Today we commemorate Robert A. Heinlein, who was born on this day in 1907. He is a giant in the science fiction genre, but like most giants, his path to literary greatness was tangled and circuitous. His naval career ended in the 1920s when tuberculosis scarred his lungs. He attempted real estate and silver mining, ran for political office in California, and only began writing to make a mortgage payment. His first story, “Life-Line,” was published in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, after Heinlein realized that Astounding paid more than the prize money for the contest he had originally entered. This began a long relationship with Astounding’s editor, John W. Campbell, who published much of Heinlein’s work through the 1940s.
When the second World War began, Heinlein went to Philadelphia to work as a civil engineer, recruiting L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, as well as his future wife, Virginia Gerstenfeld. (She would become his first reader and later suggested he write a story about a human raised on Mars.) Even after his writing career took off, he devoted much of his time to stonemasonry. Throughout all of these pursuits, he used his writing to question social mores and explore ways humanity could create an interesting future for itself.
Heinlein’s writing career spanned four decades. He was invited to comment on both the moon landing (alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Walter Cronkite) and the use of space technology to advance medical care for the elderly. He won Hugos for Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and was nominated for both Hugos and Nebulas for several other works. In 1976 he was awarded the first Grand Master Nebula for Lifetime Achievement by the Science Fiction Writers of America, which later became The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, now awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He continued to produce nuanced and controversial work until his death in 1988, despite prolonged periods of illness.
However, what truly makes Heinlein one of the great, foundational figures of modern science fiction is his intellectual curiosity, and his willingness to question life and society through his writing. His work in social science fiction was informed by a complex response to culture, and he insisted on following his ideas wherever they took him—even when that meant going against popular opinion or risking book sales. While Starship Troopers was a conservative reaction to nuclear development that stressed social responsibility and militarism verging on fascism, Stranger in a Strange Land focused on progressive stances toward religion and sexuality that were embraced by the counterculture of the 1960s.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress investigated rational anarchy and polyandry, and The Number of the Beast looked at the idea of the “World as Myth,” which posits that fictional realms imagined by writers become as much a part of the multiverse as “real” ones—and allowed Heinlein’s characters to visit Barsoom and Oz. He gave the world the concept of grokking, which was useful enough to gain traction in both the hippie and computer programming communities during the 1960s and 70s. He also popularized the acronym TANSTAAFL (“There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch”) and promoted the social philosophy of “paying it forward,” which is now one of the cornerstones of The Heinlein Society.
In short, he used his creative work to question the world around him and dream up new ones to explore, and he invited all of us to come along.
This article was originally published July 7, 2013.
I have greatly enjoyed many of Heinlein’s novels, but this article glosses over any of the more controversial aspects of his oeuvre, as seen from today’s vantage point and values.
I am not sure that the author does justice to Heinlein, by being positive and superficial rather than giving us material for a substantive discussion of his merits and ideas. Heinlein himself would not have shied away from the latter.
#1: This is a mere summary, of course, and a kind eulogy on the anniversary of his birth. I see nothing wrong with that. A summary *glosses over* alot of things, by its very nature. Click the tags to find the website’s more complete, chronological critique of Heinlein’s works a couple of years back, where he’s probably buried slightly more often than he’s praised.
I think it’s an important point that Heinlein wrote very well for young readers. Through the effect of the Heinlein Juveniles inspiring post-war teenagers, he may have had more influence on the U.S. space program than Wernher von Braun.
Through the effect of the Heinlein Juveniles inspiring post-war teenagers, he may have had more influence on the U.S. space program than Wernher von Braun.
A bold hypothesis but do bear in mind that if you’re one of the people who laments the current state of the US space program due to a lack of Lunaville and Marsports, you’re blaming Heinlein for at least part of that.
(Personally, I find the US space program, in particular their robotic probes, pretty impressive)
Does the author of this piece have any idea what the definition of fascism is? If so did he read the book, or just watch the misbegotten movie?
Not much; the technical types whom he inspired weren’t the ones making the decisions that led to the current state. Maybe they should have been, and maybe Heinlein didn’t say enough about questioning authority.
