Rereading Heinlein: Part One

I am embarking on a reading project, it seems. I am rereading Heinlein books. Probably not all of them, though it is possible. I started this project because my partner and I were talking about the Japanese anime version of Starship Troopers, and its portrayal of certain characters in terms of race. Heinlein is not always obvious about the race of his characters, he tosses clues in and leaves you to make your own assumptions. Anyway, we were discussing Sergeant Zim, who is portrayed as black in the anime. We both agreed that this was unlikely, as one of the few clues to his race is a reference to him being 'shaved blue' which I and my partner took to mean very closely shaved, in line with other references to his precision in terms of proper presentation. I'd had the vague sense that he might be Asian, based on his comment about not speaking Standard and having been taught martial arts by cadet Shikumi's father. But nothing else confirms that, and Sergeant Zim's race remains ambiguous. But that was why I started rereading.

I'm continuing with the reread because Farah Mendlesohn's long awaited (by me, at least) critical study of Heinlein is getting ready for publication and I want to reacquaint myself with a fair chunk of Heinlein's work before I read Mendlesohn's study.

(By the way, due to some contractual issues with the press that had originally accepted Mendlesohn's proposal for the book, she is publishing it through a crowdsourcing publisher. If you want a copy - and you are going to want one if you are in any way a science fiction fan - you can pre-order at the link below. It's already fully funded, so there's no risk, you will get what you order.

https://unbound.com/books/robert-heinlein

I repeat, if you are an sf fan, you will want this book. Go order it now.)

Right, back to Heinlein.

So, I reread Starship Troopers, because you can't just check out something in a Heinlein book, you get sucked into the story and you have to read it all. At least I do.

It's still a damned good story. I've never agreed with the philosophy behind his 'volunteer for the army and you prove you are deserving of the vote' but it is not necessary that you agree with him to enjoy a story based on some theory he's cooked up. And there is a small something in his argument that, if broadened, does make some sense. It's a seductive argument that one should have to demonstrate some sense of civic responsibility in order to participate in the democratic process. Maybe if we had to perform a term of service - not necessarily military (in fact, I'd say definitely not military) - but something, like giving your time and skills to a public service organisation for a few years. Meals on Wheels. A free health clinic. After school programs for kids. Something that puts you in contact with people who aren't like you, and asks you to serve, to make things better, to think about others rather than yourself. Maybe if we had something like that, we wouldn't run the risk of democracies that go soft in the head and elect leaders like Trump. I don't know. It has become an article of faith that we do not question the prime importance of universal franchise, largely because it is so easily taken away for the wrong reasons - sex, race, not owning land or having enough money or attending the right church.

Anyway, that's what's so good about the best of Heinlein. He entertains immensely, and seemingly effortlessly - but he also invites you to think. I am always amused by the more extreme among his fans, who don't think about what he wrote, and construct arguments about it, and critique it, but who just worship it. He would have hated those fans, I think. My image of Heinlein is of someone who'd rather have everyone disagree with him after thinking, than everyone agree with him without thinking.

The next book I decided to reread was Podkayne of Mars. I like Podkayne as a character - more so right at the beginning of the book than further on, as she becomes more 'sophisticated' and starts compromising her dreams. Heinlein does better at writing three-dimensional, complex and competent women than most other male sf writers of his time, but he was undeniably sexist by any standards. For instance, there's the scene where she re-evaluates her dream if being a spaceship pilot/captain: "I've been doing some hard thinking about piloting - and have concluded that there are more ways of skinning a cat than buttering it with parsnips. Do I really want to be a "famous explorer captain"? Or would I be just as happy to be some member of his crew?"

And there's the stuff about how being a woman means instinctive and overriding maternal instincts. Podkayne's mother is one of the top engineers in the solar system - she holds a "systemwide license as a Master Engineer, Heavy Construction, Surface or Free Fall" - and yet the unexpected decanting of three frozen embryos turns her into a mindless milk machine who can't even tell whether an infant's diaper is clean or dirty. And it's a stint of caring for infants during a solar flare emergency on a spaceliner that makes Podkayne think it might be better to run a crêche on a spaceship than be a pilot. It's these things that 'mystify' both femininity and motherhood in so many of Heinlein's novels that kick me out of my enjoyment of the story itself whenever they crop up.

The edition I have of the book has both endings - Heinlein's unpublished original ending in which Podkayne dies, and the ending demanded by the publisher, in which she is wounded but survives. I'm still not sure which one I prefer.

And then I moved on to Revolt in 2100. Considering the current political situation in the US, this was an inevitable early pick from among Heinlein's oeuvre. It's far too easy to see the US sliding into a theocratic dictatorship these days, what with fascists in the White House and the Republican party doubling down on 'sin and immorality.' Given the way Trump is stacking the courts, it's not hard to imagine the reversal of key SCOTUS and lower court decisions on abortion, sexual assault, gay and trans rights, maybe even, given the overt racism of the times, Loving vs. Virginia.

