Submitted by I Grok on
One of the ways human beings organize the world is by prototypes. We define a set as a typical example and a bunch of other things that are like it. For instance, when I was growing up, the prototype Writer was Shakespeare, the Artist was Rembrandt, and the Composer was Beethoven.
In that way, Robert A. Heinlein has been often been taken as the prototype Science Fiction Writer, and as changes and new paradigms shake the field, he still sometimes represents the science fiction of the past. We can speak of the Good Old Days when everyone aspired to write like him or the Bad Old Days when no one wrote any better, or at least the Simpler Time (as Peter Straub’s Shadowland says, “when all of us lived in the forest and no one lived anywhere else”) when everyone knew who he was and had an opinion on him.
If we are going to pick a prototype, he is an obvious choice. He was the first writer to be declared a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and in a sense we could say he was several grand masters:
He was the Grand Speculator, imagining breakthroughs in science and technology and considering their possible results and implications and pondering the deep questions of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics.
He was the Grand Technician. He was the master of what Jo Walton calls incluing, unobtrusively hinting at the ways the world we are reading about differs from the world we are living in (“The door dilated”), and if he didn’t invent the Future History—the chart of a consistent imagined future into which many tales may be plugged—he codified and defined it far better than it had been done before.
He was the Grand Recruiter; his “juveniles” gave the kids free samples of the Sense of Wonder that many would be hooked on for life.
And he was the Grand Amphibium. To him, the supposed walls between “Science Fiction” and “Mainstream” were merely lines drawn by others, to be used, avoided, or manipulated as he saw fit. In the ’40s, he expanded from the pulps to the slicks. In the ’60s, he was a crossover artist, joining Kurt Vonnegut and J. R. R. Tolkien in the move to pop/counterculture/”cult” fiction.
He has always been controversial. The criticisms of Stranger in a Strange Land almost make up an inadvertent Pooh Perplex. He wanted to create his own religion as L. Ron Hubbard did (even though he turned down all offers to do so). He was avidly read by Charles Manson (who couldn’t actually read a STOP sign without his lips getting tired). He put in the sex just to get us to read about the ideas. He put in the ideas just to get us to read about the sex. He was offering a secret initiation in the work of Aleister Crowley and/or G. I. Gurdjieff. Und so weiter.
Attacks on him offer an object lesson in the many sloppy ways the word fascist can be used, and H. Bruce Franklin devoted an entire book to Heinlein, the exemplar of all that is worst in Pig Capitalism. On the other side, Spider Robinson loves not wisely but too well, and Leon Stover wrote what is probably the only Twayne United States Authors study to repeatedly refer to its subject by a flattering nickname (“the Admiral”).
Heinlein’s was a difficult life. We already knew about the major health problems: the tuberculosis that forced his retirement from the Navy in the ’30s, the 1970 attack of peritonitis that almost killed him, and the stroke-like ischemic episode a few years later that forced him to undergo a carotid bypass to be able to get a reasonable amount of blood to his brain. We learn that he was never really healthy after the tuberculosis; he suffered, among other ailments, skin cancers, urethral and rectal infections, hernia, gallstones, polycythemia, life-threatening nosebleeds, and finally the emphysema that killed him.
Heinlein’s father was diagnosed with “involutional melancholia” (no longer a DSM-cromulent term), a form of depression characterized by, among other things, “delusions of ill health, poverty, sin, and sometimes even of the nonexistence of the world (all themes that were to show up later in Robert’s writing).” We learn in this volume that Heinlein himself feared that he was suffering from the condition and took the approved treatment, synthetic testosterone, a factlet that could launch a thousand bad jokes and metaphors.
One could pathologize his fictionalized doubt of external reality on the basis of this new information, but I would prefer to see it as transforming pain into art. Heinlein said that the reason he wrote about solipsism was that he could make good stories about it. One could find more stigmatizing interpretations, but he was right about that part; he explored some of the same territory as Philip K. Dick. The ultimately paranoid/solipsistic “Them,” like Fredric Brown’s “Answer,” has found its way into folklore, told by people who have no idea that it was a work of fiction written by an actual, identifiable person. As for the other parts, clearly Heinlein’s ill health was not delusional, and if he had fears of sin, he obviously didn’t let on.
While Heinlein consistently emphasized the importance of recognizing the facts and using the scientific method, he also insisted that there were areas that that approach could not touch, including the nature of human consciousness and the final question of why there is anything rather than nothing. Distrust of organized religion was below the surface in everything he wrote, and as expressing such distrust became more acceptable, he did more and more of it. Nevertheless, he was also willing to question the assumption that science has a final answer to everything religion claims. Category fiction can be seen as a series of implicit agreements between writer and reader—the romance heroine will get her man, the detective will find the perpetrator—and some feel that Heinlein committed the biggest deal breaker ever when he set a scene of Stranger in a Strange Land in Heaven. Fans are still trying to explain that one away.
Heinlein liked to present himself as a plain old storyteller competing for the reader’s beer money, with none of those fancy tricks the “literary” types use, and he has long been used as a stick to beat those who openly aim higher.
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