much later that he or she is of African or other ancestry; in several cases, the covers of the books show characters as being light-skinned, when in fact the text states, or at least implies, that they are dark-skinned or of African ancestry.
[73] Heinlein repeatedly denounced racism in his non-fiction works, including numerous examples in
Expanded Universe.
[citation needed]
Heinlein reveals near the end of
Starship Troopers that the novel's protagonist and narrator,
Johnny Rico, the formerly disaffected scion of a wealthy family, is
Filipino, actually named "Juan Rico" and speaks
Tagalog in addition to English.
Race was a central theme in some of Heinlein's fiction. The most prominent and controversial example is
Farnham's Freehold, which casts a
white family into a future in which white people are the slaves of cannibalistic black rulers. In the 1941 novel
Sixth Column (also known as
The Day After Tomorrow), a white resistance movement in the United States defends itself against an invasion by an Asian fascist state (the "Pan-Asians") using a "super-science" technology that allows ray weapons to be tuned to specific races. The book is sprinkled with racist slurs against Asian people, and blacks and Hispanics are not mentioned at all. The idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein by editor
John W. Campbell, and Heinlein wrote later that he had "had to re-slant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line" and that he did not "consider it to be an artistic success."
[74][75](However, the novel prompted a heated debate in the scientific community regarding the plausibility of developing
ethnic bioweapons.)
[76]
Some of the alien species in Heinlein's fiction can be interpreted in terms of an allegorical representation of human
ethnic groups.
[citation needed] It has been suggested that the strongly hierarchical and anti-individualistic "Bugs" in
Starship Troopers were meant to represent the Chinese or Japanese, but Heinlein claimed to have written the book in response to "calls for the unilateral ending of nuclear testing by the United States."
[77] Heinlein suggests in the book that the Bugs are a good example of Communism being something that humans cannot successfully adhere to, since humans are strongly defined individuals, whereas the Bugs, being a collective, can all contribute to the whole without consideration of individual desire.
[78]
Heinlein's biographer William Patterson
[79] relates a number of instances in which Heinlein responded to
anti-semitic remarks by (falsely) claiming to be half-
Jewish himself and breaking off all further contact with the anti-semite. (Heinlein's actual ancestry is
German-American on his father's side and
Scots-Irish American on his mother's side, both going back to the Colonial era in the USA.)
Individualism and self-determination[edit]
In keeping with his belief in
individualism, his work for adults—and sometimes even his work for juveniles—often portrays both the oppressors and the oppressed with considerable ambiguity. Heinlein believed that individualism was incompatible with ignorance. He believed that an appropriate level of adult competence was achieved through a wide-ranging education, whether this occurred in a classroom or not. In his juvenile novels, more than once a character looks with disdain at a student's choice of classwork, saying, "Why didn't you study something useful?"
[80] In
Time Enough for Love,
Lazarus Long gives a long
list of capabilities that anyone should have, concluding, "Specialization is for insects." The ability of the individual to create himself is explored in stories such as
I Will Fear No Evil, "
—All You Zombies—", and "
By His Bootstraps".
Sexual issues[edit]
For Heinlein, personal liberation included
sexual liberation, and
free love was a major subject of his writing starting in 1939, with
For Us, The Living. During his early period, Heinlein's writing for younger readers needed to take account of both editorial perceptions of sexuality in his novels, and potential perceptions among the buying public; as critic William H. Patterson has put it, his dilemma was "to sort out what was really objectionable from what was only excessive over-sensitivity to imaginary librarians".
[81] By his middle period, sexual freedom and the elimination of sexual jealousy were a major theme of
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), in which the progressively minded but sexually conservative reporter, Ben Caxton, acts as a
dramatic foil for the less parochial characters,
Jubal Harshaw and Valentine Michael Smith (Mike). Another of the main characters, Jill, is homophobic.
[82]
Gary Westfahl points out that "Heinlein is a problematic case for feminists; on the one hand, his works often feature strong female characters and vigorous statements that women are equal to or even superior to men; but these characters and statements often reflect hopelessly stereotypical attitudes about typical female attributes. It is disconcerting, for example, that in
Expanded Universe Heinlein calls for a society where all lawyers and politicians are women, essentially on the grounds that they possess a mysterious feminine practicality that men cannot duplicate."
