The Lost Manuals
by J. Neil Schulman

This is copyrighted material and may not be copied or reproduced in any form, including on other websites, without permission of the copyright holder.

©1988, 1999 J. Neil Schulman. All rights reserved. Used here by permission of the author.

Sooner or later we all imagine there’s a set of technical manuals our parents were supposed to give us at birth with instructions on How Life Works.

Not that thick book called The Purpose of Your Life. You get that one later. These are “How To” manuals. Each is called Getting By When You’re Up The Creek Without a Paddle, Fighting Back When You’re Sick of Getting Pushed Around, Love — What It is and How to Survive It, or How to Keep From Going Crazy When Everyone Around You Already Is.

Obviously, sometime before you were born, your parents pawned the manuals for a down payment on a Chevy. Or maybe the tomes went overboard when their parents emigrated to America. Or were they incinerated during the big library fire in Alexandria?

Anyway, people keep fudging up replacements. You’ll find them in the Philosophy section, the Psychology section, the Science section, and (Someone help you) the UFO Abduction/Tarot/Astrology/Numerology section.

Look no further: you’ll find the closest thing to the Lost Manuals in the science fiction section: the author was Robert A. Heinlein.

An engineer by trade, Heinlein knew that while machines can be duplicated, people can’t be: no set of engineering instructions could apply to several billion individuals. He gave basic working diagrams; folks would have to jury-rig things from there.

Heinlein wrote fiction because that’s what non-engineers could understand best — and he set his stories in strange lands because things were changing so fast that any land we encounter was bound to be.

Take the Lost Manual titled Getting By When You’re Up the Creek Without a Paddle. Heinlein wrote several versions, each with a different slant. In Tunnel in the Sky teenagers on a two-week survival test find themselves stranded on a virgin planet, probably for good. In Job: A Comedy of Justice a preacher on vacation finds that while God might not play dice with the universe, it’s only because He prefers other games.

In Citizen of the Galaxy a boy is sold into slavery to a crippled beggar … and eventually concludes this was the best thing that ever happened to him. And in Have Space Suit — Will Travel a high school senior is abducted by a UFO, and ultimately finds himself in a distant courtroom appointed Clarence Darrow for the entire human race; this novel comes close to combining all the Lost Manuals into one.

Love — What It Is and How to Survive It: Heinlein wrote this several times, also. In The Door Into Summer a poor inventor lives through his fiancee turning into as much fun after work as Lucrezia Borgia; cryonics and a time machine give him a second shot at love. Time travel also helps Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love find love a second time. It takes him 23 centuries to find the woman of his dreams but it turns out to be his own mother. (See previous Manual.)

As for How to Keep from Going Crazy When Everyone Around You Already Is — Heinlein considered most people “candidates for protective restraint.” Stranger in a Strange Land is Heinlein’s best attempt here. But try figuring out which characters aren’t already crazy.

Fighting Back When You’re Sick of Getting Pushed Around was Heinlein’s favorite topic. His early novel If This Goes On — , included in The Past Through Tomorrow, has a preacher combining the worst of Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Orel Roberts elected president; a century later a Masonic Cabal is taking on the American theocracy run by the Prophet Incarnate. Methuselah’s Children (also in TPTT) has Lazarus Long’s tribe fleeing Earth to escape genocide.

Heinlein wrote four other novels of revolution. In Sixth Column super-science drives out the Pan-Asian conquerors of America. In Red Planet colonial rebels on Mars seek Martian help against absentee rulers on Earth. In Between Planets the rebellion stretches from Venus to Mars: this is my nomination for Robert A. Heinlein’s best-written novel.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is Heinlein’s libertarian classic — the Atlas Shrugged of science fiction. The revolution is on the moon; its leaders have read Ayn Rand; and one of them, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, is based on Heinlein’s old buddy, Robert LeFevre of Rampart College.

Robert A. Heinlein, in his half-century career, wrote over 45 books selling forty million copies worldwide. A mindful history will place him alongside Dickens and Twain.

We must cry that his pen has been set down for the last time: we can rejoice at the immense lost legacy he has regained for us.

Methuselah’s Children

by NY WSC@AOL.com ©1997

(reprinted with permission–the author chose to remain anonymous)

Robert A. Heinlein first published Methuselah’s Children in a serialized version in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction in July through September 1941. He completely rewrote, expanded and republished the novel independently in 1958 and collected the longer version in The Past Through Tomorrow (1982), the version on which this precis is based.

When Methuselah’s Children saw light of day in 1941, the Holocaust was well under way with the S.S. rounding up Jews and others deemed undesirable, and shipping them to concentration camps for the “final solution.” Just as Eve Barstow, referring to her neighbors, in the novel opined, “I cannot believe they would hate me and destroy me,” real living Jews had the same misimpression under the Third Reich’s actuality. They became scapegoats, just as the Howard Families do. As the Howard Families would have done given the choice many of the Jews of the Third Reich for the most part simply expressed increasing disbelief, resignation and powerlessness and wound up martyred. Rights were suspended for the minority while the many turned a blind eye or actively supported “cleansing” and genocide. When the novel was being rewritten for its second publication in the 1950s, the citizenry of United States for the first time during the author’s adult lifetime were enjoying great material prosperity and becoming far less willing to dedicate themselves to hard chores. There is more than a hint in this novel that he found this defect as disconcerting as earlier lassitude to genocide.

The adventures of Lazarus Long and his branch of the Howards continue well beyond this novel into Time Enough For Love (1973), The Number of the Beast (1980), and To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987). RAH places Methuselah’s Children near the end of his Future History, from 2136 to 2210.

Dramatis Personae

Lazarus Long, t/n Woodrow Wilson Smith, a.k.a. Capt. Aaron Sheffield is the oldest living member of the Howard Families, believed dead, a rapscallion who strives to do unto others before they do unto him, which in part may explain his longevity. He also appears in all the later novels.

Andrew Jackson Libby is a mathematician extraodinaire, who invents a Starship drive approaching lightspeed that allows the Families to escape from our Solar system. He also appears as a youth in “Misfit” (1939), a short story collected in Revolt In 2100 (1953), is an off-stage memory in Time Enough For Love; and, later, rejoins the Long branch of the Howards somewhat altered in Number of the Beast, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

Zaccur Barstow is a member of the Families who is speaker for the Trustees of the “Howard Foundation.”

Slayton Ford is Administrator of the North American Federation, a political body which has absorbed the United States, who assists the Families to flee Earth, and shares their exile.

Mary Sperling is the “Oldest known Howard,” very concerned with her own aging, and their spokeswoman until Lazarus reveals himself.

Eleanor Johnson, a young Howard woman, 27 years old, is a new mother when the story begins.

Horace Foote is a hero.

Plot Synopsis

Because Ira Howard, a self-made Victorian era millionaire, finds himself dying of old age while in his mid-40s, his Will institutes a foundation to encourage discovery of a means to prolong human life. To this end the Howard Foundation contacts people whose grandparents live to be 100 or more and encourages them to marry. For each child born of such union, it awards the parents a monetary bonus. Offspring that intermarry receive the same incentives, and their descendants eventually achieve a natural lifespan exceeding two hundred years. Eleven years before Methuselah’s Children begins, these Families agree to allow a small percentage of their number to reveal themselves to the general populace, it having become increasingly difficult to maintain the ‘masquerade’ of altered identities concealing true ages under the highly evolved and beneficent society under the Covenant created following the Second American Revolution which freed the country from the shackles of religious theocracy. Yet despite their hopes, a frenzy of hatred develops, engendered by opportunistic politicians, abetted by the media. Ephemerals believe the Howards are not the result of reinforced genetics by selective breeding but hiding a secret technology which grants them long life. Discovery by Mary Sperling of plans to imprison and torture the revealed Howards for their ‘secret’ leads to an emergency meeting to determine their next move. Before plans are made, the Federation suspends the ‘Covenant,’ takes the Families captive and proceeds with less than lethal interrogation. Administrator Slayton Ford becomes convinced from preliminary results that genetics is indeed the only cause of their longevity, but remains reluctantly willing to destroy all members of the Families through more stringent interrogation, rather than let the morale of ephemerals be destroyed by frustrated desire for the supposed secret to long life.

Fortunately, Lazarus Long, who has managed to evade capture, contacts the Administrator with a plan; and they, together with Zaccur Barstow, scheme to enable the Families to ‘liberate’ the newly-built exploratory Starship New Frontiers to escape Earth. Ford’s collusion indirectly leads to fall of his party’s government and impending arrest, and he is forced to flee with the Howards. In an effort to escape ships tracking them, ‘Slipstick’ Libby installs an experimental close-to-light-speed drive; and within a matter of hours Sol’s system is left behind. After long years traveling, they reach the nearest G5 star and find a planet very similar to Earth. It is inhabited by the Jockaira, a race who worship their ‘gods’ in temples in each city. The Jockaira once had discovered space flight, but tell the Howards their ‘gods’ soon afterward appeared and forbade further exploration. When the Howards are obliged to adopt worship an existing ‘god’ of their own to remain Slayton Ford insists on entering a temple, only to emerge suffering from extreme psychoses occasioned by actually encountering that ‘god.’ The Jockairan ‘gods’ react by ejecting every last Howard, sans benefit of ship’s boats, directly into the New Frontiers, still orbiting in space and remotely control a 17 month journey to a new star. This star holds the planet of the Little People, a “lotus land” having “no seasons … [i]ts hills were low, its winds were gentle, its seas were placid.” Food, which the Little People bio-engineer to whatever taste the Families desire, can be daily plucked fresh from trees. Projects are put off, and put off again indefinitely, while some Howards, including Lazarus, consider this fate with apprehension. To the Families’ growing horror, the Little People go so far as to manipulate a fetus in utero, improving humanity in the person of a newborn, the highly efficient (but grossly modified) Marion Schmidt. Then Mary Sperling, who so fears death, ‘goes over’ to the Little People, her mind assimilated by them into their collective consciousness. The Families split into two camps, those who wish to return to the green hills of Earth, and those who stay, approximately 10,000, including the Schmidts, give or take an unregistered child. The Families return to Earth ready to fight for survival but find while they have been absent its population has actually discovered technological ways to prolong life, ushering in an era of general prosperity through interstellar exploration and colonization.

Thematic Synopsis

Aging is one major theme in Methuselah’s Children. Today, to avoid looking old, mankind has learned to nip and tuck and liposuction, use hormones, implant hair, dress in flattering fashions and, hopefully, look youthful. The Howards used similar techniques, both to masquerade uniqueness and for mental well being. But no one has ever succeeded in turning back time. At the start of Methuselah’s Children, petite and youthfully attractive Mary Sperling explains to her acquaintances her refusal to marry an apparently older man courting her by saying, “There’s too much difference in age.” She meant her own age, which was 183. To her knowledge, she was the oldest member of the Families. All that lay ahead, despite that she looked to be in her early 30s, was a highly increased threat of senescence. Within 90 days of diagnosis, the result was death. Mary so feared death that she was willing to assimilate her consciousness with the Little People, achieving immortality in the collective memory they possessed. Lazarus Long tells her when she first mentions her preoccupation that she should start another family. That may have distracted her, but not been a solution: the problem would be waiting when new children no longer needed nurturing. She side-steps the issue by “drowning her personality in the ego of the many.” Today we face not threat of death after an extremely long life, but death of the mind, with the possibility of a corporeal death long years off. When RAH wrote Methuselah’s Children, ‘senility’ was an expected part of old age. Now we know it to be Alzheimer’s, merely a biochemical deficiency that causes apparently healthy and physically fit individuals to suddenly begin losing mental faculties. With extraordinary means available to modern medicos who consider any death a failure to keep the body alive, an empty husk may remain, nourished, hydrated, medicated, tied to a bed and ‘life.’ In the face of this long twilight existence, presently incurable, certainty within 90 days seems relief rather than threat. The Families had the option to accept euthanasia, an option not lawfully ours. Mary Sperling’s desperate ‘solution’ which is no solution at all anticipates yet another desperate ‘solution’ attempted by the hero of another RAH novel, Johann Sebastian Smith in I Will Fear No Evil (1970). No solution is really offered here. Merely a counterpoint.

Lazarus is the counterpoint to Mary. His basic optimism, in antithesis to Sperling’s obsession on her impending death, to ‘carpe that old diem,’ living until you die, appears in many of RAH’s works. In Glory Road (1963) the inscription on Oscar’s sword reads Dum Vivimus, Vivamus, “While we live, let us live.” The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1965) ends with Manny deciding to go out to the Asteroids. “My word, I’m not even a hundred yet.” Mary, in Puppet Masters (1951), refuses to take tempus pills (to extend time) by saying, “I must live each moment and not let it be spoiled by worrying about the moment ahead.” The homemade starry flag flies over Farnham’s Freehold (1964), and they’re still going on. Even Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) enjoys life to the fullest and only works or leaves his enclave when whim takes him. And always there is Woodrow Wilson Smith a.k.a. Lazarus Long a.k.a. The Senior in Time Enough for Love (1973), Number of the Beast (1980) and To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987), taking big bites, finding so much in living that at 4300 plus years he is still going strong.

Another major theme, however, is individual reliance and wariness of all governments, organizations, and other societal groupings–including one’s own family, no matter how benevolently conceived and organized, well ordered and prosperously effected. Lazarus Long, in all of his many appearances in Heinlein’s works, epitomizes this. Here, initially, he is instrumental in saving his family only because he “opts out” at the last moment from a planned surrender engineered ‘for his own good’. Heinlein believed in “individualism” as strongly as any theme illustrated in his books. No one does it for you better than your own efforts, he argues; and it is suicidal to surrender blindly your own volition to any form of government, leadership, or life no matter how well secured by a “covenant,” how honestly led, or how life is made easy by technology. A pierced together version of Woodrow Wilson Smith’s own related history shows him fading into the woodwork in self-preservation, again and yet again. The only force which alters this major characteristic is the call of his own “family” for his assistance. And then only the call of “women and children first” will sound loud enough to bring him forth. His interest in Mary is probably his only motive for not immediately fading off into the woodwork in this novel once he breaks free of the hand of the proctors. He had no close relatives who yet lived by the time of Methuselah’s Children. At best, his descendants were several generations removed–only the most tenuous binding strings. He had opted out from any leadership role generations earlier following the Families’ Meeting of 2012 (which time “Stories Never Written” reveals immediately followed the election of the Prophet, following which the adherents of that individual’s religion legislated its creed into law, and the United States plunged into a new Dark Age), and spent the interregnum on Venus and Mars, free of the dictatorship. Yet plainly, genocide, which is on the menu in Methuselah’s Children, did bring him back into a leadership role, but only long enough to provide the vehicle, literally, of their escape. He then steps back into his role as observer–ironic, for he fails to observe Mary’s fall into failure of confidence in her own identity. Until again, another form of genocide, threatened submergence of the families into the “easy life,” into the becoming another species, calls him forward. Long is unlikely to be an altruistic sacrificial fool. His survival instincts are too strong for that. So, a danger like genocide is plainly necessary to involve him. His individualism is plainly a contrast to Mary whose solution to aging and death is the antithesis of individualism, for her solution leads surely to death of her individual self, whatever memory may remain after her merger into the collective consciousness of the “Little People.” What irony exists in the name of that species! Children robbed of their birthright of freedom, robbed of any privacy, robbed of self-identity, robbed of life itself by the “easy life” of fully realized materialism. The perfectly-effected communism, the particular bane of the author’s time, and of any time.

Yet another theme deals with overpossessiveness and overprotectiveness in child-rearing and education, creating dependency rather than maturity, and its correlative, a tendency to create both obsessively demanding and dependent parents and an equally corrosive chain of obligation toward his parent for a child so reared. This sub-plot involves Eleanor Johnson, a young mother at the inception of the novel, and her partially orphaned child. Heinlein traces what so frequently happens to the object of a too loving parent–an oppressive parental relationship, so stifling that it occupies the lives of both parent and child to the exclusion of any other interests by each. The child who never severs apron strings and the parent who becomes so childishly dependent on the life of the child that neither ever has a life of their own result. Overpossessiveness and overprotectiveness creates immaturity and dependency, each a contributing factor against the independence of a secure self-identity, so this ties in to what is portrayed by Lazarus and Mary, his thematic antithesis. In only one other novel, a juvenile, The Star Beast (1954), did the author portray a parent-child situation nearly as developed (or underdeveloped) as the one between Eleanor Johnson and her son, Hubert. In that novel, it takes a strong woman in her own right, young Betty Sorenson, to break the bond which John Thomas Stuart XI’s mother, also a widow, tries too hard to create. However, in Farmer In The Sky (1950), the obverse occurs, when a child, also partially orphaned, tries to exert control over his remaining parent, his father, attempting to coerce him by guilt into remaining a widower. It doesn’t work because the father doesn’t allow his son’s selfish wishes to prevail. In Methuselah’s Children, the son Hubert became so desperate to break the maternal bond that, first, he elects to remain behind on the planet of the “Little People” to escape her; and when she changes her mind so as to remain with him, he flees by joining the ship at the last moment. Eleanor, of course, follows at the last second, so the resolution remains uncertain. Hubert may grow up to be his own individual, but, again, he may not. The theme of dependency spread out to society at large is picked up again, much later, in I Will Fear No Evil (1970), portraying a truly dependent society created by poorly-conceived systems of social welfare which provides a modicum of material wealth without effort for all as evidenced by Joe Branca’s family and, in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), in the person of Bill, whose development is so stunted and character so warped by lack of either education or material goods that he proves himself not deserving to continue to exist, so he doesn’t.

A fourth theme lightly touches upon the dangerous and frequently unholy symbiotic relationship existing between politicians and the popular Press. Two other novels, Double Star (1956) and Stranger In A Strange Land (originally 1961) follow on this theme.

Finally, briefly touched upon, is the theme of sacrifice. Heinlein often wrote that a gentleman should possess many attributes, among which is the ability to “die nobly.” Putting your life on the line of course is the basic theme of one other work, Starship Troopers (1959). Here, at a time when it remained in doubt whether the Federation would be able to determine the identities of the Howards who had not revealed themselves, a man who knew the extent and who had revealed himself, Horace Foote, was captured, rendered unconscious and restrained and slated for interrogation before he could suicide. Before the ‘humane’ methods of truth serum could be applied to expose his family to genocidal maniacs, he bit out his own tongue. As Zim might say: “His name shines!”

Viewpoint

In this reading, unlike my first reading in youth, I am concerned most with the major theme of aging. I understand Mary Sperling’s viewpoint. To anyone else, I would describe my age as fairly young. Middle age will always be 20 years older than I am, say I; but thinking my children are approaching the age of having children themselves while writing this precis, it feels old. Mary copped out. Rather than make a firm decision to live her life, she ironically embraced another form of death, the death of her personality. Memories remained, but in a detached manner, like a “stranger remembering what an old friend remembered.” Her body will remain alive for a time but, after it leaves, only the “stranger” will remain, sharing a disembodied, indifferent memory. “Is that all there is?” The Little People’s planet was manipulated to be perfect. Could humans survive in such a world? In such a collective consciousness? Not according to RAH. In Time Enough for Love, Lazarus Long returns to that planet after 2,000 years to find not one human, not one human artifact anywhere. One cannot choose but wonder if whatever personality of Mary Sperling remained, those many years after, would have considered this choice worth the final payment? No mess, no stress, no joy nor pleasure. On and on, world without end, Amen. Her life would continue, but she would not be alive! Once we lose interest in living, in moving forward, and start concentrating inwardly on aches and pains, on regretting past mistakes or omissions, we become old, no matter our chronological age. On reading Methuselah’s Children, 20 or so years ago, I was mildly concerned with Mary Sperling’s choice to continue ‘living’ at any cost (shades of H. Ryder Haggard’s She). Today not only am I dismayed and appalled, but down-right annoyed at the waste. I cavil against this plot, wondering why she was not offered anti-depressants. The Families had psychiatrists. Why didn’t one pick up on her frame of mind?

Heinlein’s Women: Role Model Characters in the Heinlein Juveniles

by Deb Houdek Rule ©2003

This article is based on a presentation given by me at BayCon 2003, May 24, 2003, in a panel discussion by Heinlein Society members on Heinlein’s Women characters. My portion of the discussion was on the older women characters in the juvenile novels as role models

I’ve been running a Heinlein website since 1997. The most frequent question I’m asked by women and girls reading my site is, “Was Heinlein a sexist?”

Yes, I do believe he was, but not in a bad way.

I started reading Heinlein when I was eight or nine years old, at a time in the 1960s when it was still assumed that girls and women would play certain roles and take certain jobs—be secretaries, not engineers, study home economics, not calculus and physics. As a young girl reading the Heinlein juveniles, stories mainly about boys and young men and their adventures in space, I never felt excluded. I never felt that these stories couldn’t be about me, or that I could be the one having the adventures in space and on the frontier worlds. I took Heinlein’s views of women to heart—I took the math classes, did the farm work, roofed buildings, worked on my own car, went to college in engineering, where I was the only female in my engineering classes for two years. I went on to work in an area that, when I started, was almost entirely male-dominated. I credit my parents for never trying to stop me from doing anything I set out to do, and I credit what I got from Heinlein’s books, particularly the juveniles with their ingrained attitudes about the roles and abilities of women.

