Heinlein Reread, Part Two

Two of my great passions in life have been politics and the theatre. This may be why one of my favourite Heinlein novels is Double Star, the story of a down-on-his-luck actor who finds himself impersonating - and eventually becoming - the leader of a major political party and ultimately the Prime Minister of the Solar System. It helps that the politician in question espouses the same kind of beliefs about the political equality of sentient races that I'd have in a similar time and place.

The book is yet another of Heinlein's morality tales about the importance of learning to be responsible to society. Lawrence Smith - or, as he prefers to be known, Lorenzo Smythe, aka the Great Lorenzo - is an arrogant, self-centred and bigoted man who is currently 'at liberty' and stone broke. My guess is that his relative lack of success (we learn later that he has had moments of greatness in his career amid a number of unsavory incidents) is due to his rather unpleasant character rather than lack of talent. In fact, almost from the beginning he is shown to have all the gifts of a good actor, from observational skills and a good memory to the gift of immersing himself in a character in true Method style.

At the beginning, we don't like Lorenzo because he is essentially unlikeable. By the end, when he has made the ultimate sacrifice of his identity snd his future, willingly, for what he has come to believe is the good of the people - all the people, the Martians and Venusians and Jovians as well as the humans - i at least like him very much indeed. Or I like the man he has turned himself into, politician Joseph Bonforte. At the end, they are the same.

This is one of Heinlein's stronger anti-racism books. He makes explicit the link between Bonforte's support of the full inclusion of extra-terrestrial people in society and government, and anti-racist arguments in the real world:

" 'My opponent,' Bonforte had said with a rasp in his voice, 'would have you believe that the motto of the so-called Humanity Party, "Government of human beings, by human beings, and for human beings," is no more than an updating of the immortal words of Lincoln. But while the voice is the voice of Abraham, the hand is the hand of the Ku Klux Klan. The true meaning of that innocent-seeming motto is "Government of all races everywhere, by human beings alone, for the profit of a privileged few."

'But, my opponent protests, we have a God-given mandate to spread enlightenment through the stars, dispensing our own brand of Civilization to the savages. This is the Uncle Remus school of sociology—the good dahkies singin’ spirituals and Old Massa lubbin’ every one of dem! It is a beautiful picture but the frame is too small; it fails to show the whip, the slave block—and the counting house!' "

It's not a great book for representation of women, alas. The only female character of note is Penelope Russell, who has multiple degrees and is an elected representative to the Parliament of the Empire (the solar system being run as a parliamentary monarchy), but also works as Bonforte's secretary/personal assistant and is of course hopelessly in love with him. She spends the course of the novel going back and forth between handling his paperwork (but never actually giving advice, or making decisions, as do all the other members of Bonforte's staff) and crying, fainting and bring an otherwise overly emotional woman.

But Lorenzo's journey to maturity and self-sacrifice make the story worth telling.


Heinlein liked playing with time travel, I think, because he certainly did it often enough. The Door into Summer is an entertaining story, though not one of his major works. The story, despite its time travel, is fairly simple. Naive engineering genius Dan Davis is betrayed by girlfriend and business partner, then spends 30 years in suspended animation. In the future, he discovers some discrepancies in his memory of what happened with his inventions and business affairs. He conveniently finds out about top-secret time travel experiments and cons the scientist in charge to send him back in time, where he arranges to nullify the consequences of the betrayal, sets up his business and patent affairs so they match future history and will make him wealthy, and then goes back into suspended animation for 30 years. He has everything he lost and more. Oh, and he gets to marry the 11 year old girl who had a crush on him 30 years ago. And he saves his cat. I think saving Pete - the cat - is the best part of the whole caper, to be honest.

The protagonist's speech about Pete being finally old and ready for the Last Sleep always makes me cry: "...Pete is getting older, a little fatter, and not as inclined to choose a younger opponent; all too soon he must take the very Long Sleep. I hope with all my heart that his gallant little soul may find its Door into Summer, where catnip fields abound and tabbies are complacent, and robot opponents are programmed to fight fiercely—but always lose—and people have friendly laps and legs to strop against, but never a foot that kicks."

The kind of icky bit is the thing that Heinlein (and other male writers) do here is the adolescent girl who knows she's going to marry the protagonist trope. This time around, it gets rather squicky because by the time he's getting ready to go into suspended animation for the second time, he's all primed to marry the girl, even though he has only spend about an hour with her since the point where he dismisses her crush. In fact, he arranges it so that, when she turns 21, she'll have the funds to go into suspended animation herself so that he can be there, in the future, to marry her when she grows up. I guess this is supposed to be some sort of soulmates destined for each other idea of romance (If you look closely, Heinlein seems to have a thing for that in a lot of his romantic subplots), combined with his ideas about men being helpless before the power of a woman bent on doing something within her womanly sphere. But nonetheless, ick.


Rereading Heinlein honestly means rereading the extremely problematic stuff as well as the stuff that's mostly good stories that reflect the standard biases of their times. And Sixth Column is a problematic novel. Though, the story goes, it would have been worse if Heinlein hadn't toned down some if what John Campbell - who developed the original plot - had wanted in it.

It's a fairly standard plot idea - enemies invade, a resistance forms and fights back, the enemies are driven out. Because this is science fiction, the resistance has some serious scientists and they develop a weapon so powerful it is indistinguishable from magic - or miracles - and thus virtually ensures success. The rest is standard spy/adventure/military stuff, weighed down with an appalling amount of racism.

Ok, one expects the citizens of an occupied nation to be rather rude when talking about their occupiers, but the extent of the race-based venom is particularly vile. From comments about "the Asiatic mind" to epithets based solely on physical characteristics, the speech is not just about angry resistance, it's about racial hatred.

The invaders are depicted as wholly evil - they torture, enslave, engage in systematic rape of white women and conduct cultural genocide. There's no reason given for their behaviour, it's just what Asians do when they have power. (Actually, it's very much what white folks have actually done to people of colour, but that's another story for another time.) The invasion and attendant brutality is, in the view of one character, the consequence of an Asian inferiority complex in which they want to seem equal to whites. They are also portrayed as profoundly limited in understanding the complexities of the white mind, which makes it possible for less than a dozen survivors to establish a nation-wide resistance movement in a matter of months without arousing suspicions.

Heinlein would go on to write several much better underground resistance/revolution novels, including -If This Goes On and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Sixth Column has the shape of a decent novel, but it's flawed.