[83] Also, in Heinlein's
Stranger in a Strange Land, Jill, one of the main characters, says, "nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped it's partly her fault".
[82]
In books written as early as 1956, Heinlein dealt with incest and the sexual nature of children. Many of his books (including
Time for the Stars,
Glory Road,
Time Enough for Love, and
The Number of the Beast) dealt explicitly or implicitly with incest, sexual feelings and relations between adults and children, or both.
[84] The treatment of these themes include the romantic relationship and eventual marriage (once the girl becomes an adult via time-travel) of a 30-year-old engineer and an 11-year-old girl in
The Door into Summer or the more overt intra-familial incest in
To Sail Beyond the Sunset and
Farnham's Freehold. Peers such as
L. Sprague de Camp and
Damon Knight have commented critically on Heinlein's portrayal of incest and pedophilia in a lighthearted and even approving manner.
[84]
Philosophy[edit]
In
To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Heinlein has the main character,
Maureen, state that the purpose of
metaphysics is to ask questions: Why are we here? Where are we going after we die? (and so on), and that you are not allowed to answer the questions.
Asking the questions is the point of metaphysics, but
answering them is not, because once you answer this kind of question, you cross the line into religion. Maureen does not state a reason for this; she simply remarks that such questions are "beautiful" but lack answers. Maureen's son/lover Lazarus Long makes a related remark in
Time Enough for Love. In order for us to answer the "big questions" about the universe, Lazarus states at one point, it would be necessary to stand
outside the universe.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Heinlein was deeply interested in
Alfred Korzybski's
General Semantics and attended a number of seminars on the subject. His views on
epistemology seem to have flowed from that interest, and his fictional characters continue to express Korzybskian views to the very end of his writing career. Many of his stories, such as
Gulf,
If This Goes On—, and
Stranger in a Strange Land, depend strongly on the premise, related to the well-known
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that by using a correctly
designed language, one can change or improve oneself mentally, or even realize untapped potential (as in the case of Joe Green in
Gulf).
[citation needed]
Pay it Forward[edit]
The term "pay it forward", though it was already in occasional use as a quotation, was popularized by Robert A. Heinlein in his book
Between Planets, published in 1951:
The banker reached into the folds of his gown, pulled out a single credit note. "But eat first—a full belly steadies the judgment. Do me the honor of accepting this as our welcome to the newcomer."
His pride said no; his stomach said YES! Don took it and said, "Uh, thanks! That's awfully kind of you. I'll pay it back, first chance."
"Instead, pay it forward to some other brother who needs it."
Heinlein was a mentor to
Ray Bradbury, giving him help and quite possibly passing on the concept, made famous by the publication of a letter from him to Heinlein thanking him. In Bradbury's novel
Dandelion Wine, published in 1957, when the main character Douglas Spaulding is reflecting on his life being saved by Mr. Jonas, the Junkman:
How do I thank Mr. Jonas, he wondered, for what he's done? How do I thank him, how pay him back? No way, no way at all. You just can't pay. What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving. Look around, find someone, and pass it on. That was the only way....
Bradbury has also advised that writers he has helped thank him by helping other writers.
Heinlein both preached and practiced this philosophy; now the
Heinlein Society, a humanitarian organization founded in his name, does so, attributing the philosophy to its various efforts, including Heinlein for Heroes, the Heinlein Society Scholarship Program, and Heinlein Society blood drives.
[85] Author Spider Robinson made repeated reference to the doctrine, attributing it to his spiritual mentor Heinlein.
[86]
Influence and legacy[edit]
The Dean of Science Fiction[edit]
Heinlein is usually identified, along with
Isaac Asimov and
Arthur C. Clarke, as one of the three masters of science fiction to arise in the so-called
Golden Age of science fiction, associated with
John W. Campbell and his magazine
Astounding.
