Robert Heinlein: Short Story Collections

And the great Heinlein reread continues. This post finishes off the primary (first reprint) collections of Heinlein’s shorter fiction that have been in print recently enough for me to acquire them. I’m not bothering with secondary collections, or modern omnibuses, and there’s one collection, Off the Main Sequence, which contains some stories not collected anywhere else, which I have been unable to acquire


Rereading the collection of Heinlein stories containing the novella “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” which has been published both under the title of that novella, and as 6 X H, served double duty, as part if this reread project, and as part of my reading for the 1943 Retro Hugo nominations.

The novella is quite a neat, if occasionally terrifying, piece of prose. I enjoyed the combination of mystery and horror, the sense of discovering a secret, occult history of the world, the image of the world as art, compete with Critics who assess its virtues - though given their ability to decide on changes to the work, perhaps they are better viewed as editors (either way, labelling Jonathan Hoag’s profession as an unpleasant one is a delightful writerly in-joke). As usual, Heinlein’s gift for character and dialogue is strong, and his ability to pull off a complex and baffling plot yields considerable entertainment.

Heinein could write stories that make you cry as easily as he could change his shoes. The Man Who Travelled in Elephants is a n unsurpassed love story. Not just the story of Johnny, who travelled in elephants and his beloved Martha, lost and then found, but the story of an America that was passing, an America of spectacle and circus and county fairs and amusement parks. The small, intimate details of Johnny and Martha’s life together as they travelled the country, first fir work, later for their own joy, are delightful, bittersweet, familiar to any family that creates its own secret shared mythology. The growing anticipation of the reader once the truth of the tale becomes clear and you know that somewhere in the vast carnival crowd, Martha is waiting for her Johnny, that’s what starts the tears, slowly brimming, finally flowing at the end. It’s a beautiful love story.

—All You Zombies— is a tale that, oddly enough, treats intersex/transgender realities very sympathetically but can’t seem to imagine a role for women in space that doesn’t involve sexually servicing men. It’s the story of a temporal agent who is his own father and mother... or his own son and daughter, depending on what part of his timeline you’re looking at. Heinlein seemed to enjoy the time paradox theme, he wrote several of them. This is perhaps the best one.

They is an interesting piece of psychological fiction. Wr’ve all felt, at times, that we are alone in the world, different, that no one understands us. We know that in some people, at some times, this feeling intensifies, slides into a kind of delusion in which all the world is united in some strange kind of manipulative conspiracy. We call this madness. But what if it were the truth?

Political satire is a tricky thing to write well. Heinlein’s satire was usually well-disguised, but in Our Fair City, he gives us a very funny look at corrupt municipal politics, thanks to an unlikely alliance between a newspaperman, a parking lot attendant, and a playful sentient whirlwind named Kitten with a penchant for collecting pretty bits of paper and string and other sorts of things.

The final story, —And He Built a Crooked House—, is just plain fun. An architect tries to build a house modelled after an unfolded tesseract... but then an earthquake causes the house to fold up through a fourth spacial dimension and the architect and his clients are trapped inside. The set-up requires a certain degree of spacial perception to begin to visualise it, but the story itself is mostly an interesting but throw-away idea.


The Man Who Sold the Moon is a collection of short stories from Heinlein’s Future History sequence, most of them strongly focused on technological advances that form the background to the later, space-faring novels. Included here is Heinlein’s first published short story, “Life Line,” about Dr. Pinero, a man who develops a scientific method of determining the date of a person’s death. The apparatus is destroyed when Pinero is murdered by the insurance companies,and the only reason it’s part of the Future History sequence is that Lazarus Long will later mention meeting Pinero. What is of interest is Heinlein’s dark perspective on the ethics of corporations, a theme continued in “Let There Be Light,” in which a pair of scientists discover a means of generating cheap energy, heat and light, and encounter interference and threats from representatives of the power industry - a problem they decide to sidestep by giving away their methods for a minimal licensing fee to anyone who wants access. This story also introduces the classic Heinlein woman, beautiful, sexy, intelligent, with multiple degrees in science and engineering, and more than ready to be the male protagonist’s wife.

