My life in books

Heinlein wrote few adult novels during the period that he was focusing on short stories, and juveniles. Some of these may be considered as experimental novels, others began as juveniles but were eventually marketed as adult books. There s some thematic continuity between two of these, Double Star and Starship Troopers, both of which take as main themes the ideas of civil duty and sacrifice of the one for the good of the many. But not so much with the others. These transitional books - books appearing between his short story writing period and his mature period a a writer almost exclusively of novels - were:

The Puppet Masters 1952
Double Star 1956
The Door into Summer 1957
Starship Troopers 1959

The Puppet Masters is, like the pre-war novels, an adult novel written for magazine publication, and may have represented an effort to break into the mainstream adult market. The magazine version, serialised in Galaxy in 1951, was heavily cut from the original, and the editor revised it again before novel publication in 1952. An uncut original was published with Virginia Heinlein’s consent in 1990. My comments are based on the uncut version.

The novel is generally considered to be Heinlein’s most extreme cautionary novel against Communism - marked by the paranoia generated by the slugs who can move in almost perfect secrecy when their hosts are careful is highly reminiscent of the fear of “communists under the bed.” Heinlein didn’t approve of McCarthy’s methods, but he did have a strong loathing for what he imagined communism to be. Anyone who attempted to curtail free though was, in his mind, a commissar, and thus an enemy of freedom. He believed that under communism no one was allowed to have their own opinions, and was as helpless as any of his ‘ridden’ characters in The Puppet Masters, unable to act as an individual.

As it is, it’s also unlike Heinlein’s other work in tone, being more horror than science fiction. As a horror novel, it is extremely uncharacteristic of his work, being lurid in many arts, and focusing on the visceral - the sense of slime, the feeling if a master when it bursts - in ways that his usual descriptions, though powerful, don’t normally display. There’s little else in this book that plays into Heinlein’s main themes of social responsibility and personal integrity, (aside from certain aspects of gender relations) just an ‘us and them’ story in which all humans should unite against the monster who could be walking next to you.

Double Star is, on the other hand, perhaps the most extreme example of Heinlein’s theme of civic duty. In this novel, Lorenzo Smythe, a young, not too successful actor is hired to take the place of a great politician and statesman who has been kidnapped in order to interfere with a diplomatic event that will seal the alliance between humans and Martians. If the kidnapped man, Joseph Bonforte, does not appear on time to complete the Martian ceremony, war between planets is likely.

Lorenzo, after some quibbling and rabbitting, agrees, and does an excellent job. And then the real Bonforte is found, his brain deeply damaged by an overdose of drugs. Smythe must carry on in the role until the damage can be repaired. Then the final blow - Bonforte dies, and Smythe must face an enormously difficult decision - return to his own life and kill the plans for reforms and expansion of franchise to all the civilisations in the solar system, or sink fully beneath Bonforth’s identity and carry out Bonforth’s plans. It’s the ultimate demand - carry out a vast amount of good by giving up your own self, or hold onto your identity and let the future good of society be destroyed.

The Door into Summer is another time travel story in which the ultimate goal is to still be a youngish man when the prepubescent redhead you fancy is grown up enough to marry you. It’s at the heart of a much longer, convoluted tale of revenge and regaining what was indisputably yours through a story of multiple doubling up of time lines due to frozen sleep and real time travel. The plot is complex and involves a lot of legal maneuvering, both in the original betrayal and again in the secondary time loop that represents the retribution and reclamation of one’s own.

And because it’s important, relax and enjoy the ride, the cat lives.

Finally, there’s Starship Troopers, which was originally much shorter, had a more poignant ending, and was intended as a juvenile in the lineage of Space Cadet. The later showed a world at peace and the moral youth growing into it. Starship Troopers addresses the question - what if we are at war through no fault of our own? What is civic duty in a universe of violence?

It’s the most didactic book Heinlein had written up to this time - vast sections of text are set in the protagonist’s high school Moral Philosophy class, or in later conversations with remarkably erudite platoon sergeants, officers, and another Moral Philosophy class in Officer Training School and consist of arguments for the kind of society that Heinlein examines in his world of war with creatures you cannot talk to or negotiate with.

His regular publisher rejected it because they felt the story was thin and the text too didactic. It was picked up by another publisher who asked for something a bit more adult, with more material. Heinlein added a few battle sequences, took the protagonist from boot camp through officer training, and gave it a more positive ending.

It’s basically the story of privileged favoured son Johnny Rico - incidentally, one of the first Asian (Filipino) protagonists in science fiction - who joins the infantry on a whim and learns through his training and his service the way to fulfill one’s civic duty in a world based on war.

Starship Trooper’s moral world is a grim one indeed, where the height of civic duty boils down to one thing only - the willingness to put your life on the line for your society.

Heinlein project, revisited: now that Farah Mendlesohn’s book on Heinlein and his work is out and I’ve started reading it, it’s really time to finish the project I’d set for myself, to reread all his sf and fantasy work so I could appreciate her text more readily. I’d finished up the early novels and the short stories, so now for a quick tour through the juveniles.

The juvenile is an odd thing. It usually begins with the protagonists squarely set in the category of children, because they need to be people that a young person can identify with as someone like them, or at least like them in a few years. These days we also have the young adult novel, which lets us fudge things, pick almost adult protagonists that perhaps could reasonably overthrow a government or build a ship that will take us to the moon. But for adults to read and believe that a child could do these things requires a strong ability to invoke a sense that yes, it could happen. Never mind that n our past, people we’d consider children have in fact done such things - we don’t see the possibility of children doing it n now. Thus, with Heinlein’s first juvenile, we begin within pages to accept the ideas that an adult man with access to used rocketry equipment and some radioactive fuel can build a space ship - more, would choose to do so - with three teenaged amateur rocket enthusiasts.

Reading the juveniles together in close sequence allows for an interesting reading of the exploration and colonisation of the solar system, at least among the first half dozen stories. Whether this reading was part of Heinlein’s intentions with these books, I do not know. But viewed together, it seems to be on the one hand, Heinlein’s view of how and why civilisations spread to new worlds, and on the other, how to discover and train the kind of ethical man who will carry the best of a civilisation to its new home.

Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947

Heinlein’s first post-war novel, and first juvenile novel was not sold to Campbell at Astounding. It focuses on three budding young rocket scientists and their trials to build a real space ship - something a lot of kids were engrossed in in the late 40s and 50s, when it seemed as though every neighbourhood had some kind of space exploration club. Of course, this is set a bit in the future, when rockets are already a part of life, but the moon is still a goal. So these kids and their science club have a head start over the youth Heinlein anticipated as the audience for his novel.

What’s interesting about the protagonists, young Art Mueller, Morry Abrams and Ross Jenkins is that they’s all highly intelligent and motivated, they attend a science-and tech oriented high school, and they have adult mentors who let them actually get away with building a space ship. They are also a varied group - Morry is Jewish, and Art is German, his father a defector.

Most of the book is straight procedural with a shot of mystery/espionage - what has to be done to build and crew a space ship, and how to handle mysterious break-ins and other disquieting events while doing so. In places, it reads like a rocketry manual rather than a novel. It gets busier, of course, when they find both a secret Nazi base and ruins from an ancient civilization awaiting them, and end up saving the world by the skin of their teeth. Pretty impressive for a bunch of scholkids.