[87] In the 1950s he was a leader in bringing science fiction out of the low-paying and less prestigious "
pulpghetto". Most of his works, including short stories, have been continuously in print in many languages since their initial appearance and are still available as new paperbacks decades after his death.
Robert Heinlein was also influenced by the
American writer, philosopher and humorist
Charles Fort who is credited as a major influence on most of the leading science-fiction writers of the 20th-century. Heinlein was a lifelong member of the
International Fortean Organization also known as
INFO, the successor to the original
Fortean Society. Heinlein's letters were often displayed on the walls of the INFO offices, and his active participation in the organization is mentioned in the INFO Journal.
[citation needed]
He was at the top of his form during, and himself helped to initiate, the trend toward
social science fiction, which went along with a general maturing of the genre away from
space opera to a more literary approach touching on such adult issues as politics and
human sexuality. In reaction to this trend,
hard science fiction began to be distinguished as a separate subgenre, but paradoxically Heinlein is also considered a seminal figure in hard science fiction, due to his extensive knowledge of engineering, and the careful scientific research demonstrated in his stories. Heinlein himself stated—with obvious pride—that in the days before pocket calculators, he and his wife Virginia once worked for several days on a mathematical equation describing an Earth-Mars rocket orbit, which was then subsumed in a single sentence of the novel
Space Cadet.
Influence among writers[edit]
Heinlein has had a nearly ubiquitous influence on other science fiction writers. In a 1953 poll of leading science fiction authors, he was cited more frequently as an influence than any other modern writer.
[88] Critic James Gifford writes that "Although many other writers have exceeded Heinlein's output, few can claim to match his broad and seminal influence. Scores of science fiction writers from the prewar Golden Age through the present day loudly and enthusiastically credit Heinlein for blazing the trails of their own careers, and shaping their styles and stories."
[89]
Words and phrases coined[edit]
Outside the science fiction community, several words and phrases coined or adopted by Heinlein have passed into common English usage:
- Waldo, protagonist in the eponymous short story "Waldo" whose name came to mean mechanical/robot arms in the real world that are akin to the ones used by the character in the story.
- TANSTAAFL, short for There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, an existing term that refers to the fact that things supposedly given free always have some real cost, popularized in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
- Moonbat[92] used in United States politics as a pejorative political epithet referring to progressives or leftists, was originally the name of a space ship in his story Space Jockey.
- Grok, a "Martian" word for understanding a thing so fully as to become one with it, from Stranger in a Strange Land.
- Space Marine, an existing term popularized by Heinlein in short stories, the concept then being made famous by Starship Troopers, though the term "space marine" is not used in that novel.
- Speculative fiction, a term Heinlein used for the separation of serious, consistent Science Fiction writing, from the pop "sci fi" of the day, which generally took great artistic license with human knowledge, amounting to being more like space fantasy than science fiction.
Inspiring culture and technology[edit]
In 1962,
Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (then still using his birth name, Tim Zell) founded the
Church of All Worlds, a
Neopagan religious organization modeled in many ways after the treatment of religion in the novel
Stranger in a Strange Land. This spiritual path included several ideas from the book, including non-mainstream family structures, social libertarianism, water-sharing rituals, an acceptance of all religious paths by a single tradition, and the use of several terms such as "grok", "Thou art God", and "Never Thirst". Though Heinlein was neither a member nor a promoter of the Church, there was a frequent exchange of correspondence between Zell and Heinlein, and he was a paid subscriber to their magazine,
Green Egg. This Church still exists as a 501(C)(3) religious organization incorporated in California, with membership worldwide, and it remains an active part of the neopagan community today.
[93]
Heinlein was influential in making
space exploration seem to the public more like a practical possibility. His stories in publications such as
The Saturday Evening Post took a matter-of-fact approach to their outer-space setting, rather than the "gee whiz" tone that had previously been common. The documentary-like film
Destination Moon advocated a
Space Race with an unspecified foreign power almost a decade before such an idea became commonplace, and was promoted by an unprecedented publicity campaign in print publications. Many of the astronauts and others working in the U.S. space program grew up on a diet of the Heinlein
juveniles,
[original research?] best evidenced by the naming of a crater on Mars after him, and a tribute interspersed by the
Apollo 15 astronauts into their radio conversations while on the moon.