The theme of emergent technologies continues in “The Roads Must Roll” and “Blowups Happen” - both stories about adapting society to new technology, and adapting the technology to the needs of human society. In “The Roads Must Roll,” reliance on the automobile as the means of transportation has become untenable, due to rationing of oil and massive traffic congestion in cities. The technological fix is to build ‘rolling roads’ - giant conveyer belts large enough to transport not only millions of people, but also service establishments, across the countryside. In response, cities spread out, building both factories, homes and amenities along the roadways. A person can wake up, head to the nearest roadway, have breakfast in a restaurant on the road itself, get off at his place of work, and return home the same way, possibly having that afterwork drink, or picking up some necessities for the household, while the road carries him along. In the story, the dependance of the new social and economic structure on the roads leads to a revolt among a small group of roadway technicians who believe that those who control the means of transportation should also control the government. At its heart, it’s a critique of the idea that those who can cut off access to a service that society depends on should wield power simply because of that fact.
“Blowups Happen” addresses dual, linked issues - how to balance need against risk in a society, and the shortsightedness of corporations who willingly ignore long-term risk for short-term gain. It also plays on fears of atomic reactions we now know to be overstated, which dates the specifics of the story. In this story, the need for energy has finally exceeded the ability of the process introduced in “Let There Be Light” to provide it, and atomic power has been brought into the energy mix. However, the potential dangers of a nuclear plant exploding are sufficient to slowly drive anyone working on the plants into states of profound anxiety - the stress of knowing one slip could destroy a whole city, or more, becomes unbearable. And then, a close examination of atomic theory reveals that one slip could destroy, not just a city, but half the planet. The ultimate solution - move the plants into space - reduces the risk enough that people can now stand the stress, and everyone is happy. One interesting theme that underlies both stories, and can be found in a number of other instances of Heinlein’s work, is the idea that psychological testing can determine who is stable enough to work in certain professions, and who is not. There’s a naive faith in the ability of psychology to accurately determine who is capable of what.

The last two stories in the collection, “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem” tell the life story of a Moses figure, D. D. Harriman, financial genius who all his life wants only to go to the moon, builds a massive corporate empire to get the money and connections to do ir, then risks it all - only to be shut out of the trip himself, until, in the short story “Requiem” he is dying and all his money can’t legally buy him a waiver to risk his life to do the only thing he’s ever wanted. Frankly, “The Man Who Sold the Moon” has to be the most boring thing Heinlein ever wrote - it’s financial wheeling and dealing from start to finish, with a few engineering hitches thrown in here and there. “Requiem” is by far the better piece, and it really tells you everything you needed to know about Harriman. And it takes the Future History to where it really begins to take off, to the point where man begins to explore space.


In 1966 The Worlds of Robert Heinlein was published. By this tine, Heinlein was no longer writing short stories, he’d moved on to sprawling novels and there he would stay. This was the last collection of Heinlein’s work that included short stories not previously collected elsewhere. In 1980, Heinlein took the stories from this collection, added a massive number of essays, rants, and contextual pieces, and released it as Expanded Universe. Some of the stories can also be found in previous collections - “Life-Line,” “Blowups Happen” - but most pieces, fiction and non-fiction, are not collected elsewhere.

