Heinlein in Reflection

Robert A. Heinlein in the 21st Century

Christopher G. Nuttall

Table of Contents
Dedication	4
A Note on Citations	5
Introduction	6
Heinlein and Science-Fiction	10
The Reviews	16
Review: Rocket Ship Galileo	18
Review: Space Cadet	20
Review: Red Planet	23
Review: Sixth Column	26
Review: Farmer in the Sky	29
Review: The Man Who Sold the Moon/Orphans of the Sky	32
Review: Waldo and Magic, Inc.	35
Review: Between Planets	37
Review: The Puppet Masters	41
Review: The Green Hills of Earth/The Menace from Earth	44
Review: The Rolling Stones	48
Review: Starman Jones	52
Review: Revolt in 2100	55
Review: The Star Beast	59
Review: Tunnel in the Sky	63
Review: Double Star	66
Review: Time for the Stars	69
Review: Citizen of the Galaxy	73
Review: The Door into Summer	76
Review: Have Space Suit—Will Travel	79
Review: Methuselah's Children	82
Review: Starship Troopers	85
Review: Stranger in a Strange Land	88
Review: Podkayne of Mars	91
Review: Glory Road	94
Review: Farnham's Freehold	98
Review: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress	104
Review: Time Enough for Love	108
Review: Expanded Universe	112
Review: Job: A Comedy of Justice	116
Review: To Sail Beyond the Sunset	119
The Juveniles in Reflection	124
The Heinlein Novels in Reflection	131
Heinlein's Values Resonance	135
Heinlein and Values Dissonance	139
Was Heinlein a Racist?	145
Was Heinlein a Sexist? 	151
Heinlein is Unfunny: His Contribution to Science-Fiction Tropes	157
What Heinlein Got Right—And Wrong	160
Conclusion: Robert A. Heinlein in the 21st Century	163

Dedication

To Alexei Panshin, who wrote the ground-breaking Heinlein in Dimension (and who was kind enough to let me paraphrase his title) and William H. Patterson, who wrote the pre-eminent biography of Robert A. Heinlein.

A Note on Citations

Given how many different editions of Heinlein’s works there are, ranging from the early magazine printings and paperbacks to the Virginia Editions, citing quotes can be a problem.  Where Heinlein’s own books and words are concerned, I have chosen to either make it clear from textual context which book is citied or leave a simple endnote.  Where other works and websites are concerned, or I refer to a specific edition of one of Heinlein’s works, I have inserted a full citation.

Furthermore, I have drawn - as much as possible - from the final versions.  My review of Revolt in 2100, for example, is based on the final version, not the earlier short stories, and my outline of the story may not match the earlier versions.

I apologise for any confusion this may cause.

Introduction

What are the facts?  Again and again and again - what are the facts?  Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbours think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?  You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue.  Get the facts!
-Heinlein

This book has rather an unusual genesis.

In 2017, or thereabouts, I read a review of Podkayne of Mars that was, I felt, something of a hack job.  I’d read the book myself - I’d gone on a Heinlein kick a decade ago and read everything of his I could find - and I hadn't thought it was that bad.  So I re-read Podkayne of Mars, decided that the reviewer was either wrong or simply interrogating the text from the wrong perspective and wrote a review myself.  

The matter might have rested there if, a few months later, I hadn't noted Amazing Stories publishing a handful of retro reviews.  Reviewing books is something I enjoy, if there is meat within the text, and so I volunteered to write a review of Starship Troopers.  Steve Davidson, who currently runs Amazing Stories, asked me to consider writing reviews of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land.  I did ... and, as I had the bug by then, I determined that my next review would be Farnham’s Freehold.

My memories of the book were ... less than positive.  It wasn't exciting enough to grab me as a young reader (I had the same problem with Starship Troopers) and I’d heard a number of canards about racism aimed at the book.  Bracing myself, I reread ... and my eyes were opened.  Farnham’s Freehold includes racist characters, in the same sense that Huckleberry Finn includes racist characters, but it is not a racist book.  Indeed, unlike more modern authors, Heinlein actually convinced me to take (some) microaggressions seriously.  And yet, Heinlein is called a racist?

Part of the problem, of course, is that society has moved on.  What was daring and original in Heinlein’s early years - and what could be got through the gatekeepers - reads as bland and boring to us now.  There is nothing special, these days, in basing a book or a TV show on a character who isn't a straight white male.  Heinlein was ahead of the times and then behind the times, without ever having a time when his views - as presented to us - meshed comfortably with the real world.  His juveniles - which we would probably consider YA these days - are really quite astonishingly clean.  Sex is barely even mentioned.  Even in his later years, when he wrote to shock as well as to make people think, there is little that is revolutionary - to us - about his ideas.

It is difficult to place matters in context when one is unfamiliar with the past.  Heinlein, in his early years, worked under a series of restrictions that would appal us today. He had no internet, no email ... he was dependent, in many ways, on people who weren’t particularly invested in his success.  Heinlein’s words must not only be comprehended, they must be placed in context.  He was a product of his time and, while by their standards he was staggeringly progressive, by ours he comes across as a little old-fashioned.

