Cold Fusion
Brian Doherty celebrates the Heinlein Centennial, talks about the books and Heinlein-Goldwater Fusionism:
Goldwater’s appeal had two things in common with Heinlein’s: an individualist sense that Americans were being overmanaged and overpampered by an out-of-control federal government, and a belief that those rotten commies needed to get it, good and hard.
The problem with the H-G fusion of militarism and limited government is that the former always ends up eating the latter. Which is why I kept trying to warn Andrew Sullivan (and others) about “split-screen Republicanism” years before he was ready to listen. (And of course, other’s still aren’t.)
Good article, though, and god knows I’ve read a lot of Heinlein in my time. He’s a much more humane writer than Rand and a marginally better stylist. I’ll offer a minority report: his single best work is the novella, “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.” I didn’t read this one until I was in my 20s. It terrified me: sleep-depriving terror. And it’s one of the great love stories. Buy the collection of Heinlein’s fantasy stories that includes it. (And yes, I’ll make a little money! But it’s not like I’m trying to convince you that For Us, The Living has been unjustly denigrated. This is the good stuff.) The fantasies have an economy and verve missing from the later SF works. You could see “Our Fair City” from Chandler’s famous alley when the wind is right. “And He Built a Crooked House” is a great math fantasy. I stole from it for a roleplaying game scenario for my kids. “All You Zombies” is the original solipsist nightmare story. It’s all good. If you’ve read everything else by Heinlein, read these. If you can’t stand what you have read, read these.
Also, Brian’s colleague Jesse Walker reminisces about 1951’s Puppet Masters:
When an invasion by alien collectivists threatens their freedoms, the brave people of Earth fight back…with nudism. There’s a Whittaker Chambers joke in there somewhere, but I haven’t quite found it yet.
Jesse also tips the internets to the existence of the Boy’s Life comic-strip serialization of Between Planets. Can anyone identify the artist? Holbo? Collins?
Comment by Lynn Gazis-Sax —
July 9, 2007 @ 11:57 pm
I’ll second you on The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.
Comment by no fortunate son —
July 10, 2007 @ 12:09 am
Double Star has always been my favorite.
Comment by Tim —
July 10, 2007 @ 1:31 am
“They” not “All You Zombies’, you Glaroon you.
Comment by BruceB —
July 10, 2007 @ 1:32 am
“They” is also one of the masterpieces of sheer paranoia. Really, it’s just a remarkable collection of stories.
I have trouble with a lot of Heinlein these days, not really because of anything intrinsic to the stories, just seeing how those unresolved contradictions helped set the stage for current troubles. If/when political sanity returns, I imagine I’ll return to the stories with glee. (And I’m really enjoying myc urrent bedtime reading, the massive Hartwell/Cramer anthology The Hard SF Renaissance , with stories from late ’80s through early ’00s loaded with wonder and dread and fascination, and also interesting responses to their legacies.)
Comment by Sean —
July 10, 2007 @ 6:17 am
Naw, sorry Jim. The Golden Age isn’t really my strong suit.
Comment by Sean —
July 10, 2007 @ 6:20 am
Or, ahem, comics from 1978. I guess I should look at the date first next time.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
July 10, 2007 @ 10:00 am
I agree about Hoag — that collection might be my favorite Heinlein book. (Can’t say for sure: I’d have to reread Harsh Mistress to see how it holds up.)
Comment by John Bridges —
July 10, 2007 @ 10:46 am
As for the artist on that Boy’s Life adaptation, it looks a bit like Dick Giordano to me, or maybe Curt Swan inked by Dick Giordano.
Comment by Mona —
July 10, 2007 @ 1:51 pm
I haven’t red the Hoag piece, but as a huge Heinlein fan from my teen years, I will be sure to. Nor have I read Starship Troopers, which I’ve reateldy seen criticized as “militaristic.”
But The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land are among my very favorite sci-fi works, and played a formative role in my developing both a libertarian worldview and breaking away from the stultifying influence of my insanely rigid Roman Catholic parents’ worldview.
After WWII, with the Soviet bloc gobbling up Eastern Europe into its totalitarian sphere, is it so outrageous that Heinlein thought we needed a strong military deterrent?
Comment by Karen —
July 10, 2007 @ 2:26 pm
Starship Troopers was, I thought, rather dull, especially for Heinlein. His best stuff is as exciting as anything every written. Thanks for the tip on this book, which I will now seek out.
I’m looking at the moment for books suitable for 9 year old girls and boys for summer reading. My son and his three best friends — 2 girls, 1 boy — have formed a reading club. So far, the girls have read three books and the boys one and a half. Any suggestions that all of ‘em would like from the sci-fi genre? We’re typical middle class Americans, so violence is okay but sex is not.
Comment by Mona —
July 10, 2007 @ 3:39 pm
Karen, my first sci-fi book (I was, I think, 12)was by the ancient author A. E. van Vogt. It is titled Slan. I recall no sex and minimal violence; it is about a boy who is different for his telepathic antennae that “they” want to destroy. Mild romantic overtones, but no rutting.
As an adolescent, it got me forever hooked on sci-fi as a genre.
Comment by Carl —
July 10, 2007 @ 7:13 pm
Not overtly libertarian, but I recommend The Witches of Karres.
No sex but you would have to get past 3 girls traveling with an adult male not their father. Read the reviews.
Comment by BruceB —
July 10, 2007 @ 8:57 pm
Karen: If they haven’t read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, I can scarcely recommend it too highly. It’s beautiful, funny, and full of wonder. Heinlein’s juveniles are also fun, including Have Spacesuit Will Travel and Time For The Stars, among others.
