Concerning “God Is An Iron”:
Only Iwo things need to be said about this story, and the first is that it forms Chapter Two of my next novel, Mindkiller.
The second is that, while the character of Karen Scholz is not drawn from ljfe and is wholly imaginary, the business involving her father is not fiction. It is a transcript, as near verbatim as my memory will produce, of a story a woman told me in 1967. (And (1 she’s still alive out there, I’d love to hear from her.) Animals like her fat her are not made up by writers for shock value; they exist.
God is an iron. . and that’s a hot one.
Concerning “Rah Rah R.A.H.”:
When Jim Baen left Galaxy, shortly before I did, it was to become sf editor of Ace Books. Ace promptly became the largest publisher of sf in the world, printing more titles in 1977 than any other house.
Suddenly Jim found himself in custody of a great many cheese sandwiches..
So he built the magazine he had always wanted Galaxy to be and couldn’ t afford to make it,. and he named it Destinies.
It was a quarterly paperback bookazine from Ace, a book filled with fiction and speculative fact and artwork and all the little extras that make up a magazine, and it was the most consistently satisfying and thought-provoking periodical that came into my house, not excluding Omni and the Scientific American. I did review columns for the first five issues, dropping out for reasons that in retrospect seem dumb.
So one day shortly after I quit writing reviews for Destinies, Jim called and offered me a proposition: he would send me a xerox of the newest Robert Heinlein manuscript, months in advance of publication, if I would use the book as a springboard for a full-length essay on the lifework of Heinlein, for Destinies. The new book was Expanded Universe, which by now you will almost certainly have seen and therefore own; let me tell you, it blew me away.
The following is what came spilling out of me when I was done reading Expanded Universe-and when fused it as my Guest of Honor speech at Bosklone, the 1980 Boston sf convention, it was received with loud and vociferous applause. Perhaps I overestimated the amount of attention people pay to critics. Perhaps the essay was unnecessary.
But oooh it was fun!
RAH RAH R.A.H.!
A swarm of petulant blind men are gathered around an elephant, searching him inch by inch for something at which to sneer. What they resent is not so much that he towers over them, and can see farther than they can imagine. Nor is it that he has been trying for nearly half a century to warn them of the tigers approaching through the distant grasses downwind. They do resent these things, but what they really, bitterly resent is his damnable contention that they are not blind, his insistent claim that they can open up their eyes any time they acquire the courage to do so.
Unforgivable.
How shall we repay our debt to Robert Anson Heinlein?
I am tempted to say that it can’t be done. The sheer size of the debt is staggering. He virtually invented modern science fiction, and did not attempt to patent it. He opened up a great many of sf’s frontiers, produced the first reliable maps of most of it principal territories, and did not complain when each of those frontiers filled up with hordes of johnny-come-latelies, who the moment they got off the boat began to complain about the climate, the scenery and the employment opportunities. I don’t believe there can be more than a handful of science fiction stories published in the last forty years that do not show his influence one way or another. He has written the definitive time-travel stories (“All You Zombies-” and “By His Bootstraps”), the definitive longevity books (Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough For Love), the definitive theocracy novel (Revolt ln 2100), heroic fantasy/sf novel (Glory Road), revolution novel (The Moon is A Harsh Mistress), transplant novel (I Will Fear No Evil), alien invasion novel (The Puppet Masters), technocracy story (“The Roads Must Roll”), arms race story (“Solution Unsatisfactory”), technodisaster story (“Blowups Happen”), and about a dozen of the finest scičnce fiction juveniles ever published. These last alone have done more for the field than any other dozen books. And perhaps as important, he broke sf out of the puips, opened up “respectable” and lucrative markets, broached the wall of the ghetto. He continues to work for the good of the entire genre: his most recent book sale was a precedent-setting event, representing the first-ever SFWA Model Contract signing. (The Science Fiction Writers of America has drawn up a hypothetical ideal contract, from the sf writer’s point of view-but until “The Number of the Beast-” no such contract had ever been signed.) Note that Heinlein did not do this for his own benefit: the moment the contract was signed it was renegotiated upward.
You can’t copyright ideas; you can only copyright specific arrangements of words. If you could copyright ideas, every living sf writer would be paying a substantial royalty to Robert Heinlein.