But the other part of the problem is that Heinlein, being seen (and rightly so) as one of the founders of modern-day science-fiction, has been attacked for not being perfect.  This is part of a broader trend, where historical figures (almost all white men) are charged with not being modern figures who should hew to modern morality.  George Washington, for example, owned slaves (a point Heinlein himself mentioned in The Rolling Stones); Winston Churchill was a firm believer in the value of British imperialism, to the point where he was strikingly reluctant to give India any form of self-government, let alone independence.  And yet, these great men did great deeds.  Heinlein, for all his contributions to science-fiction, has faced similar attacks.  And most of those attacks are unfounded.

I returned to my rereading, reading and reviewing my way through a number of Heinlein’s more significant works.  As I did so, I came to realise that most of the charges levelled against Heinlein were not only unfounded, they were flatly contradicted by the words in the text.  That alone was annoying, but what was perhaps of more significance was a growing understanding of precisely why Heinlein became - and remains - popular.  Heinlein wrote about characters who were, in many ways, living, breathing humans.  His heroes faced dilemmas that still resonate today.  The guild system of Starman Jones might, in a modern-day book, be replaced by an evil Human Resources department more interested in setting up racial quotas than hiring and promoting by merit, but the basic principle remains the same.  A talented youngster, unfairly excluded, must decide if he should prove himself ... or cheat the system.  

I also noticed that there were a number of themes running through his works that still spoke to his readers today.  Some of those themes were easy to spot, others were subtle; Heinlein often set out to make his readers like a character before using them to illustrate unfair issues that held them back.  And, often, Heinlein wasn't so much preaching to the choir as he was preaching to a particular subset of readers; his juveniles, for example, were often aimed at teenage boys.  This sometimes caused them to read oddly - or offensively - to readers who weren't teenage boys. But to judge the books by the standards of something they’re not - as one might complain that books for toddlers are simplistic - is simply unfair.

I do not pretend this is a biography of Robert A. Heinlein.  I have no special insight into his personal life.  Nor do I claim that this is a piece of formal literary criticism.  One early reader told me this book wasn’t up to professional-level literary criticism.  This is true.  I write for the average reader, not for the literary critic.  Indeed, I regard most literary criticism with a certain degree of suspicion.  I am all in favour of studying the great authors - Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension is a good outline and analysis of Heinlein’s early works - but I tend to regard much literary criticism as being, in the immortal words of Blackadder, “full of feeble definitions and ridiculous verbiage.”  It is all too easy, as many of Heinlein’s critics have done, to fall into the trap of viewing the subject through modern eyes, or to be drawn into a vocabulary that excludes the average reader.  I have often regarded the growth of impenetrable academic commentary as a threat to reading.  Heinlein, I suspect, would have agreed.

Nor is this a formal study of the other writers who wrote during Heinlein’s era.  I have made reference to some of the greatest, but I have not tried to provide an overall study, nor have I - by and large - compared Heinlein’s works to theirs.  This is a study focused on Heinlein himself, not on his era or his contemporaries.  This is partly because very few of those authors impinged upon my awareness before I started looking for them, but also because I believe that there is little to gain from combining the Heinlein study with another.  Heinlein must be assessed as an individual, rather than one of a crowd.  

My aims in writing this book are threefold:

•	First, to read and review Heinlein’s most significant works, placing them into context.

•	Second, to assess the themes running through Heinlein’s works and consider how many of the charges levelled against Heinlein are actually true.

•	Third, to consider what lessons Heinlein can teach us today, with particular reference to modern-day political and social issues.  

Heinlein is accused of being a racist.  I cannot speak to his personal views, but I firmly believe - and I will explain why - that his works were not racist.  Indeed, they were strikingly progressive for their time.  Heinlein is accused of being a sexist.  Again, I cannot speak to his personal views, but his worlds were not - generally - sexist.  Heinlein was bad at writing women, yet even this observation must be placed in context.  Heinlein was ...

It is my belief that Heinlein was a dichotomy.  Just as Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers represented, for a while, the bibles of both Left and Right, Heinlein himself was a complicated mixture of cold-blooded realist/pragmatist and hot-blooded fantasist.  He knew too much about humanity - particularly men - to fully embrace the more rationalist (in the sense that their characters are rational) worldviews of some of his successors, but - at the same time - he wanted people to be better.  He was aware - realistically speaking - of how society’s chains held people, particularly women and blacks, in bondage, yet he also preached of worlds where those chains had been left in the past and forgotten.  Very few people - and Heinlein knew this - are wholly good or evil.  Heinlein was neither an angel nor a devil, but a man.  

I think this is both the reason why Heinlein is still admired today and why there are factions in fandom that detest everything about him.  Heinlein refused to pretend that the real world didn't exist, let alone ignore very real problems facing the men and women (white, black and brown) of his era.  Heinlein worked hard to make it clear that most of his characters did not have a friendly scriptwriter watching out for them.  There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, Heinlein told us.  This theme became more pronounced throughout the later years of his writing.  In Starship Troopers, Heinlein asks what right mankind has to survive.  And he’s right.  Why do we have a natural right to anything?

There are people who insist that the destruction of the Native American societies was effectively a horrific genocide.  They’re right.  It was.  But no amount of breast-beating will change the simple fact that it happened, or that human history tells us that the strong will always overpower the weak.  (All those jokes about how different history would have been if the natives had an immigration policy have a nasty sting in the tail - immigrants did come to America and displaced the natives.  Why would anyone want to repeat that experience?)  I think that Heinlein understood reality in a way many of his successors simply did not.  

