What Fiction are you reading this week, June 9, 2024?

[rsdsharp]

22. I slogged through Robert Heinlein's first novel, For Us the Living: A Comedy of Manners.

I originally read it shortly after it first came out in 2004, but I had forgotten just how bad it is. It’s largely 300+ pages (with appendix!) of a (socialist) economic lecture masquerading as a novel.

There’s very little plot or character development, and what little there is, is just a frame on which to hang the lecture: If the government pays everyone a monthly living wage ($150 — this was written in 1938/1939), and injects fiat money into the economy to make up the difference between over production and consumption, we would have utopia.

I hadn’t remembered the Libertatian gloss to the book — everything is allowable, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, but that’s really the “Comedy of Manners.”

There were hints of things to come. The moving roads of The Roads Must Roll are present, as is Coventry, and the novel is set in 2086, after the theocracy headed by Nehemahia Scudder found in If This Goes On—. Themes which will be more fully developed in Starship Troops, Methuselah’s Children, and Time Enough For Love are also present.

This was published after his death, and the death of his third wife, and widow, Virginia,, and to my way of thinking, is a prime example of the “Let’s publishing anything he wrote; the rubes will buy it” (guilty!) mentality that ruled in the years following his death. That’s why we got a fifty year old travelogue—Tramp Royale — and excerpts of his correspondence — Grumbles From the Grave. If they had old grocery lists, they would have published those, too.

Unless you are as big a Heinlein freak as I am, I don’t recommend this.