Posted on 12/13/2003 4:44:45 AM PST by jalisco555
TORONTO - The American science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein is known for such classic novels as Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
A new book reveals that Heinlein, at least early in his life, was a Socred, a believer in the Social Credit movement that came to power in Alberta in 1935.
Heinlein's long-lost first novel, For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs, is scheduled for publication in January. It imagines a future America patterned on 1930s Alberta.
Heinlein wrote the novel in the late 1930s. It tells the story of a U.S. Navy officer named Perry Nelson who is killed in a traffic accident and is somehow transported, alive, to the California of 2086.
The book was rejected by a number of publishers, probably because much of the story is actually a series of lectures on how Heinlein felt the future should look. In later works, Heinlein would use fictional characters for the same purpose.
In Heinlein's America of 2086, the country did not enter the Second World War, remaining isolated. (Hitler commits suicide after the collapse of the German economy, Mussolini just retires and the Duke of Windsor becomes king of a united Europe).
In the novel, in the 1950s, Fiorella LaGuardia (mayor of New York when Heinlein was writing) begins a series of economic reforms, starting with a banking system based on the Social Credit theories of Socred thinker Clifford Hugh Douglas. In the novel, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds these changes. In reality, in Canada, the Supreme Court rejected them.
In For Us, the Living, later presidents complete the reforms. These reforms then give people a basic income that bridges the gap between production and consumption, which then allows the Americans of 2086 to do what they really want, free of economic fear.
Robert James, who is writing a biography of Heinlein, says in the afterword that there was an active social-credit movement in Los Angeles at the time. According to James, Heinlein had to leave the U.S. Navy after he contracted tuberculosis. He then worked for Upton Sinclair's political campaign. The muck-raking author of The Jungle had long pushed for social reform in the United States.
In 1934, Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat on an EPIC (End Poverty in California) ticket. Sinclair was crushed by the Republicans and the conservative California newspapers. Heinlein continued in the EPIC movement and was editor of the movement's newsletter. In 1938, he stood for the California state assembly in a district that included Beverly Hills and part of Hollywood, losing to a Republican.
After that, Heinlein turned to writing, and quickly became the star of the science-fiction pulp magazines, making enough money to pay off his mortgage. His first successful novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, about a trip to the moon, was published in 1947.
Heinlein then went on to write a series of juvenile novels, which drew many young people into the science-fiction world, followed by his adult fiction.
James quotes Heinlein as telling another science-fiction writer about the later changes in his political philosophy: "I've simply changed from a soft-headed radical to hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian." James also says the events of the Second World War and the Cold War, including the threat from communism, influenced Heinlein's change of political philosophy. He supported Senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 (some political analysts consider Goldwater the first neo-conservative).
Heinlein, however, opposed what today is known as social conservativism. In the new novel, his first draft of future history includes a take-over of the United States by what he calls "Neo-Puritans" led by the televangelist Nehemiah Scudder, a character who is also prominent in his 1941 novella If This Goes On. The novella is the story of the second American revolution, when libertarians finally overthrow a dictatorship of the religious right.
For Us, the Living also includes one chilling incident, a surprise attack on the island of Manhattan by two giant helicopters that flood the island with poison gas, killing 80 per cent of the population. The helicopters are based on aircraft carriers and the attack comes when the United States is at war with Argentina, Brazil and Chile in December 2003.
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Heinlein was a close friend of Jack Parsons. Throughout Heinlein's whole career, almost all of his social depictions -- people living together, beautiful red haired women, guys and girls hanging with, well, guys and girls come directly from the real life of Jack Parson's communal coven. Heinlein was complex, and only all his writings seem to capture him. |
Yup--Weber did a masterful job of "stealing" Hornblower. And Bujold is also very good.
I agree. His books got so preachy and his characters became so verbose that the stories were lost in the dialogue. Early stuff for young readers was exciting, though.
Me, too! And I'm way past grown up...
That's why I hate everybody.
Clarke and Asimov are much better at the SCIENCE of speculative fiction. Heinlein was better at social speculation and character development.
Clarke "invented" the idea of geostationary communications satellites (I have a photocopy of the paper he presented, complete with hand written notes). His stories were mostly about the science with some fair to middling characters added in to carry his words to the reader. One that strays a bit from hard science, but that I love, is Childhood's End.
Asimov is almost nothing but science and leftist world view, particularly in his later years. The robot books and the Foundation series are required reading, in my mind. The 3 laws of robotics are still held sacred by most real researchers in the field. His science fact books are still good reads, even if some parts of them have been outdated, though the science in them (as well as his fiction) holds up better than most (except the teeny tiny nuclear reactors powering everything)
Asimov draws better characters than Clarke, but not as alive as Heinlein's. I can hardly remember any of Clarke's characters (not counting the ones in the movie versions, and even they're one dimensional) and have no desire to meet Harry Seldon, but I'd love to spend a LONG time talking to Jubal Harshaw! My only problems with Heinlein is that he got obsessed with sex in his later stories and he also started ending his books, too often, with trite or unsatisfying endings. It was apparent in many cases that he had lost interests and just wanted to end the stories. Number of the Beast comes particularly to mind.
I think you can judge Heinlein's political philosophy (if you can't get it from his books directly) by examining the two writers who he deemed his successor's, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. He nurtured both of their careers as well as influencing their writing. Particularly reading the things they've collaborated on you'll get the feeling that their about 3 sigma to the right of Rush Limbaugh (of course, that's not a recommendation for some freepers <g>).
As I mentioned, Jubal Harshaw is my favorite character from anything by Heinlein. He is who Heinlein would have liked to be, and somewhat was. I think the philosophy Harshaw speaks is straight from the author, with no intervening twists or turns.
If you enjoy Heinlein, and particularly if you like Pournelle's military SF, then you'll enjoy a relatively new author, John Ringo. Combine mobile combat suits, nasty aliens and a "tank" the size of a football stadium with a switchblade wielding rabbit named Bun Bun painted on it's turret (two stories tall) and you have quite a combination. Any novel that has the line "That's what you get for letting redneck's play with anit-matter" can't be all bad.
Frank Herbert plagiarized 80% of the ideas in Dune from a little-known author with the pen-name of "Cordwainer Smith."
I can prove this and have done so via extensive email with "Smith"'s daughter--who was unaware of this fact until I told her.
For my credentials, I am a former "keyholder" of the M.I.T. Science Fiction Society (assistant librarian) and was head librarian of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Association for nearly a decade.
--Boris
Your image and this one are my favorite ZOT images. Gotta love that rabbit with a 'tude!
You know, I always suspected something was amiss -- Herbert's writing was very uneven -- I liked the Dune trilogy but the follow-up books weren't nearly the calibre of those.
His other writing tended to be very self-absorbed. He came across as an egotist trying to convince the reader that he is right (RAH was a very very very good-writing egotist).
My pantheon consisted of (in order):
However, "Tunnel in the Sky" was one of the turning points for me in becoming a lifetime lover of scifi.
I met Pournelle (and Niven) at a con and spent a very long and interesting weekend getting drunk with them in the Con Suite. I then saw Pournelle almost every year for several years at Comdex and a couple of other geekfests. He remembered me, but couldn't remember what we'd done that weekend. Just in case, he'd always say "don't say anything in front of my wife."
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