Of the stories not collected in other volumes, it’s sometimes easy to see why. “Successful Operation” is a message story, and it quite lacks any of the qualities that distinguish Heinlein’s writing. In the forward to this story, he notes that he wrote the story because he had not yet learned to say ‘no,’ and it shows. It is an anti-racist, anti-fascist, revenge fantasy, but the merits of the theme do not hide the wooden characterisation, the simplistic plot, or the lackluster writing. “Solution Unsatisfactory” on the other hand, is vintage Heinlein at his best. This is the story that is essentially a parallel universe story about the Manhatten Project, the development and first use of a radioactive weapon of mass destruction, and the conceptualisation of the Cold War and the MAD culture - although Heinlein’s unsatisfactory solution of a global military dictatorship sidesteps the reality of the latter two events. It is interesting to note that even then, Heinlein doubted that America would be able to refrain from turning the world into its own private empire if it had the opportunity. “Free Men” revisits the concept behind Sixth Column, depicting a single incident in the struggle of an underground resistance fighting an unnamed conquering nation. “On the Slopes of Vesuvius” returns to Heinlein’s deep fear of an impending nuclear war. “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon” is a Boy Scout themed story about a young Eagle Scout from Earth on his first scouting trip on the moon. “Searchlight” is a tech-heavy short short about searching for a blind child with perfect pitch lost on the surface of the moon.

And there are a fair number of non-sf stories - “They Do It with Mirrors,” a murder mystery set in a strip joint run on the lines of the famous Windmill Theatre - full nudity allowed if no one moves a muscle; “No Bands Playing, No Flags Waving,” an exploration of the nature of bravery; “A Bathroom of Her Own,” a quite realistic story about the nitty gritty of politics and dirty tricks and fighting a corrupt electoral machine; “Cliff and the Calories,” a rather typical Heinlein writing female viewpoint story which is notable for its appreciation of women who have good appetites and are not emaciated;

The essays included in Expanded Universe reflect some of Heinlein’s basic concerns. “The Last Days of the United States” and “Pie From the Sky” argue that the only way to prevent and eventual global atomic war is through the creation of a legitimate world government, while “How To Be a Survivor” is a fear-based guide to living through a nuclear attack on the US (or any other country, for that matter) - the underlying message being that it’s better to do what’s necessary to prevent an atomic war than be forced to survive after it’s over.

One article struck me as particularly worthy of comment. “Where To?” was originally written in 1950 and was a speculative article that attempted to look forward and see the shape of society in 2000. And so much of it is so very very wrong. He gets some little bits of technology fairly close - mostly personal telecommunications devices. But his middle class family lives in a ‘smart’ house well beyond anything that’s available to the ultra rich early adopter, and cities have been decentralised, with commutes if an hour or longer by personal helicopter. And there are colonies on the moon, where older folks can retire in peace and low gravity. One area where he was very close - and later edits brought him even closer - was the revolution in family structures and the development of non-traditional families of choice. He was close on medical research, far off on investment in space travel, and in general thought that science would achieve more to improve global conditions than it has. But prediction is hard, and not really the role of a science fiction author. “The Third Millennium Opens,” while framed as a fictional piece about a person writing in 2001, looking back at the past century and forward to the next, is far more daring, suggesting the scientific development of telepathy and the technology of FTL travel is waiting in the wings.

Many of the essays, and the forwards for the various pieces, make clear Heinlein’s ever growing concern with nuclear war, and Russian domination. He becomes almost fanatical in his opposition to communism - which includes anything that involves socialising any sphere of public life, or anything resembling that American shibboleth, the ‘welfare state.’ Like many Americans, Heinlein confused communism with Russian imperialism - and now that Russia is the worst kind of capitalist state in all but name, we know that it was never about an International Communist Revolution, and always about Russia’s desire to be a world dictatorship. Heinlein visited the USSR, and wrote several scathing essays about how Intourist deals with foreign visitors, managing what they see, who they talk to, where they go. These are also included here.

Heinlein also gives much attention to matters such as the decline in education and the rising interest in astrology, witchcraft, religious cults and other things that detract from what he values above all else - science and engineering, with a side order of history. There’s a lot of material in the essays to make a modern social justice advocate like myself boil with anger, though it’s clear that he wants a society in which people don’t face discrimination, he would shudder at the idea of identity politics or critical race theory.

Essentially. Expanded Universe is Heinlein’s statement of principles, and there’s a lot that’s interesting, and sadly, a lot that just doesn’t hold up well.