Behind those adventuresome boys in the juveniles are a wealth of women playing roles of strength. There are women pilots, numerous engineers, researchers, doctors, soldiers, explorers, and a description Heinlein uses frequently, whizzes in math. The women and girls in Heinlein’s books are always good in math, better than the men and boys—none are of the Barbie-math-is-hard type.

By nearly every boy main character is a female character who is stronger, smarter, and more skilled. The female characters don’t have to be the main character to have an impact, and a powerful one. I dare say that the female characters and attitudes portrayed in the Heinlein juveniles have a stronger impact on the reader for being in the background, for being presented in a “of course that’s the way it is” unquestioning sort of way.

And overt appearances can be deceiving. Some of the books that seem to be the most male-dominated actually have the best pro-female messages.

Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)

This is a book with an almost exclusively male cast of characters. The only females appear briefly at the beginning and are the mothers of the boys who set out to go to the moon in their experimental space ship. Yet what shining examples of Heinlein women these boys’ mothers are!

Art’s mother, Grace Cargraves Mueller, is presented as a woman who got her husband out of a Nazi concentration camp, then raised her son as a single mother since he was a baby. She then decides to let her son go ahead with their dangerous project.

Ross’s mother, Martha Jenkins, is the one who makes the decision to let him go to the moon while her husband is refusing. Martha sits quietly, crying as a mother might be expected to do when her son is being sent into immense danger, but she breaks into the discussion, making the decision that Ross should go to the moon, saying, “…this country was not built by people who were afraid to go. Ross’s great-great-grandfather crossed the mountains in a Conestoga wagon and homesteaded this place. He was nineteen, his bride was seventeen… I would hate to think that I had let the blood run thin.”

Space Cadet (1948)

Curiously, I place this as one of the best examples of Heinlein providing a strong role model or message on the strength of females. It’s curious because it’s easy to see this as a book that has no females in it. Space Cadet is about a male-dominated military society and military organization that appears to have absolutely no women in it at all. It’s the men who are the military, the scientists, the explorers. The story positively drips with machismo… that is, until, our bold young lads arrive on Venus.

On Venus, the young men in the story are stranded, stuck, and have to be rescued by the all-female indigenous race. The ruler of the Venerians is a female, as are all the scientists, and soldiers. Their males—never seen—are rumored to be small and helpless. This matriarchal race is, of course, far more advanced in science and technology than the patriarchal humans, something the stranded boys have a hard time recognizing at first, but the boys catch up and stand in awe of the females’ capabilities.

The role model characters don’t have to be human for the message to be valid and powerful.

Red Planet (1949)

This book apparently underwent a rewrite on the insistence of the editor who objected to Phyllis Marlow, Jim’s younger sister, carrying a gun. Heinlein tried.

Farmer In the Sky (1950)

This is a book about pioneers and farmers, subjects near to Heinlein’s heart and life experiences. His family came from pioneer stock over generations. He knew intimately the role and importance of women as vital elements in any pioneering endeavor, as well as their critical roles on farms.

An interesting aside came up in the panel discussion about Ginny Heinlein and this story—she was a knowledgeable horticulturist who provided Robert Heinlein with the technical information on creating soil and bringing a farm to life from bare rock, that makes this story so rich and believable.

Among the women in this story are:

Molly Kenyon Lermer, Bill’s step-mother, she was an engineering draftsman who became a farm pioneer. She’s resolute and courageous.

Peggy Kenyon, little girl who Bill grew to respect. Peggy exemplified the pioneering spirit of staying and going onward even in the face of death.

Captain Hattie, a cranky old woman, is the only space ship shuttle pilot on the planet of Ganymede.

Gretchen Schultz—“How could I talk to a girl who wasn’t a colonial… Take Gretchen, now—there was a girl who could kill a chicken and have it in the pot while an Earthside girl would still be squealing,” Bill says of her with admiration. Notice how Gretchen seemed always to be ahead of him in evaluating their relationship.

Between Planets (1951)

Don Harvey’s mother, Dr. Cynthia Harvey, is a planetologist/archaeologist “All civilized persons know of them and their work.” Also a key player in the cabal.

Isobel Costello—dominates Don totally

Little Buttercup (Venerian dragon)—integrating chemist

Madame Curie (Venerian dragon)

Again, the characters don’t need to be human to make a statement.

The Rolling Stones (1952)

This is indisputably the Heinlein juvenile with the greatest wealth of strong female characters.

Edith Stone, the boys’ mother, is a physician, and, though quiet, is the dominant decision-maker in the family. She’s fearless and cool.

Hazel Stone, their grandmother, had been an engineer at the Atomic Energy Commission. “I saw three big, hairy, male men promoted over my head and not one of them could do a partial integration without a pencil,” she said. Hazel was also a pilot, a revolutionary, and a writer. Hazel Stone was the quintessential character embodying the traits Robert Heinlein saw in his wife Ginny.

Meade Stone was the boys’ older sister. “She could get a job with Four Planets tomorrow if they weren’t so stuffy about hiring female pilots, ” Hazel said of her. And Meade is co-piloting the Rolling Stone in the last scene.

Starman Jones (1953)

Ellie Coburn, turns out to be a chess champion who was playing down so as not to crush the dumb male ego, “has it ever occurred to you, the world being what it is, that women sometimes prefer not to appear too bright.” Heinlein’s female characters frequently dominate the males, yet do it in a way that isn’t overt, that preserves the fragile male ego. At some point the men usually get over it and realize how much they like strong, confident, capable women.

Maggie Daigler was a soft society lady who “had put away her jewels, drawn dungarees from ship’s stores, and chopped off her hair. Her nails were short and usually black with grime.”

The Star Beast (1954)

What can I say… pretty much the theme of the whole book is about female domination of the dumber, weaker males.

Betty Sorensen, smarter than John Thomas Stuart, and dominates him completely.

Lummox turns out to be a female who rules her species and was the senior person in the, “raising” John Thomases project.

Tunnel In the Sky (1955)

A solid example of Heinlein’s view of the abilities and equality of men and women. Male and female high school student are on an equal par in the life/death survival test. The women survive better than the men, with the bulk of the stupidest fatal mistakes being done by the men. Among the many strong female characters in this story are:

Helen Walker, Rod’s sister, assault captain in the Amazons, an all-female military unit that sounds not at all dainty.

Jack (Jaqueline) Daudet, that Rod takes as male at first, clearly doing far better than Rod or Jim.

Caroline Mshiyeni, as tough as they come, smart, strong, confident, Captain of the Guard.

Add to the sound female role models and attitudes in this book, the bonus of a racially integrated cast where minority characters aren’t presented as anything other than characters. As well as Caroline Mshiyeni, the main character, Rod Walker, was black. Bear in mind, this book was written in 1955.

Time for the Stars (1956)

The heads of the entire research project into the twins’ telepathy are females, Dr. Arnault, with a degree in science, and Dr. Mabel Lichtenstein, “boss of the research team and world famous.”

Among the numerous important female characters on the ship, Janet Meers stands out. She’s a relativist/engineer who “was a lightning calculator. ” Again, Heinlein’s women characters are superior in their math skills.

Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)

Mother Shaum, business woman, ran a taproom, lodging house, and rescued Thorby, the male main character.

Dr. Margaret Mader, anthropologist, scientist

The Free Traders—all Chief Officers were women

Mata Kingsolver, (Free Trader), mathematician, computer operator, fire controlman

Have Space Suit Will Travel (1958)

PeeWee, young but solidly resolute

Mother Thing

Starship Troopers (1959)

Starship Troopers is another of the “best” examples Heinlein’s positive female role models in the juvenile novels. While, like Space Cadet, it’s about manly men in a manly military, all the Navy spaceship pilots are female—they’re better at math. They also have the virtue over male pilots in that women pilots always come back to recover the men in their charge.

Podkayne of Mars (1963)

I’m a bit iffy on this book and the main character. Poddy may be a good role model for boys reading, but I think she’s less so for girls. Nevertheless, there are many other strong female characters around her.

Poddy’s mother, “Master Engineer, Heavy Construction, Surface or Free Fall”—rebuilt the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos

Girdie—who turns out to be tough and smart

Mrs. Grew—old cheery lady who turns out to be the primary villain, and one of the wickedest in Heinlein’s books.

Strong Women Characters in Early Heinlein

by G. E. Rule (Geo Rule) ©2003

  This article is based on a presentation given by me at BayCon 2003, May 24, 2003, in a panel discussion by Heinlein Society members on Heinlein’s Women characters. My portion of the discussion was on the portrayal of Women characters prior to 1942 when RAH met his third wife, Virginia, who is often credited as the role-model for many of his later strong women characters. My point was to show that he was using strong women characters from the beginning (which is not to deny that Ginny was the model in many cases later on). Other panelists were Bill Patterson, Robert “Doc” James, David Silver, and Deb Houdek Rule. Deb pretty much stole the show, but then she is the “most qualified” to discuss the subject! 

The version given below is slightly expanded from that given at the Con, with good lines stolen from fellow panelists (Thanks!) in some instances. The whole “Magic, Inc.” section was added when an audience member mentioned it as a good example of what I was trying to show.  I’d remembered it mostly as an EPIC-inspired political shenanigans fantasy, but when I went back to look, darn if the audience member wasn’t right. As Deb pointed out in her section, this was one of Heinlein’s great strengths  –he had a great ability to “teach under the radar” on subjects that were only peripherally connected to the story at hand, and so subtly that you usually didn’t catch him at it unless you were on the lookout for it.

There is no doubt that remarkable woman, Ginny Gerstenfeld Heinlein, was the model for many of Heinlein’s later strong and talented women characters.  It isn’t my purpose to attempt to disprove that truth. My co-panelist Doc James (author of “Regarding Leslyn” available in the Heinlein Journal, issue 9) will tell you that Leslyn MacDonald Heinlein was a model for some of the strong characters in the period I am about to discuss. I don’t deny that either.  All I am trying to show is that RAH was writing strong women characters right from the beginning of his published career. He liked strong, competent women. 

Let There Be Light” (1940 Super Science Stories; “Lyle Monroe” after Campbell turned it down for being too sexy –does not appear in all copies of the “Chart”, but Douglas & Martin and their sunscreen does. Published by a young, wet-behind-the-ears editor by the name of Fred Pohl.)

If you don’t know what Heinlein’s “Future History” is, then you need to buy a copy of “The Past Through Tomorrow” (which contains most of the Future History) and “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (which includes “Let There Be Light”) and find out what all the shouting is about.  Polls of science fiction aficionados consistently place RAH’s Future History as one of the great achievements in SF history. A thematically connected series of stories that assumed and built on each other while being entirely separate at the same time, it was a bold concept for its time.

The Future History was co-founded by a woman. Mary Lou Martin is a bio-chemist and ecologist with “enough degrees for six men”, so many that her soon-to-be-partner Archie Douglas assumes “he” is going to be an old man, and can tell that “he” is a “heavy-weight” in scientific circles.

“Figure like a strip-dancer”, blond, blue-eyes. Sassy. Lots of sex-appeal.

She initiates the contact with Douglas, traveling 1,500 miles to work with him after reading one of his articles on “cold light”. She makes the conceptual breakthrough “why can’t we cut a crystal that would have a natural frequency in the octave of visible light?” that leads to the “Douglas-Martin sunscreen”. She pulls, prods, and bullies him into completing the engineering. Finally, she is the one that realizes that the only way to beat the big power companies who are trying to throttle them with lawsuits is to make all the details of their discovery public to the whole world.

You’ll notice that the poor girl still doesn’t get top-billing, however. Maybe we should start an online petition to change the name to the “Martin-Douglas Sunscreen”!

The raw material of the Douglas-Martin Sunscreen is clay, available anywhere.  The cheap, abundant, and efficient power, heat, and light provided by the Douglas-Martin Sunscreen is the technological foundation for the rest of the Future History.

“Magic, Inc” (1940, Unknown, Robert A. Heinlein)

An out-and-out fantasy about what would happen if magic was just another part of the world, much like science and technology. The hero, Archibald Fraser, is a building supplies contractor. The story revolves around the ubiquitous use of “commercial magic”, with Heinlein showing a great deal of inventiveness in how magic could be used profitably for very mundane purposes. This story is usually remembered as a “political shenanigans story”, with Heinlein clearly using his experiences as a lieutenant in Upton Sinclair’s EPIC organization in the 1930’s. This background provided most of the details of parliamentary procedure and techniques of political skullduggery used in the maneuvering to gain or forestall monopolistic control of the magic that most businessman required to keep their businesses profitable.

Amanda Todd Jennings is a “white witch”, described as grandmotherly and “ninety years older than Santy Claus, and feeble to boot”. She is also an incredibly strong and determined woman who is the real hero of the story. Her command of the denizens of the “half world” (gnomes and such) and Hell itself is very impressive. In one remarkable scene she makes Satan himself back down:

“Satan Mekratig,” she said slowly, “do you wish to try your strength with me?”

“With you, madam?” He looked at her carefully, as if inspecting her for the first time. “Well, it’s been a trying day, hasn’t it? Suppose we say no more about it. Till another time, then—“.

He was gone.

Mrs. Jennings characterization made me want to do some research on Heinlein’s grade-school teachers in search of her model. Her handling of the Gnome King reminded me of nothing so much as a surly third-grader being brought to heel.

Sally Logan is a political insider at the state capitol, who gets her way by knowing everyone and everyone owing her a favor. She never accepts political patronage jobs, and is highly respected because of it. Another main character, Joe Jedson, describes her to Archie Fraser as “combining the shrewdness of Machiavelli with the great-hearted integrity of Oliver Wendell Holmes”. After meeting her, Archie describes her thusly:

I had unconsciously expected something pretty formidable in the way of a mannish matron. What I saw was a plump, cheerful-looking blond, with an untidy mass of yellow hair and frank blue eyes. She was entirely feminine, not over thirty at the outside, and there was something about her that was tremendously reassuring.

She made me think of county fairs and well water and sugar cookies.

And she also knows where all the bodies are buried at the state capitol and who dug the graves. Possibly she was handling the shovel on more than a few of those jobs herself.

In talking about Sally Logan, Joe Jedson describes why he prefers her to many other women in politics. One must remember that this is 1940 we’re talking about, but the following description is very informative:

“Sally isn’t a woman politician, she is simply a politician, and asks no special consideration because of her sex. She can stand up and trade punches with the toughest manipulators on the Hill. What I said about women politicians is perfectly true, as a statistical generalization, but it proves nothing about any particular woman”.

“It’s like this: Most women in the United States have shortsighted, peasant individualism resulting from the male-created romantic tradition of the last century. They were told that they were superior creatures, a little nearer to the angels than their menfolks. They were not encouraged to think nor to assume social responsibility. It takes a strong mind to break out of that sort of conditioning, and most minds simply aren’t up to it, male or female.

“Consequently, women as electors are usually suckers for romantic nonsense. They can be flattered into misusing their ballot even more easily than men. In politics their self-righteous felling of virtue, combined with their essentially peasant training, resulted in their introducing a type of cut-rate, petty chiseling that should make Boss Tweed spin in his coffin”.

“But Sally’s not like that. She’s got a tough mind which could reject the hokum”.

“You’re not in love with her, are you?”

“Who, me? Sally’s happily married and has two of the best kids I know.”

One could read the above passage as an attack on “most women” in politics, circa 1940, but I suggest that a much more accurate reading would be a profound admiration for strong, competent women with enough character to reject pervasive patriarchal societal stereotypes without losing their femininity in the process.

While the purpose of this essay is to look at strong female characters in Heinlein’s work prior to 1942, I simply can’t leave “Magic Inc.” without looking at Heinlein’s handling of race in this story as well.

Dr. Royce Worthington is a “witch-smeller”, sort of an anti-witch. He is impeccably dressed and speaks with “a cultured British voice, with a hint of Oxford in it”. Archie describes their first meeting:

My office girl brought in his card a half hour later. I got up to great him and saw a tall, heavy-set man with a face of great dignity and evident intelligence. He was dressed in rather conservative, expensively tailored clothes and carried gloves, stick, and a large brief-case. But he was black as draftsman’s ink!

I tried not to show my surprise. I hope I did not, for I have an utter horror of showing that kind of rudeness. There was no reason why the man should not be a Negro. I simply had not been expecting it.

One suspects “an utter horror of showing that kind of rudeness” is the author speaking for himself as well. Sexism and racism have often been linked, and as a corollary, anti-sexism and anti-racism are also often found together. Dr. Worthington is a native African, and Archie ruminates on stereotypes founded on African-Americans:

We white men in this country are inclined to underestimate the black man –I know that I do—because we see him out of his cultural matrix. Those we know have had their own culture wrenched from them some generations back and a servile pseudo culture imposed on them by  force. We forget that the black man has a culture of his own, older than ours and more solidly  grounded, based on character and the power of the mind rather than the cheap ephemeral tricks of mechanical gadgets.

Strong, in-your-face stuff for 1940.

“If This Goes On–” (1940, Astounding, Robert A. Heinlein)

One of the most celebrated of Heinlein’s stories, and a cornerstone of the Future History, “If This Goes On—“ describes the overthrow of a theocracy that has replaced constitutional democracy in the United States. The rule of the “Prophet Incarnate” uses religious superstition and advanced science—carefully restricted to governmental use—to control the population. Meanwhile, the “Cabal”—based in part on Free Masonry and in part on the secret societies active in Heinlein’s own Missouri during the Civil War—works to overthrow the Prophets and restore the U. S. Constitution.

Heinlein’s protagonist is the twitterpated choirboy, John Lyle. Lyle is a West Point graduate and newly made “Legate” (read 2nd Lieutenant) in the “Angels of the Lord” stationed at the Prophet’s palace in New Jerusalem. Lyle becomes infatuated with the Virgin Sister Judith. “Virgin” is her condition as well as her title, and she–and Lyle—become horrified when her true duties to the Prophet Incarnate become unmistakably clear in a very earthy manner.

If written up by the official historian of the Cabal, Sister Maggie Andrews would be the real hero of the story. It is she, another of the Prophet’s wives, who precipitates the crisis early in the story that moves Lyle, his worldly-friend Zebadiah Jones, and Sister Judith from peccadilloes to treason. When a clandestine meeting between Sister Judith and Lyle is discovered by a spy, it is Sister Maggie who attacks the spy and kills him; quickly and quietly by sticking a blade between his ribs.  She vouches for Lyle to her brethren in the Cabal, saving his life when many of them are not sure they can take a chance on a young man who is so clearly deeply indoctrinated in the rightness of the Prophets’ rule. While the others are safe in the arms of the Cabal, it is Sister Maggie who ventures out to see if the authorities have discovered that they are the culprits –a job that easily could have resulted in an excruciating death at the hands of the Grand Inquisitor.

While Sister Maggie is not well-educated nor trained because of the society she lives in, she is another of Heinlein’s supremely competent women, fearless and clear-eyed in a crisis.  After leaving her undercover work, she becomes “Sergeant Andrews” with the Cabal and works for the final overthrow of the Prophet.

It is interesting to note the difference between Zebadiah Jones and Sister Maggie in the early part of Heinlein’s story.  Zebadiah is highly intelligent and trained, and clearly understands the immorality and basic sickness of the society in which he lives.  He is the wise City Slicker to John Lyle’s Country Cousin. He knows about the Cabal, and knows that Sister Maggie is a member of it. Yet when the story opens he isn’t doing anything concrete to oppose the regime, except to play the game to his own advantage in a sardonic above-it-all manner.  That is until Sister Maggie’s actions precipitate the crisis that forces him to confront the situation and make a choice.

Heinlein rewrote this story in 1953, and an interesting difference between the two is that in the earlier story Heinlein allows Lyle to marry the inconsequential piece-of-fluff Judith.  In the later story, Sister Maggie becomes John’s wife, in spite of her checkered past (we are told she had many affairs once the Prophet “was through with her”).  We are also told that that her personality chart shows a dominant personality that “looks like the Rocky Mountains!”

“–We Also Walk Dogs” (1941, Astounding –Anson MacDonald)

General Services Corporation will provide any service (except murder) for a price.  Grace Cormet is an “aristocrat of resourcefulness” that handles the special customers with the highest credit ratings and most outrageous requests. Married, she does not use her married name, but instead stays “Miss Cormet”. Cool, unshakeable, terrifically competent. She immediately recognizes the serious nature of an unusual request from a Planetary Official and decides on her own authority to disregard company policy.

Not particularly sexual (from what we can see), but she is willing to be so if the job requires it. A natural brunette with a dark complexion (a tip-off that she is modeled on Leslyn MacDonald Heinlein), she dies her hair blond and bleaches her skin to influence a government official whose “weakness is blonds” to fulfill one mission. Her boss regards the makeover as “stupendous”, but she immediately returns to natural when it is no longer necessary. Grace Cormet leads GSC’s successful effort to invent a “gravity-shield” and secure incalculable advantages to Earth (and, oh yeah, General Services Corporation too).  Just another successful commission for GSC and Grace.