From a teenager’s perspective, it’s a great adventure story, but read from the viewpoint an adult, it sure looks like criminally negligent exploitation of three naive young men by a single-minded scientist who can't persuade anyone to give him the backing to carry out his experiments in a safe and ethical manner. Instead, he uses the unpaid labour of the boys and never discloses the full scope of the risks – particularly the indications that someone who is not averse to violence is trying to keep him from getting to the moon. Also, what is up with the parents of these boys? Two boys simply tell their parents about the scheme, and they say “if that’s really what you want, dear.” The third set of parents initially say no, but when creepy exploitative scientist talks to them about using their kids as unpaid labour and risking their lives in space, we discover that all the parents are really worried about is their kid not going to a good school in the fall – and when creepy scientist promises to tutor the boy, this makes it OK.

As a story, there are a number of things not particularly well thought-out, but Heinlein was at the beginning of his career writing juveniles, and he hadn’t quite hit on the formula for making a protagonist young enough, but not too young, which is a tricky thing to do.


Space Cadet, 1948

Space Cadet is the classic boy’s boarding school juvenile dressed up as a training camp for an elite force of Peacekeepers. It’s also a picture of how to train the ideal individual, if that person also has to be a spaceman and a peacekeeper.

The first half of the novel covers the basic training of the protagonist Matt Dodson and his friends, with special attention paid to those psychological moments that set out the change from civilian mindset to that of the committed patrolman, and more importantly, the spaceman. This is something common to Heinlein’s writing about living in space - the idea that there is a kind of psychological distinction between the spacing outlook on life and the ‘groundhog’ outlook.

Once Matt and his friends are truly cadets, the action begins. On their first cadet mission, their ship locates a lost vessel, carrying information indicative of an ancient civilisation. They then encounter a nasty confrontation brewing between humans and indigenous Venusians that only the Patrol can resolve, proving that after everything they’ve been through, they are true members of the Patrol. T

Red Planet 1949

Heinlein’s third juvenile is set on Mars, and among other things continues to drop hints about Martians, which will come to fullness in Stranger in a Strange Land. Here we meet young colonist Jim Marlowe, his friend Frank Sutton, and his Martian ‘pet’ Willis. No one in the colony has any idea that Willis is actually an infant of the dominant species, but Jim forms a close rapport with him, and senses that he is more than just an animal. When Jim and Frank go away to boarding school, at one of the communities on the path from the northern settlement, where the colony spends the summers, to the southern settlement, where it spends the winters, Wills goes with him.

But major changes that will affect all the colonists are in the air, and they begin with the Headmaster banning pets and confiscating Willis to sell to a zoo on earth. Jim and Frank discover this, and the company’s plans to end the habitual migrations, and escape the school in an attempt to get home and warn their families.

They run into some serious difficulties, but thanks to Willis, Jim and Frank are accepted as water brothers to Willis’ family, and are able to bring proof of The Company’s perfidy to the Martian settlers. Here as in other places, Heinlein’s inclinations are capitalist but anti-corporatist, as the human settlers defeat the Company and force a reevaluation of the new policies, while the Martians ensure that those who wanted to put Willis in a cage are never seen again.

Farmer in the Sky, 1950

In Farmer in the Sky, we begin to see the somewhat dystopic future for earth that is hinted at in Red Planet and some of the historical sequence stories - population pressure driving immigration, scarcity of resources, rationing.

Farmer in the Sky is a book about the perils of homesteading, a topic Heinlein was clearly attracted to, and would revisit in other novels, particularly Time Enough for Love - and if a particular theme is of importance to him, then it will be found somewhere in Time Enough for Love.

Bill Lermer and his father George are unhappy on Earth. George is a widower who wants a new beginning; Bill wants a different kind of life. Naturally, the new arrivals on Ganymede discover that conditions are far from what was claimed, the Colonial commission has set things up to work in the worst possible way, the current settlers resent them, and life on Ganymede is going to be ten times harder than they’d thought it could be....

But it’s possible, with some good will, and what follows is a manual on what you need to think about to colonise a new planet, and what not to do. Again, there is a strong suggestion that there are people who are ‘right’ for the rigours of a life away from earth, and it’s made quite clear that those who aren’t ‘the right stuff’ aren’t really pleasant people to be around, at least in Heinlein’s eyes. The kind of person needed for the job of space man or planetary colonist is the sort of person Heinlein sets his readers up to identify with. And the events of Farmer in the Sky are exactly what one would expect to find in an examination booklet on finding out if one has what’s needed to be the best colonial settlers.

Between Planets, 1951

In previous juveniles, Heinlein has implied some tensions between Earth and various colonial governments, and the colonies, developing independence, filling up with (at least for the first few generations) people who have, and are, the ‘right stuff.’ In Between Planets, one of the few real interplanetary citizens - Donald Harvey, a young man born in freefall, his mother a Venusian, his father from Earth, both scientists now living on Mars - gets caught in the middle of an interplanetary war when Venus declares its independance while he is at school on Earth. His unusual birth circumstances mean that no one trusts him, and no one is willing to do the obvious thing of sending the neutral citizen to a neutral planet. And as it turns out, he’s not exactly neutral - his parents represent an unknown but active factor in all the negotiations and allegiances, and they’ve committed Don to something he doesn’t know about, without his consent or understanding. This will leave Don with two serious ethical issues - first, which of all the people who want the secret he knows, are the people his parents would have trusted, and second, does he agree with his parents?

Between Planets is straight action all the way to the end, with very little of the blatant ‘how to be the right kind of person’ training in the earlier books. What we see instead is Don navigating the path to an ethical decision.

Rolling Stones, 1953

Rolling Stones is a comic, picaresque novel about an eccentric family of Lunar colonists, and in some ways resets the cycle we’ve seen in the earlier juveniles. Now it’s Luna that’s beginning to be too quiet and commonplace for the born explorer. As Hazel Stone, a character one will see as a child revolutionary in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, says to her complacent son, ‘Your mind may not be made up; mine is. Luna is getting to be like any other ant hill. I'm going out somewhere to find elbow room, about a quarter of a billion miles of it.’

The Family Stone consists of Hazel Stone, engineer and veteran of the revolution, her son Roger, also an engineer by trade, formerly mayor of Luna and currently a comic strip writer looking for a change of pace, his wife Edith, a doctor and sculptor, and their children, Meade, the irrepressible twins Castor and Pollux, and the youngest of the family of supergeniuses, Buster, aka Lowell, potential telepath and certified pain in the neck. Before very long, his restless family has convinced Roger to buy a family spaceship.

Before you can say “second star to the right..” the Stones are off on a Grand Tour of the solar system, with virtually al the action resulting from Cas and POl’s generally unsuccessful attempts to not quite con the locals into a business scheme. At the end of the book, they have floundered through Mars, an Asteroid mining city, and Ceres, and are preparing to ramble on toward Titan. The ideal colonist now lives in space.

Some of Heinlein’s early published novels - Revolt in 2100, Methuselah’s Children - are, I think, among his best. At least, they are some of my favourites. They’re tightly written, with lots of action and not a lot of editorialising or rambling - although both Revolt in 2100 and Beyond This Horizon have a number of passages where the characters, or the authorial voice, present large chunks of background on topics ranging from semantics to Mendelian genetics.

At the same time, two of Heinlein’s novels that I think are among his worst, Sixth Column and Orphans of the Sky, were also published in the first few years of his writing career, though Sixth Column we can perhaps excuse, as he wrote it to John Campbell’s specifications.

His first published novel, “—If This Goes On” - which is packaged, along with two linked shorter works, “Coventry” and “Misfit,” as Revolt in 2100, is the first of his Future History novels.

