I wish that son of a gun would take that other hand out of his pocket.

(X-punted over the Edge of the American West.)

On this day in 1907, the second greatest proselytizer for the strident, oversimple libertarianism of high school debaters, Robert Heinlein, was born. Second only to The Fountainhead in importance to adolescent males whose genius isn't appreciated by authoritarian parents, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress informs readers How [to] Find Freedom in an Unfree World: chunk definite articles, catapult space rocks at Middle America, and embrace Ho Chi Minh.  As my colleague Adam Roberts argues:

We might take this further, a note the many parallels between the 'Loonies' and the Viet-Cong. Heinlein may have been a pro-war signatory on the famous Galaxy double-page Vietnam advertisement, but his sympathetically portrayed, anti-American Loonies, who are essentially farmers, and who live in elaborate tunnel-systems that prove impossible for invading troops to infiltrate, have much in common with the South-Eastern enemy. More to the point, the whole scenario of a war between Earth (a large, populous, technologically-advanced world) and the Moon (a small, technologically-backward nation of farmer struggling for independence) presents a penetrating commentary upon the international events of 1966.

This is not Bob Barr's Bob Heinlein. Granted, it's a damned clever interpretation, but I'm more inclined to agree with my colleague Adam Roberts, who claims that after 1960, Heinlein sacrificed the virtues of his early work

to a strident, even desperate 'puppet-master' authorial persona, which harps incessantly and sometimes unpleasantly on a narrow range of ideological concerns: the importance of individual liberty conceived in the American libertarian mode, with a pendant mistrust of 'government' and a fetishisation of authority as such.

Difficult as it for us, as adults, to read novels in which characters break the fourth wall to deliver lectures about politics, the anti-authoritarian appeal of the libertarian rants of Heinlein's not-even-veiled surrogates shouldn't be overestimated, as the only alternative explanation for his continued popularity among the adolescent set is that 70 percent of his work is made of fucking.*

Not just any old fucking, though, but polyamorous-underwater-fucking, a practice whose appeal to the bookish 16-year-old mind can't be exaggerated.  There's also rape-fucking, which is mildly disturbing until you remember that by novel's end it becomes marriage-fucking, at which point you overdose on disturb and vow never to use your penis again.  Especially when compared to the respectful, nuanced treatment of rape by Chris Claremont.  The mind reels.**

My point, as you've probably surmised, is that this day in 1907 saw the birth of an author whose adolescent philosophy was disseminated in books chock-a-block with puerile male sex fantasies, a fact Penn & Teller would call bullshit on except, well, you know.

---

*Hence the title of the post, borrowed from a letter Joseph John W. Campbell, arguably the most powerful editorial voice during the Golden Age of science fiction, wrote Isaac Asimov on 11 May 1956:

I've got a Bob Heinlein novel on hand now [The Door Into Summer], for decision, that's got me worried and bothered. Bob can write a better story, with one hand tied behind him, than most people in the field can do with both hands. But Jesus, I wish that son of a gun would take that other hand out of his pocket.

**I know, I know, this is a family blog. But there's no other word for what Heinlein and adolescent males the world over fantasize about.

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

Oh, come on: the tradition of political blather combined with puerile slather goes back to the Marquis de Sade, in fact, to Aristophanes. Just because he's libertarian doesn't mean he's wrong about everything: Friday is a great mix of utopic and dystopic elements, classic use of SF to carry out sociological and historical projection, which is good because the backstory makes less sense than the sex.

How many "literary" writers attack the same theme over and over and over?

[SEK]

Just because he's libertarian doesn't mean he's wrong about everything.

I didn't mean to imply that he was wrong about everything because he was a libertarian or that if you're a libertarian you're wrong about everything. My intent was to mock myself for adopting the extreme form of libertarianism he espoused in his fiction when thinking about the real world. Idealism doesn't work so well when it involves, you know, real people. (Although reading Iain Banks right now ain't helping anything, as I'm being subjected to a tour of commonplace horrors which, in the Culture culture of the narrative perspective, are utterly unfathomable.

Friday is a great mix of utopic and dystopic elements, classic use of SF to carry out sociological and historical projection, which is good because the backstory makes less sense than the sex.

Really? I read Friday on the tail end of my Heinlein phase and found it loathsome. I couldn't even enjoy the story because the premises were so misogynistic. (And this was before I read the feminist texts which would render me humorless forever.) I don't even think the novel worked on its own terms, as it meandered towards its resolutiony thingy with the strict gait of a lapsed alcoholic.

That said, I may've overplayed the Heinlein hatred out of self-loathing, as I remember some of the horrible positions I took back in the day and wish I'd had, you know, something resembling life experience to temper their abstraction.

[David Moles]

Sociological and historical projection my ass. Friday might have succeeded at saying something about the American condition ca. 1982 if it had risen to the level of satire, but Heinlein took himself way too seriously for that.

(Psychological projection, now, I might buy.)

[Adam Roberts]

I tend to agree with the Adam Roberts passage you quote; although the Adam Roberts one is way off beam.