A Study of “IF THIS GOES ON—” Bill Patterson

by Bill Patterson ©2000

This article originally appeared in The Heinlein Journal, Issue #7, July 2000

Editor’s Note: The revised version of “If This Goes On—” published in 1953’s Revolt in 2100 is eligible for consideration (subject to the Hugo administrator’s final authority on what constitutes a “Revised” work) for a Retro Hugo at the 2004 Worldcon, Noreascon Four, Boston, Massachusetts. As originally published at 33,000 words in 1940 it was a novella. The 1953 rewrite –the version that the overwhelming number of SF fans are familiar with as one of the keystones of Heinlein’s Future History— weighs in at 57,300 words, which makes it a novel for Hugo purposes. 1953’s Starman Jones is also eligible for consideration for a Retro Hugo at Noreascon Four.

Gifford NHOL 011 ca. 57,300 words in final version. Published in 33,800 word version February and March 1940 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; rewritten, expanded to 57,300 words, and collected into REVOLT IN 2100 (1953) and THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW (1967

SUMMARY OF THE STORY

Elements of the story [in brackets] were not in the original publication; elements stricken through were removed in the book version.

John Lyle, Legate and Angel of the Lord, a member of the elite corps that guards the holy person of the Prophet Incarnate, has a sickness in his soul: he finds life at the Palace, capital of the former United States, disillusioning. While standing guard on a parapet one night, he meets Sister Judith – a fresh-caught Virgin, nervous about her coming service to the Prophet. He is smitten with her. [They meet twice, briefly, before] her lot is drawn and she panics when she overhears the Prophet in a cynical discussion of taxes [called on to service the Prophet sexually]. At great risk, Lyle induces his friend Zebadiah Jones, to help set up a meeting with Judith while she is under discipline. They decide to recruit help from The Cabal, an underground resistance group, or consortium of groups led by Freemasons and committed to restoring secular, democratic government to the United States. Lyle and Zeb join the Cabal and the local Masonic lodge. Judith is arrested; the Cabal spirits her away to safety. Lyle undergoes the Inquisition but his hypnopedic conditioning holds, and the Cabal rescues him, as well. [Underground now, he begins to learn about his heritage of freedom as an American and as a Freemason].

Disguised as a textiles drummer, Lyle couriers information to various cells of the Cabal around the country. About to be unmasked, he steals a skycar and crashes out of custody. Evading his pursuers, he flees for the hidden center of the Cabal, somewhere in Arizona. He goes underground in a more literal way, meeting up again with Zeb, who has transferred to headquarters in the meantime, as well. Both Lyle and Zeb are valuable additions to the Cabal, as they have West Point training in the Applied Miracles and military strategy and tactics the Cabal will use to stage the Second American Revolution. [Lyle begins a process of personal growth, shedding some of his personal rigidity.] He winds up as aide to General Huxley, the military commander of the Assault forces. [He receives a "Dear John" letter from Judith and begins dating Maggie, the Virgin and Cabal member who had helped him rescue Judith]

Even when they are militarily ready, however, the Cabal’s professional psycho technicians insist that they can win the battle but still lose the civil war that will follow if the populace is not psychologically prepared for the Revolution. Zebadiah proposes that they coordinate the assault with highjacking one of the official miracles of the American Theocracy, substituting their own propaganda figure for the annual Miracle of the Incarnation so that the founder of the Theocracy himself denounces the reigning Prophet Incarnate. The emotional shock will delay automatic resistance until they can consolidate their military win.

The assault is successful, though New Jerusalem holds out for some weeks after the rest of the country is secured. The Cabal sets up civil government capitalled in St. Louis, and begins a program of mass hypnotic reorientation of the once subject populace. [A program of hypnotic reconditioning of the populace toward non-religious freedom is proposed and rejected because "free men are not conditioned. "]

Lyle [marries Maggie and] arranges to be with Huxley during the final assault on New Jerusalem, using telepaths to handle communications with the forces. During the assault, General Huxley is killed; John Lyle quietly issues orders to keep the assault on track, then turns over command to the next in line. At the crucial moment, the Cabal forces holed up within New Jerusalem join with the assault forces attacking from outside, and the citadel falls, the Prophet torn apart by his “Virgins” before he can be captured.

After the Revolution John Lyle gives up the military life, marries Judith, and takes up a career as a textiles drummer.

1. Composition and Publishing History

As the summer of 1939 drew to a close, Heinlein’s writing was going well. His first story, “Life-Line,” appeared in the August 1939 ASTOUNDING, and Campbell bought “Misfit” (also in August, following extensive revisions over the summer). He had also rejected half a dozen other stories, but Heinlein felt that he had found Campbell’s range, to use a gunner’s expression. “—Vine and Fig Tree—” was written in August, apparently after some correspondence with Campbell which has not been preserved, but which is implied in the few mentions of this story in GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE.

Campbell was extremely enthusiastic about the story, turning down an Asimov story proposal on the religious theme to avoid either conflict or undue repetition. [Asimov, 247]. The story was accepted on August 25 at 33,800 words, a novella, though sometimes spoken of as a novel, but in any case long enough to make a two-part serial. Campbell retitled it with a reflection of the most basic extrapolation technique of science fiction, “‘If This Goes On—.” For some time, the readership and fans of science fiction had been calling for more “sociological” stories, and this was it, with a vengeance. Campbell scheduled it for the February and March 1940 issues of ASTOUNDING, following serialization of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s GRAY LENSMAN, and wrote a special editorial for the February issue dealing with the development of psychology as a science, a topic on which the story turns. As it happened, a story written later (“Requiem”) was scheduled for the January 1940 issue of ASTOUNDING, so Heinlein was in the first three issues of the new year with exceptionally strong stories that put him in the first rank of science fiction writers. [Note 1] Heinlein’s personal technique of working out backstory on the level of domestic detail and combining imagined detail on a parity level with recalled, real-life detail had produced stories of unusual “depth” for science fiction at the time, and the readers were no less quick than Campbell to notice and applaud (though the striking cover by Hubert Rogers for the February issue got almost —but not quite— as much and as enthusiastic approval). The comment by reader Joseph Gilbert in the April 1940 “Brass Tacks” letter column is typical:

“Heinlein is really going places. He has a mastery of technical principles that is amazing in such a new writer. He is so convincing and logical, and so forceful, that it is irritating to reach the end of one of his tales. The thesis that he presents in ‘If This Goes On—’ is not only interesting; it approaches fact a bit too intimately for comfort. . .” [160]

Indeed, Futurian fan Johnny Michel wrote to Campbell saying that as he was reading the first installment, his home was invaded by a disciple of Judge Rutherford of the Watchtower Society (the Jehovah’s Witnesses)^NOTE, declaiming about the coming Theocratic takeover. Too intimate for comfort, indeed!

Both parts of “If This Goes On—” placed first in the Analytical Laboratory (readers’ preference polls) published in May and June 1940. That summer, in a trip that included New York and Chicago, where he observed the Democratic National Convention re-nominate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Heinlein visited the Queens Science Fiction League specifically to talk about “If This Goes On-”

After World War II, science fiction experienced a boom that included development of a market for hardback books. A number of fan and specialty presses emerged, including Erle Korshak’s and T.E. Ditky’s Shasta Press. From 1950, Heinlein began to issue collections of his stories, including three volumes of the Future History, THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON (1950), THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH (1951), and REVOLT IN 2100 (1953). [Note 2]

Heinlein carefully edited his stories for permanent collection, but the changes were usually minor (e.g., adding jets to “Elsewhen” or changing a reference to a “honey blonde” from Sally Rand to Betty Grable and then to Marilyn Monroe in “Let There Be Light”). In a few cases, he took the opportunity to undo an undue editorial interference —restoring the title of “Lost Legion” to its original “Lost Legacy” and returning the “Ambrose James” of the magazine publication to his original Ambrose Bierce, or restoring a character cut out of his original draft for magazine publication of “Elsewhen” (this, too, is a restored title; Campbell had published it as “Elsewhere.”) These looked like significant rewriting, but they were actually restorations to their original —i.e., “as written” —version.

For collection into REVOLT IN 2100, Heinlein completely rewrote “If This Goes On—,” almost doubling its size. Many of the changes add detail about the Cabal; others reflect the mature craftsman smoothing over roughnesses of style. He tones down the drama of the leap from the rocket skycar —quite dramatic without the description of leaping through a sheet of flame. But other changes work on the characterization of the individuals, making the motivations more credible. Perhaps he also took to heart another reader comment, about the ending collapsing, in the ASTOUNDING letter column. At any rate, Heinlein, 1953, was a much more skilled and polished craftsman than Heinlein, 1939, and he took the opportunity to revise this pivotal story of the Future History. This is the version that is most familiar to modern readers of Heinlein, for it was very widely distributed in paperback editions through the 1960′s and was collected again into the Future History omnibus THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW (1967).

Around the same time, Heinlein made significant revisions in several works, including METHUSELAH’S CHILDREN, before concluding that time spent on such revisions was wasted effort and his time and energy could be more productively spent on writing new material.

2. Story Structure and Technique

The story line of “If This Goes On—” unfolds in a fairly straightforward manner, with few obvious technical innovations. It is, again, a Wellsian story that “domesticates the impossible hypothesis,” and Heinlein makes full use of his technique, first explored in “Misfit,” of using recalled detail to give parity to imagined detail. Campbell spoke admiringly of Heinlein giving him stories that might appear in the POST or COLLIERS of the day in which the story is set, the furnishings of that future thoroughly imagined and integrated. Later he was to speak of this as the ideal for ASTOUNDING stories in general. Even in this apparently transparent story, however, there is technical innovation. Like “Life-Line,” whose story is composed of interlocking lines of thematic development (instead of a conventional, story-line driven plot), the story line of “If This Goes On—” is dominated by a thematic progression that significantly determines the imagery in use at any given point in the story. It starts in the faux-Medieval imagery of the Graustark romances, progresses into bourgeois secular modernism, and then progresses again to transcend secular modernism with the establishment of the “First Human Civilization.”

In the magazine version of the story, this progression carries the story along by itself (aided, it is true, by some probably unconscious transpersonal symbolism of sky and caves and underground). John Lyle drops out of the shield-and-buckler military of the Prophet Incarnate, significantly going underground in order to travel in the sky as a commercial traveler, a textiles drummer, then goes underground again, into a magnificent cavern. He joins the heart of the Cabal deep within the earth, where the transformative technology of the day is put into the service of liberal ideals of freedom. Along the way, his social usefulness has blossomed and gained scope: he has gone from a mere decorative ornament in the pomp and ritual of the Palace, to a useful citizen, to an important —even at one point pivotal— agent of human transformation. When John Lyle’s pivotal or transcendent moment passes, he goes back to being a merely useful citizen in the secular-bourgeois world.

Heinlein may not have been conscious of the progression in 1939; fourteen years later, he is more in command of his materials, more aware of the potentialities of his progression and the story developments that will suit them: the revision for REVOLT IN 2100 strengthens the progression by interleaving a story of John Lyle’s personal, intellectual, and moral growth into the broader story of a historical movement and moment of crisis. Heinlein builds in a double discovery-of-hidden-knowledge progression: the initiation into the Masonic-led Cabal with its implied (but not delineated) progression into the secret rituals and doctrines of Freemasonry is paralleled by his self-education into the knowledge familiar to us but made strange and esoteric within the confines of the story of the liberal traditions of the pre-Theocracy United States. The two parallel lines of progression are explicitly linked by Lyle’s discovery that a number of the Founding Fathers were themselves Freemasons, and Heinlein implies that the discovery of this esoteric and “hidden” knowledge is itself a psychological reorientation of an ongoing, self-rectifying type. John Lyle did not require the hypnotic reorientation proposed for the masses (actually carried out in one line in the magazine version and rejected as inappropriate in the book version). His exposure to Masonic theory and American history has taught him critical thinking, and on that foundation he erects the new man. At the start he passively accepts the values of his environment; by the end he has become proactive. The theme of “If This Goes On—” is thus individuation, the process of becoming an independent and self-actualizing human being.

Lyle’s re-orientation is portrayed in a third parallel progression in the 1953 revision: Lyle first loses his prudery and then courts and ultimately marries the somewhat shopworn but nonetheless supremely “grounded” Maggie —Sister Magdalene of the Cabal-in-the-Palace. In this version, we leave John Lyle caught at his moment of transcendence; the unsatisfactory “Prolog at the End” that reunites John Lyle with Judith and replaces him in the sublunary world is simply truncated out. The essential material, dernier pensees about the nature of personal freedom in despite of the manipulations of semanticists and propaganda, has been embodied within the story now.

The ellipsis of the magazine version’s unsatisfying “Prolog At the End” is probably also related to the changed treatment of hypno-conditioning the populace and reflects, not so much ambiguity or a change of heart on Heinlein’s part between 1939 and 1953 (as H. Bruce Franklin implies at 33), as a recognition that the technocratic program of reeducation and psychological reorientation, assumed as necessary as a matter of course, was not consistent with the liberal goals of the Cabal —which are also the liberal values of the America of Heinlein and his wider range of readers.

“If This Goes On—” is the first of Heinlein’s many important first-person narratives, and the “Prolog At the End” displays the magazine version in the artifice of a journal —a device Heinlein was to use more effectively when he was more in command of the technique (e.g., TIME FOR THE STARS and DOUBLE STAR). The artifice is removed in the book version, to very good effect: it jarred when we discovered John Lyle was not, as he had seemed, speaking to us at all —we have been snooping in a communication intended for the psychometricians of the Cabal. In the revision, John Lyle speaks to us directly, much more effectively.

The few instances of revisions in Heinlein’s work are all unusually impressive. Typically, the work was conceived as a whole and written straight through. Comparison of the submission versions of the manuscripts with the carbons of different versions, which are often preserved with the submission copies and tearsheets in the archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz Special Collections, suggest that he was accustomed to brush-pen his verbiage as a first step, “tightening up” the prose, eliminating dependent clauses and prepositional phrases. His self-editing thus tended to be a matter of excision. There are several stories in the archives (most particularly the stories for the POST and the “slicks” written in the late 1940s) that are substantially larger in their as-written form than the as-published form. Revision, on the other hand –rewriting— involved reconceiving the story in an ampler and denser form. Heinlein was, finally, the only person who could edit Heinlein.

3. Stylistic Considerations

The composition of “If This Goes On—” took place in August and September of 1939 and shows Heinlein in full command of his very identifiable prose style and distinctive “voice,” less than six months after he started commercial writing. Yet we find here very little of the slanginess of the New Deal era and much of the biblical quotations that ornament the speech of low protestant and pentecostal sectarians of the American Midwest and South (for both of which Heinlein’s Missouri background qualifies him, protestations of the deeper South to the contrary notwithstanding). Heinlein was raised a Methodist, a sect now regarded as staid but with a rambunctious and evangelical past. He uses the biblical language and imagery with ease, again, both recalling and imagining usages appropriate to his situations.

4. Prior Commentators

Each of the critics who has written general surveys of the oeuvre commented —sometimes extensively— on “If This Goes On—”

In HEINLEIN IN DIMENSION, Panshin places the story in “The Period of Influence” but remarks that it is not well told —”thrown together any which way.” [13] This seems to be a standard or ritual complaint of Panshin’s, not a critique per se, as he makes no attempt to analyze the story’s actual structure. He sees it as exciting but melodramatic, citing the incident of the “Mark Twain”-like character who dies (in the book version) denouncing the proposed hypno-conditioning of the American people as forced emotion. [112] Panshin analyzes John Lyle as an example of the Stage 1 (Adolescent) Heinlein individual. [129] In his later SF IN DIMENSION, cowritten with his wife, Cory Panshin, he places the story, in his “subjective” reading, viewing Heinlein’s first suite of stories as “meaningful self-questioning.” [112] It is an example of Heinlein’s supposed “first crisis,” an individuation crisis moving from self-in-family orientation to self-in-peer-group orientation. Consistent with his position that Heinlein has avoided confronting personal terrors, he notes that “[o]ne of the significant factors in Heinlein’s representations of this crisis is that the Demonic is confronted only distantly.” [113] [Note 3]

In CLASSIC YEARS, George Edgar Slusser sees John Lyle as an Elect individual carrying out a predestined role in history and experiencing different aspects of the revolution only for purposes of exposition. [25-27] Confusingly, he notes character and personality changes but insists that John Lyle nevertheless remains static and undeveloping.

H. Bruce Franklin carelessly (and sensationalisticly) conflates the two versions in his one-paragraph summary at 30 of ROBERT A. HEINLEIN: AMERICA AS SCIENCE FICTION. Pursuing the metaphor of his subtitle, Franklin looks at the story in terms of the two views of liberty (and what should be done about it) presented and concludes that Heinlein is unable to resolve the dilemma: the Revolution ought not to have been able to succeed by the terms of the story without the conditioning Heinlein accepts in 1939 but rejects in 1953. [Note 4]

Leon Stover in ROBERT A. HEINLEIN relates the Theocracy to Mark Twain’s well-publicized revulsion for the theocratic potential of Mary Baker Eddy’s First Church of Christ Scientist [55] and implies that the angry Twain-like Cabalist who inveighs against psycho-conditioning free men is an evocation of Twain speaking for the true spirit of America. [68]

“If This Goes On—” is referenced fifteen times in the index of the 1978 Ohlander/Greenberg collection of essays for Taplinger, ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, but the various essayists’ looks at the story add little to the major critiques, except sometimes by way of opposition (i.e., whereas Slusser sees the sexual content of the swimming incident in the hidden cave as “prurience” and “a higher form of titillation” [25], Sarti sees the same incident as a form of humanizing characterization, establishing John Lyle as “a vulnerable human being, subject to the doubts and fears which chain us all.” [122]

5. Thematic Considerations

Heinlein’s original title for this novella was “‘—Vine and Fig Tree—” a biblical quotation with a dual implication. Not only does it set up the pentecostal, low Protestant social and cultural background of the Scudder Theocracy with its constant and characteristic use of biblical imagery, it also recalls, quite deliberately, George Washington’s parting address to the nation, in which he used that quotation to describe the ideal of government in the new world he had helped to make. It looks forward to a time of stability, peace, and plenty. Freed from a tyrannous government, “he shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall make him afraid.” It also shows the quite conscious alignment of the Cabal with American liberal idealism, in opposition to the Theocratic state, thus turning the Theocracy’s biblical imagery back on itself —a mildly plangent irony.

This particular combination of images marks Heinlein as a liberal in the native tradition. Throughout the nineteenth century, the predominant issue of conservative movements in America had been what might loosely be called “establishmentarianism,” the desire to establish a church —and preferably a pentecostal church— as the overriding authority in the American system of government. The “blue laws” that resulted from this religious political movement (such as the Comstock Law regarding postal dissemination of “objectionable” matter) cast a blight over America’s cultural life well into the 20th century. By the time of the passage of the Comstock Law in 1873, the success of the gradual de-secularization process was so alarming that virtually all factions of America’s native liberalism united in the urgent need to fight the anti-secularists. [Sears, passim but particularly Chapter 2]. Secularism thus became the dominant issue of American liberalism, with the Freethinkers as a radical wing of the liberal movement. Heinlein’s concern with issues such as marriage reform and free love place him securely within the Freethought branch of the American liberal movement.

Even in 1940, religious dictatorships were common situations for science fiction. But Heinlein’s Theocracy is something special. Campbell was entranced by the mass psychology treated as an engineering discipline; others remarked on the Applied Miracles studied at West point and turned against the Prophet by the Cabal. The ironic possibilities in these “backstory” elements are fascinating in themselves, and it is possible that a great deal of the “depth” of story imagining attributed to Heinlein lies in the incorporation of realistic ironies of this type at many different levels.

Heinlein’s principal starting point for the Scudder Theocracy was probably Mark Twain’s gloomy prediction that the U.S. would likely be in a theocracy before 1940. Twain had Mary Baker Eddy in mind as his potential prophet(ess), but Christian Science was not the only such potential theocratic dictatorship. By 1940, the issue was by no means settled.

Heinlein’s original title is thus a writer’s encapsulation of the dominant internal imagery of his story. John Campbell, however, looked at the story from the “other end,” awed by its treatment of external and objective matters —particularly the treatment of mass psychology as a developing (or partially developed) science. He seems to have seen this story as the paradigmatic example of what science fiction could be and ought to be, for he gave the story a title which has almost nothing to do with the story line, but everything to do with its conceptual methods.