I’m with you there. Putting Curiosity on the surface of Mars was every bit as impressive as putting Armstrong on the surface of the Moon. Maybe more so. Given current advances in computing, communications, sensors, and effectors, it’s hard to justify manned exploration. However, I’m counting on mobs of people spreading out over the entire solar system once the first Space Elevators are up.
And his books were of the “brown and useful” sort, guides to effective living, handbooks on how to grow up and be an adult.
And his books were of the “brown and useful” sort, guides to effective living, handbooks on how to grow up and be an adult.
*shudder* Um, no, I can’t agree. I’m still unlearning some of the crap I got from him.
It is always desirable to pay homage to those who contributed to human life. Heinlein was, no doubt, a renowned writer. Being a post World War II writer, the conflict between individual liberty and societal rights was his major concern. At one place he says, “Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.” Aphorism is the hall mark of his writing. In Stranger in a Strange Land he says, “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” Anyhow nice post!
Samreen M
Bolee.com
Plenty of other authors were born on July 7. David Eddings was born on this day in 1931, followed in 1932 by the now-obscure but once Nebula-shortlisted T. J. Bass. More recently, it’s the birthday of Lovecraft aficionado Robert M. Price (1953), Clarke-award winning hard SF author Tricia Sullivan (1968) and New Weird maestro Jeff VanderMeer (also 1968). Additionally, Arthur Conan Doyle died on this day in 1930.
@8 Maybe for men, Brooks. You might successfully argue that they are brown and useful for men. Not for women, though. And if a book is useful for men but damaging for women, what are the men learning from it?
I enjoyed Heinlein very much as a teenager and still feel affection for that reading experience, but they are not re-readable as an adult. Which simply means Heinlein was everything but a genius. That’s no small praise.
Kellyoyo@15: Oh, I’d say they are damaging for men too; fostering the perniciously anti-civilisation notions (such as that any given individual is supposed to be good at everything) isn’t gender-specific as bad things go, and Heinlein seems to have been aiming that one more at men to my reading.
As it happens, Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow made it into my Because My Tears Are Delicious to You reviews, in which I revisit the beloved books of my teen years (so far I have not run into anything the Suck Fairy really brutalized, although I don’t have great expectations for the Yellow Menace novel I have slated for next Sunday).
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4989081.html
Heinlein understood that life is complex and often contradictory. Consider the two concepts mentioned in this article: TANSTAAFL and pay it forward. At first glance one might think these are mutually exclusive. If someone is paying it forward, then someone else is getting a free lunch. But when you look at it more deeply the two aren’t in conflict at all. There is no free lunch because someone DID pay for it, even if that person isn’t the one eating it. And it’s not really free for the one eating it either (or at least it shouldn’t be) since they have now the obligation to pay their gift forward to yet another person. That obligation arises from the understanding that it wasn’t really a free lunch. The two concepts reinforce each other. It’s also a very pro-civilization message, contrary to how some perceive Heinlein’s works.
I’ll also point out that one of his juvenile short stories (“The Menace From Earth”) was extremely groundbreaking for the time in having a young female as the main character, a female that in no way felt (and was not portrayed as) inferior to any of the male characters, was highly intelligent, wasn’t a sex object, and is the one who proves to be the hero of the story. Sure that’s common now, but back then? Almost unheard of.
@15 I’m sorry but I fail to see how Heinlein was damaging to men ( I can possibly see a case made against women but that has more to do with social mores and who he was influenced by at the time he lived in) and I disagree that he was anti-civilization.
For myself the idea of the super-competent hero has always been one of those ideals you strive for even when you know you can’t reach that point. Those kinds of characters always made me push myself further.
As for civilization, as I’ve read Heinlein, he has two points looking at it. One is that the individual trumps the government and two is that why do we assume that our civilization is inherently correct. Now while the individualist approach may at first seem to go against civilization, I think it is also true that you can judge a society by it’s treatment of individuals or the smaller outside groups. If one person is oppressed than we are all oppressed or at least in danger of becoming oppressed. Yet in Heinlein’s work you also see the individuals responsibility to the society around them. This was the major statement behind Starship Troopers, if you want to help decide the fate of the nation you have to have skin in the game. In For Us The Living you see a government that gives its citizens a living salary just for being alive, eliminating destitution, but for anything beyond subssistance you have to work and contribute to those around you. However if you are too individualistic you have the option of going to Coventry which is like Ron Paul’s dream come true. However if the government is abusive then the people have to stand up, now he shows the extreme forms of that in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Revolt in 2100 but the principle is that we as individuals must come together to hold our society accountable.