In his later years, Heinlein loved to shock.  He would push forward controversial ideas - cannibalism, incest, etc - forcing his readers to actually think ... and then question the foundations of their society.  He asked questions that needed to be asked, although many of his answers were weak; he shocked, but then tried to show the consequences and downsides of breaking society’s rules.  In doing so, he laid the foundations for much - much - more. 

To some extent, as his career developed, Heinlein slowly shifted from writing adventure stories to writing literature.  Many of his early works were thrilling stories for young men - often subjected to the editor’s pen - but his later works were more elaborate pieces of literature, more interested in developing their ideas than telling a story.  (One of the reasons I didn't like Starship Troopers as a young man was because it is a philosophical work, rather than an adventure story.)  In some ways, it allowed him to get his ideas across, but - in other ways - it weakened them.  He was still more effective, as a writer, when he didn't hammer his ideas home.  He trusted his readers.  It is a lesson that many more modern writers could stand to learn.

I’d like to finish by paraphrasing a quote from Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell that, I think, fits Heinlein like a glove.

“It is the contention of modern critics that everything belonging to Robert Anson Heinlein must be shaken out of modern SF/Fantasy, as one would shake moths and dust out of an old coat.  What does they imagine they will have left?  If you get rid of Heinlein you will be left holding the empty air.”

 Heinlein and Science-Fiction

My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changes his personality, character or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking.  How he copes with it, I can’t plot in advance because that depends on his character and I don’t know what his character is until I get acquainted with him.

Introduction

If there is any one man who deserves to be called the grandfather of science-fiction, it is Robert Anson Heinlein.

His importance to the field simply cannot be underestimated.  Heinlein was the first writer to come up with a number of ideas - and tropes - that are so common today that we cannot understand how revolutionary they were at the time.  Heinlein dreamed of a future that was both fantastic and within our grasp, Heinlein asked questions that needed to be asked, Heinlein - above all - made his characters truly human.  He was the first science-fiction writer to mix the pulp genre with genuine literature, giving his works a staying power that many other writers of his time lacked.  Heinlein’s works may seem dated now - Heinlein got as much wrong as he got right - but Heinlein touched upon timeless truths that continue to resonate to this day.

Compared to Edward (E.E. “Doc”) Smith or Isaac Asimov, it is clear that Heinlein was the superior writer.  Doc Smith wrote stories of heroes who were effectively superhuman, stories that were dominated by super-technology; Asimov wrote stories that often relied on clever resolutions and smart thinking (or sometimes masterful inactivity, i.e. doing nothing), while putting the human race in the care of a guardian race of psychic robots.  One may argue, for example, that the central question of the Foundation and later Robot books is how mankind should be governed; Heinlein, by contrast, insists that man should govern himself.  

Heinlein: A (Very) Brief Bio

Robert Anson Heinlein was born in Missouri, 1907.  Growing up in Kansas City, Heinlein went to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and graduated in 1929, moving swiftly to take up a post on the aircraft carrier USS Lexington (where he would serve under the later Admiral Ernest King) and see the changes wrought on warfare by modern technology.  He then served on the USS Roper, a destroyer.  Unfortunately for Heinlein, his naval career came to an end in 1934, when he was discharged from the Navy because of pulmonary tuberculosis.  

After a brief and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to enter business and politics, Heinlein turned to writing and produced his first published story (Life-Line, printed in Astounding Science Fiction) in 1939.  Others followed, including a rewrite of a story first written by John Campbell (Sixth Column), before the Second World War intervened.  Heinlein was unable to return to active service, something that plagued him in later years, but he was able to secure a job doing aeronautical engineering for the Navy at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Pennsylvania.  In hindsight, it is clear that Heinlein’s post-naval career provided fodder for many stories, even if Heinlein himself found the period more than a little frustrating.

The end of the war brought a number of changes to Heinlein’s career.  He wrote a number of short stories that helped science-fiction become a genre in its own right, as well as starting a series of juvenile novels for Charles Scribner (1947 to 1959) and a movie script entitled Destination Moon.  (It won an award for special effects).  However, he was also growing increasingly aware of the danger posed by the Soviet Union and the need to maintain a strong defence.  His response to a suggestion that President Eisenhower should unilaterally stop nuclear tests was to urge the President to keep going, as well as standing up to the Communists in all fields.  Starship Troopers was written to make it clear, I believe, that freedom is not (and never was) free.  Scribner refused to publish it, ending their relationship with Heinlein.

It may have been a blessing in disguise.  Heinlein had long chafed under editorial requirements and he welcomed the chance to strike out on his own.  Once he had found a new publisher, he started work on books that pushed the limits as far as they would go: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough for Love.  Despite failing health, Heinlein would be involved in matters such as blood donations and Star Wars - the missile defence plan, not the movies - until his death in 1988.

Heinlein was married three times.  The first marriage, to Elinor Curry in 1929, lasted about a year and ended in divorce.  His second marriage, to Leslyn MacDonald, lasted for fifteen years before Leslyn fell into alcoholism and the couple filed for divorce.  His third wife, Virginia Heinlein (one of the first female engineers in America), outlived him.