So would a lot of other people. In his spare time Heinlein invented the waldo and the waterbed (and God knows what else), and he didn’t patent them either. (The first waldos were built by Nathan Woodruff at Brookhaven National Laboratories in 1945, three years after Heinlein described them for a few cents a word. As to the waterbed, see Expanded Universe.) In addition he helped design the spacesuit as we now know it.
Above all Heinlein is better educated, more widely read and traveled than anyone I have ever heard of, and has consistently shared the Good Parts with us. He has learned prodigiously, and passed on the most interesting things he’s learned to us, and in the process passed on some of his love of learning to us. Surely that is a mighty gift. When I was five years old he began to teach me to love learning, and to be skeptical about what I was taught, and he did the same for a great many of us, directly or indirectly. How then shall we repay him?
Certainly not with dollars. Signet claims 11.5 million Heinlein books in print Berkley claims 12 million. Del Rey figures are not available, but they have at least a dozen titles.
His latest novel fetched a record price. Extend those figures worldwide, and it starts to look as though Heinlein is very well repaid with dollars. But consider: at today’s prices you could own all 42 of his books for about a hundred dollars plus sales tax. Robert Heinlein has given me more than a C-note’s worth of entertainment, knowledge and challenging skullsweat, more by several orders of magnitude. His books don’t cost five times the price of Philip Roth’s latest drool; hence they are drastically underpriced.
We can’t repay him with awards, nor with honors, nor with prestige. He has a shelf-full of Hugos (voted by his readers), the first-ever GrandMaster Nebula for Lifetime Contribution To Science Fiction (voted by his fellow writers), he is an Encyclopedia Briitanica authority, he is the only man ever to be a World Science Fiction Convention Guest of Honor three timesit’s not as though he needs any more flattery.
We can’t even thank him by writing to say thanks-we’d only make more work for his remarkable wife Virginia, who handles his correspondence these days. There are, as noted, millions of us (possibly hundreds of millions)-a quick thank-you apiece would cause the U.S. Snail to fmally and forever collapse-and if they were actually delivered they would make it difficult for Heinlein to get any work done.
I can think of only two things we could do to thank Robert Heinlein.
First, give blood, now and as often as you can spare a half hour and a half pint. It pleases him; Blood donors have saved his life on several occasions. (Do you know the I Will Fear No Evil story? The plot of that book hinged on a character having a rare blood type; routine research led Heinlein to discover the National Rare Blood Club; he went out of his way to put a commercial for them in the forematter of the novel. After it was published he suffered a medical emergency, requiring transfusion. Surprise: Heinlein has a rare blood type. His life was saved by Rare Blood Club members. There is a persistent rumor, which I am unable to either verify or disprove, that at least one of those donors had joined because they read the blurb in I Will Fear No Evil.)
The second suggestion also has to do with helping to ensure Heinlein’s personal survival-surely the sincerest form of flattery. Simply put, we can all do the best we personally can to assure that the country Robert Heinlein, lives in is not ruined. I think he would take it kindly if we were all to refrain from abandoning civilization as a failed experiment that requires too much hard work. (I think he’ll make out okay even if we don’t-but he’d be a lot less comfortable.) I think he would be pleased if we abandoned the silly delusion that there are any passengers on Starship Earth, and took up our responsibilities as crewmen-as he has.
Which occasionally involves giving the Admiral your respectful attention. Even when the old fart’s informed opinions conifict with your own ignorant prejudices.
The very size of the debt we all owe Heinlein has a lot to do with the savagery of the recent critical assaults on him. As Jubal Harshaw once noted, gratitude often translates as resentment. Sf critics, parasitic on a field which would not exist in anything like its present form or size without Heinlein, feel compelled to bite the hand that feeds them. Constitutionally unable to respect anything except insofar as it resembles themselves, some critics are compelled to publicly display disrespect for a talent of which not one of them can claim the tenth part.
And some of us pay them money to do this.
Look, Robert Heinlein is not a god, not even an angel. He is “merely” a good and great man, and a good and great writer, no small achievements. But there seems to be a dark human compulsion to take the best man around, declare him a god, and then scrutinize him like a hawk for the sign of
human weakness that will allow us to slay him. Something in us likes to watch the mighty topple, and most especially the good mighty. If someone wrote a book alleging that Mother Theresa once committed a venial sin, it would sell a million copies.