Under either name, this story display’s Heinlein’s basic progressivist faith, very strong yet in 1939 — that we can make things better by political action (war, or revolution, being conceptualized as an extension of political action by other means). This progressivist vision, too, is strongly rooted in the American liberal tradition, as “sociology,” in the 19th century and up to World War II, was conceived as a discipline oriented to social reform, which became, by Heinlein’s time, social engineering. Heinlein portrays the scientific development of psychometry as oriented entirely toward the preparation of the masses to inhabit their world —a highly Wellsian position that underlies the assumptions of both Theocrats and revolutionaries in this story.

Mythos

The story opens firmly entrenched in the conventions of the historical romance: a soldier on the battlements is disillusioned with the life that has been chosen for him by fate; a beautiful woman in distress happens into his life, and the adventure begins. The principal revision to this section of the book version has John Lyle meet Judith twice before her distress develops, somewhat softening the historical-romance conventions. The hero faces torture by the Grand Inquisitor after spiriting his beloved out of danger.

Rescued by the Cabal [Note 5], Lyle leaves the Graustark romances behind. With his initiation into Freemasonry, a naturalistic-bourgeois phase of the story commences. Lyle travels around the Theocracy disguised s a textiles drummer – an occupation in which he finds a certain satisfaction. This phase is emblematic of the modern and secular world, in which initiates work and live unrecognized among the mass of humanity.

The progression continues into a third phase that transcends secular modernity as Lyle helps bring to fruition the Great Work of the Masonic confraternity. He again goes underground: he goes to a church and asks for “light.” He is transported to a cavern system where, in personal terms, his intellectual and moral education is completed by reading the works of the Founding Fathers —Freemasons, many of them, as Masonic lodges had participated in the underground freedom movements of the 18th century. Simultaneously he transcends the “merely modern” as a functionary of the Cabal’s super-high-tech military force making use of psychological technologies as adjuncts to military technologies. He is particularly suited to this, as he had studied both technologies (e.g., Applied Miracles) as a graduate of West Point. The barely conscious Legate John Lyle transforms into the ordinary human textiles drummer and then transforms again into a species of superman, controlling the Miracle of the Incarnation.

The overt story line here is a process-of-learning tale of a type Heinlein later characterized as a “tale of a man who learns better.” This is a story pattern very closely related to the story of Bildung, which Heinlein was to make peculiarly his own. In the process of learning better, John Lyle’s personal development allows Heinlein to exhibit the Scudder Theocracy matured into a totalitarian police state complete with its underground resistance movement dedicated to the liberal ideals of the U.S., which nevertheless achieves a transcendent transformation into the Covenant society – the first scientific social document. The implication is clear: this transcendence is latent in our U.S.

But it is humans making this transformation, not statues of dead statesmen. John Lyle must give up the prudery and straitness of his upbringing before he can advance to selfactualization. The pivotal scene of Lyle’s personal growth is not contained in the magazine version (as, indeed, the entire subplot is not contained in the magazine version): it is the swimming scene in which Lyle is brought to consciousness of his sexual nature and that of his fellows. In a pool of clear water in a cavern hidden away in the heart of a cavern, deep within the earth (fraught symbol piled on fraught symbol), John Lyle immerses in realization and regenerates himself. [Note 6] The implication is clear that sexual awareness is a key element of personal awareness; Lyle’s progress is held up until he “gets” Eros, and from that time he can make a direct, personal contact with Maggie. When Heinlein portrays an overgrown adolescent as “shatteringly naive” in this fashion, he is defining one of the key areas in which Bildung must take place. The commercial demands of his market often require ellipsis, however, in precisely this area. In 1953 Heinlein was out from under the editorial thumb of Kay Tarrant, John Campbell’s extremely Catholic editorial assistant who ruthlessly blue-pencilled everything remotely sexual. Now he could show the necessary epiphany in story terms. Sometimes it happens that people are just not “connected” into the sexual circuit of the world, and that moment of connection must take place for a person to be a whole human being. Again, it is not possible to say whether this is Heinlein speaking of his own experience or talking about an experience important to his readers.

Panshin finds Lyle’s sudden passion for Sister Judith improbable [HEINLEIN, 17], but it seems, on the contrary, quite well founded in the context of the story. Lyle lacks, at the outset, significant life experience; nor has he developed any introspective or reflective habits of mind. And he is dissatisfied with his life. This is a prescription for a character likely to be moved by impulse and prone to obsession —and this is exactly what we see in John Lyle at the start of the story.

By way of contrast, the provocative scene near the end, where the now successfully individuated John Lyle discovers that the commanding general has been killed at a crucial moment of the battle for New Jerusalem, shows Lyle weighing factors, evaluating options, and making a mature, command decision —arguably the best one that could be made under the circumstances.

Most peoples’ experience of military command is from the bottom-up perspective of the enlisted man (or, more commonly, the draftee). Orders are never to be questioned from the bottom —but this is not the perspective of John Lyle; nor is it Heinlein’s view. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, he has been taught the other —and far more important— aspect of chain of command: when an order must not be obeyed. A trained officer is guided by the Tradition of his Service, and this, as much as navigation trigonometry or the manual of arms, or a course in Applied Miracles, is why the military academies must exist —a point Heinlein makes again in SPACE CADET. Command, ultimately, is not a rote matter of regulation and paperwork, but an art form that relies on the trained intuition of skilled practitioners, proved in the cauldron of contingency. John Lyle has been raised in the West Point (army) Tradition, and this scene shows John Lyle fulfilling the promise of his training. [Note 7] The next-in-command, Penoyer, is physically unable to assume command through having inadequate communications circuits, and Lyle is not required to turn command over to his stolid, local commander. He must evaluate and decide based on doctrine and tradition.

In the end it is not John Lyle’s decision that counts so much as the fact that he has become the kind of person who is capable of making such a decision. His process of personal transformation —of individuation— is complete. Growth has come of choice at cusp.

The book version ends with the successful results of Lyle’s command decision. Contingent reality has ratified his decision. But the discarded ending of the magazine version has a final comment about this process of individuation which is well worth noting: after the moment of epiphany, of transcendence, John Lyle returns to the world to marry and have children and unroll a few bolts of cloth under his own vine and fig tree. This transcendence, so hard won, is ultimately the raw material of ordinary life.

Dianoia

That Heinlein chose individuation as the theme of his first long fiction [Note 8] is a very clear indication that Heinlein is not, and never has been, a genre writer —no matter what grade of paper his fictions were printed on. Individuation is not merely unusual as a theme for a pulp story, it is, in a sense anti-pulp. Pulp writing assumes the adolescent moment of seizing power over the self and freezes the state of emotional development so that the adolescent finds a perpetual Vahalla of battles appropriate to his life-stage, with healing and great feasts afterwards and fight again next month when the newsstands resound with clashing swords of the imagination. Power fantasies appropriately dominate pulp writing. Power, however, was not principally Heinlein’s thing; he resonates, rather, to the uncovering of hidden knowledge. To Heinlein, growth takes place in the context of a community. The problem of individuation, for him, leaves no room for the solitary preoccupation of the Magus. His writing insists on growth, destabilizing the moment of empowerment on which the pulp genres depend, and moving into the community of self-determining individuals, with its necessary attendant compromises.

The individuation theme is present in the magazine version, with its strong contrast between the natural man at the beginning —emotionally immature, vacillating, and impulsive, with hardly a “self” to call his own— and the initiated John Lyle who can command an assault force with decision and strength —but its presentation is a little blurred by the melodramatic conventions of the Graustark romances. With developmental lines added in revision, the book version of the story has its theme strongly and clearly drawn.

Logos

The magazine version, with its focus on the figure of the initiate unrecognized within the mass of humankind and returning to the world after his initiatic work is accomplished, may colorably be read as a Masonic allegory, in much the same way that Mozart’s DIE ZAUBERFLOTE is a Masonic allegory.

Freemasonry was a “cutting edge” liberal movement in the 18th century, sharing in the contemporaneous vision of the dignity of man and the importance of the individual as against entrenched aristocracy —then, a landed hereditary nobility; now the apparatus of the bureaucratic state; in the Future History, the low protestant Theocracy. It is not a matter of coincidence that so many of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons or that Masonic symbolism worked its way into public documents (such as the Eye-and-pyramid symbol on paper currency). Just as America has preserved in some elements of its linguistic conventions a phonological “snapshot” of English diction circa 1620, so do traditional American socio-political values preserve a cultural “snapshot” of Enlightenment liberalism. These “classical liberal” values have been abandoned by the political left in the U.S. since about 1930, but anyone who became politically conscious before that time -as did Heinlein— will resonate to Freemasonry to some extent, if exposed to it.

The implication is that Heinlein need not to have been a Mason —or even have been close to a Mason— in order to make this approving portrait. [Note 9] This particular question has been put to Mrs. Heinlein on the internet on several occasions, and she has indicated he told her a very good friend had interested him in Freemasonry as a young man during a period of impoverishment when he could not afford the cost; by the time he could afford it, the moment had passed. Much Masonic ritual has been published and is freely available to anyone researching the subject in a well-equipped library. However, Heinlein’s treatment shows more than mere research: it shows understanding of the goals of Freemasonry, in their own terms.

The linking of Freemasonry to the liberal ideals of the U.S. in this story expresses Heinlein’s orientation toward individualism within the context of community life. That lifelong orientation explains the unparadoxical paradox of his simultaneous opposition to both fascism and communism [Note 10] and throws great illumination on those situations in which a cooperating human group opposes hive mentalities (e.g., METHUSELAH’S CHILDREN, THE PUPPETMASTERS, and STARSHIP TROOPERS).

“If This Goes On—” also contains Heinlein’s first approving reference to the Mormons’ social philosophy. For reasons unknown, no one has felt it necessary to suppose that Heinlein was a Mormon.

Another signature Heinlein trope makes its first appearance here in print: the telepath used as communicator. At the assault on New Jerusalem, General Huxley’s command car houses the telepathic circuits that will provide secure and unjammable communications —a device he will use as the keystone of an entire book in TIME FOR THE STARS. But it would appear again and again —and in “Project Nightmare,” the sensitives would take an active role in assault and defense.

It is quite likely that this represents one of the few definite instances of a “belief” personal to Heinlein that can be pointed to with confidence —at least in the limited sense that he extrapolated these uses for telepathy as possibilities that might be realized when the anecdotal evidence of reliable witnesses such as Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair was investigated scientifically. That is, his belief (if belief it was) was highly nuanced, not a flat “Yes, ’tis.” Moreover, this is not anything like a religious belief —like the miracle of Transsubstantiation or the immortality of the soul— concerning which there is no evidence one way or another; rather, it seems to fall within the category of pragmatic opinion: He seems to have believed there was something there, and that the available evidence warranted including ESP in general within the subject matter of scientific investigation, stating firmly and in his own voice in EXPANDED UNIVERSE, in a 1980 footnote to “The Third Millennium Opens: “Anyone today who simply brushes off ESP phenomena as being ridiculous is either pigheaded or ignorant.” [385] Scientific investigation of telepathy and clairvoyance (which have proved surprisingly difficult to separate one from the other) has been ongoing since 1929, but the field is still substantially where it was in that year. The phenomena seem to fall apart upon investigation.

The aspect of “If This Goes On—” that excited the most immediate comment from reader and editor alike at the time of its first publication in 1940 was Heinlein’s treatment of psychodynamics as an engineering —and specifically a social engineering— discipline comparable to thermodynamics or electrodynamics. This element was expanded upon in the 1953 revision, with a discussion of affect indices, and linked to the new subplot of John Lyle’s personal growth curve, showing that at that stage Lyle is still predominantly reactive and not yet predominantly proactive, as he will later become.

John Campbell was so taken with Heinlein’s treatment of psychodynamics that he made this theoretical discipline the subject of his February 1940 editorial. Campbell had taken over editorship of ASTOUNDING in 1938 with a program of encouraging better and more varied writing, going outside the two predominant models for science fiction in the 1930s —adventure stories and gadget stories. Campbell’s own writing since 1930 had swung between super-science epic space operas inspired by E.E. Smith and mood pieces published under his “Don A. Stuart” pseudonym. But for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, newly renamed from ASTOUNDING STORIES (itself renamed from its original ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE), Campbell wanted more “human” stories that looked at cutting-edge science with a “modern” viewpoint, to go beyond 19th century romance-adventure story models. In this, Campbell was quite in tune with the more radical among the science fiction fans vocally demanding better writing and more “sociological” stories. In the 1930′s, before sociology became accepted as a limited academic study, the term had somewhat different implications than it does now. It was assumed that scientific organization of social and cultural statistical data would be used principally for political reform —and that these reforms would be socialist (though not necessarily Marxist) in nature. Politics would be put in the service of “social engineering.” The very concept of social engineering was new to Heinlein’s generation and cutting edge. By way of contrast, the “traditional” view was that politics effected compromises among competing demands, so that “the art of the possible” meant “what your neighbors will let you get away with.” Around the turn of the century, visionaries such as H.G. Wells redefined the art of the possible in ways we now regard as utopian and unrealistic, but which seemed to them merely “the possible.”

Heinlein clearly shared in this progressivist vision. He would, indeed, have been quite out of step with his times if he did not, to one degree or another. Progressivist visions flowered quite remarkable in the 1930′s. Technocracy was particularly well thought of —as well as Functionalism and Eugenics— among science-fiction readers of the day. All these technical enthusiasms for social engineering in the western liberal democracies died off in the wake of World War II and the worldwide public exposure of what social engineering had meant in actual political practice in Germany and in the Soviet Union (and still means in Communist China). But in 1939 the bloom of innocence was still on social engineering. It had not yet known sin.

Heinlein conceives his psychodynamics as rising out of advertising methods, rather than out of clinical psychology. It is portrayed as a handmaiden of propaganda (the Master of the Palace Lodge at one point refers to a “technician in morale and propaganda” [49]), manipulating populations by systems of mathematics that make use of semantic indices for words – quantification of the emotional impact of one word-choice over another in a given context, which sounds a little like the foundation disciplines for Asimov’s “psychohistory.” The mathematics and data collection that would be required to support such a discipline would be quite sophisticated, and the fundamental theory for such a discipline has not, even yet, been worked out. Perhaps it is simply that human intuition has been, to date, “good enough” to achieve the more limited ends of advertising.

Quotations

“If This Goes On—” also contains the first of the “quotable Heinlein.” There are many quotable and aphoristic turns of phrase, but the most enduring of these kernals is a passage of concentrated classical liberal thought:

“Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy … [sic] censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything —you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” [53]

Coming close to the middle of the story, this passage shows the first fruits of John Lyle’s liberation, of his reading in the Cabal’s library while he recuperates from the torture of the Inquisition. The final statement has been viewed as rhetoric and hyperbole, but it is actually a summation of the example of Epictitus, a Stoic slave-philosopher of the ancient world who demonstrated the freedom of his mind by having his master twist his leg until it was broken.

Inside your head is where you are free. If there are cages inside your head, you are not free, no matter what your external circumstances may be.

6. Position in the Corpus

Clearly a Future History story, “If This Goes On—” marks the end of “The Crazy Years” and, coincidentally, the Korzybskyan childhood of mankind. The Covenant, termed the “first scientific political document” in “Coventry,” the next story in the Future History sequence, marks the beginning of the First Human Civilization on the Future History Chart. It is not a permanent utopia: further in the future, we see a period of civil disturbances around the time of METHUSELAH’S CHILDREN. It is a mistake to think that, just because the Covenant is “scientific,” Heinlein intends us to think it is necessarily perfect or even correct. It is the very first movement of the, again Korzybskyan, “adolescence of mankind,” with a presumed “adulthood” later on, off the chart. Certainly Secundus is portrayed as recognizably similar in some of its political features to the childhood and adolescent societies with which we are familiar. Perhaps the Tellus Tertius civilization is to be a model for the adulthood phase. Or perhaps the war of the Circle of Ouroboros in the World As Myth books with the multiplicity of villains and antagonists is intended to represent some kind of transition.

Certainly the Second American Revolution of “‘If This Goes On-”‘ is intended to represent a transition, sweeping away the last of the old order and presenting us with a true Novo Ordo Seclorum. The contradictions of insanities of the world order we live in froze into the Scudder Theocracy. Heinlein discussed the path by which the Theocracy came into existence in his postscript, “Concerning Stories Never Written,” for the REVOLT IN 2100 collection. The ideas were fully worked out in story terms, though he could never bring himself to write the three stories that led up to “If This Goes On—”: “Word Edgewise,” “The Stone Pillow,” and “The Sound of His Wings.” [Note 11]

Works Cited:

Analytical Laboratory, The. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (May, June 1940)

Asimov, Isaac. IN MEMORY YET GREEN. New York: Doubleday & Co. ,1979

Campbell, John W., Jr. “It Isn’t a Science —Yet!” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (February 1940)

Franklin, H. Bruce. ROBERT A. HEINLEIN: AMERICA AS SCIENCE FICTION. London: Oxford University Press, 1980

Gilbert, Joseph. Letter. “Brass Tacks.” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (April 1940)

Heinlein, Robert A. GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1989

——————————- . “‘If This Goes On—” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (February, March 1940)

————————————— “If This Goes On—” REVOLT IN 2100. New York: Baen Books, 1980 (1954)

————————————— “The Third Millennium Opens.” EXPANDED UNIVERSE: THE NEW WORLDS OF ROBERT A. HEINLEIN. New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1980

Jung, Carl G. “The Visions of Zosimos.” (1938) ALCHEMICAL STUDIES. Vol. 13 of Bollingen Series XX THE COLLECTED WORKS OF C.G. JUNG. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967

Moskowitz, Sam. SEEKERS OF TOMORROW. MASTERS OF MODERN SCIENCE FICTION. Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Co., 1966

Ohlander, Joseph D. and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. ROBERT A. HEINLEIN. Writers of the 21″ Century Series. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1978

Panshin, Alexei. HEINLEIN IN DIMENSION: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS. Chicago: Advent: Publishers, 1968

Panshin, Alexei and Cory Panshin. SF IN DIMENSION: A BOOK OF EXPLORATIONS. Chicago: Avent: Publishers, 1976

Sarti, Ronald. “Human Sexuality in the Work of Robert A. Heinlein.” Joseph D. Ohlander and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. ROBERT A. HEINLEIN. Writers of the 21^st Century Series. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1978

Sears, Hal D. THE SEX RADICALS: FREE LOVE IN HIGH VICTORIAN AMERICA. Lawrence, KS: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977

Slusser, George Edgar. CLASSIC YEARS OF ROBERT A. HEINLEIN. Riverside, CA: The Borgo Press, 1976

Stover, Leon: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (Twayne’s U.S. Author Series) Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987

Notes:

NOTE: The original attribution of “Seventh Day Adventist” in the Heinlein Journal publication was incorrect. Thanks to Jan Roof for pointing out this error. –Bill Patterson

1. Sam Moskowitz in SEEKERS OF TOMORROW holds that Heinlein’s reputation was not firmly established until “The Roads Must Roll” in the June 1940 issue of ASTOUNDING. Published reader reaction, however, seems to justify setting the publication of “If This Goes On—” in February and March 1940 as an unequivocal acceptance of Heinlein as, as one of the readers put it in the April 1940 letter column, “the best of the new authors.” Interestingly, Isaac Asimov was the only contemporaneous fan to rank both “Life-Line” and “Misfit” among the best stories of 1939 —he was, in fact, one of the very few readers to mention those stories at all.

2. The title of this collection is unaccountably odd, for the Second American Revolution takes place in 2075, and, while “Coventry” in the same collection takes place twenty-five to thirty years later, there is no actual “revolt” in 2100. No correspondence relating to the title has survived, and Mrs. Heinlein is unable to offer an explanation. There is one famous “revolt” in 2100 that might have been in Heinlein’s mind: that is the year that the Sleeper wakes and touches off a worker’s revolution against his own estate. But is has not proved possible to relate the Wells book directly to any of the stories in this collection.

3. Panshin’s “subjective critique” of Heinlein in SF IN DIMENSION, while ingenious, misidentifies the object of his subjectivity. If Heinlein’s stories deal with individuation crises, it is quite likely that this is so because his market is young people who are concerned with their own individuation crises. The presence of these critical figures and congeries of symbology which Panshin has identified imply principally that Heinlein is in tune with his audience, and relays his experience in confronting and surmounting his own individuation crises. The inference that Heinlein continues to be personally concerned, late in middle age, with his own adolescent crises unconfronted is not logically drawn from the material, and is unlikely given the matters dealt with in subsequent publications.

4. We suggest, on the contrary, that the 1953 revision, with its rejection of technocratic interference, is Heinlein’s resolution what is not, for him, a dilemma. Perhaps he falls back on his faith in the basic decency of his fellow citizens as expressed in his 1952 postwar credo for Edward R. Murrow’s “This I Believe” radio program, preparation for which had occupied his attention for several of the months during which “If This Goes On—” was being revised. Such conditioning, he realized, was neither necessary nor desirable.

