Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press, 2014; $45.00 tpb; 221 pages
The Heritage of Heinlein is mainly the work of Joe Sanders, though revered scholar Thomas D. Clareson produced drafts of the first three chapters (about a quarter of the text) before his death in 1993. These chapters cover Heinlein’s long-unpublished For Us, The Living, written in 1938 but not finally issued in print until 2003, and his early fiction through to the mid-1940s. Sanders completed the project, which involved editing Clareson’s work and writing chapters to cover Heinlein’s oeuvre from the Scribner juveniles (1947–1958) to the 1980s. Despite this unusual history, The Heritage of Heinlein appears seamless.
In what follows, I’ll comment on some of the book’s interpretations and evaluations of particular stories and novels. Where these are from chapters written only by Sanders, I’ll refer to them as his.
In addition to the efforts of Clareson and Sanders, The Heritage of Heinlein includes a ten-page foreword by Frederik Pohl written in February 2013 before his death in September of that year. The book’s format crams more words than usual onto each page, so Pohl’s foreword is, in its own right, a substantial essay. As a very young man back in the early 1940s, Pohl edited Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, and he thus became one of Heinlein’s first editors. He snapped up four pieces that, for a variety of reasons, John W. Campbell had rejected from Astounding Science-Fiction. (Pohl remembers the magazine as being Astounding Stories at this point, but the name changed to Astounding Science-Fiction in March 1938, somewhat before Campbell published anything by Heinlein. Astounding had further name changes ahead: first, it lost the hyphen in “Science-Fiction” in the mid-1940s and eventually it became Analog Science Fiction and Fact.)
The four stories concerned were “Let There Be Light” (1940), “Beyond Doubt” (coauthored by Elma Wentz, 1941), “Lost Legacy” (1941), and “Pied Piper” (1942). As Pohl observes, these are not discussed beyond brief mentions by Clareson and Sanders, so his reflections on them are a bonus.
Pohl and Heinlein were colleagues and friends for many decades, and the foreword contains much of interest. Pohl recommends that readers not bother with For Us, The Living: Clareson and Sanders say all that needs to be said about this early effort. He also laments that Heinlein’s late novels, starting with The Number of the Beast (1980), suffered from the lack of an editor with sufficient authority to challenge Heinlein as an equal. I’ll return to this, because Sanders, by contrast, takes a relatively sympathetic approach to Heinlein’s novels of the 1980s, searching for their literary intentions and possible strengths.
To the extent practical in a single scholarly monograph, Clareson and Sanders attempt to do justice to the entirety of Heinlein’s varied output of short fiction and novels, including For Us, The Living, whose thematic seriousness they emphasize while making no pretense that the manuscript was artistically successful. One highlight of The Heritage of Heinlein is an especially loving, careful, and informative chapter on the Scribner juveniles. This has inspired me to go back and reread those splendid tales of adventure, which generally appeal to adult readers as much as teenagers.
While everything Clareson and Sanders have to say is worth considering, The Heritage of Heinlein gave me some minor disappointments. For example, the authors offer an overly bleak reading of Heinlein’s 1941 time-travel story, “By His Bootstraps,” missing the sheer bravado and playfulness of the narrative in which multiple journeys back and forth in time repeatedly bring the protagonist into contact with past and future versions of himself. The writing process may or may not have been enjoyable, but it certainly must have been painstaking: Heinlein presents us with an intricately complicated and seemingly paradoxical set of space-time events that appear to be internally consistent no matter how you look at them. For readers, the story has its dark elements, but it is also a joyful tour de force.
I was more seriously disappointed by Sanders’s cursory reading of Starship Troopers (1959). He gives it considerably less attention than, for example, Podkayne of Mars (first published in serial form in 1962–63), although Podkayne occupies a relatively minor place in the Heinlein canon. Of Starship Troopers, Sanders claims: “There’s really little to say about the novel—partly because it says exactly what Heinlein intended so that that there’s little need for additional commentary, but also partly because its effectiveness as a polemic makes it less resonant as a novel.” A couple of pages later, he adds, “Of all [Heinlein’s] novels, this is the one that most vehemently treats its readers like children.” I appreciate the force of this, since Starship Troopers undoubtedly includes some contrived, emotionally manipulative plot points, and it sometimes feels like militarist propaganda. That granted, I’d have appreciated a more strenuous effort to locate the novel’s strengths and attractions. Like it or not, Starship Troopers won a Hugo Award in 1960, and it remains a much-loved classic of the sf genre. Its author was evidently doing something right.
By contrast, there are fine readings of many other novels, including some commonly neglected or deprecated ones such as the aforementioned Podkayne, Glory Road (1963), and Farnham’s Freehold (1964). Whereas Sanders is dismissive of Starship Troopers, he reads—perhaps even overreads—Farnham’s Freehold in depth, revealing authorial clues to Hugh Farnham’s limited self-awareness and other flaws. This interpretation may seem against the book’s grain, for in many ways its protagonist is coded as admirable. Sanders’s argument is attentive and persuasive, but a suspicion remains (at least in my mind) that Farnham’s Freehold as explicated in The Heritage of Heinlein may be a better book than the one Heinlein actually wrote.
