One of my favourite writers has always been Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988).
A 1953 illustration from ‘Tom Corbett – Space Cadet’, series closely based on Heinlein’s future universe. Public domain, http://public-domain.zorger.com/ space-pioneers/102-tr-1- space-ship-and-asteroids.php
His first short story, ‘Life-Line’, was published in 1939 and remains one of the most haunting tales I have read. Right there, Heinlein demonstrated his knack of driving to the heart of his subject with real characters – living, dimensional human beings. His techniques ran to the core of fiction writing. He had that same sparse, utilitarian style that made Hemingway great. He knew that omission is as powerful a tool for a writer as inclusion. And his stories were always about people – irrespective of the gee-whizz tech they lived around.
All this was displayed in his ‘juveniles’, a dozen books written mainly in the 1950s, for teenagers. Time For The Stars was about relativistic star travel, but it was really about sibling rivalries. Tunnel In The Sky was about adolescent group behaviour when isolated from society – his take on Lord Of The Flies, which he reversed. To Heinlein, civilisation was more than a veneer. Have Spacesuit – Will Travel – a riff on 1950s teen culture, googly-eyed aliens and UFO’s – was really about a teenager learning to cope with the failure of his boyhood dreams; to grow up and leave home.
By any measure, Heinlein was one of the top American writers of the age. Period. His work, as literature, stands alongside Hemingway.
Much of his edge came from the way he mixed the human ‘real’ with sci-fi settings that were believable extensions of the mid-century ‘now’, into a plausible future. This was no coincidence. Heinlein was an engineer. He worked on pressure suits during the Second World War – which came out in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. He invented the modern waterbed, describing it to the point where he got the patent. He invented the concept of the telemanipulator - the ‘Waldo’, used in laboratories. Here’s some other stuff he anticipated – both real and SF trope:
XE atomic rocket motor – exactly as Heinlein envisaged – being assembled for cold (non-fissionable) test firing at Jackass Flats, Nevada, 1967. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Atomic rockets. In 1947, Heinlein envisaged using atomic reactors (‘piles’) to heat reaction mass (hydrogen) and drive interplanetary spaceships. Way more efficient than a chemical rocket. Ten years later, the AEC and NASA began working on it for real.
- The ultimate weapon. Your matter-to-energy ‘torch drive’ delivers zetawatts of energy. Who needs nuclear weapons? Heinlein pointed it out as a throw-away line in Time For The Stars (1956).
- Cellphones. The society of Space Cadet (1948) used ‘em – another throw-away detail but one that nailed the modern trend.
- Medical beds. One featured in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel (1958), a decade before Trek.
- Maglev trains. Starman Jones (1953) portrayed supersonic trains suspended via ring-magnets. (Don’t get caught by the shock wave.)
- Star Gate. Guess who invented the idea. Heinlein’s Tunnel In The Sky (1955) pivoted around one of them failing.
The science – extensions of the possible into a ‘not yet invented, but it will be’ , worked hand-in-glove with realistic characters. The result was a suspension of disbelief. And that tells us how to do it, today.
The only down side, for me, was Heinlein’s contrived ‘American frontier’ analog. Mars, especially in Space Family Stone/The Rolling Stones (1952) was Dodge City. In Tunnel In The Sky his heroes used Conestoga wagons to explore exoplanets. In Farmer In The Sky (1953), the characters travelled on the ‘torch ship’ Mayflower to the new world, Ganymede. The parallel was exact even down to the symbolisms and choices of food. Earth was starving and the colonists had ‘good and plenty’, including (inevitably) corn, corn-bread, ham, turkey, squash, potatoes, butter, cream and apple pie.
When he wanted to create a different society, he did – witness Starman Jones, where employment revolved around medieval-style guilds. But that novel still had Nova Terra, a caricature of the American frontier dream. Why did Heinlein do it? Nostalgia? A vision of colonial society as freer, tougher – a place for hard life and hard characters. Part of his perception of ‘real’, and one of the ways he made his writing ‘real’. But for me it wasn’t different enough. The past is a foreign land; so is the future. The human condition renders some behaviours similar across time, but history never repeats to this level of detail.
I’m sure Heinlein knew that too. He had other reasons for portraying an idealised American frontier dream in space.
What do you figure?
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012
Thank you for citing one of my favorite childhood writers. His juvies are far superior to the crap he pumped out for an “adult” audience, with the possible exception of “Glory Road” and “Starship Troopers,” which either was or is taught at an American military academy.