5. The word “cabal” is not a specific creation for this story, but is a general term for a conspiracy.

6. Carl Jung analyzes the pool-of-water symbology that underlies both alchemical [= hermetic] imagery and Christian baptism as self-destroying and self-generating. See, “The Visions of Zosimos” passim, but see also paragraph 97, inter alia, of ALCHEMICAL STUDIES, Volume 13 of the Bollingen Series XX COLLECTED WORKS OF C.G. JUNG. It could also be interpreted thus in Masonic terms: The old John Lyle goes into the cave pool and passes away; the new John Lyle emerges having given his prudery up to the appropriate governor.

7. At this point, we may infer that Heinlein knows whereof he speaks, and he speaks with personal authority, only slightly displaced. The incident is present in both magazine and book versions of the story and may, therefore, be assumed in some sense to be an essential part of the story in Heinlein’s writerly judgment; it may present the key to interpreting John Lyle’s name: “John” may refer to “Dumbjohn,” West Point slang with which he may have been familiar because his brother Lawrence graduated from West Point, but “Lyle” is significantly the maiden name of his mother and her father, Alva Lyle (Heinlein’s cut-rate pseudonym, Lyle Monroe, combines the two family names of his mother’s parents). Moreover, John Lyle’s best subject was Ballistics —an essential discipline for a fire control officer, Heinlein’s own naval specialization. Heinlein may be referring to himself by these obvious displacements.

8. Leaving aside the fictionalized economic tract he wrote, presumably, in 1937, —FOR US, THE LIVING—.

9. It should be noted that “If This Goes On—” never explicitly claims the leaders of the Cabal are Freemasons, though the quoted fragments of ritual, an invocation of the blessings of “The Great Architect,” and references to 18th century brethren among the Founding Fathers are unmistakable.

10. Franklin wishes to see these oppositions as topical and serial —i.e., Heinlein’s politics are conventionally anti-fascist in the context of World War II but become anti-communist during the Cold War era, reflecting a (non-existent) turn to the political right. But it is quite clear that when Heinlein speaks in 1940 of the “lights going out in Europe” it is to both communism and fascism he is referring.

11. Joseph Major discusses and speculates about these three stories in “Writing Stories Never Written: Speculation Concerning ‘Stories Never Written”‘ in THE HEINLEIN JOURNAL, issue 6, January 2000, pp. 8-17.

“A Flight of Speculation”

by Edward M. Wysocki, Jr. ©1998

After World War II, Heinlein tells us, he resumed writing with two objectives: “first to explain the meaning of atomic weapons through popular articles… I wrote nine articles intending to shed light on the post Hiroshima age, and I never worked harder on any writing, researched the background more thoroughly, tried harder to make the (grim and horrid) message entertaining and reasonable…I continued to write those articles until the U.S.S.R. rejected the United States’ proposals for controlling and outlawing atomic weapons… and I stopped trying to pedal articles based on tying down the Bomb… –Was I really so naif that I though I could change the course of history this way? No, not really. But damn it, I had to try!” Heinlein referred to these articles as his “failing at World Saving.” Recently, Ed Wysocki wrote, for the The Heinlein Journal, an article about one of these attempts, entitled “Flight Into the Future.” By special arrangement with the author and the Journal, this paper is republished here. This is especially significant because it is the only one of Heinlein’s cautionary articles written after World War II that he was able to get published.

During the course of performing other research on Robert Heinlein’s early writing, I was trying to locate everything he had written, no matter how obscure, in the hope that it would provide some useful information. This other research concerned the identity of a purely fictional device which Heinlein was supposed to have described in one of his early stories and which was then actually developed for Navy use by one of his Academy classmates (see my Note in Issue No. 2 of the Journal). As the evidence appears to indicate that the classmate was his close friend Caleb Laning, the existence of an article by Heinlein and Laning was too obvious to pass up.

I am referring to “Flight into the Future,” a non-fiction work which appeared in the August 30, 1947, issue of Colliers magazine, and which has not been reprinted in any collection of Heinlein’s works. A quick reading of the article showed that it unfortunately contained nothing of use in my research into the identity of the device.

Although “Flight into the Future” could contribute nothing to my original research task, many of its features were sufficiently interesting to keep me from simply tossing it aside. My first step was to see how the article was discussed in Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension. Although it is properly listed in the table of non-fiction works, it is not mentioned at all in the accompanying chapter or elsewhere in the book. His statement is that some of the listed non-fiction works: “… have a certain pertinence to his science fiction, and hence deserve some discussion, if only briefly.” (Panshin 178)

This makes the absence of any discussion of “Flight into the Future” a bit puzzling, as it has a direct connection with several of his fictional works. Furthermore, I was not able to locate any other book or article in which the content of this article and its relation to Heinlein’s other works are discussed.

The most obvious place to start is to note that just as “Beyond Doubt” is Heinlein’s only fictional collaboration (with Elma Wentz) to be published, “Flight into the Future” is apparently his only published non-fiction collaboration.

Let us then consider how the authors are listed, “Captain Caleb Laning, U.S. Navy and Lieutenant Robert A. Heinlein, U.S. Navy, Retired.” Laning was on active duty at the time, in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, having been elected Chairman of the Joint Army-Navy Radar Committee in February, 1947. He retired in May, 1959, advancing on retirement to the rank of Rear Admiral on the basis of his combat awards (Laning Naval Bio). But Heinlein had been retired for medical reasons in 1934. He was clearly entitled to refer to himself in the manner described. I am not aware, however, of any other publication for which he identified himself as author by his prior naval rank and his retired status.

This particular means of listing the authors could be a function of how well Heinlein felt he was known outside the bounds of science fiction in 1947. All of his publications up through 1942 had been in the science fiction magazines, the “pulps.” His post-war short stories had just started appearing in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947, the same year in which “Flight into the Future” appeared. Would the arguments and speculation be better received by most readers if presented by two naval officers (one current and one former) than if presented by a naval officer and a science fiction writer most of the general public had probably not heard of at the time?

Taken as a whole, the article is concerned with the prospect of future atomic wars and the steps that may be taken to prevent such wars. But the article may be clearly divided into sections with somewhat different focus.

Orbiting A-Bombs

When I began to read the article, I was immediately struck by its similarity to another Heinlein work. The first work by Heinlein which I read, in fact the first work of science fiction I ever read, was Space Cadet. This work has long been recognized as an extrapolation of Heinlein’s Naval Academy days. Although many aspects of the story have been overtaken by history and the knowledge of actual planetary conditions, it is still a good read.

One key chapter of Space Cadet is Chapter X, “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes,” which mainly consists of Matt Dodson recalling his just completed home leave. These recollections include him attempting to explain to his parents the servicing of orbiting atom bomb rockets, a task with which he was occupied prior to his leave. This topic of discussion results in his mother becoming extremely upset and in a confrontation with his father on the possibility of the patrol ever attacking the North American Union. The chapter concludes with his attempting to resolve his confusion and doubts with Lieutenant Wong, his adviser aboard the orbiting school, the P.R.S. Randolph.

The description of the servicing of the rocket bombs, beginning with the departure from a base on the moon, forms the first 50 percent of “Flight into the Future.” Some material is included to explain the nature of the moonbase, the makeup of the crew, and a few elementary details of spaceflight. This extra material is necessary, as the article is clearly intended for those not familiar with concepts well known to readers of science fiction. But particular segments of the article have exactly corresponding segments in the novel. The degree of similarity can be demonstrated just by comparing two sets of quotes. First, consider a description of the type of orbit employed:

Let’s consider a rocket with a two-hour period and arrange for it to circle north and south from pole to pole, instead of around the equator (“Flight” 19).

and

The rocket bombs go round and round, like this, from pole-to-pole, every two hours (Space Cadet 119).

Following the approach of the patrol ship and a space-suited crew member going out to retrieve the rocket bomb, we then have a description of the process of “safing” it prior to bringing it aboard the patrol craft for inspection and servicing:

The man inserts the crowbar gadget in the war head of the rocket and locks it into place. There is now a mechanical obstacle stopping the sequence of events necessary to trigger the atom bomb (“Flight” 36).

Now compare:

Besides that, I had inserted the trigger guard – that’s nothing more or less than a little crowbar, but when it’s in place not even a miracle could set it off, because you can’t bring the sub-critical masses together (Space Cadet 121).

These and other details leave little doubt as to the source of some of the material for Space Cadet, which was apparently written in late 1947, at least according to information contained in Grumbles From The Grave (44). One may conclude that this idea of the rocket bombs and the patrolling space ship under the control of the Security Council of the U.N. and rocket bombs was then expanded to form the Patrol and the Federation which then provided the framework for the plot of Space Cadet.

Defense Against Attack

The next section of the article considers the launching of atomic bombs from orbit from the perspective of those on the ground and how they might defend against such an attack.

This point is raised in the novel, during a discussion between Dodson and his adviser:

Men on the surface of the planet are as helpless against men in spaceships as a man would be trying to conduct a rock-throwing fight from the bottom of a well. The man at the top of the well has gravity working for him (Space Cadet 110)

This has a corresponding piece in the article:

… but consider an analogy: Two men, one at the bottom of a 200-foot well, one at the top, each equipped with large, jagged rocks. Who bashes in whose head? (“Flight” 36)

By considering orbiting bombs or an orbiting ship capable of launching bombs from orbit, a different type of defense problem was presented than was the case of the ICBMs with which we all became familiar, fortunately not in a direct manner, during the era of the Cold War. Heinlein and Laning were posing an even more difficult problem than that faced by the proponents of the Strategic Defense Initiative. In attempting to counter an attack by ICBMs launched from bases in Russian or Chinese territories, the developers of a defense were able to consider the possibility of employing a layered approach. If the missiles could be detected at launch by orbiting satellites, they would be vulnerable to several different countermeasures during their flight. Space-based lasers were proposed to destroy missiles during the boost phase. Other lasers or anti-missiles would then attempt to destroy the survivors of the first layer during their ballistic trajectory. Finally, the few (we would hope very few) survivors would encounter ground-launched interceptor missiles as they re-entered the atmosphere (Jastrow 243).

Heinlein and Laning’s rocket bombs were already in orbit, either on their own or as the payload of an attacking ship. All that remained of our attacking ICBM’s trajectory in the case of the rocket bombs is the terminal phase, with all of the difficulties of a shortened reaction time. This is recognized by Heinlein and Laning when they state that in the absence of a Space Patrol, the only alternative would be ground-based interceptors. But they correctly point out that the attacker has the advantage.

The problems and consequences of defense (or lack thereof) against a nuclear attack have formed the basis of other works of Heinlein: “Solution Unsatisfactory,” “The Last Days of the United States,” “How to be a Survivor,” “Pie From The Sky,” “On the Slopes of Vesuvius,” “The Long Watch,” Rocket Ship Galileo, and Farnham’s Freehold. And we must not forget the line from the movie Destination Moon:

There is absolutely no way to stop an attack from outer space. That, gentlemen, is the most important military fact of this century.

The conclusion presented in the article is that we must make the U.N. work and then develop a Space Corps which will form the basis of the U.N. Security Forces. This concept of an international patrol has its roots in the political and technical situation which was presented in “Solution Unsatisfactory.” The argument is made that should our attempts to make the U.N. work not succeed, we must enforce a Pax Americana, the exact term employed in this earlier work (111).

Development of Rockets

To make the Space Patrol work, one obvious criterion is that we must have patrol spaceships. (I will leave the discussion of the possibility of the second criterion, that the Space Patrol could have ever developed from the U.N. given the existence of the proper technology, to someone else.) Although the orbiting bombs are themselves rockets, their size makes it reasonable to assume that they are placed in orbit by the patrol ships. Consequently, the final portions of the article consider the probable course of the development of long range rockets, leading to the patrol spaceships.

The discussion began by quoting Professor J.R. Dunning that the first-large scale application of atomic power for transport is large seagoing ships. An excellent prediction as long as we restrict ourselves to warships such as aircraft carriers and submarines. The atomic-powered airplane is dismissed because of the weight of shielding required. The discussion then proceeds to the atomic powered spaceship in the manner of Rocket Ship Galileo and Destination Moon.

We can forget about atomic rockets. The only work done in that area, at least by the United States, was Project NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) (Ley 501). The principle is as explained in Rocket Ship Galileo and Destination Moon, that a nuclear reactor is used to heat a reaction mass which is then expelled. The difference between fact and fiction is that Heinlein used metal (zinc) as the reaction mass in Rocket Ship Galileo and water in Destination Moon, where Project NERVA used liquid hydrogen. Atomic power was considered likely to provide more powerful rockets than would be possible by chemical means. This was balanced by the obvious radiation hazard and the need to carry sufficient shielding. Given our concerns about the environment and the restrictions placed on nuclear testing (not to forget the uproar over the recent launch of the Cassini probe with nuclear material on board), I would think that it is safe to assume that we are not likely to see atomic-powered rockets at any point in the foreseeable future.

The development of rockets leading to the patrol spaceships is then proposed as a consortium of various government agencies, the military, universities and industry. This is a theme which we can find in another work, Destination Moon:

The problem right now is one of research, design, special materials, the pooling of resources, specialized skills, engineering brains, industrial capacity. No single company could possibly do it….

There is one Heinlein story, “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” which took the opposite view of the situation, in which a single company accomplished the trip to the moon.

A very brief description is given of the then-current program under way at White Sands, involving the launch of V-2 rockets shipped from Germany and converted to research purposes. The article states that we would run out of V-2 rockets in 1948. The last V-2 actually flew in 1951, a total of 52 firings (Ley 606 – 607). As Heinlein and Laning state that a hundred V-2s were shipped to White Sands, they appear to have assumed that these rockets were going to be shot off at a very high rate.

Progress in the Conquest of Space

The final section of the article then considers what will come immediately after the V-2 in the hoped for progression to the patrol Spaceship. The immediate successor to the V-2 is identified as the Neptune, which was the name assigned during its early development. When the rocket finally flew, it was as the Viking (Ley 307).

There is some discrepancy between the characteristics of the Viking in the article and the performance of the actual flights in later years. The speed was stated as better than a mile and a half (7920 feet) per second, but Viking XI, which flew on May 24, 1954, had the highest velocity, only 6300 feet per second. Similarly, it was stated that the Viking could carry an instrument package twice as high as the V-2. If we again look at Viking XI, it holds the record at 158 miles, as compared with the highest V-2 flight of 116 miles on December 17, 1946 (Ley 609). If we consider that the Viking was first announced in June 1947, shortly before “Flight into the Future” appeared, and that this announcement most likely contained preliminary performance estimates, we can’t really fault Heinlein and Laning.

The concluding sentence of the article explains where Heinlein and Laning expected the work to lead:

From the 300-mile missile, we progress to the ocean-spanning missile, then to the permanent-orbit round-the-world missile at which point these lines of development also converge on the space ship.

Why did we wind up with ICBMs instead of orbiting bombs? It is a question of technology as well as public perception. The failure to develop atomic power for space ships has already been discussed. In addition, orbiting bombs would require a permanent presence in space. The U.S. space program did not develop such a presence. We could say that the Russian space program did develop a permanent presence, depending how one considers MIR. For the moment, let us assume that we and the Russians had independently developed a permanent presence in space, in the face of the failure of an international organization to develop as suggested in the article. We would then have had two superpowers with the orbiting bombs and ships capable of launching an attack. Whether this situation would have been more unstable than what we actually faced, I will again leave to others to debate. One could argue that the presence of orbiting A-bombs is very similar to the presence of missiles in submarines which are difficult to track and destroy—so far as both are compared with missiles in silos.

But, all technical and geo-political considerations aside, we can only wonder if most people would have reacted to the orbiting bombs in exactly the same manner as Matt Dodson’ s mother:

…I don’t like this. I don’t like it, do you hear me? What if it should fall? (Space Cadet, 119)

The final paragraph of the article refers to the development of missiles by the various services at Wendover, Nevada, or at Point Mugu, California, or at Wright Field, or at the Naval Air Materials Center in Philadelphia. We can recognize the last of these as the location of Robert Heinlein’s service during World War 2. But at least one other of the locations has a direct Heinlein connection. To quote from the naval biography of Buddy Scoles, a Heinlein friend and shipmate:

…he served nine months as Commanding Officer of the U.S. Naval Pilotless Aircraft Unit, transferring in September, 1946 to the U.S. Naval Missile Test Center, Point Mugu, California.

Conclusion

“Flight Into the Future” clearly shows the background for the novel Space Cadet, including direct analogs to sequences in the novel. The article provides ties to many of Heinlein’s other writings, starting with “Solution Unsatisfactory” and continuing on to Destination Moon and other works. It also provides a well-reasoned assessment of the possible way in which atomic war could have occurred and suggested at least one way it could have been avoided. These are all quite interesting features of an article which has been neglected for so long. One is led to wonder why this article was never included in any other collection of Heinlein’s works.

Works Cited:

Destination Moon. Dir. Irving Pichel. Screenplay by Rip Van Ronkel, Robert A. Heinlein and James O’Hanlon. Eagle Lion, 1950.

Heinlein, Robert A. Farnham’s Freehold. NewYork: Signet, 1965.

————————-. Grumbles From The Grave. Ed. Virginia Heinlein. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 1989.

————————-. “How to Be a Survivor.” Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein. New York: Grosset And Dunlap, 1980.

————————-. “The Last Days of the United States.” Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein. New York: Grosset And Dunlap, 1980.

————————-. “The Long Watch.” The Green Hills of Earth. New York: Signet, 1963.

————————-. ” The Man Who Sold the Moon.” The Man Who Sold The Moon. New York: Signet, 1963.

————————-. “On the Slopes of Vesuvius.” Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein. New York: Grosset And Dunlap, 1980.

————————–. “Pie From the Sky.” Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein. New York: Grosset And Dunlap, 1980.

————————–. Rocket Ship Galileo. NewYork: Scribner’s, 1947.

————————–. Space Cadet. New York: Scribner’s, 1948.

————————–. “Solution Unsatisfactory.” Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein. New York: Grosset And Dunlap, 1980.

Jastrow, Robert. “Reagan vs The Scientists.” Day of the Tyrant. Ed. Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr. New York, TOR, 1985. 221-246.

Laning, Caleb B. and Robert A. Heinlein. “Flight Into the Future” Collier’s 30 Aug. 1947: 18+.

Ley, Willy. Rockets, Missiles, And Men In Space. NewYork: Signet, 1969.

Panshin, Alexei. Heinlein In Dimension. Chicago: Advent, 1972.

United States. Department of Defense. Naval Biography of Captain. C.B. Laning, USN. Washington: Navy Biographies Section, OI-140, 1955 (updated 1959).

United States. Department of Defense. Naval Biography of Rear Admiral A. B. Scoles, USN Retired. Washington: Division of Naval Records and History, Op-29, 1952.

For Us, the Living

The last of the wine,
or,
still sane after all these years

by Spider Robinson

©2003 Spider Robinson, All Rights Reserved
originally appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Oct. 1, 2003

Robert Anson Heinlein died in 1988, and his fans have been more than half-seriously expecting him to return from the dead for fifteen years, now.

At the close of his most outrageous novel, “THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST–”, we learned that The Beast-the monstrous creature that hounded all its characters across multiple universes with malicious glee–was in fact RAH himself and that book ended with an assertion that the Beast had been slain, and the hesitant reply, “Friend Zebadiah–are you sure?” Lazarus Long, the character who throughout five novels most clearly embodied Heinlein, was specifically told at the end of TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE that, “You cannot die, beloved.” He was well over two thousand years old at the time.

So it’s almost unsurprising to fans that Scribner, the original publishers of the famous “Heinlein juveniles” (a series written expressly for young adults in the 1950s), is about to release a new Heinlein novel–written in 1939!

Even the irony of its happening to be titled FOR US, THE LIVING is being taken in stride. Of COURSE the very first words the Grandmaster ever typed for money turn out to be a punchline that won’t pay off for sixty-four years!

Perhaps that says it best: there is unprecedented prepublication demand for this new book, even though everyone is fully aware that it was Robert’s very first attempt at writing for publication, that it didn’t sell…and that he himself did his level best to destroy all copies shortly before his death. His readers are all dying to know why…and desperate for one last morsel, however imperfect, of the Grandmaster. (The title Grandmaster of Science Fiction is the highest honour bestowed by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America; the first ever Grandmaster was Heinlein.)

Robert’s desire to suppress the book is in retrospect understandable. FOR US, THE LIVING is absolutely fascinating, packed with the kind of startling, totally outrageous yet logical ideas for which he was justly famous, and its claim to be a novel is unassailable…but it is only just barely a story. What he intended when he sat down at the typewriter was simply to deliver a series of Utopian lectures, to propound some (then) radical ideas whose adoption he felt would benefit mankind. Fully aware that many dislike being lectured, he borrowed from his favorite writer, H.G. Wells, the notion of sugar-coating his lectures with a thin layer of fiction. The fiction content of this “novel,” in other words, is meant to be no more convincing than that of Wells’s WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME.