Methuselah’s Children, the novel that follows “—If This Goes On” introduces two key elements of Heinlein’s universe, to which he would return again and again at various points in hus writing career - the Howard Families, and the iconic figure of Lazarus Long, the irascible, irreverent, Senior of the Howard Families, the oldest human being thanks to a genetic quirk at the early stages of the Howard Family longevity breeding experiment. There’s a line in Methuselah’s Children that places Lazarus in the background of Heinlein’s first published short story, “Life-Line,” and Lazarus will play a key role in the last novel Heinlein wrote, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. In a way, Lazarus is Heinlein’s Everyman, not as he is but as he should be, the personification of everything Heinlein sees as quintessentially human, from his eternal restlessness to his refusal to be broken in spirit, no matter what befalls him.

Methuselah’s Children opens in the year 2125, a quarter-century after the end of the American theocracy described in Revolt in 2100. America is now part of a global world government, and is back in the space era - we can assume from various comments in both books that the exploration and development of colonies in the solar system continued under the management of other countries while the US was isolated. The establishment of a planetary civilisation the has as its main values peace and tolerance, in which we assume economic inequality has been overcome through technology and global resource management, has led the secretive Howard Families to believe that they can finally come out of hiding and live among short-lived humans without the need for changing identities and moving on every few decades to conceal their longevity.

Of course, it’s a mistake. Shorter lived humans refuse to believe that it’s just a matter of genetics, and set aside the Covenant that guarantees the rights of every human bring so that the Howard Families can be arrested and the ‘secret’ of long life forced from them. Fortunately, Federation Adnimistrator Slayton Ford, recognises from the early reports of interrogated Howards that there is no secret, and decides to try and resolve the situation without more violence - he, Howard Foundation Chief Executive Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus, develop a daring plan - to highjack the generation star ship New Horizons, which is about to be launched on the Second Proxima Centauri Expedition, and use it to evacuate all the Howards to another solar system, so the two branches of humanity can continue in isolation.

The plan works, and Ford, deposed and labelled as a traitor, joins the fleeing Howard Families as they seek a new home world. While a trip that would ordinarily take generations would be less daunting to the long-lived Howards, the timeline is further shortened by the invention, by Andrew Jackson Libby - last seen in Misfit - which brings them to a possible planet in a much shorter period of time, relatively speaking (a minor character, Hubert Johnson, who is an infant at the time of the evacuation, has grown into a nasty spoiled brat when they reach their destination). But the planet they land on is inhabited, and as it turns out, is no place for humans - the most numerous species, the Jockaira, may be intelligent and human-like, but they are all the willing servants and worshippers the dominant species of the planet, whom the perceive as gods. When it becomes apparent that the humans cannot, and will not, enter into the same relationship with the true rulers if the planet, the ‘gods’ of the Jockaira use their advanced abilities - whether science or psionic, is never clearly determined - to send them to another system, also inhabited. At first it seems like a paradise, but eventually the deep differences between the two species - the Little People are in fact a society of communal minds, with each ‘individual’ living in many different bodies - make it clear that this is no home for humans either. Frustrated and homesick, they return to Earth, prepared to fight for their rights as members of the human race - only to find that in their absence, determination and allocation of vast resources have achieved what the Howard Families’ more limited resources were unable to - a real technology of rejuvenation that is affordable for all, and which puts Howards and non-Howards back on an equal footing. And their exploration adventures - and Libby’s star drive - are enough to wipe clean the criminality of their escape. Humanity is reunited, the stage is set for real space exploration, and all is well.

The inability of humans to become, like the Jockaira, servants, or perhaps pets, of a dominant race, and their general reluctance to merge into communal groupings of Little People, are, like Lazarus himself, keys to Heinlein’s beliefs about the essential nature of human beings. Throughout his novels runs the theme of the ‘free man’ - an individual who can be captured, even killed, but cannot be conquered. There’s an interesting tension here - on the one hand, Heinlein sees this as the defining quality of humanity, and yet so often, it’s only his heroes and their associates who display this trait, and they are surrounded by weaker men who give up and give in.

Hidden in the story of the highjacking of the New Horizons is the seed of Heinlein’s next novel, Orphans of the Sky - which comprises two distinct sections, Universe and Common Sense. The New Horizons was built for the Second Proxima Centauri Expedition. Heinlein’s next novel would backtrack slightly and tell the story of the first Proxima Centauri Expedition.

The first part of Orphans of the Sky, Universe, begins with the notation “The Proximo Centauri Expedition, sponsored by the Jordan Foundation in 2119, was the first recorded attempt to reach the nearer stars of this galaxy. Whatever its unhappy fate we can only conjecture . . .” The novel is the story of what happened to the lost expedition. The protagonist is a young man named Hugh Hoyland, who is apprenticed to become a scientist - which, we quickly learn, has nothing to do with science, and is rather his culture’s term for priest. It is through his eyes that we discover what’s happening on the lost ship, generations after its launch. For Hugh, there is only Ship. It is his universe, and he has no concept of an outside, a space through which the ship moves. Few people can read or write, outside of the ranks of the scientists, and what oral history there is has become entangled with a theology in which Jordan, the supreme god, created the ship and its people, who when they die will go to Centaurus to live forever in paradise. There’s a memory of a mutiny, in which most of the original ship’s crew was killed, which is probably the point at which survival needs took over and much of the basic knowledge about the nature of the true universe was lost. What books remain have been interpreted by the scientists as religious allegories.

The plot begins to develop when Hugh, on an expedition with some other young scientists to the sectors where Muties - mutants born as a result of higher radiation levels in the ship, though it’s generally attributed to the resurgence of the original sin of mutiny - live, is injured and left for dead. He’s taken as a servant by conjoined twins, Jim and Joe, who share one body and who are also possibly of Howard stock, being several generations old. Jim and Joe are highly intelligent, and have gained a position of some leadership within the Mutie community. They have also read extensively, explored the low-gee areas of the ship, found the main control room, and looked out at the stars. They have deduced much of the true nature of the ship and its voyage - though their sense of scale is sadly lacking - and they introduce Hugh to the truth as well.

The second part of the novel, Common Sense, is largely about Hugh’s attempts, with the backing of Jim and Joe, to take control of the Ship and carry out ‘Jordan’s Plan’ - colonisation of a new planet. Of course, the attempt to convince the other ship’s officers of the truth eventually fails, and Hugh, Jim, Joe, and a small handful of supporters find themselves hunted, with no way out - except the single shuttle remaining after the catastrophe that was the mutiny. The novel ends as Hugh and the others - minus Jim and Joe, who died in the fight to get to the shuttle, land through the greatest of luck on an unknown planet that can sustain human life. We would not learn if Hugh and his followers survived until ears later, when Heinlein revealed their fate in a casual discussion in the novel Time Enough for Love.

Orphans of the Sky has never been one of my favourite Heinlein novels. It’s an interesting concept, with a reasonable amount of action, but the characters are thinly realised and even Hugh Hoyland doesn’t have much depth to draw one into the story. Conjoined twins Jim and Joe are perhaps the most memorable characters, but it’s rather annoying the way that Heinlein can’t quite figure out whether to treat them as one person, because they share a body, or two people, because each head clearly belongs to a distinct individual with a definite sense of personal identity. Plus, there are virtually no women in the story, other than a mutant woman knifesmith who has one short appearance, and the wives of Hugh and his handful of human supporters. Women on the Ship are slaves, used for domestic and sexual service, treated with physical violence even by the supposed hero, and don’t even have names of their own, only what their men choose to call them - at least among the ‘normal humans.’ Hugh hasn’t even bothered to give one of his wives a name. It is clear, hiwever, that the female Mutie, Mother of Knives, has not only a name but a degree of respect within her community.

It’s an early novel, but where his other early novels, Revolt in 2100 and Methuselah’s Children, and even, to some degree, Sixth Column, are already clearly ‘Heinlein’ novels - well-written, strong characters of both genders, solid plots - Orphans of the Sky does not pass muster.