And some of the cracks made about Robert Heinlein have been pretty personal. Though the critics swear that their concern is with criticizing literature, few of them can resist the urge to criticize Heinlein the man.
Alexei Panshin, for instance, in Heinlein In Dimension, asserts as a biographical fact, without disclaimer of hearsay, that Heinlein “cannot stand to be disagreed with, even to the point of discarding friendships. “I have heard this allegation quoted several times in the twelve years since Panshin committed it to print. Last week I received a review copy of Philip K. Dick’s new short story collection, The Golden Man (Berkley); I quote from its introduction:
I consider Heinlein to be my spiritual father, even though our political ideologies are totally at variance. Several years ago, when! was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him-one of the few tree gentlemen in this world. I don’t agree with any ideas hepursforth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn’t raise it, Heinlein loaned the money tome… . he knows I’m a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love.
Full disclosure here: Robert Heinlein has given me, personally, an autograph, a few gracious words, and a couple of hours of conversation. Directly. But when I was five he taught me, with the first and weakest of his juveniles, three essential things: to make up my own mind, always; to think it through before doing so; to get the facts before thinking. Perhaps someone else would have taught me those things sooner or later; that’s irrelevant: it was Heinlein who did it. That is who and what I love.
Free speech gives people the right to knock who and what I love; it also give me the right to rebut.
Not to “defend”. As to the work, there it stands, invulnerable to noise made about it. As to the man, he once said that “It is impossible to insult a man who is not unsure of himself.” Fleas can’t bite him. Nor is there any need to defend his literary reputation; people who read what critics tell them to deserve what they get.
No, I accepted this commission because I’m personally annoyed. I grow weary of hearing someone I love slandered; I have wasted too many hours at convention parties arguing with loud nits, seen one too many alleged “reference books” take time out to criticize Heinlein’s alleged political views and literary sins, heard one too many talentless writers make speeches that take potshots at the man who made it possible for them to avoid honest work. At the next convention party I want to be able to simply hand that loud nit a copy of Destinies and go back to having fun.
So let us consider the most common charges made against Heinlein. I arrange these in order of intelligence, with the most brainless first.
I. PERSONAL LAPSES
(Note: all these are most-brainless, as not one of the critics is in any position to know anything about Heinlein the man. The man they attack is the one they infer from his fiction: a mug’s game.)
(1) “Heinlein is a fascist.” This is the most popular Heinlein shibboleth in fandom, particularly among the young-and, of course, exclusively among the ignorant. I seldom bother to reply, but in this instance I am being paid. Dear sir or madam: kindly go to the library, look up the dictionary definition of fascism. For good measure, read the history of fascism, asking the librarian to help you with any big words. Then read the works of Robert Heinlein, as you have plainly not done yet. If out of 42 books you can produce one shred of evidence that Heinlein-or any of his protagonists-is a fascist, I’ll eat my copy of Heinlein In Dimension.
(2) “Heinlein is a male chauvinist.” This is the second most common charge these days. That’s right, Heinlein populates his books with dumb, weak, incompetent women. Like Sister Maggie in “If This Goes On-“; Dr. Mary Lou Martin in “Let There Be Light”; Mary Sperling in Methuselah’s Children; Grace Cormet in “-We Also Walk Dogs”; Longcourt Phyllis in Behond This Horizon; Cynthia Craig in “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”; Karen in “Gulf”; Gloria McNye in “Delilah And The Space-Rigger”; Allucquere in The Puppet Masters; Hazel and Edith Stone in The Roiling Stones; Betty in The Star Beast; all the women in Tunnel In The Sky; Penny in Double Star; Pee Wee and the Mother Thing in Have Spacesuit-Will Travel; Jill Boardman, Becky Vesant, Patty Paiwonski, Anne, Miriam and Dorcas in Stranger In A Strange Land; Star, the Empress of Twenty Universes, in Glory Road; Wyoh, Mimi, Sidris and Gospazha Michelle Holmes in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress; Eunice and Joan Eunice in I Will Fear No Evil; Ishtar, Tamara, Minerva, Hamadryad, Dora, Helen Mayberry, Llita, Laz, Lor and Maureen Smith in Time Enough For Love; and Dejah Thoris, Hilda Corners, Gay Deceiver and Elizabeth Long in “The Number of the Beast…”.*