It is difficult to exaggerate how much change Heinlein saw in his life.  The world of his childhood, one he would later evoke in Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset, was a world of horse-drawn carriages, primitive medicine, poor communications, institutionalised racism and sexism; he saw both world wars and the Great Depression, the collapse of the European Empires, the aggression of the Soviet Union (which invaded Poland in 1921 and Finland in 1939), the Civil Rights Era and so much more.  He learned the importance of keeping one’s powder dry from a very early age, as well as the value of civilisation ... a civilisation he saw as being under threat.  And, to a very large extent, he was right.  His experiences - and those of his country and world - shaped his development, as surely as my experiences shaped mine.  Heinlein grew up in a profoundly unsafe world, where - eventually - the threat of nuclear annihilation arose to promise the destruction of everything he held dear; his critics grew to adulthood as the world stabilised - for a while - and the prospect of imminent death and destruction faded into the background.  Heinlein never knew the safety (and immense comforts) we tend to take for granted - and, in many ways, his harsh view of the universe was more practical than anything put forward today.

It was Heinlein’s great blessing, I think, that he could and did look ahead of the world of his birth.  And it is his great curse that his critics are often unable to understand the world that surrounded him when he wrote. Many of Heinlein’s modern-day critics are far younger: Nora Jemisin, who has insisted that Heinlein was a racist, was born in 1972 and would have been sixteen when Heinlein died.

In his early years, for example, Heinlein had less creative freedom than one might expect.  He was often forced to argue with his editors, who insisted on changes that ranged from the sensible - in line with the issues of the day - to the thoroughly absurd.  It was a great deal harder for him to get concepts past such eagle eyes; the stranded characters of Tunnel in the Sky, pairing up as they come to realise they may never be rescued, make a big song and dance about getting married.  Later, as he became a name, Heinlein enjoyed more creative freedom, openly including sex, characters of colour and even homosexuality.  Even so, by modern standards, Heinlein’s more adult books - To Sail Beyond the Sunset, in particular - are ridiculously clean.  Sex is rarely, if ever, acknowledged in any of his juvenile books.  Babies appear to come from nowhere.

Heinlein, going by some accounts, was far from perfect.  He was grumpy and opinionated at times and often, depending on which account you believe, enjoyed making people pay for his favours.  He liked his privacy, as Alexei Panshin discovered; he pushed back hard when he found out that Panshin had obtained copies of letters he’d exchanged with a friend, after that friend’s death.  He may well have massively overreacted, although - as Panshin notes - the affair came at a very bad time for Heinlein:

“In fact, as I look back on the situation now, it appears to me that by the end of January 1965, Robert Heinlein must have thought he was under siege and had already taken rounds of incoming fire.”

But then, Panshin did step over a line.  As Heinlein himself put it:

“My prime reason for disliking Mr. Panshin is that he obtained and read without my knowledge or permission a file of very personal letters from me to my dearest friend -- all this after my friend's death.  Details, with proof, will be Exhibit A.  A man of meticulous honour does not do this.  In the words of a great statesman: “Gentlemen do not read other people's mail.””

This is not, of course, an unreasonable point.  Letters exchanged between two people, letters that might touch on issues that might damage one or both of their reputations, are exchanged in the reasonable expectation of privacy.  I would have the same reaction as Heinlein, if I discovered someone had been prying through my mail.  Heinlein would have been all too aware of the dangers of having someone read a letter, perhaps without context, and using it against him.  And Heinlein was, even in 1965, a vulnerable man.

I suspect he was grimly aware of the difference between his world, as he presented it, and his real life.  Heinlein, who had enjoyed an open marriage with Leslyn, was still at risk of losing everything if he was discovered to be an adulterer.  He might go to jail - or, worse, lose his writing and publishing contracts.  Patterson explains:

“There was enough prudery in the children’s book business that Scribner’s could invoke a morals clause in his contract - a clause nullifying the contract if Heinlein was found engaged in any of several activities considered unsavoury - and that would be that.”

Heinlein was not perfect.  Far from it.  And yet, like just about every great man in history, Heinlein is not brought down by his flaws.  Instead, he rises above them.

Heinlein’s Books

The vast majority of Heinlein’s works can be comfortably divided into juvenile (we would probably call them Young Adult today) and adult books.  The former were written specifically for teenagers (mainly teenage boys, although by the time The Rolling Stones was written it was clear that a number of teenage girls were reading them too) while the latter were more literarily in scope, asking questions about the rights and duties to one’s country (Starship Troopers), making observations about the impact of religion on society (Stranger in a Strange Land) and challenging the comfortable beliefs of his readers (Farnham’s Freehold.)

Indeed, the majority of Heinlein’s books straddled the line between pulp (adventure) fiction and literary (big ideas) fiction.  Where John Ringo’s A Hymn Before Battle confidently fits into the pulp category, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama fits neatly into the literary category, many of Heinlein’s works - particularly his juvenile books - comfortably fit into both.  Thus Starman Jones is a tale of a young man who goes to space (pulp), but also an observation on both the dangers of locking talented youngsters out of a guild and the difficulties in making the super-privileged realise just how privileged they actually are (literary).