The last of Heinlein’s early novels for adults is Beyond This Horizon, written in 1942. The world as portrayed in Beyond This Horizon owed much background to his unpublished novel, For Us, the Living. It’s not hard to see where he built the flesh and muscle of this book, on the skeleton of the socialist-influenced, socially progressive society he invented in that very early work. Gender equity in many respects (though in an armed duello society, women generally go unarmed and have immunity from challenge), a multi-national government (in Heinlein’s future, Asia and Africa were virtually destroyed by imperialistic wars their people are considered to be at the developmental level of barbarians), guaranteed annual income, respect for privacy and personal choice - there’s a lot here that’s admirable. What’s highly questionable is his whole-hearted embrace of eugenics - the deliberate breeding of human beings for so-called desirable traits - which underlies both the entire notion of the Howard families in the Future History novels, and the way that, in Beyond This Horizon, ‘genetically compatible’ humans are urged to create children together, with or without any existing or on-going relationship between them. He goes to some lengths to differentiate ‘bad’ eugenics, which produced humans bred for specific functions and purposes and the horrors of two world wars, and the ‘scientific’ eugenics of his near-utopian civilisation that sought to conserve positive traits and eliminate inherited weaknesses, from bad teeth to depression.

The protagonist of Beyond This Horizon is Hamilton Felix, a product of multiple generations of genetic selection designed to conserve several favourable traits, who presents a serious problem to the genetics planners - he sees no particular reason why the human race should continue, genetically improved or not. Felix is intelligent, rational, highly adaptable, a survivor on many levels, the kind of person the natural selection would favour if civilisation wasn’t making that aspect of evolution obsolete. He himself enjoys life, but he does not see much real happiness around him, nor a clear argument for continuing humanity, or at least, an argument fir him contributing to its continuation.

It’s clear, though, that he’s not as disaffected as he seems. When he comes into contact with a revolutionary group planning to overthrow the current world government and replace it with a fascist regime that sounds far too close to the ideas behind the empire that was responsible for the Second Eugenics War, he willingly volunteers to infiltrate the organisation and report on its plans. In the meantime, his life becomes complicated when Longcourt Phyllis, the woman who’s been selected as the best match to conserve and strengthen the genetic lines that make him of some importance to the genetic planners decides to look him up, he discovers that she’s exactly the sort of woman he’d like to be involved with - except for the fact that she, like every perfect Heinlein woman, wants a passel of kids.

Everything comes to a head when, during the attempted coup, Felix, Phyllis, and Mordan Claude, the genetic planner responsible for the breeding lines they represent, are all pinned down in Claude’s office, fighting off the rebels trying to seize control of the valuable stores of germ plasm Claude is responsible for. Facing death, Felix realises what it is that would make him sufficiently interested in the future of humanity to participate in its continuation - answers to, or at least, a serious investigation of, the great philosophical and metaphysical questions that have haunted humankind. The nature of consciousness. The fate of the self after death. The limits of human knowledge. The beginning and the end of time.

The revolution is, of course, unsuccessful. Felix, Phyllis and Claude survive. And Claude presents Felix’s questions to the world ruling council, who realise that Felix has in fact identified a key lack in their modern, rational world. After some discussion, they establish a massive foundation (a society where technology ensures high productivity and values tend not to encourage obscene concentration of wealth and power being a society with cash to spare) to explore exactly the kinds of questions Felix wants answers too. He and Phyllis marry and proceed to have children who are even more exceptional than they are. The end.

What’s interesting about Beyond This Horizon is Heinlein’s argument, presented through Felix, that freedom, love, and material well being, as important as they are, are not enough to satisfy the human soul. That there are needs beyond the physical and emotional, questions that reach beyond the realm of the rational and phenomenological world, that are of importance to human societies. That the driving question that underlies all others is simply “is this all there is?”

The publication of Beyond This Horizon marked a sharp change in Heinlein’s writing career, likely brought about at least in part by the entry of the US into WWII and Heinlein’s war work. After this novel, he would spend the next ten years writing mainly short stories and juveniles, until 1952 when he would write the thinly disguised Cold War, Communist-under-the-bed novel The Puppet Masters.

I’ve already done posts about the novellas and novelettes I read in looking for potential nominations for the 1943 Retro Hugos. Now, it’t time for the short stories.

Leigh Brackett was a master of the planetary romance, stories about strange beings and ancient civilisations on other planets, and the adventurers, some heroic, some cynical and world-weary, who explored them. In the short story “Child of the Sun,” her hero, Eric Falken, a rebel fighting for the survival of free men against a tyrant who enforces Happiness on humanity and rules a docile populace, discovers a hidden planet inside the orbit of Mercury, and a vastly ancient energy being who wants amusement - human toys to play with. Falken must outwit the creature to gain the planet as a hiding place for the rebels.

“Child of the Green Light” is another of Leigh Brackett’s short stories, this one about Son, the only survivor of a space ship crew trapped by a mysterious green light, which is the manifestation of a part of another universe penetrating our own. Under the influence of this light, he has changed, his atoms altering frequency. Eventually, he will be able to cross over to the other universe, where a woman is waiting for him. But then another ship of humans arrives, and he learns that the light is affecting all life in the solar system, slowly killing the human race, and he must choose between the woman he loves or the survival of a human civilisation he barely remembers.

Lester del Rey’s “The Wings of Night” is a haunting and emotionally powerful story about the last member of a once advanced civilisation living in a refuge created when the moon began to lose its atmosphere. As the soil is depleted over time of an element necessary for reproduction, it seems inevitable that Lhin, the last of his species, will die alone. Until a distressed space freighter carrying two humans makes an emergency landing on the uninhabited moon and, by accident, triggers the landing doors to Lhin’s underground world. The story examines - and condemns - issues of prejudice, colonialism, exploitation and slavery, and ends with hope for both Lhin and the hearts of men.

It may be pushing the boundaries somewhat, but Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Funes, His Memory” - also known as “Funes the Memorious” - is certainly a tale of the fantastic, a story about a boy named Funes who suffers an accident which leaves him crippled, but with a memory so intense, detailed and complete that he amuses himself by inventing a number system in which every number up to 70,000 has its own name. Borges turns the simple recollections of a man who met Funes a few times into a meditation on the varieties and purposes of memory and forgetting.

Heinlein’s short story “Pied Piper” is a slight piece of work but nonetheless entertaining. There’s a war, and as always, one side is losing. The leaders of the losing side turn to their greatest scientist for a weapon to help them win the war. Instead, he proposes a way to end the war, forever.

Isaac Asimov’s “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” is one if the Robotics Corporation stories, this time about a robot programmed for construction work on the moon that somehow ends up in rural Virginia, where a general purpose repairman finds him and tries to make a few quick bucks off his discovery. It’s a comedic story, light in tone and mostly just for fun.

Malcolm Jameson, writing as Colin Keith, produced a charming little capitalist comedy called “If You’re So Smart—“ about a scientist frustrated by a greedy robber baron who controls pretty much every major business on Titan and is trying to close down his research so he can a quire it cheaply. Determined to resist, the scientist figures out how to use his new machine to take over all the industrialists holdings, destabilising the solar system economy in the process. Humorous and well-written.

Jameson’s “The Goddess’ Legacy” is a rather different work. Set in Nazi-occupied Greece, the story’s narrator, an American businessman, encounters a remnant of the cult of Pallas Athene, and is witness to her continued legacy of protection for her city and people.

L. Ron Hubbard’s Strain is a truly gut-wrenching story about what a person will endure in war for the sake of his country, his fellows, his mission, but it’s the ironic turn at the end that turns the whole thing inside out and makes you think about the ethos and the military culture. Psychologically adept, well-written, painfully graphic treatment of a difficult subject.