Heinlein knew his people. He knew there was a massive streak of religious fanaticism in American culture, to say nothing of virulent nationalism, just waiting to be fanned by the 'right' person. But the core novella in the collection that's come to be known as Revolt in 2100, -If This Goes On, isn't just about the dangers of a religious dictator, it's also about how the organs of the establishment - media, the church, the schools - shape public knowledge and manipulate public opinion. There's practically an entire primer on the uses of propaganda in supporting - or destabilising - a government buried in the narrative, to say nothing of some ideas about how to organise an underground revolution.

Not surprisingly, -If This Goes On has a lot to say about religion and spiritual practice. Rereading it, I wonder how much my own ideas were shaped by some of the observations placed in the mouth of the protagonists friend, Zebediah Jones. For instance, "I believe very strongly in freedom of religion—but I think that that freedom is best expressed as freedom to keep quiet. From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit" - that's pretty much the central tenet of my belief about spiritual performance. I have some very strong spiritual beliefs - and I almost never talk about them. For what it's worth, Zebediah is one of the few Heinlein avatars (there's one in most of his novels for adults) that I had a crush on as a youngish person.

The story is tightly plotted and fast-paced despite the multiple ruminations on religion, dictatorships, the process of decolonising the mind, and other themes. It's a very quick read in spite of its depth. And there are somr things that just sit perfectly with me. I've always felt a strange sense of rightness in the last sentences of the novella. For all his annoyingly sexist assumptions about women, he got one thing dead right - the deep level of anger that exists in women who have been sexually abused should never be underestimated.

As for the two shorter pieces that are bundled with -If This Goes on in the Revolt in 2100 volume, "Coventry" and "Misfit" - they're both in their own way variations on a theme, that of the young man who needs to find his way to be part of society.

"Coventry" is not quite as successful as some of Heinlein's other stories, in my opinion. Heinlein's characters all do a lot of talking about ideas, but not so much about themselves, and Heinlein doesn't usually talk to the reader about them, he lets the reader see for herself who they are. But in "Coventry" the omniscient third person narrator pointedly backs up what we have already seen in David McKinnon's behaviour - that he is the classic entitled, self-pitying and angry young man who thinks he deserves everything despite giving nothing back. This makes McKinnon at first seem overdone, more like a caricature than a real person - though to be honest, some of the real young men of his ilk that I've met seem like caricatures of themselves. It also makes his sudden transformation into a responsible human being, willing to sacrifice for the common weal, less believable. Why does this whiny prat suddenly decide to risk his life for the society he turned his back on merely a few weeks earlier? Because he's shamed by the courage of a young girl? Because he's been mistreated in Coventry? Because he feels gratitude to the Fader? Because he sees how power without responsibility destroys lives? How has he "cured himself"? It's a little too pat for my tastes. If we accept the suggested etiology of his entitlement and rage, years of emotional abuse primed him to be a selfish and angry man, and the effects of that kind of abuse don't go away that quickly.

I'm also curious about the Covenant itself. Dismissing the concept of justice as undefinable, it takes as the cornerstone of appropriate behaviour, doing no damage. Yet it does not recognise the damage of emotional abuse. McKinnon's crime is responding with physical force to verbal abuse. Given his history, it may well have been a matter of PTSD. He's not ready to be a responsible citizen, but he's been damaged and no one has given him any redress. (Yes, it's possible, perhaps even common, to be an abuse survivor and an entitled prat simultaneously.) I must remember, when rereading the other novels set during the tine of the Covenant, to read them with this story in mind.

"Misfit" is, on the other hand, a story about a marginalised outsider finding his gift, the thing that makes him special and gives him a sense of worth. The young Andy Libby doesn't have a problem with entitlement or with a lack of responsibility to his fellow human beings, he just doesn't realise what he has to offer. The situation is another of Heinlein's patented 'hard work and discipline will make you a man' scenarios - a whole generation of misfits being sent out into dangerous conditions in space to do construction work, an uneasy cross between the Peace Corps and a chain gang. In the context of the society of the Covenant, it's likely an alternative to the 'psychological readjustment or Coventry' choice offered to adults. These are barely more than boys, who don't fit into society, but theoretically aren't so set in their ways that they can't be salvaged without psychological manipulation.

It's also our introduction to one of my favourite characters in Heinlein's Future History series, Andrew Jackson Libby, mathematical wild talent and one of 'traditional' science fiction's first trans characters.

And now I shall have to consider what to reread next. Another of my favourites, I think. Double Star.