heinleinblog

I’m not surprised that libertarian-leaning Reason magazine seems to ‘get’ Robert A. Heinlein:

Heinlein venerated the armed forces, most notoriously in his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which celebrated an elite military order. Just two years later, he was publishing the counterculture classic Stranger in a Strange Land, with its simultaneously beatific, sexy, and heroic vision of Martian-inspired communal living. A rich mix of bohemian and straight-arrow values, Heinlein’s unique take on American individualism made him the bridge between such disparate ’60s icons as Barry Goldwater and Charles Manson.

Heinlein’s novels and short stories reflected the rough-hewn anti-government but pro-defense message associated with Goldwater and the conservative movement he sparked. At the same time, his writings exuded the communal desire to live in blissful togetherness, ignoring the repressive sexual and religious mores of bourgeois America. With a libertarian vision that appealed to individualists of both the left and the right, Heinlein not only set the template for the American 1960s but helped create the looser, hipper, more pluralist world of the decades since.

The previous post was about a review that suggested Heinlein was a fuddy-duddy sexist. Now he’s “helped create the looser, hipper, more pluralist world of the decades since.”

[tags]Heinlein,Reason magazine,libertarian[/tags]

Dwayne Day reviews “Project Moonbase” (a television pilot turned movie co-written by RAH) for The Space Review and comes away with the conclusion that while The Master was ahead of his time in many ways in portraying women in authority, he had  a little problem with sexism.

I suggest that Heinlein was ahead of his time, but had no interest in portraying women who acted like men. And remember that a movie script is written to spec, and the bosses can and often do insist on changes. It’s quite possible the clunkers Mr. Day points out were the result of these changes.

It’s odd to hear this criticism considering that the term “Heinlein Heroine” is synonymous with smart and competent.

Dwayne A. Day’s July 2 article for The Space Review:

With these concepts in mind, it is worth looking at a rather amazing memo that Heinlein wrote in 1945 advocating a rigorous American missile and space program. Heinlein wrote it soon after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. He argued that the bomb had changed the world and he believed that intercontinental rockets would also have a major effect on warfare. He wanted the United States to get out in front of this new development like it had with the bomb.

There are many interesting aspects to the memo, but what is unique about it is that it occupies a point precisely in the middle of the overlap between science fiction and current reality. Although Heinlein thought that he was discussing the world as it was-or was about to be-his own interests in rockets and spaceflight were biasing his projections. He was advocating solutions to current problems that were far more fantastical than practical. Heinlein was certainly not alone in this. Many people looked at the atomic bomb and made dire predictions that fortunately proved false. But Heinlein believed in rocketry and spaceflight so fervently that it led him to conclusions that were not well-grounded in the actual technical realities of his day. That is worth considering today, six decades later, when Heinlein is still held in such high esteem as a prophet for the NewSpace movement.

I am continuously amazed at how RAH is revered as a guru in the worlds of fiction, politics and science.

[tags]Heinlein,Robert A. Heinlein,space flight,rockets,Space Review[/tags]

From just about every newspaper in America:

ON THIS DAY IN 1907 — Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein is born. He’s a four-time winner of the Hugo Award for best SF novel of the year and one of the giant figures in the history of the genre.

My friends at The Heinlein Society* Heinlein fans** are throwing one Hell of a birthday bash in Kansas City. Because I have to work, I can’t go. I’m not as active a following of Heinlein fandom as I once was. The job throws a kink into my social calender, and the blog soaks up a tremendous amount of time.

But I never forgot the important role the works of Robert A. Heinlein played in shaping my opinions. As I’ve written about before, I grew up in a family of Kennedy Democrats. My grandmother was a Kennedy delegate in 1960, for crying out loud. My youthful politics were liberal. I’ve stood there like an idiot with signs proclaiming that we ought to just give peace a chance.