The Embassy, written by Donald Wohlheim under the pen name Martin Pearson, is a twisty little story about what might happen if someone decided that Martians had set up an observing mission somewhere in New York City, and hired some not too imaginative private eyes to track it down.

And, from a writer I don’t remember hearing about at all, F. Anton Reeds, with a bittersweet story called “Forever Is Not So Long,” about an English scientist in 1931 working on time travel. He decides to run the first trial, to travel forward a decade - and learns things that change his priorities fir the rest of his life.

“Deadlock,” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, writing under the name Lewis Padgett, is an interesting variant on the mad robot story. The Company has been working on developing robots for some time. The ultimate goal - an intelligent, indestructible robot capable of solving any problem. The problem they keep running into is that the robots keep going mad, and being indestructible, end up being encased in tombs of concrete. Finally, they develop a robot who remains sane - but as it turns out, that’s even worse.

Moore and Kuttner - writing again as Lewis Padgett - produced another robot story in 1942, “The Twonky,” a very unsettling story about a temporarily temporally displaced mechanical technician from the future who, while suffering from amnesia, spends an afternoon working in a radio factory until he recovers, realises his situation and goes back to wherever he came from. He’s not otherwise important to the story. The problem is, that where he comes from, he makes Twonkies - robots programmed not only to do household tasks, but to censor the cultural exposures, and manipulate the impulses of their “owners” - removing individuality, creativity, initiative, and terminating those who persist in their wayward ways. The story leaves the reader hanging, having shown us what Twonkies can do, with a Twonky loose in the 20th century and waiting for the next unsuspecting customer. Sf horror at its finest.

“Later Than You Think,” written under Kuttner’s name alone, is one of those stories about a person who, in some fashion, finds a way to learn tomorrow’s news today. In this story, it’s a sales clerk in a record store whose hobby is tinkering with radio equipment, who accidentally builds a radio that plays tomorrow’s news. Unfortunately, he and his radio fall into the hands of a gangster, who forces him to use it to make money for the gangster by various nefarious means. All ends well, however, and the boy gets the girl and finds a way to use his radio without causing too much mayhem.

Kuttner’s “False Dawn” is an interesting tale of unintended consequences. An egotistic and immoral scientist has developed a process that regresses life forms through the stages of evolution, and decides to use his discovery to get rid of his financial backer by regressing him to amoeba status. The plan backfires when it turns out that human evolution has a rather longer history than anyone realised. Kuttner builds some nice ironic turns into the story.

Writing under the name Kelvin Kent, Henry Kuttner penned a series of light-hearted time travel adventures featuring a roguish chap named Pete Manx. “Dames is Poison” sees Manx in renaissance Milan, getting mixed up with Cesare and Lucretia Borgia.

“Kilgallen’s Lunar Legacy” by Norman L. Knight is a Bunyanesque story about an Irishman, his will, a dozen replicas in spaceborne coffins and a buried legacy of unique proportions. Tongue in cheek humour.

Fredric Brown’s “Etaoin Shrdlu” is an updated version of the sorcerer’s apprentice - this time the enchanted machine is a sentient linotype machine that can set anything in a fraction of the tine that the process normally takes, and that demands to be kept working. The solution - teach it Buddhism, so that instead of running its operator ragged, it meditates and achieves nirvana. Yes, it’s Orientalist as fuck.

In “The Shoes”, Robert Bloch plays with the old idea of bargaining with the devil for eternal life. Everyone who tries it thinks he can outwit Satan, and the little man who calls himself Dr. Faust is no exception. But everyone leaves out something that trips him up in the end, and here too, Dr. Faust is no exception.

Fritz Leiber’s “The Sunken Land” is a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, which means classic sword and sorcery adventure. This time the two soldiers of fortune are out fishing when Fafhrd finds a relic of a long lost sunken country in one of the fish as he cleans it. The relic leads to a dreamlike experience for Fafhrd as he seems to relive a voyage of his ancestors to the doomed island before it sank.

Jane Rice’s “Idol of the Flies” is a disquieting portrait of Pruitt, a child without empathy or conscience, the sort of child we now understand to have a profound psychological disorder. A child of some wealth and privilege, he hates the people around him, using his position to torment, ridicule and abuse the servants in the household. And he tortures small creatures. Pruitt has a particular fascination for flies. Indeed, he has created a ritual in which he commands the help of a supernatural being he calls the Idol of the Flies in his schemes to harm others. It’s unfortunate - for him, at any rate - that Pruitt doesn’t know all the names of the Lord of the Flies, nor his true nature, until much too late.

Hannes Bok is primarily known as an illustrator, but he also produced some speculative fiction. In “Letter to an Invisible Woman” Bok’s protagonist addresses a woman he has fallen in love with, a woman who has a secret that makes her different, who has abandoned him because he has discovered it. He pleads with her to return, but the story does not give us her answer. Or perhaps, it does.

Nominating short fiction for the Retro Hugos is difficult. It’s easier with novels, as there were far sff fewer novels published then, and the ones that were, are mostly still in print. But this was in the heyday of the pulps, there was a lot of short fiction published, and most of it is unavailable, unless you collect the classics pulp magazines. While most of the stories that were considered really good have been anthologised, you have to go through a lot of anthologies to read them all, and that’s not easy to do, especially if you’re reading ebooks only.

So, I do what I can. This post contains my thoughts on the eligible novellas I managed to find and read.


In A. E. Van Vogt’s Asylum, a pair of space vampires, aliens who live off both blood and the vital “life force” of their victims, land on an Earth which has developed interplanetary space flight and learned to live without interpersonal violence - rape, murder, even war are considered “social perversions,”

Merla and Jeel are advance scouts for their people, the Dreegh, who violate the laws of Galactic society to raid relatively primitive human planets, harvesting as much blood and life energy as they can before their activities are noticed and thwarted by the Galactic Observers. But this time, Merla and Jeel decide to attack and destroy the system’s Observer before they are noticed, so that the Dreegh can drain Earth of all its life. To do this, they kidnap and interrogate a reporter named William Leigh to help them find the hidden Observer.

The novella is written in a rather florid style, and suffers from too many descriptions of the extreme magnetism and vast intelligence of the nonhuman characters. As well, Van Vogt has some very odd ideas about psychology and how to write internal conflict. I’ve read a fair bit of his work over the years, and I would not rank this among his best, despite the interesting storyline and the foreshadowed but still surprising last minute plot twist. Some pulp sf ages well; this unfortunately did not.


Lester del Ray’s novella Nerves, on the other hand, reads almost like modern fiction, albeit with some quirks in dialogue that mark it as being from an earlier area, and a very bad excuse for a Japanese accent. The novella begins with a team of medical personnel dealing with the aftermath of a serious accident - thirty-odd injured and 17 fatalities - in an industrial facility where an assortment of radioactive products are constructed. The lead physician, Dr. Ferrel, is a former ‘star’ surgeon, who has lost his confidence ever since he had to perform on his dying pregnant wife, and was unable to save her. He has been working in obscurity ever since. His assistant, Dr. Jenkins, a young doctor who once dreamed of being an atomic scientist, is in his own way unsure of his limits, and still longing for the career he could not have.

As the action unfolds, we learn that the plant where everything went drastically wrong was being used to test an experimental process, and that if the still ongoing, but dangerously malfunctioning process isn’t shut down properly, the plabt will explode in a matter of hours, taking the whole facility, and possibly a large region of the populated area nearby, with it. When it turns out that the only man who has the knowledge and experience to safely shut down the process is severely injured and suffering from serious radiation exposure, Drs Ferrel and Jenkins will need every but of their combined experience and background to save the dying atomic engineer. Nerves is a story about damaged people facing an extreme crisis and finding ways to overcome their limitations under pressure. In that sense, it is a very timeless story.