In other news: following the link to the amazon.com Friday page makes for some interesting reading of (87, no less) customer comments. For example, Joss Delage (Seattle, WA USA): "One of my all time favorite...: Heinlein is great, although sometimes a little bit paternalistic vis-a-vis women..." First ellipsis mine; second his. Yes, writing a pneumatic, promiscuous supposedly 'strong' female character who loves to be raped is a little bit paternalistic vis-a-vis women. Pff. Speaking as a pater I do not concur. Mind you, perhaps Joss Delage's observation sets out to deconstruct traditional family dynamics by uncovering the systematic deeprooted sexual violence underpinning our patriarchal culture? As readings of Friday go, that would be one of my all-time favorite.

[Adam Roberts]

Favourite, indeed.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Friday was also the last-ever Heinlein book I read. I must have been 14, something like that. It was a completely gross book (if I may lapse into 14-year-old descriptive terms). SEK left out the mutilation that was part of the rape-torture scene that the heroine bravely gets over so that she can sleep with the one of the rapists who was nice. There's really nothing much you can say about that other than "ick". And the politics -- well, a remember a paean to British Canadian politeness, and the idea that politeness was the good from which all political goodness flowed, and even to a 14 year old, that just didn't seem very rock-and-roll. It was typical libertarianism, which is to say that serious crimes against the powerless didn't matter in comparison to the "freedom" to have white middle-class people set the societal rules.

That Iain Banks book, now, that's politics. My favorite of the list of commonplace horrors was the volunteer doctors. I had up to that time completely fallen for the idea of doctors charitably serving the poor as a good thing. Then of course I thought, but would I want to go to a volunteer doctor? Given that we're in a society in which expertise is expected to be rewarded with money, what does it mean that poor people are left to volunteers?

[Adam Roberts]

I remember the politeness thing too: although I feel Rich undersells the complexity and insight of Heinlein's position. If I recall, Friday's boss tells her that the absolute symptom of societal breakdown is not only that people stop being polite to one another, but that they take perverse pleasure in being rude. That's when decadence leads to apocalypse. Punk rock, you see: after 1976 Western Civilisation had a matter of only a few years before everything broke down completely.

[Ahistoricality]

At risk of digging myself a hole, the narrator and chief sexual actor in Friday is not a psychologically normal person particularly where sexuality is concerned: Heinlein's very clear about that. He may be setting her up as a paragon/fantasy, and a lot of 14-year olds may read it that way at first, but there's all kinds of emotional and sexual trauma in her background (and present, yes) which she deals with by using an immense amount of self-rationalization and an intense, frustrated search for emotional security. I've never read Friday as a serious sexual fantasy: the character is much too troubled.

[Aaron Boyden]

Indeed, I also think this Heinlein-hate is excessive. Consider that the author of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress also wrote Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land. For the connection between the first and the second, you might claim that libertarians often have a secret authoritarian streak, and indeed they often don't hide it well, but you have to do a lot more work to fit in the third. Heinlein let all his characters speak for themselves with great vehemence; their passion shouldn't necessarily lead us to think that they were also speaking for the author.

Also remember that Heinlein never claimed to want to change the world, the way Rand did; he always said he wrote for the money. And one thing that has to be said about even his last, most unreadable novels, is that they always sold very well.

[JPool]

Wait, did Adam forget he was English up there? Has his "Englishness" all been some elaborate ruse? What's he after, I wonder.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I am unable to write about Heinlein without perhaps excessive dislike, and don't pretend to. But remember that part of Stranger in a Strange Land was the threat of genocide. If the new messiah decided that humanity didn't measure up, he was ready, willing, and able to do something to the Earth's core to destroy it. I'm sorry, but that's still authoritarian. People seem to be willing to treat sex fantasies as anti-authoritarian when really they're perhaps just fantasies of older men getting to fuck all sorts of younger women equally.

I'm glad that Scott has taken my advice to read some Iain Banks. I renew my advice to read Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, too. It's nowhere near as good a book, or as pleasant a read. But I still think that you can't really understand early-to-mid SF -- including Heinlein -- without reading it.

[Adam Roberts]

JPool "Wait, did Adam forget he was English up there?"

Cut-and-paste erodes my cultural roots. Evil cut-and-paste!

Rich: "remember that part of Stranger in a Strange Land was the threat of genocide." It's more than just the threat: the novel explains that the asteroid belt was once a planet, until the Martians 'grokked' wrongness in its inhabitants and blew it to smithereens. It would be a handy political tool, that. 'Do you have specific practical accusations to make against the Arabs/Jews/Blacks/Gypsies/English, Mr President?' 'Nothing specific: I just grok wrongness in them.' Kaboom!

[Josh]

I liked a good deal of Heinlein's pre-1960 work and passages here and there in his later stuff; but I'm most grateful for his existence because it led to H. Bruce Franklin's Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction, which changed my life in my teen years.

[Doug]

There's a Paul Di Filippo story in which Joseph Campbell is indeed the most powerful editor in the Golden Age of science fiction; it's in _Lost Pages_. There's another in the same collection with Heinlein as president after Truman...