Setting aside the brief opening chapter devoted to For Us, The Living, the only other novel to receive a chapter of its own is Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). This may be Heinlein’s most famous individual novel, and it is one of four that won him Hugo Awards. Again, Sanders reads closely, picking up small points and offering a useful analysis. One issue that rankles slightly, although Sanders is scarcely blameworthy here, is a brief discussion of the suggestion that Stranger ought to be read as “a satirical anatomy along the lines of Tristram Shandy”—an idea that Sanders attributes to William H. Patterson, Jr. and Andrew Thornton in their 2001 scholarly book on the novel.
For the record, I’ll note—as I did when I reviewed the Patterson/Thornton book (NYRSF 181, September 2003)—that I made a similar point in a substantial paper published in 1985. Even this may not be the first critical discussion along these lines, although I’m not aware of an earlier one. In any event, the idea was in the air well before 2001.
That said, my 1985 paper is somewhat informal in tone, and it was published in a relatively obscure place (the proceedings volume of the 1985 Worldcon’s academic track). I would not expect Patterson, Thornton, or Sanders to be aware of it unless it were drawn to their attention. Still, it makes the point that Stranger is more a Menippean satire than a psychological novel, much of its amusement lying in its snippets of “news reports, bad verse, Socratic dialogue, fable, and philosophy.” That still sounds about right, and when we understand Stranger as belonging to what we might call the Menippean tradition, this makes a difference to how we might view, evaluate, and (perhaps) defend it.
Sanders comments, plausibly enough, that it “does feel like a novel,” because of the way “the unruly masses of satirical conversation and description coalesce around a central character.” I concur with this as far as it goes, and yet Stranger does not depend on consistent characterization or even, necessarily, on providing all the characters with distinct and identifiable personalities. Of course, nonacademic readers don’t need to be versed in any of this in a theoretical way. All they need do is engage with Stranger (and perhaps—dare I say?—grok it) on its own exuberant and outrageous terms rather than treating it as a botched attempt at a more conventional novel.
I was pleased to see a very long chapter (nearly 60 pages) on Heinlein’s late fiction: “The Final Period.” The chapter begins, however, with work published in the early 1960s, when Heinlein was still relatively young. At this point, he was only halfway through his long career, and there was little indication in the likes of Podkayne and Farnham’s Freehold of the huge, ludic, self-referential works that were to come. It might have made sense to hive off I Will Fear No Evil (1970) and Time Enough for Love (1973) into a chapter of their own and to take still another for the last five books, published in the 1980s after a gap that was caused, at least in part, by serious illness. (The publishing history of I Will Fear No Evil was also affected by illness, and this may have compromised its execution.)
In his foreword, Pohl specifies the last five novels—The Number of the Beast (1980), Friday (1982), Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984), The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), and To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987)—as suffering from editorial indulgence and some loss of the novelist’s powers. Many readers might, however, make similar criticisms of I Will Fear No Evil and Time Enough for Love while being kinder to Friday and Job. The latter two are, are of course, very different books from each other, but both stand out as relatively conventional compared to the others published in the final two decades of Heinlein’s life.
Whatever their faults, The Number of the Beast and the four novels that followed in Heinlein’s last decade attracted accolades and readers as well as much exasperated criticism. As with Starship Troopers, it is worthwhile trying to examine what Heinlein is doing right in these books, despite the misgivings of Pohl and many others, and why they still find readers three decades later. It’s refreshing, therefore, that Sanders takes them seriously. It’s likely, he suggests, that Heinlein was always fully capable of writing in a conventional, more self-restrained manner, but in later life he took opportunities to experiment, play, and reflect on his own past creations.
Indeed, we can easily miss the degree to which Heinlein experimented throughout his career with literary techniques that sometimes included subversive attitudes to traditional plots. This became more prominent in his life’s later phases, but it shows to an extent even as early as Beyond This Horizon (1942). Here we can see Heinlein resolving the main sequence of the action before introducing further events that enrich its significance. Again, Glory Road (1963) appears on one level to be a typical (if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) heroic quest novel. The quest concludes, however, long before the book ends, enabling a further sequence of events with reflections on the nature of heroism and success.
My main impression in reading The Heritage of Heinlein is of the impressive variety of Heinlein’s work. This can be seen even in the 1980s, where Friday and Job contrast with each other and stand out from the other three novels of the time. Heinlein was an innovator and a pathfinder. He was arguably the most important science fiction writer of the twentieth century: Arthur C. Clarke stands as one of his very few rivals while H.G. Wells is out the running because (almost all of) his greatest work appeared in the 1890s.
For whatever reasons, academic scholars and critics of sf often overlook Heinlein’s achievement, literary range, and historical importance. One glaring example is the lack of a chapter on Heinlein in Blackwell’s 2005 A Companion to Science Fiction, edited by David Seed, although there are chapters on numerous other “key writers,” including my own chapter on Greg Egan. All the authors concerned were or are fine and important contributors to the sf field, but the obvious omission of Heinlein looks almost as if it’s trying to make a point. Likewise, numerous individual works receive individual chapters of the Companion, but there is none for Stranger in a Strange Land or anything else by Heinlein. This kind of thing is puzzling.
In that cultural context, The Heritage of Heinlein is especially welcome. It is a clear, penetrating, accessible, and comprehensive study of Heinlein’s fiction that any scholar with an interest in Heinlein or in twentieth-century sf will find invaluable.
Russell Blackford is an Australian philosopher, author, and literary critic. His most recent book is Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds (2014), coedited with Damien Broderick.
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