Alfred Bester’s novella Hell is Forever is a rather dull and dreary recapitulation of the rather common idea that hell is of out own making. Of the top of my head, I can think of several plays that have gotten the idea across much better, including Sartre’ No Exit. In Bester’s version, six annoying people accidentally summon something rather like a devil who offers each of them their own reality - which of course turns out to be an eternity of experiencing their own worst nightmares. I really couldn’t get excited about it, it was far too repetitious and once the point is made with the first of the obnoxious protagonists, the fate of the others is of little interest. They are simply not sympathetic enough as characters for us to care about the specifics of each individual hell.


I’ve also reread Heinlein’s novella Waldo. This time around, I feel a strong connection to the title character that is new, and connected to the severe degeneration of my own physical state since my last reading; now, I perceive Waldo as “crip lit” and a fairly sensitive example, for something written by a man who likely perceived himself as able bodied. I was struck by the unifying metaphor of the waldo, the device that allows Waldo to manipulate objects on scales that would be impossible, not just for his crippled self, dealing with severe myasthenia gravis, but in some cases, for any human. This concept is recapitulated in the concept of the Other World which Waldo learns from a traditional hex doctor, the other dimension in which mind resides, and from which mind extends to influence, direct, manipulate the material world through its connections with brain and body.

There are other interesting and very modern ideas in Waldo - including the concern about untested long-term consequences of exposure to new technologies. All in all, a fine example if Heinlein’s early work.


Anthony Boucher’s The Compleat Werewolf is a nicely comedic novella about a university professor named Wolfe Wolf who has fallen in love with one of his former students, the actress Gloria Garton. When she declines his marriage proposal, he goes out drinking, meets a magician who calls himself Ozymandias, and learns that he is a werewolf. But that’s only the beginning of the tale, which also involves satanic temples, a German spy ring, and a taking cat.

The tone is light and just a bit on the frivolous side, the story pure entertainment.


Robert Heinlein’s novella The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag takes a fascinating conceit - the world as a work of art - and turns it into a baffling and rather frightening story of supernatural mystery. (And also, in its description of Hoag’s profession as unpleasant, an in-joke for writers.) Jonathan Hoag is an amnesiac. Not only has he no memory of his live before a time five years ago. He has no idea what he does during the day. Distressed by the sudden realisation that he doesn’t really know who he is, he turns to a private detective to discover the things about himself that he doesn’t know.

Their investigation leads to a series of strange events, terrifying nightmares, unnatural threats, and unbelievable encounters, a sense that either they or the world is gong mad. As it turns out, it’s the world that is subtly wrong, and Hoag’s unknown profession carries with it the potential to make things right.

It’s like one of those secret history stories, in a way. It is so very unbelievable, and yet it could be true, and one would never know. Both the story and the concept stay with the reader after the process of reading is over - surely one of the qualities of good art.

Of the novellas I found and read, I thought both of Heinlein’s pieces, plus the Boucher and del Ray offerings, worth nomination. It will be interesting to see what works others found and decided to nominate.

And now for my thoughts on a Heinlein book i’d never read before, For Us, the Living. I think I’ve read everything else he wrote, but this was released so late in the game that I hadn’t gotten around to it til now. I’m glad I read it, because it’s in some ways a sourcebook for some of his greatest works.

It’s not actually a novel, of course. It’s a utopian treatise, one in a long line of such works that goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic. The story is the same in every case - dump unsuspecting everyman into your ideal society and find reasons for people to kindly take the time to explain everything about their world in depth. What is interesting is that as one reads For Us, the Living, one sees Heinlein publicly doing the worldbuilding for some of the novels and other writings that would follow. This is the world of Beyond This Horizon, and Coventry. It’s a world that came dangerously close to -If This Goes On, but escaped the theocracy (and tells us everything we needed to know about Nehemiah Scudder).

I like many of the ideas of this Heinlein, from a guaranteed annual income for everyone to the end of marriage as a public contract to compulsory voting to running a society on the idea that religious morality has nothing to do with law. To be sure, Heinlein is still pretty sexist - he thinks women are essentially different from men in some crucial ways and he couldn’t quite imagine a utopia where women are fully half of the politicians and engineers and test pilots and surgeons, though he could imagine some women being among the best in any field. But there are some bits in his utopian musings that are very much at the centre of even modern feminist thinking - such as his analysis of how giving women full economic equality, through the GAI he envisions, changes the entire nature of relationships between men and women. And there’s a bit where he accurately describes the way that male possessiveness turns into controlling relationships that stifle women.

This is the manifesto of the young (pre-Virginia) Heinlein, and it’s important because it shows where his “future history” came from. I kind of wish this Heinlein had stayed around, and avoided the plunge into John Birchism that influenced aspects of his later work.


Having read the first book Heinlein wrote, It seemed somehow appropriate to next read the last book he wrote, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. This is a book I both love and am frustrated by. Maureen Johnson is quite a tour de force of a character, the most vividly presented woman in all of his books - only a few of which are centred on a female protagonist, as this one is. She is everything I appreciate about the feminist Heinlein’s idea of the independent woman, and everything that makes me want to pitch something nasty at the old sexist’s ghost. Maureen is brilliant, practical, she adapts easily to new situations, she earns five or six degrees in subjects as diverse and complex as medicine, the law and philosophy, she is a financial genius, an amazing mother, a sexual free spirit. She also is the ever-ready sexual fantasy of too many entitled man-boys and just loves being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen. It’s the quintessence of Heinlein’s ideas about the perfect woman, one who is strong but wants her man stronger, one who never says no to the ‘right’ men, one who loves to take care of her men and her children, who is as smart and brave and competent as any man but goes out of her way to make the men in her life feel smarter and braver and more competent. She lets her first husband control her life, make all the important decisions, for over 40 years of marriage, acting for herself only when he decides to ask for a divorce, at which point she outmaneuvers him with impressive ease and goes on to live an unapologetically independent life. She inspires and infuriates me.

She’s also the mouthpiece for Heinlein’s later political views. While his attitudes about sexuality and religion remain pretty constant throughout his working life - he was always in favour of sexual freedom and thought religion was a crock used to manipulate the masses - the man who began his writing career extolling the virtues of socialised medicine and a guaranteed annual income ended it ranting against freeloaders snd governments that gave people handouts.

And then there’s the stuff that squicks. In the course if her long life, Maureen has sex with her cousin, her son, at least one son-in-law (and probably at least some heavy petting with a daughter or two) and tries her hardest to seduce her father. Heinlein puts a lot of incest in both this book and in Time Enough for Love, his novel about the lives and loves of Maureen’s son Woodrow, aka Lazarus Long. He seems quite unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the power issues of parent-child sex, which exist well into adulthood. Never having had a sibling, I’n not really equipped to comment on his insistence that left to their own devices, siblings are going to form sexual relationships, but even as adults, it seems to me that there are some serious complications arising from the intense emotional cauldron that is the family. I don’t believe in sin myself, only in harm, and if siblings or other close relatives who have never lived in the same family and don’t bring that potentially hazardous baggage with them should meet as adults and decide to enter a sexual relationship, the only major objection I have is that of genetic consequences should there be children. But there’s way too much potential for psychological harm if there are already familial bonds established, and you attempt to build sexual bonds on top f them. So Maureen’s willingness to hop into bed with anyone, even her own father and son, as long as she isn’t risking pregnancy, bothers me. And I wonder what brought it to such a prominent place in Heinlein’s ideas about sexual freedom.