For more good recommendations than you can handle, go to Making Light and ask in any open thread. The couple who run it are the best book-length editors in sf, and their readership includes authors, artists, and others you want to hear from. I know I’m blanking on great modern writers just because it’s too hot here right now, and they will compensate for my deficiencies and then some.
Comment by max —
July 10, 2007 @ 11:06 pm
The problem with the H-G fusion of militarism and limited government is that the former always ends up eating the latter.
This becomes an interesting question: whom is it better to be eaten by? Democracies tend to fail (actually I’ll put it more strongly; all the pre-modern democracies wound up committing suicide. Not enough time has passed to judge whether or not the modern democracies will fail.) quite quickly.
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He’s a much more humane writer than Rand and a marginally better stylist.
I would argue that Rand and Heinlein differ fundamentally, but so unobviously that even Heinlein himself missed it. If you follow Rand, then ’selfishness’ is the ultimate justification, such that if one became a tyrannical ruler, that would be ok, as long as you were, you know, l33t. (See Alan Greenspan.) Whereas Heinlein comes from the traditional American outlook, which values liberty for everyone above all else. Rand’s um, great contribution was to make the former masquerade as the latter.
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I say the Heinlein of the 50’s was better than the Heinlein of the 60’s-70’s (which seconds your recommendation); the latter had way too much tell and not enough show.
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[Having read the article] Ya know, it’s an article that appears in a political magazine, so I suppose the political aspects uber alles, but it seems to me that it entirely misses the point.
m, so much so that i would give myself a headache trying to sort it out
Comment by no fortunate son —
July 11, 2007 @ 12:06 am
George RR Martin once said that the book that turned him onto sf as a child was Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.
Comment by Chuck Divine —
July 11, 2007 @ 8:06 am
Authoritarian states also tend to fail — in some pretty spectacular ways. Just consider the former Soviet Union in the recent past.
An interesting case can be made that democracy is a relatively new idea that’s taking centuries to work out enough bugs to last a long time. I do suspect if the entire world falls completely under the dominion of authoritarians the human race will not last much longer.
Comment by DocNebula —
July 11, 2007 @ 10:57 am
I’m a big Heinlein fan; see Heinlein: The Man, The Myth, The Whackjob, its sorta sequel, here, along with the entirely separate Robert A. Heinelin, Mark Evanier, & Me: The Influence of Robert A. Heinlein on the Modern-Day Superhero Comic, and various ravings on my blogs over the years, if you want any more of THAT. But you probably don’t.
Having looked at the BOY’S LIFE pages with interest (and thanks for linking there, I had no idea the adaptation existed), my somewhat educated guess is going to be that it’s either Dave Cockrum or Jim Starlin doing the pencils, and Frank Giacoia doing the inks. But these are guesses, it could be Murphy Anderson doing both, in a big hurry and with a bad hangover.
No idea who did the scripts, although I will note that the the lettering style is identical with what we were seeing on most DC comics in ‘78. But DC wasn’t doing lettering credits back then (I don’t think) so I have no idea who was responsible for that look.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Heinlein’s rather straightforward, point to point fiction writing; he always seemed to me to be the textual equivalent of a comics artist like Curt Swan or Dan Spiegel; one of those low key guys who didn’t have big flashy rendering styles, but who could draw absolutely anyone doing anything imaginable to anything else conceivable, from any angle at all, and do it in such a way that any reader could immediately tell without any hesitation at all what was going on in the panel.
Of course, that was an illusion; Heinlein could really only write action packed character driven adventure stories that lucidly. His later, more ‘adult’ books, showed he had some pretty severe limitations as a writer (hey, Bob, here’s a hint — when no one can tell one of your many crusty but lovable old libertarian recluse guys from any other all but identical character, don’t write a cross-universe romp which ends up with all of those characters sitting in the same room interacting with each other. Steve Englehart can get away with this in AVENGERS because he’s got a guy drawing everyone in different costumes; you, on the other hand, simply have seven very similar characters speaking to each other in virtually the same voice for pages at a time.)
Having said all that, though, RAH remains my favorite straight SF author. It is, perhaps, emblematic of the differences between SF and fantasy, that Roger Zelazney remains my favorite fantasy writer. While I think Zelazney is almost certainly a far more skilled and even talented wordsmith than Heinlein was, on the other hand, I do not think Zelazney could ever in his life have managed to tell a somewhat complex tale as straightforwardly as Heinlein did in THE PUPPET MASTERS or DOUBLE STAR.
In my experience, UNPLEASANT PROFESSION OF JONATHAN HOGUE, and the stories in that collection (especially one you didn’t mention, “The Man Who Travelled in Elephants”) tend to be cited as favorite Heinlein works by people who either don’t really like SF much, or who are vaguely embarrassed at what they perceive to be Heinlein’s obsessions with sex, violence, and fascism.
However, if you really liked HOGUE, you may want to give JOB: A COMEDY OF JUSTICE a scan. Of all the books Heinlein did in his last couple of decades, that one and FRIDAY are the only ones that I find to be really worth rereading, and JOB is very much a continuing exploration of many of the themes established in HOGUE.
I enjoy talking about Heinlein way more than I enjoy talking about politics these days. Thanks for the momentary diversion.
Comment by Geoff Robinson —
July 13, 2007 @ 12:29 am
When i try to explain Stirnerite individualist anarchism to my students I suggest that the lunar utopia of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is perhaps what Stirner had in mind.