But those were works from the very end of Wells’s career, when, in Sturgeon’s immortal phrase, he had “sold his birthright for a pot of message,” and lost interest in telling stories. For Heinlein the process worked precisely in reverse: sometime during the construction of this book, he apparently realized he was having much more fun with the characters than he was with the concepts, enjoying the dialogue way more than the didactics. Within months of its completion he put this manuscript aside, went back to the typewriter, and composed his first published work: one of the most memorable, heartbreaking stories in English letters, “Lifeline.” Two short years later he was the Guest of Honor at the 3rd World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, and it was already clear he dominated his field.

So part of the fascination of FOR US, THE LIVING is that it directly inspired Heinlein’s entire career. Another, even larger part is that he was able to mine it for enough material to write at least twenty of his published novels. Ideas and preoccupations he would return to again and again in the next fifty years are found here in seed form: time travel, multiple identity, transcendence of death, personal privacy, liberty, future arts, the nature of sexual love, flight to the moon, the wicked prophet Nehemiah Scudder, and a dozen other signature concerns.

Still more fascinating are vigorously argued beliefs and theories he later repudiated. Commonly (and inaccurately) believed to have been be an archconservative, Heinlein in 1939 was a 32-year-old left-wing Democrat, an influential member of Upton Sinclair’s radical EPIC party. He later explained to colleague Alfred Bester, “I’ve simply changed from a soft-headed radical to a hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian.” and it is enormous fun to be able to track that evolution from its hitherto obscure beginning. Equally delicious is a detailed, ingeniously worked out “future history” bridging 1939 and 2086…which omits World War Two! (In fairness, FDR claimed to have been equally surprised.)

But the main attraction is not the brilliantly constructed explanations of unconventional economic theory, nor the rich source material for later works, nor the gentle pleasure, more fond than malicious, of seeing a great and beloved talent in his callow, fallible youth (like watching Leno embarrass guests with clips of their early work in dogfood commercials). The reason there’s so much prepub demand that Scribner may have to go back to press before publication, just to have some copies left to show off on Launch Day, is simply that the word is already out: this book contains on every page the unmistakable, aggressively rational, irresistibly folksy, heart-tuggingly familiar voice of Robert A. Heinlein–which so many have missed so badly, for so long. A special gift, for us, the living.

Spider Robinson
-Bowen Island, British Columbia
5 September, 2003
www.spiderrobinson.com

Red Planet – Blue Pencil by Jane Davitt ©2001

Explanatory Note

Red Planet

In 1949 Robert Heinlein submitted a juvenile called ‘Red Planet’ to Scribners. They published it only after many cuts and changes in the plot and this is the version referred to as the 1949 edition in this article.

After Heinlein’s death the book as Heinlein originally submitted it, with no cuts or alterations, was printed by Del Rey. This is referred to as the restored edition in this article.

Additional text found only in the restored book is shown in italics. Additional text found in the 1949 publication but not the restored book is enclosed in [brackets]. Where text in the 1949 publication was in italics and need to be referred to for purposes of comparison, it is shown in UPPER CASE to avoid confusion. When a page reference is given, the first page number refers to the restored edition, the second to the 1949 book.

Introduction

It is entirely appropriate that the first altered text in Red Planet was the phrase, “Shut up.” When Heinlein was forced by editorial pressure to make changes in his 1949 juvenile he was indeed silenced and the thrust of his message blunted and warped. As he phrased it in a letter to Alice Dalgleish, one of Scribner’s editors,

‘I have made great effort to remove my viewpoint from the book and to incorporate yours, convincingly – but in so doing I have been writing from reasons of economic necessity something that I do not believe. I do not like having to do that.’ [1]

This should, incidentally, serve as a caution to those who insist on interpreting Heinlein’s personal beliefs from his fiction…. it is not always a reliable source.

Young readers a half century later, who will in all probability be reading the restored edition, complete with all its additional text, should find little in its pages to shock them, nor would they perhaps appreciate how galling it was for Heinlein to make the changes that resulted in the original publication. They will simply enjoy the story, smile at Willis’s antics and be thrilled by Jim and Frank’s adventures as they race across a planet to save their families from bureaucratic treachery and the hardships of a Martian winter.

So what difference do the changes make? A word for word comparison of the two texts reveals changes in every chapter, some major, covering significant plot and philosophical areas, some minor, yet cumulative, as slang and ‘inappropriate’ concepts are tidied away. Perhaps the most puzzling editing comes in the deletion of dozens of single, innocuous words and phrases which, when reinstated, give the text more depth of detail. Unless text length was a burning issue it is difficult to understand why these particular changes were made.

It is possible to identify several major areas targeted or affected by the editing; the characters of Jim Marlowe and Dr MacRae, the sub plot concerning the sex of Willis, the historical and philosophical rationale behind the gun laws on Mars, the use of contemporary slang and the sometimes significant deletion of single words or phrases. To a certain extent, these areas both overlap and impinge on one another; for example the changes in the way gun ownership is treated result in two very different portrayals of Jim Marlowe.

So, why were the changes made at all? It is difficult to judge if Alice Dalgleish was tailoring the book to suit the sensibilities of the library list out of the knowledge that it would otherwise be rejected, or applying her own, rather narrow, standards to the story and finding it lacking. A little of both perhaps. The end of the 1940′s was still a time when writing for children was hedged about with many restrictions; it would be at least two more decades before the rigid distinctions between fiction intended for children and that aimed at adults were eased.

During the discussions of the changes needed in ‘Red Planet’, Heinlein pointed out to Miss Dalgleish that the content of the Scribner adult catalogue contained much that would conceivably shock to a young reader, turning 18 who had previously been,’…sealed in cellophane, sterile in vitro,’ [2] and then exposed to the full gamut of adult reading.

As one book about girl’s fiction from 1839 to 1975 puts it,

‘Of all biological phases, adolescence surely is the one in which bodily experiences are of paramount importance; yet for reasons of convention, squeamishness, and the idea that their audience was in need of moral guidance at every level, children’s authors until recently have been prohibited from mentioning many of its most fundamental aspects.’ [3]

This is certainly borne out in the 1949 publication, where Jim is unable to advise his mother, as he does in the restored edition, that, ‘” Uh, there’s a toilet right across the hall,”‘ when he takes her to his old room at the school to rest.

It is also useful to consider the position of ‘Red Planet’ within the body of Heinlein’s work. It was his third juvenile, following closely on the heels of ‘Rocket Ship Galileo’ (1947) and ‘Space Cadet’ (1948) but it represents a significant shift in approach in a few short years. ‘Rocket Ship Galileo’ has its fans but most would consider it to be somewhat lacking in originality and rather formulaic. ‘Space Cadet’ had livelier characters but was still based around a familiar plot: the training of young men in a military organization. ‘Red Planet’ on the other hand was different; an attempt to depict a whole new way of life on a strange planet complete with mysterious aliens but written in such a way that the reader feels at home almost at once. Heinlein had found his balance, targeted his audience and was all set to produce some of the most memorable works in his oeuvre.

Language

The sanitized conversation of the 1949 publication does have both positive and negative effects; it detracts from the colourful personality of the Doctor and it makes Jim and Frank seem unnaturally polite at times but it does mean that the 1949 publication seems less old fashioned than the restored book. Nothing dates as fast as colloquialisms and some of the expressions the two boys use in the restored edition have a quaint tang to them. Perhaps in this area, the editor unwittingly did the book a service. That said, the prissiness that alters ‘bellyache’ to ‘tummy ache’ and ‘deuce’ to ‘dickens’ tends to grate when one considers the intended audience of teenage boys, not renowned for the purity of their language!

Some of the humour is lost too; Phyllis, Jim’s sister, is a marginal character in both books but in the restored edition she seems less two dimensional; akin to other young, independent Heinlein females with irritating brothers. Part of the excised dialogue between the siblings is so realistic that it is a pity to lose it,

‘Phyllis said, “Take the charges out of your gun, Jimmy, and let me practice with it.”

“You’re too young for a gun.”

“Pooh! I can outshoot you.” This was very nearly true and not to be borne; Phyllis was two years younger than Jim and female besides.

“Girls are just target shooters. If you saw a water- seeker, you’d scream.”

“I would, huh? We’ll go hunting together and I’ll bet you two credits that I score first.”

“You haven’t got two credits.”

“I have, too.”

“Then how was it you couldn’t lend me a half credit yesterday?”

Phyllis changed the subject.’ P12/P15.

The alterations of dialogue do not just affect the two boys or their friends; Doctor MacRae is censored even more than they are. This is because he tends to use a very idiomatic style of speech; for instance when he wants to advise Kelly, waiting at the school, that it is safe to emerge he says, ‘”Okay. You –” MacRae grabbed one of his squad by the arm.”- tear back and tell Kelly that allee allee out’s in free.”‘

This reference to a children’s game was evidently deemed too obscure for readers. He also uses the phrase ‘”little red schoolhouse”‘, when he is alerting Dr Rawlings to the hostage situation at the school. This is a reference to the single room schoolhouses common in nineteenth century America; perhaps this was altered to simply, ‘school house’ for the sake of overseas readers.

In his case the slang adds an aura of antiquity to his personality, something that may be of significance in the restored book where his lifespan seems longer than his appearance warrants. The doctor is fond of blunt speech, and uses the one expletive of the book, deleted, naturally, in the 1949 publication,

‘”The Company hates the expense of moving us, but more important they are bloody anxious to move more immigrants in here faster than we can take them; they think they see a cheap way out by keeping North and South Colony filled up all the time, instead of building more buildings.”‘ P 145/P 130.

His scathing denunciation of Gibbs is likewise diluted,

‘” I might mention in passing [add] that I was a man grown when this Gibbs party was still wetting his diapers [drooling on his bib] –”‘

Yet it is clear that he is an educated man; his speech has an almost theatrical sound to it at times, as if he is, as James Gifford comments in his recent book on Robert Heinlein, ‘…a virtual caricature of the crusty old frontier doctor.’ [4]

There is also a tendency to confine the references of the 1949 book to those that would be familiar to young readers, understandable from one perspective but limiting in educational value. For instance, when Smitty discusses the terms of his loan to the boys, a reference to Shakespeare’s Shylock is deleted from the original edition, ‘” I’ll have both of yours, on one I.O.U., at six per cent – per month. The security will be the pound of flesh nearest your heart.”‘ Was it really thought that the readers would not pick up the allusion? In a similar way there is an amendment of Doctor MacRae’s praise of Frank’s idea about using the Martians to help them, ‘”It just might work. It’s worth a whirl. That notion of making use of Martian immunity is positively Machiavellian [brilliant], Frank; you should go into politics.”‘ Heinlein preferred not to talk down to his readers; these changes must have irritated him.

In considering the deletion of individual words, it is interesting to see how much of a difference the small changes can make. For instance, during the negotiations between Mr. Marlowe and Beecher we are told that, ‘Beecher seemed excessively pleased with himself.’ The inclusion of ‘excessively’ gives us a clearer picture of Beecher as somewhat unbalanced; he is gloating rather than simply satisfied that the plans of the colonists are not going well.

Similarly, when Frank is defending his career choice of rocket pilot to Doctor MacRae, he says, ‘”Why not?’ Francis answered doggedly. “I might make it.”‘ The extra word, ‘doggedly’ adds much emphasis; we can see that Frank is truly determined, even in the face of disapproval from a respected mentor. This makes his actions in leaving the school to warn the colony and thereby risking that career even more laudable.

We also lose much that hints, however faintly, of a criticism of authority, be it parental or scholastic. When Jim invites Frank and the doctor for dinner at the start of the book, Frank declines on the grounds that his mother thinks he spends too much time at Jim’s house. The doctor replies,

‘”My mother, if she were here, would undoubtedly say the same thing,” admitted the doctor. “Fortunately I am free of her restraining influence. Call your mother, Jim.”‘

Later, when the boys are at school and are discussing Howe’s sweeping changes in the school routine, they are told by a cynical older boy,

‘”Get wise to yourself kid. A man wouldn’t go into school teaching if he didn’t enjoy exercising cheap authority. It’s the natural profession of little Napoleon’s.”

“Stoobie wasn’t like that!”

“Stoobie was an exception. Most of them like rules just for the sake of rules. It’s a fact of nature, like frost at sundown. You have to get used to it.”‘ P 50 / P 47.

It is not just words like ‘stinker’ that are targeted in the 1949 edition (deleted at least three times from descriptions of Howe) but anything that hints even faintly at sex, including a change in the clothing habits of the colonists.

At the start of the book we are given a description of the Doctor from Willis’s point of view,

‘The Mars creature saw an elderly male Earthman almost completely covered with wiry grey-and-white hair. The hair was thin on top, thick on chin and cheeks, moderately thick to sparse on chest and arms and back and legs. The middle portion of this strange, unMartian creature was concealed in snow-white shorts [and shirt].’

Notice that although in the restored edition Jim is described as being appropriately clad for indoors in bright red jockey shorts, the Doctor in the 1949 publication wears a shirt.

The Doctor accompanies Jim home for dinner and we are given a further hint that clothing indoors on Mars is slightly skimpier than on Earth, ‘Jim’s mother met them: Doctor MacRae bowed [.] a bow made no less courtly by bare feet and a grizzled, hairy chest.’

After he engages in some mild flirtation,

‘Jim’s mother blushed. She was wearing a costume that a terrestrial lady might choose for sunbathing or gardening and was a very pretty sight, although Jim was certainly not aware of it.’

Heinlein’s attempts to show that in a climate controlled environment Earth style clothing is unnecessary are weakened by restricting this freedom to the youngsters. It is a point he makes in other stories, written for an older audience; there are references in “The Black Pits of Luna” to moonsuits that, ‘show an awful lot of skin.’ [5] In “It’s Great To Be Back” such suits are described as, ‘six ounces of nylon’ [6]. This speculative extrapolation of future fashions was evidently seen as too daring in 1949.

Guns and Oaths

One of the most significant changes in the book, possibly the one that irked Heinlein the most, occurs during the dinner visit of Dr. MacRae, when we are told a little about the way weapons are regulated on Mars. In the version that was published first, Jim leaves his gun where his baby brother can get it and is reprimanded by his father. Much emphasis is put on Jim’s failure to live up to the oath he took in front of a Council when he was permitted to be a licensed gun owner. We are told that his father,

['"guaranteed that you would obey the regulations and follow the code, wholeheartedly and all the time – not just most of the time."']

This has echoes of the Scouting oath and is intended, at Miss Dalgleish’s insistence, to present a picture of a society where the owning of weapons is controlled and subject to approval from a governing body.

To Heinlein this was anathema. He roundly informed Miss Dalgleish in a letter that, in his opinion, the right to bear arms is the basis of all human freedom; a remark that he later puts into Jim’s mouth, as a quotation from Dr MacRae. He was also opposed to the licensing of guns and disliked the fact that, in order to make the book suitable for publication he had to, ‘Build up the licensing into a complicated ritual, involving codes, oaths, etc. – a complete reversal of evaluation.’ [7]

In the restored edition there is still a form of licensing; when Phyllis asks to be allowed a gun of her own, her father suggests that Mrs Marlowe take her to city hall to be licensed. The difference is that the necessity for such licensing is not approved of by Mr Marlowe and is attacked strongly by Dr MacRae,

‘”Sir, it is not the natural limitations of this globe that I object to; it is the pantywaist nincompoops who rule it- these ridiculous regulations offend me. That a free citizen should have to go before a committee, hat in hand, and pray for permission to bear arms – fantastic! Arm your daughter, sir, and pay no attention to petty bureaucrats.”

Jim’s father stirred his coffee. “I’m tempted to. I really don’t know why the Company set up such rules in the first place.”‘ P13 restored edition.

In the 1949 publication, Phyllis is never shown to be a gun user, neither is her mother, although one of the reasons she gives for wanting a gun is to be able to help her mother by taking on the duty of protecting her younger brother when he plays outside; the Martian fauna containing some dangers.

Later in the story, when the colonists are trapped inside the school we are told that,

‘Men and women, boys and girls, t[T]he colony listed hundreds of licensed gun wearers – and yet a handful of gun fighters outside, as few as two, could keep them holed up.’

Notice how the reference to an entire colony of armed citizens is deleted; the implication being that such a widespread gun ownership was not an acceptable part of a story for teenagers.

The Journey of James Marlowe

The character of Jim, or rather its development, is drastically affected by the cuts. In the 1949 publication he and Frank are quite similar. Jim tends to be more likely to speak without thinking, as he does when he defends his home and family against Howe’s disparaging comments but generally, when Willis is not involved, he and Frank are much alike. In the restored edition Jim initially takes on a far more aggressive personality, in sharp contrast to Frank’s more sensible and pragmatic attitude. This cannot be simply put down to gun ownership by someone too young to be responsible; in both versions Jim has a weapon and has been trained in how to use it, in both stories we see him firing it at water seekers and at a sniper. The difference is that in the restored edition Jim seems to have no qualms about threatening to use his gun whenever he perceives there to be a danger to himself or Willis. The undeniable fact that in most, if not all, of the cases, using his weapon would increase rather than decrease the problem or danger makes this reaction seem immature, even foolhardy.

The reason for having an apparently flawed hero is of course to provide an object lesson. It is a common theme in a Heinlein juvenile to have the hero learn and grow from the events he experiences during the course of the book. In Jim’s case he is apparently only given a short time in which to mature; the period from Howe’s confiscation of Willis to the end of the book is a scant thirteen days. Heinlein manages to sidestep this potential weakness in the plot by making those days count by cramming them with hardship and difficult decisions and with the interlude in which Jim watches months and months of Willis’s memories. This strange vision or trance enables Jim to evaluate a long period of time in a few short hours. It is a pivotal event in the changes in his personality, changes that can perhaps be mapped by his various reactions to the idea of losing Willis. Jim still has moments of impetuousness but this experience seems to begin the process of stabilizing his emotional responses.

At the start of the book no amount of well meaning advice from friends or family will persuade him to let Willis hibernate or remain in familiar surroundings. He reacts emotionally to the temporary loss of Willis in the school; tears pouring down his face as he vows vengeance on Howe. Later, when he and Frank are resting with the Martians and Gekko tells him that Willis cannot be returned to him he goes on a disruptive rampage through the building, searching for his friend,

‘Jim would no more have disturbed a Martian in a trance, ordinarily, than an American western frontier child would have teased a grizzly – but he was in no shape to care or notice; he shouted in there, too, thereby causing an unheard-of and unthinkable disturbance. The least response was violent trembling; one poor creature was so disturbed that he lifted abruptly all of his legs and fell to the floor.’ P 114/ P 102.

When Gekko manages to catch up with Jim he picks him up and holds him like a child and it is as a child that Jim responds,

‘Jim sobbed and beat on the Martian’s hard thorax with both his fists. Gekko endured it for a moment, then wrapped a third palm flap around Jim’s arms, securing him. Jim looked wildly up at him. “Willis,” he said in his own language, “I want Willis. You’ve got no right!”‘

The 1949 publication lacks a description of Jim’s reaction to the loss of Willis at the end of the story. The doctor remarks that he is going to break the news to Jim and Mr Marlowe replies that Jim won’t like it. In the restored book we are actually shown Jim’s reaction and see that he has mellowed considerably,

‘Jim took it well. He accepted MacRae’s much expurgated explanation and nodded.”I guess if Willis has to hibernate, well, that’s that. When they come for him, I won’t make any fuss. It’s just that Howe and Beecher didn’t have any RIGHT to take him.”‘

To fully appreciate the growth in Jim that allows him to be so reasonable at the end of the story, it is necessary to examine his earlier actions in the restored book. The 1949 publication deletes or waters down Jim’s aggressive responses and the changes in his personality are lacking. The Jim we meet at the start of the book is little different than the one at the end. The restored book benefits from the inclusion of the incidents because they provide a benchmark against which Jim’s emotional growth can be measured.

The changes begin at the point where he and Frank leave for their new school. The journey is broken at Cynia where they meet up with a Martian, Gekko, who picks up Willis. The Martian was meditating so the boys carefully stepped round him; Willis then attracted his attention by rubbing against his legs and letting out some ‘mournful croaks’; probably an attempt to communicate in Martian. What he said is not translated but it may even have been a request to be picked up. The Martian emerged from his trance, bent down and scooped up Willis. Jim reacts strongly to this fairly innocent action in the restored book,

‘”Tell him to put Willis down! Or, so help me, I’ll burn his legs off!”

“Oh, now, Jim, you wouldn’t do anything like THAT. It would get your whole family in trouble.”

“If he hurts Willis, I sure will!”

“Grow up [Relax]. Martians never hurt anybody.”‘

Throughout the book much is made of the fact that the Martians are sacrosanct; Jim and Frank even use this as a way of resolving the siege at the end of the story.

‘Every human who set foot on Mars had it thoroughly drummed into him that the natives must not be interfered with, provoked, nor their customs violated – nor, above all things, hurt.’

Jim knows this, has been brought up with it and yet he is prepared to break the taboo simply because Willis has been picked up, possibly at his own request. His instinctive reaction is to use his weapon to protect his friend; we do not know if he would have carried through his threat but that he made it at all is indicative both of his impetuous nature and the degree to which he feels responsible for Willis.