The other thing that’s both fun and strange is Heinlein’s quest, in the last years of his creative life, to amalgamate the universes of all of his works - and those of some other authors he admired - into one giant multiverse with multiple timelines. He carefully determined which stories and novels took place in which timelines, and created a Time Corps and a theory of creativity as reality to explain how he brought together not only his own science fiction works, but the fantasy worlds of writers from Burroughs to Baum. It’s fun, in a way - much as Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton family of superheroes is fun - but it also seems oddly obsessive.

It’s a sprawling, self-indulgent novel that never ceases to fascinate and infuriate me.

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.

Not too long ago I bought a book bundle offer at an online auction to help Vera Nazarian, and received a generous stack of classic (and not so classic) science fiction from the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s. Some I’d read before, some I hadn’t, and some, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if I read when I was a kid or not. Here's my thoughts on some of them.


Worlds of the Imperium, Keith Laumer.

A fast-paced parallel universe caper, in which the protagonist is kidnapped from an Earth that appears to be our own by agents from a universe where science has found a way to navigate the various world-lines in order to assassinate a dangerous warlord from yet another world-line. It’s a fairly straight forward spy caper, and a very quick read. Like so many genre novels of the era, the only woman character is a “love interest” for the hero – she’s portrayed as intelligent, brave and beautiful, but does little of substance beyond serving as a compensatory “reward” for the hero, torn from his own world to save another.


Phase IV, Barry N Malzberg.

An alien influence provokes accelerated evolution among a colony of ants somewhere in Arizona. Soon the ants are on the move, destroying homes in a “planned community” being built in the region. The area is evacuated, scientists arrive to investigate.

Much of the novel is a science fictional reworking of Carl Stephenson's famous short story "Leiningen versus the Ants" – only the ants have developed a form of intelligence and the ability to adapt rapidly to threats, and they have a purpose, not just a blind instinct to follow. And that changes the ending completely.


Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein

This has always been one of my favourite Heinlein juveniles. It’s a classic reversal of fortune story, complete with an ironic justice payoff – the victim of interstellar slave traders turns out to be one person most suited to track interstellar slavery to its very roots and eradicate it.

There is some wonderful worldbuilding in the section that’s set among the Free Traders, to say nothing of a consciousness of power relations between the sexes that to some extent belies the accusations of sexism that are frequently levelled against Heinlein. In Free Trader society, the conscious separation of a person’s roles within the Family and the Ship produces a culture in which each person’s abilities are acknowledged and used – meaning that men and women work together at the jobs they do best – but at the same time, everyone follows strict gender roles as members of the Ship’s Family – roles that are obviously constructed as a response to the social needs of a people divided into small clans that must practice exogamy to avoid the risks of inbreeding.

My main quibble with the book is that it ends far too quickly – just as the protagonist Thorby has just begun the task that all of his history has prepared him for.


Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein

The first Heinlein juvenile, this reads more like a “boy’s own” adventure than just happens to involve rockets than a science fiction novel. The plot is simple – a group of boy scientists find a mentor, decide to build a rocket that will take them to the moon, and in the process, foil the evil intentions of Nazi space pirates (this are not nearly as cool as it sounds).

What bothers me is the basic set-up of the story. From a teenager’s perspective, it’s a great adventure story, but read from the viewpoint an adult, it sure looks like criminally negligent exploitation of three naive young men by a single-minded scientist who can't persuade anyone to give him the backing to carry out his experiments in a safe and ethical manner. Instead, he uses the unpaid labour of the boys and never discloses the full scope of the risks – particularly the indications that someone who is not averse to violence is trying to keep him from getting to the moon. Also, what is up with the parents of these boys? Two boys simply tell their parents about the scheme, and they say “if that’s really what you want, dear.” The third set of parents initially say no, but when creepy exploitative scientist talks to them about using their kids as unpaid labour and risking their lives in space, we discover that all the parents are really worried about is their kid not going to a good school in the fall – and when creepy scientist promises to tutor the boy, this makes it OK. This rather spoiled my appreciation of what is a slender and formulaic tale to begin with.

However, one nice touch is the inclusion of a Jewish boy as one of the junior scientists, and he turns out to be the one most suited to be the co-pilot (creepy scientist is of course Captain and pilot), which gives him at times some opportunities to be heroic.


Glory Road, Robert A. Heinlein

I liked this when I first read it, and I still like it. Sure, it’s basically a very thin adventure fantasy/RPG/arcade game plot, namely, the Quest for the McGuffin. Hero and party overcome obstacles of increasing difficulty on the path to the McGuffin, overcome the Big Boss who guards the McGuffin, take the McGuffin back to its proper place, then hero marries princess.

And it features three of Heinlein’s favourite characters: the super competent, super beautiful woman; the curmudgeonly old geezer who’s been there and back and knows it all; and the straight-as-an-arrow young man who is about to learn what the world is really all about.

But as one of Heinlein’s rare forays into fantasy, it’s interesting, and it does answer the one question that not too many writers of standard adventure fantasy ever get around to answering – what happens after the plough-boy cum hero settles down with the princess? And at least the princess in this case isn’t just the bait, er, reward for the successful hero, she’s part and parcel of the mission, from planning to execution and she decides whether she’s also part of the hero’s reward.

In that sense, it’s a lot better than a fair number of others of its ilk.


Earth Unaware, Mack Reynolds

If ever a cover was not just totally disconnected from the actual contents, setting and plot of a book, but wrong in every respect, it would have to be the cover of Belmont Books’ May 1968 edition of Mack Reynolds’ Earth Unaware (originally titled Of Godlike Power).

The cover features a muscled, nearly nude barbarian warrior with flowing blond locks and a fluffy loincloth. Clinging to his arm is a red-haired woman with ample breasts, hips and thighs, wearing something dark and vaguely furry that covers her torso and nothing else. They seem to be standing in a cloud of low-lying yellow fog against a dark, featureless background. At their feet is something vaguely mechanical, somewhat suggestive of an abandoned futuristic oversized grenade launcher. It’s all done in an impressionistic, soft focus, pseudo-Franzetta style.

The book itself is a modern speculative fantasy set in a North America not too far advance from the date of writing, in which increasing capacity for the mass production of consumer goods has led to the (once expected and highly anticipated) leisure society, where material abundance and technological advances have resulted in increasingly shorter work-weeks and a massive demand for popular entertainment. The protagonist is Ed Wonder, the host of a radio show that features interviews with people who claim to be reincarnations of Alexander the Great, or to have been taught a new philosophy of life by aliens from Jupiter.

Then Ed and his friends, socialite Helen Fontaine and newspaper columnist Buzz De Kemp find the real deal among all the stories of somewhat questionable veracity – a travelling preacher who advocates an end to consumerism and profligate wasting of natural resources, calling for a return to a simpler way of life, who has the power to change the world with the over-heated Biblical style curses he utters in the heat of anger or passion for his view of how people should live.

The first major manifestation of this comes when Ed and Helen visit one of the preacher’s tent-revival-like meetings. Helen interrupts his sermon on the wastefulness of modern society, provoking his anger – which results in a curse on the vanity of women. Ed and Helen leave the meeting, but before the evening is out, Helen finds herself driven to wash off her makeup and comb out her high-society hairstyle. The next morning, Ed (and the world) discovers that women everywhere are avoiding cosmetics and anything else that might enhance their appearance, choosing functional clothing and wearing their hair au naturel. And only Ed and Helen can even being to figure out why.

So, no, no barbarians, blond or babe-like, but an interesting satire-cum-thought experiment. I’d read some of Reynolds’ other books when I was younger, and I found this as enjoyable in its own way as my memories of his other books.

