17 thoughts on “Defending Robert Heinlein”

  1. I hope Heinlein is somewhere in one of his multiverses laughing his ass off that people are still managing to get offended by his writing.

  2. Well, I like Heinlein. So does John Scalzi, a leftish (at least by this blog’s standards) writer. So do a lot of people I run into at SF conventions.

    So I’m not sure who Sarah Hoyt’s talking to that get all cranky about Heinlein, and more to the point, not sure that they are anything but a tiny minority.

    (Full disclosure – Hoyt’s first novel is on my to-be-read list.)

  3. I do not know, some of the later Heinlein got to me.

    That everyone should think for themselves and be highly competent – yet worship the lead characters to the point of submission and even incest… I definitely got the sense that Heinlein developed a bit of a God complex. His characterization of relationships frequently based on dominance/submission spoiled it for me, and seemed contradictory with competent free thinking people. But he was one of the first good SF authors and the world has changed significantly since his time. I especially like “The moon is a harsh mistress”, written before he went weird.

  4. His characterization of relationships frequently based on dominance/submission

    Specifics please?
    He definitely leaned more to the right in his later years; this article from the wsj in 1985 demonstrated that.

  5. This is pretty Cool. I say this as the guy who was in charge of putting on the Heinlein Centennial in 2007 (7/7/7!) in Kansas City.

    Heinlein was soooo curtious, he’d arranged for his 100th birthday to fall on a Saturday. What a guy…

    People don’t realise how much Heinlein wrote in order to *provoke.* His letters, his correspondance, are all available for download (for a cost) from the Heinlein Prize Trust web site. If you read through them, you realise how much of a *non* sexist he was — for his time. Also, how much from 1959 or so onward he was writing whatever the heck we wanted to write, period, and damn the…torpedoes, or whatever.

    Yeah, dead for decades, and still pissing people off. I think that’s a Win. <gri

  6. “Lazarus Long” character that committed suicide unless worshiped and idolized. “Number of the beast” – into hierarchies and absolute personal relationships “I love you so much daddy that I will sleep with you if you want me too” Farnham’s folly – Heinlein’s desire to trade to a younger hotter wife…

    The libertarian view is to me more about personal responsibility, avoiding absolutes, embracing uncertainty and encouraging relatively equal opportunity for others (one should oppress one’s self – not other people). Heinlein could be very black and white in his special kind of morality. I got the impression that if he did not get his way he would throw a tantrum, many of his characters had big egos that demanded stroking. I found it disturbing that I tended to perceive the author – not the characters, in some of his books.

  7. “Lazarus Long” character that committed suicide unless worshiped and idolized

    No, he (intended) to commit suicide because he was bored.

    ““Number of the beast” – into hierarchies and absolute personal relationships “I love you so much daddy that I will sleep with you if you want me too”

    OK, relationships based on dominance/submission. And not one of his better products; finshed by his wife while he was recovering from a TIA.

    Farnham’s folly – Heinlein’s desire to trade to a younger hotter wife…

    He’d already done that by that time so he’d be writing about a past experience. And I don’t see the dominance/submission there, his last wife was by all accounts a full partner.

  8. Heinlein was good but Frank Herbert was IMO better. Heinlein was a bit… how shall I put this… corny. Still, he was less corny than say Harry Turtledove.

  9. To be fair to Heinlein you have to divide his work up into the right segments. His REALLY early stuff, especially non-fiction on the nature of government is relatively left wing, at least by modern US standards and some of his letters in the SF Museum in Seattle hint that a lot of his early “libertarian” stuff was firmly tongue in cheek.

    A lot of the problems with his later stuff, especially the utterly without redemption “Number of the Beast” came after his brush with cancer. Apparently he rewrote most of the book after surgery because the original draft was so bad.

    A lot of the crit comes from the incest themes in sections of Time Enough for Love and some of the other related multiverse stuff. He certainly seemed to develop a set of sexual hangups as he got older that made for tough reading.

    All that said, in my opinion Friday is one of his better later books.