When Frank manages to communicate with the Martian, Jim is picked up and carried towards the city with Willis. He again wants to reach for his gun, but is physically too tangled up to do so,

‘He cradled Willis in one arm; his other two arms came snaking down suddenly and enclosed Jim, one palm flap cradling him where he sat down, the other slapping him across the belly. Jim was unable to get to his gun, which was just as well.’

Yet, moments later, after gazing into the Martian’s eyes, Jim is overwhelmed by a feeling of trust and friendship. This sudden change in attitude is underlined by Jim’s physical reaction to the Martian’s odour, ‘Worse, the little supercharger on the top of Jim’s mask compressed not only the thin air, but also he body odor of the native; the stench was overpowering.’

Strong words and ones that Frank evidently agrees with; when he is picked up a few moments later he says, rather rudely, ‘”Judas- what a smell! Pew!”‘

However by this time, the Martian has managed to calm Jim down to such an extent that not only is he no longer bothered by the, ‘stink of his kind’, he has already forgotten that he ever was bothered, ‘”Smell? Don’t be a sissy. He smells better than you do.”‘

This part of the book was probably deleted for the same reason that three references to Howe being a “stinker” are deleted; it was perhaps felt to be in bad taste. Yet the deletion costs us not only a significant hint about the mental powers of the Martians but also a link to the 1956 book, Double Star in which Lorenzo Smythe has a similar reaction to the smell of Martians, cured in his case by hypnosis.

The demonstration of Gekko’s control is impressive. All of Jim’s hostility drains away in moments. It could also provide an explanation of his excessively protective feelings about Willis, a younger Martian but with talents of his own. This nuance is missing in the book as it first appeared. It could be argued that it is interaction with the Martians that speeds up Jim’s maturation rather than the actual adventures he and Frank experience. Certainly Gekko and the water sharing experiences play their part in opening Jim’s eyes to feelings which he would normally have buried and ignored. During the first water sharing alone he changes his attitude quite radically.

‘He was acutely aware of the presence of the Martians, of each individual Martian, and was becoming even more aware of them with each drifting minute. He had never noticed before how beautiful they were. “Ugly as a native” was a common phrase with the colonials; Jim recalled with surprise that he had even used it himself, and wondered why he ever had done so.

He was aware, too, of Frank beside him and thought about how much he liked him. Staunch – that was the word for Frank, a good man to have at your back. He wondered why he had never told Frank that he liked him.’ P 35 / P 34.

After the “growing together” ceremony with their new friends, the boys resume their journey to school. The arrival of Mr. Howe, the new headmaster is the cause of much disturbance as he makes sweeping changes in the way the school is organized. After he discovers and confiscates Willis, he makes the most significant changes; the abolition, in the original book, of the Student Council and the post of student armourer in charge of weapons. Neither the council nor the armourer is mentioned in the restored book; this seems to be another attempt by the editor to stress that weapons are not readily available to the students and are closely monitored. In both books the headmaster is to be in charge of all the guns in the future, including those belonging to licensed gun owners. Frank thinks that the primary reason for the change is that when Mr. Howe confiscated Willis, Jim’s reaction was so extreme that he feared for his own safety: ‘”There was murder in your eye and he saw it.”‘

This is a fair comment; as Howe left their room with Willis, Jim had tears streaming down his face. He turned to Frank and said,

‘”I should have burned him,” he muttered. “I should have burned him down where he stood.”

“Suppose you did? Want to spend the rest of your life in an asylum?” [Frank went on] Don’t let him get your goat, fellow; if he gets you angry, you’ll do something silly and then he’s got you.”‘ P 53/ P 50.

Again there is no overt threat to Willis; Jim has dug himself into a hole by his insistence that Willis is a free agent and not a pet. Incidentally, this is not borne out by the events in the book; Jim seems to treat Willis exactly as one would a pet, albeit a pet that can talk. Like John Thomas and Lummox in ‘The Star Beast’ the balance of power is ostensibly weighted on the side of the human. If he had carried out his threat it is difficult to see how the situation would have been improved. Could Jim really think that after killing his headmaster he would be allowed to keep Willis?

Next day Jim reads the notice about surrendering weapons and says,

‘”I’m not going to give up my gun. Dad wouldn’t want me to. I’m sure of that. Anyhow, I’m licensed and I don’t have to. [I'm a qualified marksman, I've passed the psycho tests, and I've taken the oath; I'm as much entitled to wear a gun as he is.]“‘ P 54/ P 51.

It has to be remembered here that in the restored edition where Jim expresses the wish to shoot Howe, there are no ‘psycho tests’. If there were it seems debatable as to whether Jim would have passed them at this point in his life.

When Jim visits the headmaster to retrieve Willis and send him home, there is, in the restored book, a section dealing with Howe trying to get Jim to hand over his gun ( hidden by Smitty – for a price) and Jim evading his questions in an attempt not to tell an outright lie about where his gun is. Jim certainly confirms Howe’s belief that he is dangerous; when Howe accuses him of lying (and Jim is lying by omission), he is told, ‘”You know that I have no gun, or you wouldn’t dare say that.”‘ The implication seems to be that Jim would have shot Howe for calling him a liar.

As Frank and Jim discuss plans for leaving, Jim once again has to be calmed down by his clearer headed friend,

‘”I’ll wait until daylight and just walk out. If Howe tries to stop me, so help me, I’ll blast him.”

“The idea,” Frank said dryly, “is to get away, not to stir up a gun battle. What you want to do is pull a sneak.”‘

During all of this melodrama, Frank remains the voice of reason but he must be getting a little worried about Jim’s emotional stability. This is not to say that Frank is a man of peace but he waits until the true perfidy of the non migration plan is exposed by Willis to make a stand,

‘”That fat slug,” Frank said softly,” I wonder how he would like to tackle a winter at Charax? Maybe he’d [HE'D] like to stay inside for eleven or twelve months at a time – or go outside when it’s a hundred below. I’d like to see him freeze to death – slowly.”‘

Frank then goes on to discuss getting the money they need,

‘” We’ll get it out of Smitty.”

“How?”

“We’ll get it. I’ll tear off his arm and beat him over the head with it if I have to. Let’s go.”‘

Frank’s threats are more rhetorical, whereas Jim’s involve using a gun with which he is expert and are thus both more believable and more dangerous.

At least Jim agrees with Frank that guns were not an option when it comes to the scene at the scooter station where the driver leaves without them. Jim blames himself for getting out of the scooter to eat but Frank points out,

‘”Can you imagine us shooting it out with a couple of innocent bystanders and hijacking the scooter? I can’t.”

“Uh – no. I guess you’re right.”‘

An interesting comment found in both versions of the book occurs when the two boys are with their Martian friends for the second time and Jim is told that Willis cannot be returned to him. ‘It is not important that Jim did not have his gun with him; Gekko could not inspire the hatred in him that Howe did.’

This seems to imply that Jim needs to know and dislike someone to be able to threaten them with his gun but as has been shown this is not really the case. Consider his reaction later on in the story when his father, not fully comprehending the situation, advises him to surrender. There is no one present who could conceivably be considered an enemy or a threat yet, ‘His right hand, almost instinctively, was hovering around the place where his holster ordinarily hung.’

His father, if he had noticed this, must have been even more worried a few moments later when he tells him of the charges Howe has made against him and Jim responds,

‘” I’ll ‘theft’ him! If he ever shows up around me, I’ll burn him down!”

“Jim!”

“Well, I will!”‘

Mr. Marlowe is obviously taken aback at his son’s attitude but it is interesting that when Mr. Sutton shows up with Frank a few moments later, he too, has a similar reaction to threats,

‘”Pop told them that if they touched me he’d burn their legs off [make them sorry]“, Frank said proudly ,”and he would too.”

Jim caught his father’s eye. Mr. Marlowe looked away.’

The reader is being encouraged to approve of a supportive father, Mr. Sutton, even though he is, at this point, behaving in a manner that seems far from exemplary. One can sympathise with Jim and understand Frank’s pride but at the same time feel that perhaps such bellicose threats are an over reaction.

If the Martians and their mental powers play a significant part in Jim’s growth it must also be remembered that Jim is accompanied by a human role model: his friend, Frank. Frank is the peacemaker, in many ways the most rational of the pair. He is the one who constantly reminds Jim of the consequences of his actions. It is noticeable that Frank does not approve of Jim’s, often wild, threats; at one point he literally wrestles Jim to the ground and sits on him in an effort to calm him down. Frank could be viewed as a shadowy figure in the book; a sidekick rather than a co lead character but in fact he is an example of what Jim needs to become in order to be an asset to the colony rather than an immature child. Jim tends to model himself on Doctor MacRae, quoting his words and turning to him in times of crisis but Frank is in many ways a more suitable mentor. Frank undergoes many hardships himself in the course of the book; worry over his mother if the migration does not take place, a physically exhausting journey when he is ill and yet does not seem to change much. Given his importance in the book this can be taken as an indication that he is already on the right track and needs no significant alterations in his character.

The combination of Frank’s influence as a peer and a friend and the mystical forces used by the Martians serve to divert Jim from his rather reckless behavior patterns and onto the road to adulthood. In the restored book this is a significant part of the story: in the 1949 publication it is not stressed as much due to the deletion of Jim’s aggressive threats.

Dr MacRae, Back Seat Driver or Eminence Grise?

The complex character of Dr MacRae dominates the book, though his influence over Frank and Jim seems greater in the restored edition. He is, by virtue of his age, the senior member of the colony (some even speculate that he is The Senior in disguise…. that theory, enticing though it would be to explore, is however outside the scope of this article!) but his adventurous attitude, ‘[salty comments and outrageous observations]‘ make him both a mentor and an ally to the boys. They turn to him, rather than their own parents, confide in him, trust him and quote his words constantly throughout the book. For example, Jim, in discussing Smitty’s business like approach to Howe’s new rules remarks,

‘”He reminds me of something Doc used to say ‘Every law that was ever written opened up a new way to graft.’”

“That’s not necessarily so. My old man says Doc’s a crackpot. Come on.”‘

This rapport is shown in the opening pages, as he attempts to dissuade Frank from his chosen career as rocket pilot, a passage missing from the 1949 publication that also gives a hint at the difference between the society on Earth and that on Mars, paving the way for the later conflict.

‘”See here, Frank, do you really want to live a life bound around with rules and regulations and discipline?”

“Mmmm…I want to be a pilot. I know that.”

“On your head be it. Me, I left Earth to get away from all that nonsense. Earth has gotten so musclebound with laws that a man can’t breathe. So far, there’s still a certain amount of freedom on Mars. When that changes –”‘ P 6 / P 11.

The character of Dr MacRae is a real scene stealer in both books but in the restored edition he is even more intriguing, rather carelessly dropping clues about his past that, if true, would make him practically an Old One himself. It is possible that Heinlein was laying the foundations for the doctor being a member of the Howard Families and thus tying in his juvenile series to the Future History timeline that he had developed. It is equally possible that Scribners would have frowned on this link between one of their juveniles and ‘Methuselah’s Children’ which at this point had only appeared in the ‘pulps’. Miss Dalgleish viewed these early science fiction magazines with some scorn as being rather ‘cheap’. [8] Heinlein may also have decided that setting all of his stories, especially full-length books intended for younger readers, within the Future History framework was too restrictive. The different versions of aliens and Earth itself that occur in the juveniles would tend to indicate that he preferred them to stand alone.

The first hint that the Doctor is older than he appeared comes at the dinner party with Jim’s family,

‘”Tell me, sir, do you know what television was used for when it first came out?’

“No. How would I?”

“Well, I didn’t see it myself of course, but my father told me about it. It seems –”

“Your FATHER? How old was he? When was he born?”

“My grandfather then. Or it may have been my great grandfather. That’s beside the point.”‘ P 15/ P 17.

Later when the boys are sent to him to be checked over after their journey and they are discussing Jim’s strange experience with the old Martian, invisible to Frank, he again lets something slip,

‘”Sure you did – because seeing takes place in the brain and not in the eye. I can close my eyes and ‘see’ the Great Pyramid shimmering in the desert heat. I can see the donkeys and hear the porters yelling at the tourists. See ‘em? Shucks, I can smell ‘em – but it’s just my memory.”

Jim looked thoughtful but Frank looked incredulous. “Say, Doc, what are you talking about? You never saw the Great Pyramid; it was blown up in World War III.” Frank was, of course, correct as to his historical facts; the eastern allies should never have used the Pyramid of Cheops as a place to store atomic bombs.

Dr MacRae looked annoyed. “Can’t you permit a man a figure of speech?”‘ P 135/6 / P 121.

He continually uses expressions that stand out as being somewhat old fashioned and Heinlein uses this subtly at times to show how far ahead in the future Red Planet is set; for example, the doctor is old yet he refers to, ‘”way back when women wore skirts,”‘ as if that change in fashion was long in the past. To the modern reader it may seem that this small reference was deleted because what is there to marvel at in a woman not wearing a skirt? It is more likely that it was deleted in the 1949 publication because the widespread fashion for women’s trousers was relatively new. In Britain,

‘Women took to wearing trousers when working in factories, Civil Defence or turning out at night into their air-raid shelters. If the war can be credited with producing any fashion in women’s clothes it was the popularizing of trousers for women of all ages.’ [9]

It is probable that American women also found that trousers were a liberating, useful addition to their wardrobe but this change was viewed with some horror by traditionalists who felt that trousers were both unfeminine and immodest. Donning a pair of slacks in a story set in the 1940′s was often used as a metaphor for a female character shedding inhibitions. Consider for example this quotation from a novel set in wartime Britain and written in 1960,

‘She bought two woolen jerseys and a pair of stout walking-shoes, and – most daring and exciting of all – she bought a pair of navy-blue trousers and a polo jersey.’ [10]

Later, when she wears the trousers for the first time she discovers that,

‘The trousers were not as comfortable as she had expected – there was a strange flappy feeling about the legs – but whether they were comfortable or not she was determined to wear them, for they were symbolic of her new life.’ [11].

The doctor also has a slightly subversive effect on the boys. He makes no bones about encouraging them to deceive their parents in both versions of the book. Jim and Frank approach him with a plan for escaping the siege at the school and ask what his opinion is, only to be told,

‘”However, about the other stunt – the garbage can paratrooper act – if you ask your father, he’ll veto it.”

“Can’t you ask him? He’ll listen to you.”

“I said ‘IF you ask your father,’ you idjut. Do I have to wipe your nose for you?”‘ P 166 / P 148.

In the aftermath of the fight we get another indication of Dr MacRae’s original views as he comments that Beecher is clearly paranoid. Dr Rawlings agrees and says that Beecher will need to be hospitalized but MacRae has other ideas,

‘”Certainly, certainly,” agreed MacRae, “but speaking non-professionally, I’d rather see the no-good so-and-so hang. Paranoia is a disorder only contracted by those of fundamentally bad character.”

“Now, Doctor,” protested Rawlings.

“That’s my opinion,” insisted MacRae and I’ve seen a lot of cases, in and out of hospital.”‘ P 183 restored edition.

It is somewhat amusing that in the 1949 publication this section is replaced by an attempt by Mr Marlowe to get MacRae to take over the headmastership of the school until a replacement for Howe can be appointed. The suitability of MacRae for such a position is debatable but it’s a moot point; he refuses vehemently and we lose the chance to see him in control of the school, a situation which might have had far longer lasting effects on the pupils than Howe’s petty restrictions.

Mama Willis?

Another major revision in the plot, linked again to what seems excessive prudery on the part of the editors, occurs when the boys are recuperating with the Martians and wake up to discover that Willis has apparently laid eggs during the night. This entire sub plot was excised from the 1949 publication, much to the detriment of the story. The fact that Willis has done something extraordinary makes the Martians’ anger at those who would harm him more believable. Without it we never really appreciate why he is important though both versions speculate that he is a baby Martian, a caterpillar to their butterfly. We are given a clear picture of the imperturbable Martians, who wait long minutes before speaking, being jarred out of their normally calm behaviour,

‘Neither of the boys had ever seen a Martian hurry before, nor show any signs of excitement. Gekko let out a deep snort and left the room at once, to return promptly with as many companions as could crowd into the room. They all talked at once and paid no attention to the boys.’

The story closes with the deaths, one could say the executions, of Beecher and Howe and the tense negotiations between the Martians and the colonists, represented by the ubiquitous Doctor, which end with a tenuous peace between the two races. In the restored edition we also get confirmation that Willis is not all he seems,

‘”That’s the trouble. It’s very complicated and I don’t know where to start. Willis IS important and it does matter that he’s a she.”‘

(One wonders incidentally, why it was initially assumed that Willis was male; because he used Jim’s voice as his own perhaps?)

We are then told that Willis’s Martian name means, ‘”In whom the hopes of a world are joined”‘ Mr. Marlowe comments, “Sounds like a name for a messiah, not a bouncer”‘

It is tempting for readers to make a connection between this comment and the plot of ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ especially as the Martians in both books appear to be the same; ‘Red Planet’ though written first is of course set later than the events of ‘Stranger’.

Conclusion

Red Planet is one of four Heinlein books reissued in a restored form. The reasons for the editing are not the same in each case and each version has its fans and critics. ‘Podkayne of Mars’ has perhaps the least amount of new or changed words but the alteration of the ending has a profound effect on the rest of the book. ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ is unchanged as far as plot goes but is enriched (or encumbered) by hundreds of tiny additions to the text. Perhaps the most similar case to ‘Red Planet’ is ‘The Puppet Masters’ which, although unquestionably an adult book was divested of much of its darker and more adult themes. The difference is that the cuts were made in an effort to create a book that was more suitable for serialization in a magazine: length, rather than content was the primary factor. Certainly Heinlein was willing to make those changes as they did not result in a book that endorsed views contrary to his own.

It is partly because ‘Red Planet’ as it first appeared was not written the way that Heinlein wanted it to be written that the restored edition is more valuable to a Heinlein reader who also enjoys the sometimes dangerous, always exhilarating, hobby of analyzing the stories. There is less point in analyzing the 1949 book; it was so altered that Heinlein seriously put forward the suggestion that Miss Dalgleish should be named as a co-author. That is not to say that the 1949 publication has no merits but weighed against the loss of Heinlein’s intended message it cannot be viewed as superior or preferable. The reader may not endorse the message but it is authentic Heinlein, not watered down or twisted Heinlein. If we are to have a target to aim at, let it be a valid one. It is also weakened by the lack of emphasis on Jim’s growth and the references to the importance of Willis as a hope for the future.

What then is the message or theme of ‘Red Planet’? It seems to be an exploration of a frontier society and the need for a return to the values of the past which served America so well as the vast land was tamed. Echoes of even more distant history are evoked in the tension between the Earth based Company and the Mars based colony, resolved once more in favour of the colonists and their fight for independence.

It is interesting to note several passing references in the book which link the Martian colony to America’s past. For instance, when Jim disturbs meditating Martians, this is described as being akin to an American child of the frontier taunting a grizzly. I have mentioned Doctor MacRae’s use of the term, ‘little red schoolhouse.’ Earlier in the book, when MacRae and Marlowe are discussing gun licensing, the Doctor also mutters, ‘something that combined ‘Danegeld’ and the ‘Boston Tea Party’ in the same breath.’

On a less serious note, when Phyllis asks for an explanation of the term, ‘folk dancing’, the Doctor mentions an important tradition of the pioneering families, ‘” These kids are missing something. I think I’ll organize a square-dancing club. I used to be a pretty good caller, once upon a time.”‘

When the colonists meet to discuss the recording that Willis has made about the migration, Doctor MacRae makes a direct link between the situation in which the colonists find themselves and that of the Americans before the War of Independence,

‘”The question is not whether or not we can last out a polar winter; the Eskimo caretakers do that every season. It isn’t just a matter of contract; it’s a matter of whether we are going to be free men, or are we going to let our decisions be made for us on another planet, by men who have never set foot on Mars!

“Just a minute – let me finish! We are the advance guard. When the atmosphere project is finished, millions of others will follow. Are they going to be ruled by a board of absentee owners on Terra? Is Mars to remain a colony of Earth? Now is the time to settle it!”

There was dead silence, then scattered applause. Marlowe said,” Is there more debate?”

Mr. Sutton got up.” Doc has something there. It was never in my blood to love absentee landlords.”

Kelly called out, “Right you are, Pat!”‘ P 145/ P 130.

Later, Doctor MacRae spells it out again in another impassioned speech to the colonists as they debate their options in the school,

‘”Now as I see it, this is a frontier society and any man old enough to fight is a man and must be treated as such – and any girl old enough to cook and tend babies is an adult, too. Whether you folks know it yet or not you are headed into a period where you’ll have to fight for your rights. The youngsters will do most of the fighting; it behooves you to treat them accordingly. Twenty-five may be the right age for citizenship in a moribund, age-ridden society like that back on Earth, but we aren’t bound to follow customs that aren’t appropriate to our needs here.”‘ P 158/ P 141

The story ends with Doctor MacRae’s vision for the future a real possibility after the negotiations with the Martians and there is a final nod to history,

‘”Is the Proclamation of Autonomy written? Did the folks go for it?”