Heinlein’s genius lay in making the two categories work together.  Rendezvous with Rama is not a character-based story, not in any real sense.  The true star of the book is the mysterious alien ship.  Naomi Alderman’s The Power is focused on a world-changing event, not a handful of characters.  Both books would not be that different if the characters were different; indeed, the events of the book overwhelm the characters.  Most pulp books, certainly the ones written in Heinlein’s era, rarely asked any genuinely big questions.  Doc Smith’s adventure novels were exciting, with a giant arms race that ended with entire planets being thrown around like rocks, but they never asked us to reflect on human nature.  Heinlein, on the other hand, rarely lost sight of his characters.  Sixth Column is SF pulp in the truest sense of the word - super-technology used to defeat a vastly more numerous enemy force - but it is driven by its characters, not by its world.

It is this, I think, that accounts for Heinlein’s continued popularity amongst SF readers.  He serves as an excellent entry into the genre, even if his juvenile books seem very dated today; young readers can read them without an adult’s sceptical eye.  Older readers can admire the amount of thought that goes into his juvenile works, the moral lessons he tries to impart and, perhaps, the limitations that made it harder for him to say what needed to be said.  (He had trouble with his editors when he wanted to include characters who were not straight white males, to the point where he was compelled to only hint at Rod Walker’s skin colour (black) in Tunnel in the Sky.)  

His adult books were more literary than pulp, to the point that my twelve-year-old self discarded Starship Troopers fairly quickly after discovering it was not particularly exciting compared to some of his older novels.  Heinlein would raise big ideas - he was perhaps the first serious author to write about a gender-swapping character - and invite us to challenge our perceptions.  He would discuss, often at length, how the world worked (or at least how he saw the world working.)  And he was clever enough at getting his ideas across that he opened a number of minds.  I can honestly say that it was Heinlein, not anyone more modern, who convinced me to take microaggressions seriously.

Part of this, I think, was that Heinlein was careful to make us like his characters before showing us the roadblocks in their path.  Rico of Starship Troopers, for example, is given a chance to grow on us before Heinlein casually reveals that he’s Filipino.  Tunnel in the Sky has Rod Walker, but it also has Jackie ... whom Rod assumes to be male until she proves her competence (bonus points for Rod repeating what, to a teenage boy, would have seemed the height of wisdom about girls ... and putting his foot firmly in his mouth.)  The Rolling Stones has Hazel Stone, who faced discrimination from male engineers; Farnham’s Freehold has Joe, who is perhaps the most likable character in the book.  He gets a chance to give a breaking speech to Hugh Farnham, who thoroughly deserves it.

It’s sad, but true, that we empathise more with likable people than people we consider unlikable.  A character who happens to be stridently tilting at windmills - Lisa Simpson or Hermione Granger, for example - is more likely to become the butt of various jokes than hailed as a hero.  Whining and moaning is not seen as heroic; professional victims, however defined, are rarely liked, no matter how much lip service is paid to their words.  The man who overcomes his weaknesses and strides triumphantly into the future is seen as more heroic than the man who lets bitterness overcome him.  Heinlein understood that, I think.  His characters had weaknesses and flaws, very human weaknesses and flaws.  Not all of his successors have the same understanding.

Heinlein in the Modern World

Heinlein is not (and never was) above criticism.  His works have drawn a great deal of fire over the years, most notably Starship Troopers (which had to endure the indignity of a truly terrible movie named after it.)  Yet, in recent years, Heinlein’s legacy has come under attack from SF readers and writers who really should know better.

Part of this, I suspect, is because Heinlein was (and is) such a towering and polarising figure in the field.  A person who tries to attack or defend Heinlein will take fire from people who want to defend or attack Heinlein.  He is such an important personage that many authors, myself included, have drawn inspiration from Heinlein’s work and, in many ways, consider him something of a father-figure.  An attack on Heinlein is an attack on the foundations of our house and should not - must not - be tolerated.  But this makes it difficult for people to assess Heinlein in the context of his times and, worse, gives ammunition to those who want to tear Heinlein down.  It is easy to shout “racist” or “fascist” at a Heinlein supporter, which does absolutely nothing for the tone of the debate.  Heinlein was neither, as I will demonstrate, and his supporters aren’t either.

Indeed, like it or not, we have reached a point where we must hail someone as an unquestionable hero who must not be criticised (Nelson Mandela, for example) or insist that one flaw in their otherwise saintly appearance demands that we declare them to be completely beyond the pale.  The question of precisely what we do with the works of great creators who have sinned has become more pressing in recent years, with the revelations about Jimmy Savile, Harvey Weinstein and, in the science-fiction and fantasy field, Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Heinlein was nothing like these abusers, but - as a man of his times - he sometimes wrote things that would be considered problematic today.  But is this enough to condemn him?  

I say no, for both logical and emotional reasons.  Heinlein cannot be fairly judged by the standards of our time; he must be judged by the standards of his time.  It is neither fair nor logical to hold him to account by standards that simply didn't exist in his world.  But emotionally, Heinlein is very much the grandfather of science-fiction.  I can recognise his flaws, and I will be discussing them later in the book, but I can no more reject him than I can reject my biological father.  Nor does the fact that Heinlein said or did something automatically invalidate it.

But the other part of the problem is that Heinlein did not have the advantage of drawing on the works of countless older authors.  He was breaking new ground; sometimes taking old tropes and transferring them to outer space, sometimes making his ideas up out of whole cloth.  To newer readers, Heinlein sometimes reads as a horrendously outdated writer from the Stone Age, as one commenter put it.  His works are sometimes strikingly idealistic, as if they and their writer came from a more trusting age.  Heinlein’s works evolved as Heinlein himself evolved.  The simple truths of his early writings gave way to admitting the complexity of the world around him.  