    I’ve a fairly left wing friend, even by UK standards who would vehemently defend Heinlein against charges of sexism purely on the strength of the female characters that run through his mid-life books.

  10. I’m reminded of a line from a review of Farnham’s Freehold:

    “Racist, sexist, fascist – but readable.”

  11. He made a very interesting point, related to the reason for incest taboos in human society. Essentially, the point being made is that incest taboos are the extreme end of the spectrum of social pressure against inbreeding; and the reason for those is that inbreeding leads to defective offspring and a society that indulges in it a lot doesn’t survive very long.

    So what happens to the taboo if you have medical technology good enough to ensure that people likely to produce defective offspring don’t breed? Or to tell in the rare cases when unrelated people would produce such offspring?

    Actually, Heinlein wasn’t by any means the first to raise this point in fiction. E.E. Smith was, AFAIK, the first. There was a very strong hint of incest in The Children Of The Lens; the whole point was that the Children (one male, four female and that probably wasn’t a coincidence either) were one and all genetically perfect – being the end product of a breeding programme that had lasted at least since the invention of sex. That being so – and bearing in mind that all five of them were not only physically fitter than any normal could ever be but intelligent enough to make Newton and Einstein look morons, so how would any of them be attracted to normal humans – what exactly is wrong with them “committing” incest? Admittedly, this is a rather extreme case.

  12. I’m reminded of a line from a review of Farnham’s Freehold:

    “Racist, sexist, fascist – but readable.”

    Some years ago I read a review of Farnham’s Freehold that I agreed with after a re-reading of the novel. (I wish I could remember who wrote it or where it appeared; I don’t think it was by Alexei Panshin.) The reviewer made the case that Heinlein was deliberately subverting his “competent man” character. Basically, Hugh Farnham is an utter fuckup who is not in control of his destiny; his family is a mess, his efforts to escape all fail, and he is saved at the end only by the pity of his captors.

    Also, for all of his self-proclaimed high-mindedness, Farnham is a racist, and he managed to pass on that racism to (at least) his daughter: Heinlein explicitly pointed out Joe’s silent reaction to Farnham’s statement about how well white people were treating black people these days, and one scene in which Joe called him on it. Heinlein also highlighted,with one of the few interior monologues not by Hugh Farnham, his daughter Karen congratulating herself for being so broadminded and enlightened that she doesn’t really believe that black people smell funny.

    This isn’t the review I mentioned, but it makes many of the same points.

  13. Mike G. – that review of Farnham’s Freehold is very thought-provoking. It’s been decades since I read the novel, and I think some of it went right over my head.

  14. So I’m not sure who Sarah Hoyt’s talking to that get all cranky about Heinlein, and more to the point, not sure that they are anything but a tiny minority.

    If not for, Starship Troopers, there wouldn’t be quite so much crankiness. When that book came out, he was pretty much universally accused of pro-militarism by the Left. His intractable fall-out with Arthur Clarke over SDI didn’t help much, either. And, yes, if you are a hardcore feminist, Heinlein is a complete bastard to you because he didn’t follow the proper Progressivist dogma.

    And that really is the problem — he pissed people off because he refused to be pigeon-holed.

    I definitely got the sense that Heinlein developed a bit of a God complex.

    Ah, yes, “God in a dirty bathrobe”. Many people used that epithet who were pissed off that he managed to be successful and write well all within his own lifetime, instead of being a suffering artiste who fails to be recognized for his greatness until after his death. They also didn’t like that he didn’t give them free stuff and pander to their sense of entitlement.

  15. Now what was the technical term Larry Niven uses for people who think that the opinions of a fiction author’s characters are necessarily those of the author? Ah, yes “idiots”.

  16. I still think we’d have been better off with a formal religion made by Robert Heinlein than Ron L. Hubbard’s efforts.

  17. Peace and freedom are not universal concepts… therefore you can never have both at once. You can never have your cake and eat it too. At least not without spitting in someone else’s frosting at the same time… you can only hope to be able to find a suitable compromise you are both willing to live with.

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