Sarah Hoyt said:
I’ve been on a dozen or two Heinlein panels at cons, and it always devolves to name calling.
She goes on to discuss why she thinks this is. I have a different theory about it. Heinlein’s god-given gift was sounding authoritative. It’s part of what I was talking about with his “of course”—he can say the most absurd things and the reader agrees. It’s also what I was saying about his “confiding tone.” This is a wonderful gift for a science fiction writer, and Heinlein made great use of it.
However, sounding authoritative is not actually the same thing as being right.
I’ve been on plenty of Heinlein panels too, including moderating one at a Worldcon about women reading Heinlein. I’ve also posted quite a bit about him here, including a review of Starship Troopers. None of it has ever descended to name calling. But I have noticed on Heinlein panels and in online discussions that some people tend to react as if they are being personally attacked to any suggestion that Heinlein might have been wrong about anything.
My theory is that it has to do with the way we respond to his tone emotionally, only afterwards justifying that response with logic. It’s very easy to confuse sounding authoritative with being right, perhaps because of the way we’re hardwired to respond to authority. Heinlein himself was pretty good about admitting he was wrong—look at his updates to his predictions about the future in Expanded Universe for instance. But he does seem to attract readers who think he was perfect, as well as others who delight in shooting motes in barrels. This leads to the kind of arguments where everyone gets on the defensive and there isn’t any way forward. I try to avoid that myself by finding an angle that takes me through what I want to say about the text without pushing those buttons, as best I can, and in general that seems to be working fairly well.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
I’d actually start with a different theory. People who disagree with what they perceive his politics to have been quite frequently start the discussion by accusing him of racism and bigotry. So the talk goes:
“I like Heinlein because…”
“How can you possibly like that evil racist bigot?”
And it devolves from there, because those people are definitely implying racism and bigotry of anyone that dares to disagree with them (and in some cases more than implying, outright saying it). And that’s just downright offensive. And since charges of racism and bigotry are extremely hard to defend from, it just goes downhill from there.
Jo,
For me, it’s not that I feel personally attacked. It’s simpler than that – I find a lot of the labeling that happens gets in the way of anything remotely like analysis.
“RAH was sexist” immediately biases the discussion, making it hard to question that assertion lest one also be labeled sexist (or racist or…). The assertion is also usually stated broadly and personally rather than “Some of RAH’s work shows sexist attitudes, mostly HERE, but other times these are belied, for example HERE… what does that tell us about…” People usually label not to understand, but to dismiss. There’s also many times more than a whiff of self-righteousness as if anyone who ever writes something that’s not fully and always enlightened is Lesser. Reality isn’t that simple.
I think a series of posts about the *works* and what they reveal about race or gender would be interesting. The current posts on tor.com about the man are not, partly because we can’t interrogate the man, partly because the logic in them is so flawed, but mostly because they aren’t about understanding the fiction but mostly about labeling the author. Sadly, I don’t see the discussion changing – I fully expect an online version of what happens at cons, labeling, talking past one another, etc. That’s too bad.
I, on the other hand, find that pointing out in a perfectly reasonable way that Heinlein had the attitudes of his time and that they were frequently racist and sexist leads to people to immediately begin asserting, LOUDLY, that he was no such thing and besides it was the times and how dare you!
If you try hard enough, you can be outraged either way: by Heinlein’s implicit sexism/racism, or by the failure to recognise that Heinlein was far less sexist/racist/monogonormative than society as a whole was when he was writing.
Both of these stances have some merit, but I don’t think it’s worth spending a lot of energy fighting over the two viewpoints.
Can’t we all just agree that shacking up with incestuous redhead twins is totally hot?
I suspect a lot of people built really quite a lot of their mental furniture using materials and techniques Heinlein provided. If you manage to question a bit that they’ve built in deeply enough, people get pretty upset. It’s like questioning the Bible or something!
(Despite having built a lot on his work, I don’t think I actually do tend to get angry about most of the ways people question his work, myself. Mostly.)
“Can’t we all just agree that shacking up with incestuous redhead twins is totally hot?”
Best line of the day. Well played. Rob
I read a lot of Heinlein as a kid, and reading his stuff was a formative experience for me. My opinions have evolved somewhat since then, but I think Heinlein’s influence continues to be felt in that I am inherently suspicious of any unself-conscious labeling or broad opinion that lacks nuance.
Having said that, I think that as Heinlein had such a formative effect (on me and the genre as a whole), it’s important to examine what that effect was. His views of sex and race are definitely valid areas of criticism. The point I think is that as Heinlein’s views tended to be nuanced and introspective, labeling him a ‘sexist,’ a ‘racist,’ ‘fascist,’ or ‘communist,’ or any other ‘ist,’ is going to be in some sense dishonest. The arguments that arise out of such labeling are polarizing, as he was so influential. Ultimately when discussions take on this tone, they have less to do with the man or his writing, and more to do with the people discussing him. Not surprising or necessarily bad, but perhaps it’s important to understand that.
My thoughts, for what its worth.
Authoritativeness might be part of the answer, but I think SJN might be closer to the mark. People who’ve spent a lot of time dreaming Heinlein’s dreams have felt them become part of their identity. Dreams run even deeper than ideas, maybe the most fundamental tribal identity of all.
@Artanian: It looks to me like you use a similar approach to discredit those who don’t like Heinlein. Your approach seems to be as close minded as theirs may be.
dripgrind @@@@@ 4 “Can’t we all just agree that shacking up with incestuous redhead twins is totally hot?”
Almost certainly not. That way lies many of the much more acrimonious and deeply stupid fronts of the Eternal Heinlein Flamewar.
I’ve been impressed with the level of the general discussion in these comment threads, so far.