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.

Like many science fiction fans of my generation, the appearance of Star Trek on my television screen in 1966 was a pivotal moment (these days, people call it ST: The Original Series, but for me there is only one Star Trek, which cannot ever be confused with The Next Generation, or Deep Space Nine, or any of the others). I watched it faithfully. I and several of my friends began writing fan fiction, something that had never occurred to any of us before then, but which was something we could no more not do than we could choose not to breathe. Something about Star Trek demanded that we join as co-creators, that we find ways to explore the consequences of what we were watching in the universe where they had happened, that we give those mesmerizing characters more to do, that we put ourselves into the world of Kirk and Spock and Scotty and Uhura and all the others.

So I wrote genfic and Mary Sues, and slash, and all the kinds of fanfic that everyone in fandom knows about today - but were almost completely new in the late 60s.

And something else happened then - other people started writing new stories set in the Star Trek world and getting them published. And I read those just as avidly as I had watched to show itself.

Every once in a while, I still get in the mood to read - or re-read - official star Trek novels, though I'm rather picky - I only read novels set in the original Star Trek setting. The Star Trek novel-reading itch hit me again in early 2011, and these are the books I picked to satisfy it, almost all of them re-reads:


Dave Galanter, Star Trek: Troublesome Minds
Melinda Snodgrass, Star Trek: Tears of the Singers
Barbara Hambly, Star Trek: Ishmael
Margaret Wander Bonanno, Star Trek: Strangers from the Sky
Jean Lorrah, Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders
A.C. Crispin, Star Trek: Time for Yesterday
Diane Duane, Star Trek: Doctor’s Orders

Diane Duane has finally completed her Star Trek alternate universe Rihannsu series, with the publication last year of The Empty Chair (unless, of course, she has some more ideas about what to do with her characters in, oh, another five or ten years). The first Rihannsu book, My Enemy, My Ally was written way back in 1984, more than 20 years ago. The only problem with a series – or in this case, more of a sequence of three related books, one of which was divided up into three volumes – that is written over such a long period of time is that every time a new volume comes out, you pretty much need to go back and re-read everything that’s gone before so that you don’t miss any nuances.

So over the past week I’ve read the whole series, including the final volume:

My Enemy, My Ally
The Romulan Way
Swordhunt
Honour Blade
The Empty Chair

At one time, I read all the Star Trek books that were being published, starting with the James Blish episode adaptations, his original Star Trek novel Spock Must Die!, and the Marshak-Culbreath anthologies. Somewhere around the 50th Pocket Books novel, I stopped reading them all, and only bought the ones that really drew me – primarily those that were about Spock or the history of Vulcan, and those written by a very small handful of “Star Trek authors” whose work I’d come to anticipate, whether it was Star trek related or not. One of those authors is Diane Duane.

In terms of plot, there’s nothing all that spectacular or unusual (as Star Trek novels go) about the Rihannsu books, although they’re certainly well-conceived and interesting, and considerably more complex than most: but when all's said and done, what it all boils down to is Kirk, Spock and McCoy save the Federation from the aliens and the aliens from themselves, on an ever increasing scale, with lots of action and intrigue and phasers in space and on the ground. What’s special about these books is Duane’s world-building. The Rihannsu are not the cardboard Romulans of ST:TOS (or even the slightly more developed Romulans of ST:TNG and ST:DS9). Star Trek’s Romulans are aliens who hate us, er, the Federation because they hate the Federation, who are sneaky because they are sneaky, and who are villains because they hate the Federation and are sneaky.

Duane’s Rihannsu are a people with a highly developed culture, religion, and history who have very good reasons for mistrusting the Other and whose ways of acting and reacting are perfectly appropriate within their cultural context. Of course, like any civilisation, they have good leaders and corrupt leaders, and in Duane’s ST universe, this is a time when the leaders of the Rihannsu have become corrupt. But Duane’s Rihannsu are not inherently evil or treacherous, and that’s part of what makes the Rihannsu books so interesting.