Heinlein would have wanted to slap me upside the head and tell me to wake up. In a way, he did just that. My first Heinlein book was “Friday.” I didn’t buy it because I was impressed with all the glowing reviews of this and other Heinlein works. I bought it because the cover showed a busty blonde chick wearing a blue jump suit unbuttoned down to there. I was in junior high at the time, and the sexy passes left me flustered. The heady political commentary no doubt festered in the back of my brain.

You see, that’s how insidious Heinlein is. You read his stuff becauseit’s so damn much fun — all that violence and action — and you end up being taught tot hink for yourself. I remained a liberal Democrat for the next 15 years or so, but in retrospect, I have to admit there was always a little tinkle, a buzz, really, that was telling me that people really ought to be more self-reliant, and that I ought to not be supporting candidates who want to take away folks guns.

As much as Heinlein put the ideas in my head, it took having to work for a living for a few years that really soured me on the Democratic Party. The final straw came during the 1988 impeachment hearings for Bill Clinton, when members of the party I supported (including the years I worked as a reporter) fawned all over a man who was as far from the Heinlein heroes I respected as a man could get. Feh.

Still I knew I wasn’t a Republican or a conservative.

I came across a passage describing Heinlein as “libertarian,” so I visited a few Libertarian Party Web sites and decided I found a home. I left THAT home after 2001 when I heard LP standard bearer Harry Browne blame the United States for causing the terrorists to attack us. Heinlein would have slapped Browne silly – figuratively speaking, of course. Whether or not a more libertarian-minded foreign policy prior to Sept. 11, 2001, would have gotten the terrorists mad at us or not is debatable, but there’s no debate in my mind on what should have happened after Sept. 11, 2001. And it isn’t sitting around hoping that they don’t get mad at us again. “Starship Troopers” told us what Heinlein would have thought about that idea.

So, Heinlein left me a man without a political party to call my own. Which is where any person with a working brain ought to be.

So, Happy Birthday, RAH. Thanks for the presents.

*As commenter Audry Gifford noted, the bash was organized by autonomous group, although no doubt most are members of the Society.

** I know for a fact that several members of THS were deeply involved in centennial celebration activities. I know because before I essentially gave up Heinlein related activities due to lack of time, etc., I attended one or two online planning sessions.

[tags]heinlein,robert a heinlein[/tags]

Brian Doherty, a senior editor of Reason magazine and the author of “Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement,” has this glowing tribute to RAH published in the Los Angeles Times:

The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein was born in Missouri, and his fiction was mostly set in the future and on distant planets. But there’s no question that Heinlein — born 100 years ago this week — was one of Southern California’s great prophets.

[snip]

From 1939 until his death in 1988, Heinlein was science fiction’s acknowledged leader, with 33 popular novels, most of them in print decades later. He was the first to be awarded the annual Grand Master title by his fellow science fiction writers, ahead of such other genre heroes as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. He won four Hugo Awards for his novels and helped set the genre’s standards for dealing with everything from time travel to interplanetary colonization and war to super-longevity.

From a letter tothe editor in the LA Times:Re “L.A.’s Nostradamus,” Opinion, July 1

I confess to being more than a bit amused by the glowing tribute to one of the world’s greatest science fiction writers, Robert Heinlein. Sadly, it shows just how much the truth can be twisted and omitted when the mood fits. Just one example of how far California is from Heinlein’s view of how free people should live is the insane gun laws that have been adopted. Heinlein firmly believed that “an armed society is a polite society” and felt strongly that no good could come from barring individuals from the right to own and carry arms.

Heinlein also was disgusted by the use of race for promotion or consideration in society. The hair pulling and tantrums of the loony left would have only served to sadden this great man. I find it troubling that just as the left has reinvented the stars of communism (Hugo Chavez, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and the like) it is now trying to reinvent such icons as Heinlein to fit its view of the world. For a more accurate view of how Heinlein might have seen California, one should read all of his books as well as “Grumbles from the Grave,” published by his widow after his death.

KEITH H. MCGRATH

Pueblo, Colo.