[ExI] Wall Street Journal on RAH

[Michael M. Butler]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118541376285478493.html

Robert A. Heinlein's Legacy
By TAYLOR DINERMAN
July 26, 2007; Page D7

Science fiction at one time was despised as vulgar and "populist" by
university English departments. Today, it is just another cultural
artifact to be deconstructed, along with cartoons and People magazine
articles. Yet one could argue that science fiction has had a greater
impact on the way we all live than any other literary genre of the
20th century.
[Robert A. Heinlein]

When one looks at the great technological revolutions that have shaped
our lives over the past 50 years, more often than not one finds that
the men and women behind them were avid consumers of what used to be
considered no more than adolescent trash. As Arthur C. Clarke put it:
"Almost every good scientist I know has read science fiction." And the
greatest writer who produced them was Robert Anson Heinlein, born in
Butler, Mo., 100 years ago this month.

The list of technologies, concepts and events that he anticipated in
his fiction is long and varied. In his 1951 juvenile novel, "Between
Planets," he described cellphones. In 1940, even before the Manhattan
Project had begun, he chronicled, in the short story "Blowups Happen,"
the destruction of a graphite-regulated nuclear reactor similar to the
one at Chernobyl. And in his 1961 masterpiece, "Stranger in a Strange
Land," Heinlein -- decades before Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to the
White House -- introduced the idea that a president's wife might try
to guide his actions based on the advice of her astrologer. One of
Heinlein's best known "inventions" is the water bed, though he never
took out a patent.

Heinlein brought to his work a unique combination of technical savvy
-- based largely on the engineering training he'd received at the U.S.
Naval Academy and a career in the Navy cut short by tuberculosis in
1934 -- and a broad knowledge of history and foreign languages.
Bemoaning the state of U.S. education in the 1970s, he wrote that "the
three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages
and mathematics . . . if you lack any one of them you are just another
ignorant peasant with dung on your boots." Heinlein was certainly no
ignorant peasant.

Though he later became well known for his anticommunism, Heinlein in
the late 1930s indulged in both leftist and isolationist politics. He
sold his first science-fiction story in 1939 for $70, "and there was
never a chance that I would ever again look for honest work." After
Pearl Harbor, to his great disappointment, he was not called back into
uniformed service. He ended the war at the Philadelphia Naval Aircraft
Factory, working with fellow writers L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac
Asimov.

>From the late '40s to the late '50s, Heinlein mostly wrote adventure
stories aimed at boys. Some, such as "Citizen of the Galaxy" (1957)
and "Starman Jones" (1953), examine social and economic status with as
jaundiced an eye as Tom Wolfe's. Others are comedies like the
delightful "The Rolling Stones" (1952), which helped inspire the
famous Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles."

In 1958, in response to what he saw as a liberal effort to weaken
America's military, he set aside the "Sex and God" book on which he
had been working and wrote "Starship Troopers." This was probably his
most controversial book. In it he imagines a future society in which
the right to vote must be earned by volunteering for service,
including service in the military. In response to claims that the book
glorifies the military, he wrote: "It does indeed. Specifically, the
P.B.I., the Poor Bloody Infantry, the mudfoot who puts his frail body
between his loved home and the war's desolation -- but is rarely
appreciated."

Afterward, he finished the work he had set aside, and it became his
second and possibly greatest masterpiece, "Stranger in a Strange
Land." The book tells the story of a human child raised by Martians
who is brought to Earth and discovers religion, lust and love, as well
as politics, interplanetary diplomacy, legal shenanigans and life in a
traveling carnival. The novel introduced the word "grok" into the
vocabulary of the 1960s counterculture and seduced many of its members
into reading some of Heinlein's other works -- writings that, in some
cases, helped them to rethink the assumptions of hippiedom.

His next book was "Glory Road," another novel on the subject of duty,
heroism and love. The first chapter not only sets up the story but
includes one of the most eloquent and witty denunciations of military
conscription ever written. In "Glory Road," his protagonist is
magically transported from Earth, where he had been fighting
"pragmatic Marxists in the jungle," to a fantasy universe where, armed
only with sword and bow, he would rescue a priceless treasure. His
guide and mentor is a woman of "ageless perfect beauty" who later
turns out to be the Empress of the Twenty Universes. She explains to
the hero that "so far as I know, your culture is the only
semicivilized one in which love is not recognized as the highest art
and given the serious study it deserves."

Heinlein's political beliefs were moving more and more toward the
libertarian side of the spectrum. He supported Barry Goldwater in
1964, and in 1966 he published what many considered his greatest book,
"The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," the tale of how penal colonists and
their descendants on the Moon successfully revolt against their
Earthly masters. The core of this book, which keeps it near the top of
the libertarians' reading lists, is the speech by an old professor,
Bernardo de la Paz, to the rebels' constitutional convention: "...like
fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible
master. You now have your freedom -- if you can keep it. But do
remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves
than to any other tyrant."

The professor explains: "The power to tax, once conceded, has no
limits; it contains until it destroys. I was not joking when I told
them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away
with government -- sometimes I think that it is an inescapable disease
of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved
and inoffensive -- and can you think of a better way than by requiring
the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby."
As they say on the Moon, "TANSTAAFL!": "There Ain't No Such Thing as a
Free Lunch!"

Heinlein's later novels were overshadowed by his failing health, and
he often wrote on medical themes such as brain transplants and
cloning. He was a strong supporter of blood drives and a big supporter
of NASA's medical research projects. In the '70s, in a speech to the
midshipmen at the Naval Academy, he said he thought that "patriotism
has lost its grip on a large percentage of our population. . . . But
there is no way to force patriotism on anyone. Passing a law will not
create it, nor can we buy it by appropriating so many billions of
dollars."

Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988, lived a life inspired by two
great loves. One was America and its promise of freedom. As one of his
characters put it: "Your country has a system free enough to let
heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time -- unless its
looseness is destroyed from the inside." And he loved and admired
women -- not just his wife, Virginia, who provided the model for the
many strong-minded and highly competent females who populate his
stories, but all of womankind. "Some people disparage the female form
divine, sex is too good for them; they should have been oysters."

In another hundred years, it will be interesting to see if the
nuclear-powered spaceships and other technological marvels he
predicted are with us. But nothing in his legacy will be more
important than the spirit of liberty he championed and his belief that
"this hairless embryo with the aching oversized brain case and the
opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will
endure and spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his
honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his
noble essential decency."

Mr. Dinerman writes a weekly column for the Space Review.


-- 
         Michael M. Butler  :  m m b u t l e r  ( a t )  g m a i l . c o m
         "I'm going to get over this some time. Might as well be now."