Variable Star, R. A. Heinlein & Spider Robinson

Well, this was touted as a brand new story from Heinlein’s notes, brought to life by one of Heinlein’s greatest fans and a solid SF author in his own right, Spider Robinson.

What it actually was, I think, was a Spider Robinson pastiche of an idea that Heinlein had for one story but which he subsequently used as the basis for three or four of his other juveniles instead. I don’t dispute that they found an outline for a novel that Heinlein never wrote – in the exact same form as the outline, anyway – but the story has so many familiar plots, subplots and themes that I rather suspect that the main reason the Heinlein never turned this particular outline into a novel is because he decided (rightfully, I think) that he had too much going on in the outline for one novel and broke it up into several other books.

Seriously. If you’ve read Time for the Stars, you know about 75 percent of the plot. (It is worth noting, I think, that Time for the Stars was published in 1956, the year after Heinlein wrote and shelved this outline. The POV character is different, but the plot’s very similar. For the POV character, we have one of Heinlein’s dirt-poor farmboys headed to space to make his fortune.

One of the major themes of the outline, which is all about the corruption of wealth with an interstellar commerce backdrop, was probably part of the seed for Citizen of the Galaxy (which appeared in 1957).

The remaining part of the plot is a Heinlein staple – very young girl, preferably a genius, falls in love with older boy/young man , and spends the novel finding a way to make him realise he loves her/making him love her/waiting to grow up enough so that expressing his love for her isn’t statutory rape. In this case, it’s the time dilation effect that allows the young girl genius to magically become the same age as the initially much older protagonist by the end of the book. However, it’s worth noting that another book published in 1957 - The Door into Summer - also deals with finance and corruption, and features a young girl who manages to catch up to the older man she loves, this time thanks to his spending a few decades in cold sleep. The fact that in this outline, it was a rich little girl and a poor but worthy young man got re-used in Have space Suit Will Travel (published in 1958).

Incidentally, the outline was missing an ending, so Spider Robinson supplied one that is quite his own. But my gut says that the ending Heinlein intended to go with the “lost” outline ended up as the basis of the Dora interlude in Time Enough for Love - young girl, passionately in love with much older man, ends up homesteading on a colony world with him.

I wasn’t sorry I’d read it, because I do like Spider Robinson’s stuff, and I have a fondness for Heinlein’s juveniles, but it certainly wasn’t a brand spanking new Heinlein story, nor did it live up to the hype.

I’m way behind on the grand project I embarked on almost a year ago, which was to actually keep an annotated record of the books I read. So, to try to get back on an even footing for the all-too-quickly-approaching New Year, here are some thumbnail sketches of some of the the science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction novels that I’ve read in recent months (actually, more like the past six months or thereabouts) and haven’t yet written about.


The World of the Fae Trilogy – Anne Bishop
Shadows and Light
The House of Gaian

I wrote briefly about the first volume in this series back at the beginning of the year. It took a while, but I have at last finished the trilogy. It’s interesting – what first interested me about the series was Bishop’s elves – the fae – and their relationship with the witches – almost all women – who are the physical and mystical bond that maintains the link between the human world and the world of the fae. However, what came to dominate my perceptions of the books as I read them was the horrifying and all-too-believable war on women that drives the storyline. Think of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, of the male-dominated society portrayed in the early books of Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast Chronicles, of the utterly evil misogyny that almost destroys both elves and pagan humankind in Gael Baudino’s Strands series. In many ways, Bishop’s trilogy reminds me most of Baudino’s work, in fact, because in both, the answer to hatred and misogyny comes from the mingling of traditions, elven, pagan/wiccan, and human.


The Darker Jewels Trilogy – Anne Bishop
Daughter of the Blood
Heir to the Shadows
Queen if the Darkness

A very different setting and cast of characters from Bishop’s World of the Fae series, although it’s interesting to see that the themes of gender-based power struggles, separate but interconnected worlds or dimensions, and the discovery of lost heritages are also strong elements in the Darker Jewels series. This series is an interesting exploration of power – political power, psychic or magical power, sexual power, the power of conviction and honour, the power of love and hate. And there’s also a nice twist on the standard light=good, dark=bad iconography in a great deal of modern fiction: The devils and the undead are, as much as anyone can be, the good guys here.


The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde

Jack Spratt is a detective. He works the Nursery Crimes beat. His latest case: who killed Humpty Dumpty and why? Only Jasper Fforde could have written this book, and I’m glad he did. Absolutely hilarious, and full of not-so-subtle digs at the entirety of the detective genre.


Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein

After I did the “50 most influential” meme, I just couldn’t resist. I have, after all, been on a project to reread some of the science fiction I grew up with, and Heinlein is a big part of that. I’ve written elsewhere about my love-hate relationship with Heinlein, and this is one of the ones that really pushes all of those buttons. It’s a fun action story, but, and but, and but… tell me again how flogging people publicly makes for a crime-free state. And why military service is the only kind of service to the state that demonstrates one has a sense of responsibility and commitment. And why men are big infantry lugs and women are dainty ship’s pilots and in the future there are no tough ass-kicking grunts like Jenette Goldstein’s Vasquez in Aliens who can smash Bugs with the best of them.


The Puppet Masters - Robert Heinlein

This was the uncut version, although to be honest, it’s been so long since I’d read the original that I didn’t realise this until my partner pointed it out. Then it was sort of obvious – the sex wouldn’t have been quite so explicit in the early 50s when this was first published, but I’ve read so much of Heinlein’s later work, where the sex is pretty much unending, that I didn’t notice. glaurung, who actually compared the versions as part of a grad school paper on Heinlein, also tells me that the first publication had also toned down some of the elements intended to evoke the horror of being possessed, but I remember finding it chilling back in the 60s when I first read it, and it’s still chilling at that level. What I didn’t see so clearly when I first read the novel, although I’ve long since figured it out, was how the puppet masters are so openly paralleled with Russian state communism/totalitarianism. And how much this is a cold war, McCarthyist horror tale in which the communists could be anywhere, even in bed beside you, and you’d never know unless you practised unrelenting vigilance.

One thing that I had not noticed before was that for once, Heinlein’s super-competent, super-sexy, gun-toting female protagonist has a real psychology behind her. Mary, who we learn in the last chapter of the book has undergone horrifying experiences as a child including one of the more traumatic kinds of abandonment imaginable, is almost certainly overcompensating out of a form of PTSD – even if Heinlein didn’t have a clinical description of the condition available to him at the time. Which finally clears up one aspect of her behaviour that always bothered me – her about-face virtual submission to the male protagonist after he rejects her emotionally and assaults her.


Smoke and Mirrors - Tanya Huff

The second of the Tony and Fitzroy novels, though this one is somewhat Fitzroy-light. Doesn’t matter, Tony does just fine. And let me assure you, this is one killer of a haunted house story. With all the insanity of a TV location shoot thrown in for laughs. I’m really loving these books.


The Wizard of the Grove duology – Tanya Huff
Child of the Grove
The Last Wizard

I first read Child of the Grove years ago, alerted by a friend who knew Huff and had read the book in manuscript, and it was this book that made me an instant fan of Huff’s work. It’s always been an interesting duology – the first book is heroic, mythic, epic in nature, all about the wars of nations and the clashes of ancient powers, a classic good versus evil scenario, although with a greater degree of sophistication than many such. The Last Wizard is much smaller and more personal book – what is the life of the hero after the quest is over. Of course, there’s magic and adventure and all of that good high fantasy stuff, but it’s more about the last wizard herself, and what does she do now that she’s met her destiny and survived. An unexpectedly mature sequel to a fine high fantasy epic.


More to come....