” Yes, it’s written – we cribbed a good deal from the American Declaration of Independence I’m afraid, but we wrote one.”

In this milieu, with the dangers from the Martian fauna (and indeed the Martians themselves) weapons and a trained, armed citizenry are seen by Heinlein to be essential. The changes that were made in the text militated against this vision; it is implied that only men were armed and the restrictions applied to gun ownership would have been seen as unnecessary by Heinlein. As he remarked in a letter to Miss Dalgleish,

‘I am aware of the dangers of guns, but I do not agree that those dangers can be eliminated nor even ameliorated by coercive legislation – and I think that my experience entitles me to my opinion at least as much as school teachers and librarians are entitled to theirs.’ [12]

And there indeed lies the heart of the matter and the reason to prefer the restored edition; we may want to disagree with Heinlein or we may be in profound agreement but no matter what our views, we want to apply them to the story as written by Heinlein.

Jane Davitt

REFERENCES

1. ‘Grumbles From The Grave’ P 62 [return]

2. ‘Grumbles From The Grave’ P 77 [return]

3. ‘You’re a brick, Angela!’ P 97 [return]

4. ‘Robert A Heinlein A Reader’s Companion P 158 [return]

5. ‘Green Hills Of Earth’ P 63 [return]

6. ‘Green Hills Of Earth P 80 [return]

7. ‘Grumbles From The Grave P 62 [return]

8. ‘Grumbles From The Grave’ P 53 [return]

9. ‘You’re a brick, Angela!’ P 284 [return]

10. ‘Spring magic’ P 35 [return]

11. ‘Spring Magic’ P 46 [return]

12. ‘Grumbles From The Grave’ P 64 [return]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Red Planet’ Robert A Heinlein Victor Gollancz Ltd 1963

‘Red Planet’ Robert A Heinlein Ballantine Books 1990

‘Robert A. Heinlein A Reader’s Companion’ James Gifford. Nitrosyncretic Press 2000. ISBN 0-967987-1-5

‘Spring Magic’ D. E. Stevenson. Fontana Books 1960.

‘You’re a brick, Angela!’ Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig. Victor Gollancz Ltd 1976 ISBN 0 575 02061 X

‘Grumbles From The Grave’ Robert A. Heinlein edited by Virginia Heinlein. A Del Rey Book Ballantine Books December 1990. ISBN 0-345-36941-6

‘The Green Hills Of Earth’ Robert A Heinlein. Pan Books 1956. ISBN 0 330 10679 1

There are two editions of Red Planet referred to in this article. The original 1949 publication was published by Scribners. The edition I used was published in 1967 by Pan Books Ltd 4th printing 1978 ISBN 0 330 107127. The restored book is a Del Rey Book published by arrangement with Charles Scribner’s Sons. First revised edition January 1990. ISBN 0 345 34039 6.

I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein: An Angry Fabulist’s Expression of “Rejection Syndrome”

by David M. Silver ©1998, 2002

The novel I Will Fear No Evil was almost fit for publication when in January 1970, peritonitis almost ended Robert Heinlein’s life. Just before hospitalization, he completed the first cut of his draft. The author gravely ill and unable to make business decisions, his wife and agent exercised their authority over his affairs and decided upon publication in unfinished form. The result is said by one commentator to be “a rather rambling and murky story line that almost certainly would have been shortened and tightened up considerably had Heinlein been able to edit the draft before publication.” Heinlein remained very ill and underwent other surgeries for the entire next two years. Because it lacks this supposed needed final polish and contains what many then and now consider bizarre subject matter, it has been one of his least appreciated works–a sad fate considering current social history and, also, what I believe is its true intent.

It is not a part of the “Future History Series” but seems to exist further down the time line of Stranger In A Strange Land, which Jubal Harshaw in his brief encore appearance in To Sail Beyond The Sunset tells us is our very own.

The story occurs a half-century or so into the future.

Dramatis Personae:

Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is perhaps the richest man on an increasingly crowded Earth, a self-made, cantankerous very old coot who has made the final error. He has let himself fall into the clutches of the medical profession, and they will not let him die. Mentally as acute as ever, but permanently harnessed into life support gear afforded only the very rich, he has found a way to outwit the medicos by committing an elaborate suicide. A brilliant, unorthodox surgeon, considered charlatan by most, claims he has successfully transplanted brains from one chimpanzee to another–and there are films of the operation and both simians now climbing trees and eating bananas. Doubting whether a first attempt with a human will succeed, even were the operation not a fraud, Smith does not care–he’s got no choice. The hopeless alternative is to accept increasingly mind-numbing narcotics to offset pain until a final vegetal state arrives.

He wagers not to wait and suffer mental or physical agony. All he needs is a body, recently dead; and, as it would make a wildly overoptimistic surgical team more willing to attempt this lunacy if the body has the same rare blood type as he–AB Negative, his solution is simple: advertise for a body!

Eunice Branca, a delightfully beautiful, young, nubile and intelligent woman, is Smith’s recently promoted private secretary. She supports her husband, a body-painting artist, whose favorite canvas is his wife. She likes old Johann, appreciates his gallant efforts to evade the inevitable fate tied to his automated bedpan, and delights in exhibiting herself to this very old man in his last few days: Are those tights she’s wearing, or just paint? Only Eunice, her husband, and the reader, know for sure.

Jake Salomon is Smith’s private attorney, long-time friend, and co-conspirator against the medicos. One other thing: he’s quite a “fixer.” Organ transplants have become big business. Relying on precedents that a dead body is ‘property’ of the dead person’s estate, Salomon has little difficulty in setting up a lawful offer to buy a recently dead one in ‘prime’ condition for his very rich client. It’s simply a matter of awaiting some accident to provide a proper host for Johann’s brain.

Joe Branca is the prototypical artist as a young man, seemingly a minor character, not very bright, but talented in an obscure area few would seriously believe is art: “body-painting?”! It’s doubtful whether he would be able to live, let alone pursue this “art” without the effort and strong, loving support of his talented wife. He is offspring of an indolent cranky ungrateful mother, who, vicious, bigoted and stupid, lives on the largess of the country–a welfare drone, paradoxically grinding out bastard children who grind out bastard children ad infinitum and, amazingly, thinks herself neglected by and “better” than almost all others of her indulgent, troubled, decaying society.

Plot Synopsis:

To his surprise, Johann awakens from surgery. Memories of strange dreams under anesthesia did perturb him a bit; but he’s delighted to find himself alive, without pain–for the first time in years. Numbness below the neck gradually wears off as his new body adjusts to the demands of its new brain. He’s not even particularly shocked to find the young new body is female–no one thought to specify the sex of the donor. He’s perfectly willing to try on his new life in that gender–it might be fascinating! A bit curious he has asked for a mirror, which they are bringing.

The tremendous shock caused by discovery that the face and body the mirror discloses are those of Eunice Branca would kill a lesser man. Then suddenly that which had been disturbing him during his time under anesthesia becomes manifest. Eunice is present in his consciousness. Since the operation she has always been there. She soothes his troubled mind. How can two “consciousnesses” exist in one brain, short of that conditions described in The Puppet Masters, i.e., parasitic enslavement and exploitation of one form by another, or what persons educated before the end of the 1970s then and the general public still calls “schizophrenia”?–for this is not an essay on the current labeling flavor of the day endorsed by an evolving profession. I leave that question for later.

The body and minds of this construct Johann-Eunice start a journey unlike any in the annuals of speculative fiction. First, there’s the little matter of recovering legal control over self. During unconsciousness following surgery, to keep Johann’s granddaughters from having him declared dead (and presumably inherit), Salome, er, Salomon did a legal dance to persuade the state to declare him guardian over Johann’s head and Eunice’s body. The granddaughters are offspring of his second and third wives, who each divorced Johann, but only after presenting him with children not biologically his; and, therefore, they are not granddaughters in any but the strict legal sense of being children of his presumed “daughters” who themselves also were born during wedlock.

And the only son this man ever had, an honorable man who died taking a worthless hill in a discredited war, was the result of yet another cuckolding whose mother, whom Johann truly loved, died giving him birth. But Johann, a gentleman, has and will never mention this knowledge (certain because of the blood types he knows his “children” possessed) to anyone except Eunice whom he finds now sharing his brain, even though control over the property and his corporate empires is at stake.

Salomon and Johann-Eunice will win the legal battles. A bewildering display of sub-plots intermixed with didactic social commentary occurs during this contest and following. Here I set most of the didacticism aside, since commentary on all the subjects raised by the author’s agenda would require an essay far beyond the scope of this paper: however, as a first decision, Johann-Eunice ordains she will henceforth be called Joan, but pronounced “Yo-an” Smith.

First among the subplots: Johann was a sperm donor; and frozen sperm exists. As all of Johann’s putative children from three wives were not biologically his (Johann was lucky in a “foolish fourth marriage,” hoping to bring back something that had died in him with the death of his ‘son’ whom he loved, as it brought forth no issue, but merely cost a “chunk of money” to get shut of it), Johann-Eunice decide early on there shall be one; and secretly one of Yo-an’s eggs is surgically implanted fertilized with his thawed genetic remnant, immediately before the next activities commence.

Next is this little matter of returning to an adult life–this time as a woman. First, to complicate things a bit, Yo-an seduces “Winnie.” She is another prototypical character, a bright vivacious redhead, familiar to all Heinlein’s readers, a type sometimes associated with Virginia (called by some “Ginny”) Heinlein, his final wife. She is Yo-an’s nurse, and now becomes female companion, that is, nursemaid. To complicate matters a bit more, Winnie has a boyfriend, the semi-mysterious Robert, or “Roberto,” whose detailed associations with Winnie and profession are kept private and off-stage from us by the author, until mid-novel when we find he was one of the specialists charged originally with Yo-an’s physical recovery. To complicate yet more, it turns out that Eunice, before her death, had an on-going affair with Jake Salomon, old Johann’s “fixer” and only real friend. So Yo-an seduces Jake to assuage his grief and reveals to him her secret: the two minds that exist in her cortex. Then Yo-an visits Joe Branca, still struggling to produce ‘art for art’s sake,’ and finds him in virtual poverty. He told the “fixer,” Jake, to “kark in his hat” when offered a staggering sum for Eunice’s body. Eunice was mugged and murdered while shortcutting through one of the many dangerous neighborhoods existing in this decaying world of walled and privately policed enclaves to save time getting to an emergency patient as an “Angel of Mercy,” a rare blood donor. One of Joe’s old models, “Gigi,” whom Eunice knew and loved, has moved in and is trying to support them by, unknown to Joe, prostituting herself. Yo-an loves them both and arranges personally with the model to subsidize Joe. Joe’s head is so far up in the clouds he does not ask about the source of money Gigi brings for food and shelter. Now the young struggling artist has an effective ‘keeper’ again! The plot is beginning to resemble one of Wagner’s Ring-cycles–less some of the murders–well under way, isn’t it?

Let’s skip the rest of the complications, including much more sleeping around, er, loving. Jake marries Yo-an; and they sail away onto the only safe and secure place now existing on Earth, the open seas of the Pacific itself. Joe and the model, now married, and many other people come along on a large trimaran. Other complications ensue, including more love triangles. These complications interfere with Joe’s art, so the couple decide to go ashore. During their helicopter departure, Jake, still strong and virile, tries to steady a swinging piece of heavy luggage being winched above, overtaxes his aged heart and immediately expires.

At that moment, Jake’s consciousness enters Johann-Eunice’s shared brain and body. Now they are a trinity. Curiouser and curiouser. Step aside Wagner-this author’s just surpassed you and taken the teacake at this party of the mad!

Now to the finale: Johann-Eunice-Jake decides to immigrate to the Moon to escape Earth’s soiled civilization entirely and ensure the soon-to-be-born child may be born in a world of hope. Reenter “Winnie” and boyfriend Dr. Roberto Garcia, who was responsible for the care of Johann-Eunice during her first convalescence. They accompany the emigrant Johann-Eunice-Jake as her personal servants (huge charitable donations would have gone elsewhere had the Lunar Authority not allowed that wild departure from its strict screening policies–the rich necessarily always play by ‘different’ rules) as that baby is very important and, by the way, there now appear some indications that the graft of nerve cells between brain and spinal cord is deteriorating–a situation called by the healers of this novel “rejection syndrome.”

A hiatus intervenes. We are in Luna; and Johann-Eunice-Jake is in labor. Yo-an repeatedly insists to ‘Winnie’ that she promise that, if anything “happens,” the baby will be named Eunice Jacob. And just as the expectant mother goes under, while an argument over NAMES occurs among the three in the brain, there is the following conversation between Yo-an and Winnie:

“I do promise you, Joan. Cross my heart.”

“My dear sweet Winsome. We’ve come a long way together, you and I and Roberto [The emphasis is not in the original].

“Yes, we have dear.”

“I’m ill. Am I not?”

* * * * *

And as she goes under, the “rejection syndrome” begins … and Johann-Eunice-Jake begins to die while giving birth to a new life.

But then something shocking intervenes:

Between surgeries a conversation occurs between Yo-an and “Roberto” the putative doctor. In very erotic detail, Yo-an, using the classic and infamous Anglo-Saxon verb, thanks him for graphic acts of sex in which they have engaged. “Now wait just a minute,” I said when I read this first edition hot off the presses, twenty-eight years ago, “This is the first time I’ve ever read anything like that in Heinlein. He doesn’t exactly put asterisks in as in expurgated copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover but his writing is never like this. When did she have a chance to get in the sack with ‘Roberto?’ He faded into the woodwork as soon as the paralysis following the original transplant surgery wore off.” Then I thought hard and remembered that among many beddings she and Winnie once swapped partners (Jake for “Roberto”) after a night on the town. There was nothing remarkable then described about the sex that evening; but I shrugged off the seeming lack of a point–other than a severely ill-timed but understandable expression of gratitude–to this and read on. After all this is a Heinlein lady, and all Heinlein ladies are unique–to put it kindly–and quite tricky. Perhaps they found other times? I then read on to the bitter end in which at the instant of giving birth to new Eunice Jacob, that overburdened treble mind expires, leaving these last words:

“An old world vanished and then there was none.”

Thematic Synopsis:

I used to consider the salient point in I Will Fear No Evil to be that Eunice’s consciousness continues to exist in the donor body. I saw this novel, among other things, to be Heinlein’s conscious examination of the one form of self-identity some believe exists, an identity so strong as to defy death, that is, an inquiry into the question: is there a “soul?” I reasoned he reasoned if Eunice’s consciousness were present in the left-behind body after the death of her brain–and her brain was shattered beyond repair (declared “dead”) in a mugging–then T.H. Huxley’s scientifically unprovable and undisprovable enigma “how can a soul exist” necessarily needs re-examination. How this scientific-proof extrapolation to the “animus” occurred to the author is fairly easy to infer. He expressly writes here of the cellular memories of the flatworm, an inoffensive otherwise not very unusual early form of life we all recall from basic biology that has one unique property. Cut in two, each end grows the missing part. The tail grows a head (with a complete whatever passes for a brain in a flatworm), and the head grows a tail. Medicine considers “death” to occur when the brain is said to be “dead.” Ah, but what if a body can regenerate the brain? Not yet? Maybe not; but way back down in our evolutionary chain, our DNA could! What made that happen, then, but not now? “Could that be the soul?” Heinlein is asking.

If a soul truly exists, then indeed David the King, my namesake who wrote the Psalm, and Robert Heinlein may honestly recite:

Yea, Thou I Walk
In The Valley Of
The Shadow Of Death
I Will Fear No Evil
For Thou Art With Me
Thy Rod And Thy Staff

and the symbolic old man with a beard both Eunice and Johann say they saw in their troubled dreams during their original recovery will indeed appear. That neatly accounts for the title.

Maybe so. But then there are these matters of wives supporting artists and all this business about names, particularly hyphenated ones, including the screwy argument over names at the end and interdependence of threesomes and of “split personalities,” and “rejection syndrome.” And then the mysterious stranger “Roberto,” a one-night stand tucked in there with such significance to the lady with the hyphenated name that Heinlein (that ‘nice Naval Academy graduate’ even librarians named Mrs. Grundy used to love) actually writes purple prose to describe her gratitude. And we didn’t get an afterlife here, did we? We got a version of the bubble ending from Mysterious Stranger, by Mark Twain, favorite author of mother Maureen Johnson Smith of Thebes (I almost said Butler), Missouri and grandfather Ira Johnson. Oops, sorry wrong Smith. It’s Johann Sebastian Bach Smith here, not Woodrow Wilson Smith, isn’t it?

But then we are reading about artists such as Joe in this book, not successful naval officers, leaders or politicians, aren’t we?

One thing I learned a long time ago: Robert Anson Heinlein was a very tricky writer about many things, but most importantly about names. Look at Stranger In A Strange Land for example. Virtually every name in it has multiple resonances.

Take one here from the very beginning: Agnes, Johann’s first wife, whom he loved for the short period they had together (like Poe’s “Annabel Lee” as the author reminds us). She gave him the beloved ‘son’ who died in a discredited war. One meaning for Agnes is “Chaste.” (Another is lamb in Latin, usually a victim or an innocent sacrifice when referred to in religious writings.) David, later the King and poet who wrote the Psalm, was a sacrifice as well, when they sent him to face Goliath. And we recall another David Lamb, don’t we? “The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail,” from Time Enough For Love? The son’s blood type from the dog tags that were all that was left of him was “O+,” impossibility for an AB-negative father. What is wrong here? Why that name is deliberately upside-down! Nothing in this novel is what it seems! Because it is not primarily a novel, I believe. On a major level it is the allegorical autobiography of Robert Anson Heinlein, born July 7, 1907, in Butler, Missouri, graduated United States Naval Academy, class of 1929, married briefly to a lady concerning whom little is known almost immediately after graduation, then divorced and remarried to Leslyn MacDonald who supported him after he was rejected from Naval Service because of tuberculosis; and probably while he was rejected a few times by publishers concerning those mysterious first efforts at writing which are now turned up by conscientious research, rejected by the voters in an election for the California State Assembly in 1938 in which as Johann tells Eunice “he” was put up to run by the party in an election they were going to lose anyway, because he could afford to pay for his own campaign (RAH took out a mortgage), and whom he mysteriously divorced in 1947 concerning whom there have been recurrent rumors of hospitalization for alcoholism and, perhaps, of a family history of bipolar disorder, finally thereafter married to the vivacious red haired woman who everyone calls “Ginnie,” but he called “Ticky” until the day he died, who was and continues to be his “mouthpiece” to his adoring public and whose shared philosophies were the subject of heated rejections by 1969, in the midst of the draft-dodging, “Heigh, heigh, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” drop-out malaise then occurring. You remember, don’t you? It was about the time some critics began to say his publicly acclaimed Starship Troopers had been awarded the Hugo in mistake, because the novel described a “fascist utopia”–a libel we read deliberately resurrected when Verhoeven’s filmed abortion was released.

I can go on…. Three wives. Students at our service academies are still not permitted marriage until they graduate. In the 1920s, just as today, they were taught they already had Three Wives: Duty. Honor. Country. Above all else, these are the three precepts all of our service academies drum into the minds of their graduates. He did his Duty with Honor to his Country; and it rejected him when it discharged him despite the “cured” status of his tuberculosis, then rejected his persistent efforts to return when he “with a feeling of loss of personal honor such as I never expected myself to experience … found myself sitting on a hilltop, in civilian clothes, with no battle station, and unable to fight, when it happened” on December 7, 1941. He nevertheless did the duty that was offered him during that war by his beloved old commander, now Admiral Ernest King–a bastard job which could just as easily have been done by a Lieutenant or Lieutenant Commander rather than a Mr. Heinlein, that included “unofficial” work as mediator between naval officers who respected that Class of 1929 ring on his hand and civilian scientists who respected him as the eminent artist in a field they revered. He did it just as Johann did his duty to what was presented him by unchaste Agnes. She gave Johann a bastard but died in the attempt, and the fine boy died in a discredited war. Whether it was Oscar Gordon’s father’s UnWar I (Korea), or Evelyn Cyril’s own UnWar II (Vietnam), it does not matter; it was one of the rocks he found on Glory Road. Duty, Honor and Country. One died early, two divorced him, and three gave him bastards and, by 1969, some of their progeny was abusing and wasting needed resources and grasping greedily for more. The fourth wife that he divorced after he tried recommitment to a public service life for a year to revive his hopes. Politics? That cost him a heap of money to get shut of. He needed to sell that “first” short story, “Life-Line,” to pay off the mortgage he took out for the ill-fated attempt at the California Assembly.

Filling in the remaining allegorical blanks is left as an exercise to the student, if you will.

“Roberto,” you miserable sonofabitch suffering from “rejection syndrome,” you’ve done it to us again. And it took me twenty-eight years to figure it out. I am so embarrassed I am going to vanish in a bubble ending.

David M. Silver

April 19, 1998 (lightly revised June 5, 2002)