It is often suggested, most notably by John Wright, that Heinlein could not win a Hugo Award today.  There may be some truth in this.  On one hand, science-fiction has evolved and fandom has expanded in many different directions.  (More people bought a copy of my latest book than voted in the 2017 Hugo Awards.)  And, on the other hand, conventions and fan associations have developed a terrible habit of excluding people for having the wrong political beliefs (i.e. conservative) or saying the wrong things or generally refusing to toe the party line.  Heinlein, in his later life, saw no reason to kowtow to ideologues and, I suspect, would probably have been ejected from numerous conventions.  

But success is not measured in awards, but books sold.  And, by that standard, Heinlein’s legacy is alive and well.  Why might this be so?

There is a section in Marvel Comics Civil War: Front Line where Sally Floyd chews Captain America out for not keeping up with modern life and uses this as an argument to prove that Cap is out of touch.  Cap is shamed into silenced (or too stunned at her stupidity to tell her she’s being stupid) and Sally thinks she’s won the debate.  But consider this:

A teenage boy and a teenage girl live in adjoining houses.  The boy wants to spy on the girl as she undresses every night.  In 1900, he drills a hole through the wall and peeps through; in 2000 he hacks her webcam and watches through it; in 2100 he uses a microscopic nanocam; in 2200 he uses a zero-width wormhole.  But in all four eras, the boy is a pervert spying on the girl without her knowledge or consent.  There is a timeless principle that one does not play the voyeur.  And most of Heinlein’s works hum with timeless principles.

And that, I think, is why Heinlein is still popular today.

The Reviews

It was originally my intention to review all of Heinlein’s novels and short-story collections.  I ended up reviewing all but seven of his novels; I disliked For Us The Living, I Will Fear No Evil, Friday and the remaining four too much to give them fair reviews.  The remainder of Heinlein’s novels have been reviewed in this section of the book.

I’ve sorted them by year published, rather than dividing them into juvenile and adult books, but the list below shows the books by class.

Reviewed:

Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947 (Juvenile)
Space Cadet, 1948 (Juvenile)
Red Planet, 1949 (Juvenile)
Sixth Column, 1949 (Adult, Pulp)
Farmer in the Sky, 1950 (Juvenile)
The Man Who Sold the Moon, 1950 (Adult, Pulp/Literature)
Waldo & Magic, Inc., 1950 (Adult, Pulp/Literature)
Between Planets, 1951 (Juvenile)
The Puppet Masters, 1951 (Adult, Pulp)
The Green Hills of Earth, 1951/The Menace from Earth, 1959
The Rolling Stones, 1952 (Juvenile)
Starman Jones, 1953 (Juvenile)
Revolt in 2100, 1953 (Adult, Pulp/Literature)
The Star Beast, 1954 (Juvenile)
Tunnel in the Sky, 1955 (Juvenile)
Double Star, 1956 (Adult, Literature)
Time for the Stars, 1956 (Juvenile)
Citizen of the Galaxy, 1957 (Juvenile)
The Door into Summer, 1957 (Adult, Literature)
Have Space Suit—Will Travel, 1958 (Juvenile)
Methuselah's Children, 1958 (Adult, Pulp/Literature)
Starship Troopers, 1959 (Adult, Literature)
Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961 (Adult, Literature)
Podkayne of Mars, 1963 (Juvenile?)
Orphans of the Sky, 1963 (Adult, Pulp)
Glory Road, 1963 (Adult, Pulp)
Farnham's Freehold, 1964 (Adult, Literature)
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 1966 (Adult, Literature)
Time Enough for Love, 1973 (Adult, Literature)
Expanded Universe, 1980 (Adult, Literature)
Job: A Comedy of Justice, 1984 (Adult, Literature)
To Sail Beyond the Sunset, 1987(Adult, Literature)

Not Reviewed

Beyond This Horizon, 1948.  (Adult, Literature)
I Will Fear No Evil, 1970 (Adult, Literature)
The Number of the Beast, 1980 (Adult, Literature)
Friday, 1982 (Adult, Pulp/Literature)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, 1985 (Adult, Literature)
For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (written: 1939; published 2003)
Variable Star (outlined by Heinlein: 1955, written by Spider Robinson in 2016)

Review: Rocket Ship Galileo

It is actually quite hard to believe, in some ways, that Heinlein wrote Rocket Ship Galileo as it is quite different, in many ways, from his other juveniles.  It is quite evident, simply from a cursory look, that Heinlein was only just entering the juvenile market and he hadn't figured out how to make such books actually work.  It’s hard to see a logical progression from Rocket Ship Galileo to Space Cadet (his second juvenile) although this was probably not helped by me only reading Rocket Ship Galileo well after I’d read the others.   

And yet, if you can suspend your disbelief, Rocket Ship Galileo works better than some of his other juvenile works.