[94]
Heinlein was also a guest commentator for
Walter Cronkite during
Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin's
Apollo 11 moon landing. He remarked to Cronkite during the landing that, "This is the greatest event in human history, up to this time. This is—today is New Year's Day of the Year One."
[95] Businessman and entrepreneur
Elon Musk says that Heinlein's books have helped inspire his career.
[96]
Heinlein Society[edit]
The Heinlein Society was founded by
Virginia Heinlein on behalf of her husband, to "
pay forward" the legacy of the writer to future generations of "Heinlein's Children." The foundation has programs to:
- "Promote Heinlein blood drives."
- "Provide educational materials to educators."
- "Promote scholarly research and overall discussion of the works and ideas of Robert Anson Heinlein."
The Heinlein society also established the
Robert A. Heinlein Award in 2003 "for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings to inspire the human exploration of space."
[97][98]
In popular culture[edit]
- Heinlein appears as a major character in Paul Malmont's historical novel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown (2011).
- In John Varley's novels Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, the author includes a society of "Heinleiners" as key plot elements. This fictional community is composed ofrugged individualists who, like classic Heinlein characters, are determined to provide for themselves and those around them voluntarily, without government coercion. Their name is explained to originate with a colony ship they built called the Robert Heinlein, which is turned into their home base on the moon.
- In the 1985 Science Fiction film Explorers, one character is a genetically engineered talking rat named Heinlein.[99]
- In the Star Trek TV series, "The Trouble with Tribbles", the title creatures in the episode resembled the Martian flat cats in Heinlein's 1952 novel The Rolling Stones. Script writer David Gerrold was concerned that he had inadvertently plagiarized the novel which he had read fifteen years before.[100] These concerns were brought up by a research team, who suggested that the rights to the novel should be purchased from Heinlein. One of the producers phoned Heinlein, who only asked for a signed copy of the script and later sent a note to Gerrold after it aired to thank him for the script.[101]
- In the Star Trek novel The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing, a starship during a key space battle is called the USS Heinlein.[102] In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise had a shuttle named Heinlein, shown as being tested in Hangar 2 in the episode "Evolution".
- Heinlein appears indirectly as the purported author of an ancient manuscript, supposedly one of his "unwritten stories", 'The Stone Pillow', in the novel The Counterfeit Heinlein by Laurence M. Janifer.[103]
- Jon Anderson of the rock band Yes was inspired by a Heinlein novel's title for his song Starship Trooper.
- Jimmy Webb "appropriated" the author's title The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for his song of the same name:
Robert Heinlein was a kind of early mentor of mine. I started reading his books when I was eight years old. ... I guess I was really getting more of my education out of science-fiction than out of public school. I was reading Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and learning a great deal about the patois of the language itself and how these words were being used to create emotions. I was learning this from writers without even knowing it. ... "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" was one of the best titles I've ever heard in my life. I really am guilty of appropriating something from another writer. In this case I had contact with Robert A. Heinlein's attornies. I said, 'I want to write a song with the title, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Can you ask Mr. Heinlein if it's okay with him?' They called me back and he said he had no objection to it.
[104]
Orbital path of Robert Heinlein's
eponymous asteroid
In his lifetime, Heinlein received four
Hugo Awards, for
Stranger in a Strange Land,
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,
Starship Troopers, and
Double Star, and was nominated for four
Nebula Awards, for
Stranger in a Strange Land,
Friday,
Time Enough for Love, and
Job: A Comedy of Justice.
[105] He was also given two posthumous Hugos, for
Farmer in the Sky and
The Man Who Sold the Moon.
In 2001 the United States Naval Academy created the Robert A. Heinlein Chair In Aerospace Engineering.
[109]
The Libertarian Futurist Society has honored six of Heinlein's novels with their
Hall of Fame award.
[112] The first two during his lifetime for
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and
Stranger in a Strange Land. Four have been awarded posthumously for
Red Planet,
Methuselah's Children,
Time Enough for Love and
Requiem.