As a writer, there are themes in his oeuvre I no longer like much, and even a few I can’t stomach any more. But he will always have my respect and admiration for much of his work, and he’s an enduring influence. Ave atque vale, RAH!
Yes, I liked his juveniles (which I read as a teenager) far better than his adult work – hence the focus on them in this post! I agree, aspects of what he promoted are – well, let us say of his time. And things have moved on. But yes, beyond that, he endures. I still find his stuff inspiring, not least for his insights into the core of the human condition, something that transcends time, place and culture.
Hm, Matthew, this theme is interesting and intriguing.
My own take on Heinlein is colored by how I got started reading him — discovering Have Space Suit Will Travel almost by accident (and became the first book I ever purpose-ordered) in the 5th grade.
It’s tempting to argue that this “pioneer spirit” theme is put forward in the same sense that Roddenberry pitched the original Star Trek series as “Wagon Train to the stars.” The argument would be that Heinlein, like Roddenberry, looked to an American audience whose mythology included that “Wild West” theme upon which the stories could piggy-back; the future therefore becomes predictable, or at least shares continuity with the past. For example, there’s a scene in Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) where the parents of one of the teenaged crew won’t give permission for him to go on the first trip to the Moon (OK, what they THOUGHT was the first trip). The wife instigated it; but eventually gives in, citing “pioneer spirit” and noting that the land their house stood on had been homesteaded in that era and the pioneer wife was only sixteen years old at the time. “I would hate to think I had let the blood run thin,” she says, and bolts from the room in tears.
Consider that this provides a perspective on hardship and sacrifice, again, in a way that’s familiar at least to American readers. As you rightly point out, Heinlein, the aerospace engineer, was well versed in the likely difficulties of space travel; “pioneer days” makes a good analogy, whose purpose is to put things in context: “Sure, it’s hard, and it’s gonna be tough out there. But we’ll make it. We’re the sons of the pioneers. They made it, and we will too.” (Imagine John Wayne in a space suit saying that to a bunch of scared kids in space suits about to board their space cruiser and that should convey the idea nicely.)
Then too one might recall that Heinlein was unabashedly (and perhaps chauvinistically) American. Look at the reaction of Lazarus Long to joining the American military in World War I (Time Enough for Love). To me it’s a schizophrenic scene in more ways than one; the only way I could resolve it was to think that family, in the immediate sense, and country, in the larger sense, and the regard with which one wishes to be held by both, were far more important than minor details like the total idiocy of enlisting to serve in a futile, bloody conflict of which Long already knew the outcome. Again, this is Heinlein the patriot, bringing that patriotism to his writing.
I also think Heinlein saw space travel and colonisation of other planets as a perhaps endless series of chances for the human race to “get it right” in accordance with his own notions of what’s right. How would an American patriot, who perhaps didn’t care for the direction his beloved country was taking, portray that in his writing? In this context, consider Starship Troopers, Glory Road and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
Although a note on Starship Troopers. When I saw the film I found it shocking, almost as if the Nazis had won World War 2 and then had mellowed out. I thought surely I was wrong, and that the filmmakers had distorted Heinlein’s views as set out in his book. I reread Starship Troopers…and I hate to say that the filmmakers got it pretty much right. So, your thoughts?
I enjoyed that movie on a number of levels. Verhoeven was, I think, pitching his adaptation as a pretty sharp commentary on where certain disturbing modern trends might lead if unchecked. But Heinlein did too, relative to when he wrote the book. That speaks pretty clearly to me about the darker side of the human condition – and both Heinlein and Verhoeven, in their own ways, were warning us about it, I think.
No question that patriotism was part of Heinlein’s mix, more so than for many other US writers, and certainly more than Asimov’s. I think you’re quite right; he was portraying a potential future that had ‘got it right’ in his terms. But why not write that way? Asimov did too, in his very different terms, and you’ve inspired me to blog about that in the next week or so. Will be great to generate discussion, I think.
Incidentally – for me the intriguing part of ‘Spaceship Galileo’ was the fact that the craft was a commercial orbital/suborbital freighter. Commerce had paved the way and had the capability to be adapted to do more – but had never needed to do it. I can’t help wondering whether the current crop of commercial cargo ships (“Dragon/Falcon 9″ especially) isn’t leading us pretty much in that same direction. Heinlein, once again, getting it right – mainly, I think, through that knack he had of keying a believeable future out of the ways that he knew the human condition tended to work.
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