Rocket Ship Galileo is set in the United States, probably somewhere around 1950.  (There’s a reference to Roswell in the novel, which dates it after 1947.)  Three teenage boys are experimenting with rockets when they are recruited by a scientist - who happens to be one of their uncles - to serve as his crew on an experimental rocket ship.  After a brief struggle to convince their parents to allow them to go, they ready the ship for flight and set off to the moon.  Their triumph at being the first men on the moon is rapidly spoilt when they discover they’re not the first after all ... and their competitors are Nazis.

Nothing loathe, the boys turn the tables on their foes, capture the enemy base (built in the ruins of a long-gone lunar civilisation) and return to Earth, secure in the glory of having defeated a deadly threat and opened the stars to mankind.

Heinlein was not, at this point, the master he would later become.  The three boys appear largely identical, save for one who carries a camera everywhere.  And yet, they are recognisably teenage boys, from one moaning over how unfair it is that they will be penalised for an accident to another being unhappy that he didn't get to do pilot training while his friend did.  The scientist is a neat presentation of a scientist, although he is both more practical than most (he offers sensible advice to one of the boys) and dangerously irresponsible, in taking them on a lunar trip when they are unprepared for much of what they encounter (although no one would have really expected to run into Nazis.)

Indeed, the book appears dated by its attitude to such details.  Written in 1947, between the Fall of Berlin and the moment when the Cold War became inevitable, it has an unusual view of the world, certainly when compared to Heinlein’s later books.  In an era where fugitive Nazis were a potential threat - U-977 had sailed to Argentina after the end of the war, where it was speculated that she had landed escaped Nazi leaders before surrendering - Heinlein cannot be blamed for using them as his enemies.  He avoids the trap of turning their relatively small lunar base into an immense threat, pointing out that even they have problems resupplying their redoubt.  The book also features a UN Police, a relic of a time when even people like Heinlein believed the UN would turn into something worthwhile, and corporations being unwilling to risk investing money in the moon.  You’d think they’d make back their investment by tourism alone.  The existence of a lunar civilisation, albeit one that was already dead, was not disproved until later.   

The plot, though, is more than a little cumbersome.  There’s a brief plot involving spies that is dropped halfway through, never to be resurrected.  Heinlein glossed over a lot of details that probably should have been mentioned.  Building a rocket - and later equipping one - and obtaining atomics is apparently easy.  The Nazis move from overwhelming threat to a much smaller threat, although this is lucky for the boys.  One may think that this is their perceptions influencing events.  The Nazis appeared more dangerous until they came to grips with them.

Heinlein did not win any diversity awards with this book.  All four of the main characters and the bad guys are all male.  The only woman of any note is one of the mothers, who points out to her husband that sons have to grow up sooner or later ... and if they want to risk their lives, they have a right to do just that.  Nor, for that matter, does Heinlein make any attempt to humanise the Nazis.  He presents them as flat, one-dimensional villains (including other things, one of the heroes' relatives was forced to flee Germany) and rightly so.  

It’s also a glimpse into the attitudes of a different time.  Atomic power is treated with respect - the boys wear devices to warn them in case of an overdose - but not as a caged demon.  The irrational fear of nuclear technology had yet to grip the Western psyche.  No one seems concerned about the scientist launching an actual spacecraft, particularly one with an atomic drive.  Nor does anyone care about the boys experimenting with rockets - something that would probably be frowned upon today - or even their age when the rocket takes off.  The only person who does is a bureaucrat who is swiftly neutralised to keep him from interfering.  In some ways, it was a better (or at least more innocent) time ... but then, not everyone would have agreed.  

Most surprisingly of all, Heinlein praises American public education and schools.  This is unique amongst Heinlein’s works, which rapidly grow dismissive of public education and praise characters who learn from their parents or on their own.  But then, American - and Western - education started a sharp decline shortly afterwards.  Heinlein took note.

Oddly, it may well have had a greater influence on the genre than it seems.  The “Nazis on the Moon”! plot may lead directly to Iron Sky, but I think it stopped along the way at W. A. Harbinson’s Projeckt Saucer books.   (A rogue American genius helps the Nazis develop flying saucers, which are eventually based in Antarctica as part of a plot to take over the world.)  How many others drew influence from this book? 

Rocket Ship Galileo is nowhere near Heinlein’s best work.  It has too many flaws, which Heinlein ironed out before he wrote his next juvenile.  And yet, if you can suspend your disbelief - and knowledge - long enough to read, I think you’ll enjoy it.  

Review: Space Cadet

It is not enough that you be skilful, clever, brave— The trustees of this awful power must each possess a meticulous sense of honour, self-discipline beyond all ambition, conceit, or avarice, respect for the liberties and dignity of all creatures, and an unyielding will to do justice and give mercy. He must be a true and gentle knight.
-Space Cadet

It’s interesting to realise that Robert Heinlein was himself a naval man who attended the US Naval College, as it is genuinely striking just how much of his experiences were incorporated into Space Cadet.  Indeed, rereading this book after reading biographies of Heinlein is something of an eye-opener.  Heinlein may have gotten a lot wrong about the way politics and technology would develop, but he does manage to get across both the life of a student at a naval academy and the early years of an officer of a naval force.  And it’s in space!

The plot is relatively simple.  Matt Dodson, an American teenager, applies to join the Space Patrol (a combination of the USN and the Coast Guard).  Going through a series of tests, some with hidden tricks to catch cheaters, he is eventually permitted to join as a cadet and go to the academy (actually, a spaceship which has been converted into a school).  There, he meets three friends (one of whom, Oscar Jensen, was born on Venus, which is a later plot point) and a semi-rival, Girard Burke.  For better or worse, perhaps for the worse, Matt finds himself rooming with Burke.  

