Thinking About Heinlein: 1956-2006

[RonPrice]

I wrote this piece today--thinking about 50 years of Heinlein:
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STRANGERS AND FRONTIERS

During my early and middle childhood(3-12) and my early and middle adolescence(13-17) Robert Heinlein was working on his book Stranger in a Strange Land. In June 1961 it was finally published. It is arguably the most famous science fiction book ever written and the first to be a national best-seller. In 1961 I was just beginning a reading program that would only end with my death or some physical and/or mental incapacity. It was a reading program which, in the next fifty years(1961-2011), from the age of 17 to 67, would keep me busy with some 40,000 books read and partly read and some 100,000 articles read or partly read. This, of course, is a guesstimation. But during those years, that half century, science fiction was hardly touched. Perhaps that was the main reason my own effort to write a sci-fi book was unsuccessful.

Heinlein’s book was a challenge to social mores. While Heinlein was writing his book I became first associated with and then a member of a religion which also challenged social mores. Heinlein’s book is also about a utopia that cannot be achieved. The religion I had joined in 1959 and pioneered for in 1962, was often accused of being utopian, unrealistic or, as the critics of Heinlein’s book put it, "outside the bounds of psychological realism." This was Heinlein’s first venture into a more highbrow literary landscape and I was beginning my lifelong journey on another highbrow literary landscape in many other genres.

Heinlein had a period from 1939 to 1961 of writing juvenile novels. I had a period from 1961 to 1983 of writing juvenile essays and poems. Heinlein had an obsession with privacy in these years and the topics he wrote about, like a trip to the moon, were often considered surprising if not preposterous. My enthusiasm for privacy came much later, but many of the ideas I hypothesized in my writing were considered unrealistic if not preposterous. These experiences gave me a sense of communion with Heinlein who died in 1988 just as my life as a poet was really beginning for a 25 year hiatus. For both his work and mine there is an extensive self-referentialism; for Heinlein there is an autobiographical, self-parodying element; for me there is self-parody, self-criticism, self-analysis, self-love, person-centred and existential therapy, gestalt therapy and behavioural therapy, among other efforts to heal and endure.

One writer saw Heinlein as a modern pioneer in the Turner tradition. He thought Heinlein would have been comfortable with Turner’s pioneer, frontier, thesis being the pioneer that Heinlein was in so many ways. I have found Turner’s historical pioneering analysis and backdrop to my own experience heuristic.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1893.

Only a small fraction went pioneering
even then, Frederick; some thought your
emphasis on the pioneer exaggerated.
Still, Frederick, they were then the genesis
of the American dream like mine, like mine.

Yours, like mine, was a spiritual frontier
as was Heinlein’s, although mine got
little press during these first years of the
last stage of history as we transformed
the wilderness of our world and made
an entirely different creature—a new
race of men—each time we touched
a new locality on this incredible earth.

Ron Price
June 27th 2006

[j. d. worthington]

This is also, as noted on another thread, the centennial of Heinlein's birth. Perhaps it wouldn't be amiss to have some sort of recognition of that on the Chronicles? Like him (or his work) or not, he helped bring American sf out of the pulp magazine gutter it had fallen into during the 20s and early 30s, and he, along with such as John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov (among others) began to once more make it a branch of literature worthy of the name.

[RonPrice]

Now wasn't that a coincidental posting! On the 100th anniversary of his birthday, no less. Thanks-Ron

[The Ace]

Yeah, I always liked his work. though the only thing I own of his at the moment is the brilliant "The Past Through Tomorrow, " anthology.

[pyan]

Well, I grok Heinlein! I've just about eveything he wrote, from Lifeline to To Sail Beyond The Sunset, though I've still to read For Us, the Living. He was the first author I read with self-referential, internal timelines, and I can still remember the amazement I felt the first time I noticed a reference to another character in another book to the the one I was reading - I think it was to JSB Smith from I Will Fear No Evil, referred to in Time Enough For Love.

For me, he will always be the greatest hard SF author ever - even realising some of his odder personal beliefs later, the sheer joy of reading Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, and TEFL( Lazarus Long is surely close to the top of any "Greatest SF Character ever" list!) is still one of my early memories of the genre, and shaped my reading to the present day.



Sláinte mhath, RAH, the Dean of Science Fiction Writers. We will not forget.

[j. d. worthington]

Heinlein remains high on my list; I would imagine he always will. And, darnit, I can't find my copy of For Us, the Living; going to have to go get a replacement! (grumble, grumble) Like you, though, Pyan, I'd not got around to reading that one yet -- I understand it really wobbles badly, being a very early attempt at a novel; but I'm curious about it, nonetheless.

Glad to see that little bit from Woodie, by the way ... I suppose (not being able to program a computer and such) I wouldn't quite make it on that scale, but I most heartily agree with the final line!

[pyan]

Nerdily enough, I used to check off items on it, currently having about three left. Hope I'll never have to do the last one, though!