Reply #9: For Us, The Living [View All]

[khashka]

By Bob Heinlein.

First Review (read it damn it, you might learn something):

To Heinlein's Children

That's what the book's dedication says, and it's accurate. You won't agree with my five-star rating unless you're in the publisher's target audience, so be warned: my rating is _not_ based on 'literary quality' and your mileage will _definitely_ vary.

Strictly, I have to count myself one of those 'Children'. I was born in 1963, learned to read very young, and cut my literary-intellectual teeth on _Stranger_ and _Mistress_; moreover, this fact is so significant in my personal development that it's something you _must_ know if you want to grok the way my mind works even today, some forty years later. (Spider Robinson remarks somewhere that RAH was the one who took his 'literary virginity'. Same here.)

So whatever issues I may happen to have with the Old Man -- and believe me, I do have some -- I'm most definitely one of the readers at whom this book is aimed. And I highly recommend it to any of Heinlein's _other_ Children out there. To the rest of you, it will be at most of historical interest, so wait for the paperback.

If you're reading this page, you already know what the book is: it's Heinlein's first novel-length writing (though Robinson's introduction suggests that it may not be a 'novel' proper). You've probably already read the comparisons with Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_ and H.G. Wells's _When the Sleeper Wakes_.

Here I'll simply confirm that those comparisons are apt; Heinlein's unpublished 1939 work, a look at the 'past' from an imagined future, is essentially a sociopolitical tract wrapped up in a bit of story to make the medicine go down a little more easily. The protagonist, Perry Nelson (whose double-admiral name is presumably a two-gun salute to a couple of Heinlein's naval forebears, though neither the MS nor the commentary explicitly makes this connection), is basically a cardboard figure, and so is his companion-of-the-future Diana.

_As_ a tract, it's pretty interesting. As a story, it's not very, and although there are occasional hints of the writer Heinlein was to become, you wouldn't notice them if you weren't familiar with his later work. What's _really_ interesting is something that will appeal only to those 'Children' of his. I've thought through my entire shelf of Heinlein novels and I can't think of a _single one_ that doesn't have _some_ roots in the ideas set forth in this manuscript. Why, there are a few elements here that don't resurface until _Stranger_.

Most of us have long suspected (hell, known) that the Old Man was deliberately lecturing us in those books of his, no matter how many times he swore up and down that his sole purpose was to entertain. (And no matter how many times his most zealous defenders insisted we couldn't infer anything about Heinlein's own opinions from those of his characters.) But until this MS was published, we didn't have much direct evidence that Heinlein himself accepted and wanted to propagate the ideas set forth by, say, Col. Baslim, Col. DuBois, Jubal Harshaw, Professor de la Paz, and Lazarus Long.

You may not buy all of those ideas yourself; I don't either. But anybody who grew up reading Heinlein's stuff has to credit him for stretching our minds so far out of shape that we will never, as long as we live, lapse into simple-minded moralistic conventionality. About anything.

(The 1960s owe much of their experimentation with convention to a handful of famous and not-so-famous minds from the previous generation or two; Lord Bertrand Russell was one of the famous ones and Paul Blanshard -- twin brother of philosopher Brand Blanshard -- was one of the not-so-famous. Heinlein is on that shortlist; without _Stranger_, much of the ensuing decade wouldn't have unfolded quite as it did.)

I also don't mean to suggest that Heinlein's ideas didn't change _at all_ over the next fifty years. Certainly they did; at the very least, as he himself remarked in the late 1950s (and as Robert James reminds us in his afterword), he turned from a 'soft-headed radical' into a 'hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian'. But those radical (and libertarian) themes had been present in Heinlein's writing from the very beginning; in Spider's apt analogy, this MS contains their DNA. In his life as a fiction writer, Heinlein had to wait another twenty years before his ideas even became publishable -- and even then it was largely because he had personally laid the groundwork for them.

His predictions herein are in some cases uncannily accurate, but he flops in one surprising and deeply ironic respect: as of 2086 there _hasn't yet been a moon landing_. Hee hee. (But in 1939 Heinlein successfully predicted both Hitler's suicide and the development of a united Europe with its own currency. The details are wrong, but still . . .)

Don't skip the 'Social Credit' economic arguments either. If you disagree with them, see if you can spot where they go wrong (if they do).

I'm generally not a huge fan of Heinlein's nonfiction writings and I'm very, very glad he turned to fiction. (Even on strictly scientific matters, Asimov's reputation as the Great Explainer was never in much danger from RAH.) Nevertheless I think that in its treatiselike aspects, this 'novel' is one of his best _nonfiction_ works. At the least, the underlying theories are better thought out than in any of his later nonfiction.

But overall, what will be of interest to the 'Children' is that in this MS, we can see Heinlein (in the language that Robinson borrows from Zelazny's _Lord of Light_, as he does whenever he wants to talk about something like this) put on his Aspect and raise up his Attribute. This MS dates from the time that Heinlein _became_ the writer of speculative fiction that drove us to the Moon. Reading it is like stepping into a time machine and going back to meet a young John Lennon picking up his first guitar.

If you're one of Heinlein's Children, don't miss this MS. Everybody else can afford to wait a while. But don't wait _too_ long -- or you'll be left behind when the rest of us escape to the stars.

End of review.

1-10 scale? Review 10. That boy got it. But I am one of Heinlein's Children, as well. And I may have a few (serious) issues with Daddy, but I am his Child.
The book rates about a 1.5 as a novel, as a brilliant and offensive political treatise it rates a ten. In 1938/39 he took on racism (the suffering that Blacks and Jews endured truly offended him), he made arguments in favour of women that feminists wouldn't get around to for another 30 years, he championed no-fault divorce, he predicted the rise of the religious right.

I am goddamn fucking proud to be one of Bob's children and a child of Virginia Heinlein too.

(As far as the economics goes, as far as I can tell it works. Maybe someone smarter than me can find the flaws.)

Khash.