Duane also writes for an audience composed of Star Trek/science fiction fans reading something they love but don’t take seriously as “great literature,” which means there’s a wealth of in-jokes and ironic commentary on all sorts of subjects. Just as examples, there’s a metareference to the growing popularity of slash fanfiction made by McCoy in My Enemy, My Ally: “People start the damnedest rumours about this ship’s crew, even without provocation…” and Duane’s agent, Donald Maass, is listed among the crew members taking part in a particular mission. And in the final volume, there's a lovely comment about how the English language doesn't just steal from other languages, it drags them off into dark alleys and rifles their pockets for spare change.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed these books. The “guest protagonist” of the series – Rihannsu commander Ael i-Mhiessan t'Rllaillieu of the starship Bloodwing, and aunt of the unnamed “Romulan Commander” from the ST:TOS episode “The Enterprise Incident” – is a marvellous character. We see Ael first in My Enemy, My Ally where, finding corruption and a deep violation of the traditional Rihannsu code of honour (mnhei’sahe, which is of course untranslatable and means much more than “honour”) at the heart of her own Empire, she turns to her bitterest enemies, the crew of the Enterprise, to help her destroy a Rihannsu military/scientific installation where captured Vulcans are being used as experimental research subjects to find a way to give Rihannsu leaders the dangerous mental abilities of Vulcan adepts without the necessity of years of personal discipline and adherence to logic. Ael fears that to give the corrupt and dishonourable leaders of her Empire such power without any restraint would be a disaster for her own people, and sees Kirk and the Enterprise as the only way to stop it, even if it means that she and her crew will be at best exiles from the Empire they are trying to save.

Ael plays a much smaller role in the second novel, The Romulan Way. This book is primarily an exploration of Rihannsu society and politics; plot is secondary – although it does very nicely set up a major character, Arrhae ir-Mnaeha t’Khellian, born Terise Haleakala LoBrutto, and later known as Arrhae i-Khellian t’Llhweiir – for the final three-volumes. In this novel, Arrhae/Terise is a deep cover agent gone “native” and the Federation picks none other than Doctor McCoy to go in after her to see whether she’s still a Federation asset or has been assimilated into Rihannsu society to the point that her allegance is compromised. McCoy eventually discovers that the answer is “both,” and Ael shows up at the very end to yank McCoy’s chestnuts – and an emblematic sword – out of the fire.

The final three volumes deal with the consequences of the events of the first two books, political intrigue and civil unrest within the Rihannsu Empire, the threat of war on a galactic scale involving the Federation, the Rihannsu and the Klingon Empire, secret orders, plausible deniability, the demands of honour and the possibility that one man – or woman – can change the future. Duane makes good use of both the Canon enterprise crew and her own additions (including the young Horta, ensign Nahraht), she draws together all the loose ends from My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way, and brings in as a major character the physicist K's't'lk from one of her other ST novels, The Wounded Sky. The pace suffers from having been released as three separate volumes, but it’s a highly satisfying conclusion, with two minor exceptions. First, I’d been enjoying the idea that Kirk and Ael shared loyalty, honour, respect and friendship, and nothing more; Duane chooses to change that – although in a restrained fashion – at the very end of the final volume. Second, just before the final events of the book, when Ael makes a necessary and honourable choice, it takes Kirk to finally convince her that this is indeed what she must do; the Ael I came to know though these five volumes wouldn’t have needed Kirk to show her what mnhei’sahe requires.

As with almost all Star Trek fictions, this series is marred by the inherent assumptions of the inherent rightness of Federation intervention in the politics and cultures of other peoples (the First Directive is only honoured when the Federation has no vested interest in doing otherwise, and so it has always been), but then we always knew that the Federation was constructed as being intrinsically good. But anyone who is still reading Star Trek fictions at this point in the game has learned to live with that in their own fashion. And within that set of assumptions, Duane’s Rihannsu series is among the best fictions created in the Star Trek universe.