Then we have his questions on society in general which is mostly what Stranger in a Strange Land is about. New religions, different morality, these are things that either topple or fundamentally change societies. Yet would that change be for the better? I think it is a question that must be asked in fiction so that we can grapple with what is going on in the world today. Once again we have different religious values (the popular phrase “I’m spiritual but not religious”) accompanied with new views on sexuality coming into stark contrast with our old social understanding. Can our civilization stand the strain? Waiting is till we grok in full.
@@@@@#6 -“Does the author of this piece have any idea what the definition of
fascism is? If so did he read the book, or just watch the misbegotten
movie?”
Why do you think the author of the article is a “he” ??
@@@@@#14 “You might successfully argue that they are brown and useful for men. Not for women, though. And if a book is useful for men but damaging for women, what are the men learning from it?”
There’s a Facebook group “Heinlein Forum” that has quite a few women and they seem to be quite happy with RAH.
TimW@18:For myself the idea of the super-competent hero has always been one of those ideals you strive for even when you know you can’t reach that
point
And that leads directly to being damaging, by a) distracting effort from striving for things you actually can reach, and b) inducing one to judge oneself by impossible standards.
OBrien@20
But if you don’t have high standards, even impossible standards, you never really know how far you can go. It’s like telling a child that anything is possible for them. We all know that its not true, life will kick them in the teeth when they least expect it, but if you tell them that you run the greater risk of stifling their abilities altogether. With a fictional character you know it’s fake so you don’t beat yourself up for failing miserably but you still have an ultimate goal to strive for.
Heinlein was a deft juvenile author. His books are fast-paced, well-written, presenting a lot of (for the time) groundbreaking ideas that eventually became tropes and clichés themselves. However, his tone is paternalistic; his worldview, simplistic and puerile, his characterization, lacking. They are good reads for your teen years, but reading him in your adult years feels poorly unless you’re looking for a little bit of unchallenging, brainless fun.
A little basic research would be nice.
Heinlein did NOT leave the Navy in the 1920s. He graduated from the Naval Academy in the class of 1929 and was medically retired in 1933.
I think that would be “civilian engineer” rather than “civil engineer”. Dr. Heinlein was a mechanical engineer, rather than a civil engineer. The basic difference was that mechanical engineers often build weapons systems, civil engineers always build targets. RE: the “Dr.” in front of Heinlein’s name: Eastern Michigan University granted him a Doctorate when he addressed a graduating class. That little Podunk school dragged my tired butt to the gates of Hell and back for a lousy BS in engineering. If they say he’s a Doctor, then he’s a Doctor in my book.
Bad for women? ??? One of the reasons I’ve loved Heinlein’s books since childhood was BECAUSE of his strong, intelligent, capable, witty, heroines! I have read that many of Heinlein’s strong women characters were modeled after his wife, Virginia, who is, to all accounts, a woman of many and varied accomplishments. Are his books a “mindless” reread as an adult? Only because I have read my favorites many times.
Dear Kellyyoyo and HelenS,
How precisely did Heinlein harm women? Where specifically were his premises re human nature and proper adult functioning in society wrong?
To say that Starship Troopers “stressed social responsibility and militarism verging on fascism” makes me think you either did not read the book very carefully or do not understand what fascism is. I think people often confuse the book with the rather awful movie that was made (which Heinlein had no involvement with). A nice article laying out some these issues can be found at: http://www.jimhull.com/HeinleinAndTroopers.html.
I have always had a little mixed feelings about RAH.
I enjoyed his juvenile books as a kid (despite the dreaded “Nazis on the Moon” climax of Rocket Ship Galileo)—and no doubt this inspired me to gravitate towards the sciences.
