Robert Heinlein

Today is the birthday of Robert Anson Heinlein.  As many readers will know Robert Heinlein was a science fiction writer whose heyday was in the fifties and sixties.  Like many Science Fiction writers of that time he wrote about a future where space travel and aliens were, if not commonplace, at least part of the known world(s).  Unlike those other writers, who have mostly faded into obscurity, Robert Heinlein is still read today and his ideas still have a currency that lends them to be debated.  In this respect he is almost unique.  I would like to share a few observations about why that is.  If it seems a little odd to be celebrating a science fiction writer on a web-magazine about men and style, then I have to say that Robert Heinlein had some very important things to say about men.  

I have read Robert Heinlein all my adult life and he shares a comparable place in my literary gallery with Ernest Hemingway.  Indeed there are some real similarities between them.  There is much to write about Robert Heinlein and it cannot all be contained in one article.  For now I will concentrate on Heinlein’s men.  I hope to write more in due course. 

Robert Heinlein

Robert Heinlein brought an intellectual maturity to SF and a willingness to make his stories explore complex and important ideas.  His stories inhabit a consistent future history, where starships, ray-guns and technology have taken men to new worlds.  However Robert Heinlein had a rare ability to use the SF form to write provocative novels about subjects as diverse as race, politics, the function of the military and the place of rituals in modern society.  In his later novels he turned to metaphysics and the hard questions of why are we here?, what happens after we die?  However his real genius was to write adventures that men could relate to, be excited by and enjoy.

Man Alone

Heinlein’s men are heroes, though they do not start out that way.  In Double Star, a failed actor becomes a double for a politician under threat of assassination, and inadvertently becomes the bridge between humans and an ancient and sophisticated Martian culture.  In Starship Troopers, Juan Rico is a spoilt rich boy who finds his manhood as an infantryman in a war against a genocidal race of alien bug creatures. 

 Robert Heinlein believed passionately in self-reliance, the need for an individual to avoid conformity and follow his own ideas and visions.  He coupled this with a intelligent and worldly understanding of modern western society, characterising it as technically dependent and with a need for conformity.  His ability to write elegant lucid stories with a mature adult sensibility brings these two contradictory worlds together in colourful and provocative adventures.

 We read his stories because they ask the question “How does a man live in a world he has not made?”  It is the same question we ask ourselves.

 I think that one of the reasons we read him is that he never cheats us.  His future societies may have starships and rayguns but they are realistic, they suffer the same problems that every complex society has, bad laws, stupid people, natural upheavals.  The effects of these societies feel real to the protagonists, and they feel real to us.  Heinlein’s men have to understand their society and decide what their moral principles are.  Which we all have to do. 

 For Robert Heinlein never gives his heroes a free ride.  They have to form themselves mentally and morally, usually while getting caught up in a plot to enslave all human colonists on Mars (Red Planet), freeing a future America from a religious dictatorship (Revolt in 2100) or trying to stop an invasion of alien mind parasites (The Puppet Masters).  With Heinlein it’s always running and putting your jacket on at the same time.  I believe this is one reason why he is still so readable.  The stories have a breakneck excitement, complex ideas are explored in prose of Hemingwayan terseness and every mistake the hero makes could cost him his life.  The hero’s resources are his skills, his moral principles and his self-reliance.  It could as easily be us as the hero.

Real men and real communities

Heinlein’s view was that government was a necessary evil.  The societies he approves of, (the ones he imagines in his books) are American in spirit, filled with free thinking individuals, intelligent decision makers and a desire for progress that is joyous and unafraid.  In “The Moon is a harsh mistress” he came the closest anyone has every come to describing a working libertarian community.  His luna is a penal colony, filled with convicts and ex-convicts, all transported by the governments of Earth.  Their fight for independence from a tyrannical Earth, is funny, inspiring, heartwarming and exciting.  Nearly fifty years after its publication The Moon is a harsh mistress remains an inspiration for libertarians. 

Here is the great contradiction in Robert Heinlein’s writing.  He is utopian enough to want good government but knows the price of it.  He writes perceptively of the need for good communities, for shared moral principles and good manners, for hierarchies of abilities and the need to recognise the importance of critical knowledge and skills.              

However shared values are among the things that deny his heroes their freedom.  In Stranger in a strange land, his best-selling tale of an Earthling raised by Martians and taught great powers, Robert Heinlein asks the question how do you build a society when each man has the power to stand outside of it, or destroy it.   

 For Heinlein politics is a necessary evil but definitely evil.  He values liberty over government, is scathing about politicians (he was a political activist before becoming a writer).  He saves the worst of his venom for repressive societies that destroy the human spirit, communism being the foremost amongst them.  Time of course has proven him right but in the sixties novels like Starship troopers, The Puppet Masters and Revolt in 2100 were a crusade against socialist conformity.

 Heinlein sees humanity’s best hope as free people tolerating (at best) a weak government, a kind of federated universe.  Even here he knows that freedom will be constrained.  In Glory Road, The Moon is a harsh mistress and Farnham’s Freehold, Heinlein makes it plain that freedom is on the frontier, where civilisation and its rules have not yet encroached on life.  No-one has written more perceptively about the innate contradictions between men and their community.  Real men assert themselves for justice and the community resists this.  Heinlein knew this and makes heroic stories out of this.     

Men and magic

But we do not read Heinlein for his socio-political shading, gripping though that is.  We read him for his men.  Juan Rico and his journey from spoilt kid to courageous and honourable fighting man, the actor Lorenzo Smythe,an unlucky man who gets a second chance late in life and has the courage to take it,  “Oscar” Gordon, the man who does not fit in, who answers a newspaper ad starting “Are you a coward?”, who gets the chance to slay dragons.

Men and magic and adventure

These novels are men’s adventures, from a tradition that goes back thousands of years.  Robert Heinlein may be a master of political thought, hard science and military history but it is the adventure that is the thing.  One man against the world.  His heroes are modern Francis Drakes, D’artagnans, and dragon slayers. 

 The simple truth is that Robert Heinlein’s books are a joy to read.

 Robert Heinlein says it better than I can.  I have the following excerpt from Glory Road pinned up in my office:

 “I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom.  I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me ,  “The games afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi  on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.

 I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake.  I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon.  I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid.  I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be – instead of the tawdry, lousy fouled-up mess it is.   

Robert Heinlein’s men are risk-takers, lovers and fighters.  Great men have that sense of wonder.

 What did I learn from Robert Heinlein?  Adventurers have the best lives. 

Thank you Robert Heinlein.