July 26, 2007
Robert A. Heinlein Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST 2007 is the centenary of Robert A. Heinlein, one of the great American science fiction writers (July 7, 1907–May 8, 1988), and today Arts and Letters Daily, a splendid website, links to three pieces on Heinlein. All are celebrations. An article in The Wall Street Journal celebrates Heinlein’s politics—he was a strong anti-Communist, and also a libertarian—and, as was once traditional when admiring science fiction writers, his predictive powers, crediting him with foreseeing Chernobyl in 1940 and inventing, although not patenting, the waterbed. A piece on Reasononline centers on his politics, and is graced with a complicated understanding of them. Heinlein’s taste in politicians included both Upton Sinclair and Barry Goldwater; he evinced what was taken for a fascistoid streak in Starship Troopers, helped popularize hippies and the sexual revolution in Stranger In a Strange Land, and was, as the piece notes, his own kind of libertarian (in the 1950s, he tried to form a national organization, the Patrick Henry Leagues, to raise taxes for a stronger defense). The third article, at the Space Review website, charts Heinlein’s very considerable influence on people who have pushed for the American space effort. My vastly affectionate memory of Heinlein’s writing centers, as is probably appropriate for this blog, on his use of history. The first Heinlein novels I found were three of his young-adult books, Tunnel in the Sky (1955) Between Planets (1951), and Have Spacesuit Will Travel (1958), which were for some reason in one of my sixth grade classrooms. I must have been 10 or 11, I took them home, and read them enough times that years later I could quote pages at a stretch. I soon found the other young-adult novels in libraries, and was most rhapsodic about Starman Jones (1953), Farmer in the Sky (1950), The Star Beast (1954), and Citizen of the Galaxy (1957). There is an old tag about people inventing the past and remembering the future, and it seems to me that the latter half of that phrase is precisely what Heinlein’s best young-adult novels did. Farmer in the Sky was about sodbusters settling the Great Plains, disguised as the terraforming of Ganymede; Between Planets was the American Revolution restaged on Venus; Citizen of the Galaxy was in part about abolitionism; Starman Jones was a reworking of the voyages of exploration to the New World; etc. They were patriotic visions of our history fused with a sense that the American story would continue into the future, replaying similarly glorious themes. Heinlein could tell a story, and at least by the standards of an 11-year-old, he was a thrilling stylist. I read everything he wrote through the late 1960s, then trailed off. I am a bit abashed to reflect that very little I have ever read since has given me more pleasure. It is now the fashion to say that we must always contextualize and historicize works of imagination, with the implication that we should acknowledge that all writing about the future will be the future remembered rather than truly imagined. Maybe so, although it can be done in remarkably different ways, giving very different amounts of pleasure. If you were a certain sort, at a certain time, Heinlein gave astonishing pleasure. He had other tricks, old and good ones, beside restaging the pageant of American history—there were wicked stepfathers and journeys of development, a celebration of duty, and of the pleasures of old-fashioned American iconoclasm, also at moments a commitment to a kind of humanism, a vision glorying in what our species could be. Looking at the shattered remains of a vanished civilization of insectoid aliens, a teenager mused something to the effect that they had not let their environment push them around, they had mastered nature through reason and engineering, so he supposed that they were men. It is an old-fashioned sentiment, although by my lights not an unattractive one. He linked a number of his novels into a “future history,” which fascinated me and others. In an age that believed in the inevitability of history, a history of the future was not as scandalous as an alternate history of the past, but it could be almost as hypnotic. He had his quirks and his crotchets, but he was a very resonant voice in our mid-century popular culture, and maybe something more. By a historical irony, Heinlein is widely remembered as a fascist, on the strength of Starship Troopers (a novel inspired by successful wars against fascists), and became vastly popular because of counter-cultural enthusiasm for one of his least representative novels, at a time when he was about to support Goldwater. Along the way, he seems to have helped inspire a remarkable number of the people who designed and built America’s spaceships, when we used to do that sort of thing. If we do so again, or if anyone else ever does, the great days of Heinlein’s fame may still be ahead of him.
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