I deeply loved his “middle period”—Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Glory Road are among my favorite books of all time; I see where he was going with Starship Troopers (the book) although this was a difficult book to read during the Vietnam years.
I became somewhat disenchanted with his later books. Yes, Stranger is a classic and we had to read it in high school, and it was an impressive work, but it started his theme of “hero is a witty older guy whose goal in life is to prove to them young folks that they didn’t invent sex.” I found this theme becoming more and more obtrusive through Time Enough for Love (mommy issues, anyone?); his attempts to tie together all his books and characters I found to not work so well (although I do give him a major salute for introducing the character of Ted Smith, Lensman). I found Asimov’s later works where he united the Galactic Empire and the Robots to work better.
All in all, I think you have to look at the different eras of Heinlein (what I call “juvenile” “mature adventure” and “aging”) through different prisms and in light of the times in which they were written. His talented, empowered, and always highly gorgeous women might not fly in today’s more enlightened times, but in context were very impressive. I think he was ahead of HIS time in how he portrayed women, although perhaps behind OUR time.
In any case, happy birthday Anson MacDonald (his pen name, under which he wrote the brilliant short story By His Bootstraps)!!
I’ve always had strongly unmixed feelings about Heinlein (positive), but I think it’s important to notice that the world has been changing, while his books pretty much remain the same.
A lot of women of my generation credit Heinlein with telling them they could be engineers or scientists. He did that deliberately — he sought out female engineers for his work during WWII for example. In The Rolling Stones, a book published very specifically for boys in 1952, he included a section on what we now call the “glass ceiling” and the negative way it affected Hazel Stone’s life (and had as the sole name of a historical person proposed for the name of their ship Susan B. Anthony).
A lot of younger people, raised in the world that Heinlein helped create (I think he’s one of the few SF authors who really did contribute to changing the world), take a lot of this for granted; because the world has developed to a place where it is fairly normal, at least in theory. And what’s left, after that, is the parts of his social views that haven’t aged so well.
Heinlein was, going back to the first sentence of the original post, born in 1907. That’s before the Model T Ford. He attended the Naval Academy (graduating in 1929, contrary to the original article), which was a somewhat backward-looking institution at that point (trying to get back to pre-war standards in many social ways). Freud was becoming culturally influential around then (he became a doctor and started doing research considerably earlier, but it takes a while to invent so much new stuff, and it takes a while for the stuff to seep out into popular culture). And the big problem Heinlein got left with, in regard to modern perceptions of his work, is that he was a gender essentialist. That’s a position at the heart of the culture wars today, which means people on both sides have high emotional reactions to it.
Which, yeah, means that after being actively important in the sexual revolution (he always was rather interested in sex, it’s quite clear from the biography, even if it didn’t come out much in his juvenile novels due to publishing constraints of the time), one of his big positions is now on the social conservative side of the culture wars. Heinlein never got on well with the hippies who grooved on Stranger in a Strange Land (probably partly because he was encountering the disadvantages of being as big a celebrity as he had become), and I suspect he would have some problems with some of the people who are his fans today.
It’s probably a bad idea to give his works to children today; unless you’ve got one of those rare children who has enough concept of history that they can read it as “historical SF”, which will contain social attitudes not appropriate today, and not be put off by it. If Heinlein hadn’t helped change the world in specific ways, this wouldn’t be true. I suspect, if we could ask him, he’d be happy at this outcome.
One detail on Heinlein’s “origin story” — that tale of the writing contest and how he wrote his first story for it can’t be true. The existence of For Us, the Living contradicts it. There’s also a story he published in a Naval Academy publication while a student there, but one student exception might not really invalidate the overall story; still, it shows he had some concept of writing long before 1939.
@17 – It’s painful to reflect on an era in which “The Menace From Earth” was groundbreaking. It’s a short story about a teenager flipping out because she thinks a tourist is going to steal her boyfriend. When it’s included in anthologies, the cover art is smoking hot, but the story is cringeworthy.
And that, for those of you asking, is a classic example of how Heinlein is not great for women. Sure, Holly is the protagonist of a story that is all about her feelings about a boy, and her intelligence and athleticism (both of which should be impressive) are totally irrelevant to the story Heinlein chooses to tell about her.