The cadets are pushed hard, until Burke either resigns or is asked to leave (the text doesn’t make it clear.)  Matt and his three friends, however, are allowed to proceed onwards to the next level, actual service on an interstellar ship.  After a short adventure where they stumble across the remains of another ship, lost in the asteroid belt, they are called to Venus by reports of a native (i.e. alien) uprising.  Matt and co take a smaller ship to the foggy planet, but accidentally crash-land and are captured by the natives.  There, they discover that Burke, their former comrade, was engaged in a little gunboat diplomacy that got his entire crew killed and himself captured.

Burke offers them a great deal of money if they keep his secret, summon the marines to put down the “uprising” and parcel out the captured land.  Instead, Matt and his friends make friends with the natives, patch up an old ship and head back into space.  Burke is placed under arrest and the three patrolmen, now feeling like patrolmen, resume their duties.  

Believe it or not, I think Space Cadet is perhaps my favourite of the Heinlein juveniles.  It works well as a story for teenage boys while also including a great many bonuses for the more adult readers.  It is clean and simple, yet has a number of underlying themes that stick in the mind.  Heinlein-as-teacher is very clear in this work, where it isn't clear in others.  

And what makes it work, I think, is that Matt starts out as a recognisable character.  He may come from a future world - an early section has him using a mobile phone to call home - but he’s still human.  He’s as close to us as he would have been to the kids in Heinlein’s first audience.  When he starts, he’s on the cusp of manhood; he’s eager and determined, but also naive and profoundly unsure of his abilities.  The story is not so much space adventure as Matt and his friends growing into men.

Matt is contrasted with Burke, who is a cynical bounder of the worst sort.  Burke is not a bully, in the sense he picks on Matt or the other cadets; Burke privately questions the purposes of the tests, assuming that everything is a test with a hidden purpose ... in short, as a cadet, Burke undermines the other cadets.  His view of the universe has no room for honour or even for basic common decency.  (He sees a spaceship crash, when the cadets are being tested, and assumes that it’s part of the test.)  Later, as the CO of an exploration ship, Burke schemes to deprive the natives of their mineral rights by kidnapping their queen, forcing her to sign a contract and then - presumably - using the contract as a figleaf of justification for a military operation.  This was not, of course, uncommon in the days of the Wild West.  Here, it has a happier outcome for the natives.

This is, in many ways, the start of a theme that runs through most of Heinlein’s books.  Colonisation, in the classic sense, is wrong; exploiters, people who will steal from the natives, are evil.  Normally, Heinlein tries to make us like someone before he uses them to make a point; this time, Heinlein goes to some trouble to make us dislike Burke to ensure that we do not side with him.  It’s a curious moment when one remembers that the colonisation model that Heinlein condemns is not the European one, but the American one.  Heinlein wants us to realise, I think, that the victims of such exploitation are human (or at least intelligent) too.  It’s notable that Oscar, who grew up on Venus, actually treats the natives with respect ... something that helps the cadets escape certain death.

Indeed, Space Cadet includes an antiracist message that seems to have gone largely unnoticed.  Heinlein was less subtle at this point, it should be noted; the characters make a point of saying that a senior officer’s skin colour (black) doesn't matter to them, although they’re comparing him to the aliens.  And yet, it is clear that the Patrol is a multiracial as well as multinational organisation.  (That said, it is also men-only. Women are barely mentioned within the text.)

Heinlein touches on many other issues of importance to young men.  The importance of honour, for example, is contrasted with shameless money-grubbing.  Matt is told that you can't buy men of honour, just as Matt himself refuses Burke’s massive bribe.  The patrol is held together by honour.  It can't function any other way.  There are also moments drawn directly from Heinlein’s own experience as a naval cadet, including a sad moment when Matt goes home ... only to discover that he no longer fits into his hometown.  The gulf between him and his family (and former friends) is simply too large.

The recent biography of Heinlein suggests that Space Cadet was originally conceived as a sequel, of sorts, to Solution Unsatisfactory, which was written before nuclear bombs were recognised as a threat.  Instead, the Patrol of that story deployed radioactive dust against its enemies; later, it launched a de facto coup against the world governments on the grounds that it was the only way to keep a greater threat from devastating the planet.  Matt - originally - would have ended up bombing his hometown.  There are moments of acknowledgement to the original plot, if indeed that was the original plot, in the story, but overall the second version works far better.  It certainly lacks the grimness that would have weakened the original version.

In some ways, Space Cadet can be seen as a precursor to Starship Troopers.  They both cover the transition of a callow youth to a mature officer, but Space Cadet is relatively simplistic while Starship Troopers is as much or more a philosophical work as it is an adventure novel.  Space Cadet barely touches on politics, for better or worse.  Keeping one’s officer corps out of politics would, of course, be highly desirable.  

Overall, I stand by my original judgement.  Space Cadet may be outdated - the tech is a mixture of surprisingly accurate and laughably wrong, while the solar system is a far more exciting and inhabited place than reality - but the underlying themes of the story are still relevant today ...

... And besides, it’s a fun little read.