Podkayne of Mars throws over her dream to be a pilot because men find it too threatening. Instead, she decides to be a pediatrician. Also, because of her belief that women shouldn’t beat men, she won’t even exert herself to win against her little brother at arm wrestling.
Maureen Johnson can chart the cost of running her household in a level of detail that would impress any quartermaster, but wouldn’t dream of spending her personal savings on groceries to feed her children, lest she hurt her husband’s precious feelings.
His adult work has some troubling biological essentialism (per Time Enough for Love, women with gynecelogical health issues are actually psychologically conflicted about femininity, Maureen Johnson just does not understand why lesbians persist in spending time with sex toys, when every man has a dildo attached – clearly, Heinlein had no idea what lesbians get up to, and a very odd opinion of men), and wow, so much incest. So much. I am and remain troubled by Heinlein’s choice to have every brilliant woman ever sleep with Lazarus Long, including his mother and many of his daughters. And then to have his mother sleep with her dad.
Lazarus Long talks a ton about the importance of the pee watch, but I notice that it appears to be quite rare that he’s home to take that shift himself.
I have read a lot of Heinlein, starting when I was very young, and I am nostalgic about that part of my life, but his ideas in practice can indeed be deeply harmful to women. He was ignorant about their social and biological experiences, and threatened by female competence. While I am nostalgic about the time I spent reading Heinlein myself, I have less fond memories of the time I spent (mostly in college) with earnest young men who wanted me to read the books because they felt that Heinlein explained life in a way that would be useful to them, and a good basis for romantic relationships with me. (I’m polyamorous and always have been, but Heinlein’s models for that aren’t particularly practical, and wouldn’t be even in a more accepting legal environment, because they seem to be based on the assumption that no one has either health problems or emotional needs – besides the male need to be the source of all things, and to have his ego protected from female efforts at self-sufficiency, however practical they may be.)
The first book I ever read, other than school work, back in eighth grade, was _Between Planets_ and I’ve read all of his other work and lots of things written about him.
I think, in his later works, his ambition caused his reach to slightly exceed his grasp. However, his later books are better reading and re-reading than most things written in the field. I never worried that his fiction, or any fiction, was good for me or damaging to anyone. These are stories, they are for enjoyment.
The _text_ in Troopers shows a very free society if you don’t join the military. And none of the people arguing that it wouldn’t work that way seem to notice that Heinlein never really said it would. This setting, that has so many fanatical foes and so many fanatical defenders, was never used again by Heinlein in his entire career.That is how important it was to him.
His current fandom have abandoned the idea of paying it forward, used TANSTAAFL to denigrate the idea of social security entirely, and have embraced his conservative-militarism views to the point where he is one of the top 3 SF authors of choice for the alt-right. It is a shame his legacy has been toxified the way it has, but I think we have to accept that his inclusion in any list of influential authors has to come with several incredibly strongly worded caveats about just who he has influenced and to what end.
I first came across Heinlein in my middle school library when I was about 11 or 12. And I loved his books for many years. I credit him for getting me interested in science fiction, but I can’t enjoy him now really. Many of his plots remain fun adventures, but I just don’t think that his work or character depictions aged well. His women weren’t very real.In retrospect, I remember several books with lecherous older men and cartoonish characters.
Also books that struck me as interesting social commentary when I was a teen just seems blunt, reductive and unsophisticated writing. And even back then as an African-American girl, books like Farnham’s Freehold were pretty hard to take though I understand some readers believe he meant to be anti-racist.
It’s could be Heinlein wasn’t racist and he was just trying to be provocative in Farnham’s Freehold. But even giving him all the benefit of the doubt in the world, the book is egregious, really warped and nasty. I’m glad I didn’t read it when I was a kid.
My opinions of Heinlein have varied with time, and I tend to think the last book he wrote that was worth reading was Friday, and was far from his best work. (In no particular order, I think his best books were Double Star, Starship Troopers, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress; I believe his worst were Farrnham’s Freehold, and Number of the Beast; there are others upon which I have no current opinion, as I found his last few books to be self-indulgent twaddle).