Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  I do not know that this system would result in a better government—nor do I know of any way to insure “knowledgeable” and “intelligent” voting. But I venture to guess that this fictional system would not produce results any worse than those of our present system. Not that I think it is even remotely likely that we would ever adopt such a system—24

  Moreover, from the evidence that this was the story Heinlein did write and did complete, it must have had that ring of “relevance,” of engagement, he had been missing with the Podkayne story. He later explained some of his thinking in generating the story to colleague Theodore Sturgeon:

  … I’ll state explicitly the theme of Starship Troopers: it is an inquiry into why men fight, investigated as a moral problem.… being a novelist, I tried to analyze it as a novelist. Why do men fight? What is the nature of force and violence, can it be morally used, and, if so, under what circumstances?.…

  What I tried to do … was to find, by observation, a fundamental basis for human behavior—and I decided that the only basis which did not call for unproved assumptions was the question of survival vs. non-survival in the widest possible sense—i.e., I defined “moral” behavior as being survival behavior … [sic] for the individual, for the family, the tribe, the nation, the race.

  Now this thesis may or may not be true, but it is the theme of the book, explicitly stated over and over again—and every part, every incident, in the story merely explores some corollary or consequence of the basic theorem. Is conscription permissible morally? No, because moral decisions cannot be determined by law, by committee, by group—to fight or not to fight is a personal, moral decision.…

  Everything in the book turns on this single theorem … 25

  He framed his ideas slightly differently for Alice Dalgliesh:

  Let me state the theme of my story: the central theme of the story is John XV 13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” The story starts with a boy, a child, a spoiled son of the extreme right, one who is utterly incapable of conceiving this ideal. The story ends when he is perhaps only two or three years older, but fully matured, a lined and tempered adult wholly dedicated to that simple, selfless proposition.26

  The story came together along the same basic lines as Space Cadet: a high school graduate going into the army and coming of age as he comes to understand the emotional and moral meaning of the theme—why people would fight and die to protect their homes. Presumably to clarify the individualist nature of the moral theme, Heinlein made the antagonists soulless hive-creatures, representing the forces of totalitarian collectivism that were threatening to overwhelm the free world. Later he said:

  Starship Troopers describes a libertarian, democratic, almost idyllic utopia—but under wartime conditions and told through the eyes of a young, inexperienced man who has to form his own philosophy under those conditions.27

  And the philosophy of life his high-school-aged hero develops in the crucible of war is embodied in lines one of the characters quotes to Johnny Rico, from the fourth stanza of “The Star Spangled Banner”:28 “Oh! thus be it ever, when free men shall stand/Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!”

  Space Cadet had been about the military in peacetime and played itself out in the sanitized “social service” aspect of the military—as had much of Heinlein’s own service. But this book was set in the military in time of war, and required a more realistic picture of what the military means.

  He started writing Shoulder the Sky (the title a reference to Atlas holding up the sky)29 on November 8, 1958. He used all the skill he had at his command to make the violence of the combat in the opening chapter nauseatingly real, but his protagonist likable and “identifiable.” This forced his young readers to entertain two mutually contradictory self-pictures in their minds—a “nice” guy who wreaked incredible violence in the best of causes—the strongest possible argument against namby-pamby pacifism he could mount.

  Some people were not going to want to hear these things. Alice Dalgliesh was not going to want to hear these things.30 But these were things that needed to be said in the intellectual and moral climate of 1958:

  Why have I written a book which I judge ahead of its time is likely to displease quite a few people?

  I could answer that almost everything I have ever written does not please most people and that answer would be true. But not sufficient.

  I wrote this book because it is in tune with the times, although not with popular beliefs. It has something important to say about war, about juvenile delinquency, about the civic responsibility of the citizen, about education, about a young man’s proper role—his duty—in his social group. What I am saying to my young reader is: “Look, son, this is not an easy world; this is a grim and dangerous world—and it is quite likely to kill you. But you have a free choice: you can go to your death fat, dumb, and happy and never understanding what is happening to you right up to the time the bombs fall … [sic] or you can grow up, face up to your harsh responsibilities, look death in the face and defy it, and thereby enjoy the austere but very real and deeply satisfying rewards of being a man. But the choice is yours, and neither your mother, nor your teacher, nor the state can in any wise release you of it.”

  I could have written this as an essay—and no teen-ager would ever bother to read it. Instead I cast it into the form of an adventure story in the belief that many would read it, and some would understand it and profit by it.…

  As such, the story is timeless; I dolled it up with futuristic gadgets and strange planets simply to flavor it for the kids. And, as such, it is most timely—for this is exactly what our boys in high school face.… What has happened to our boys in a single generation? I am not sure—but the results terrify me.31

  In the writing, the title had changed from Shoulder the Sky to the more descriptive and catchy Sky Soldier and then to Starside Soldier. He finished the 60,000-word draft at 5:20 A.M. on November 22 and left it on the kitchen counter for Ginny to first-read. When he woke up, he found a note from her: “Darling—I read the end—you will be pleased to know I cried—maybe others won’t; but I did. I’m at Lucky’s. Call me. All my love, T.”32 That ending was a good stroke—his protagonist’s life choices validated by his father, creating a wholeness to the boy’s life. He was about to make another combat drop—and the implication was that neither Johnny Rico nor his father would survive it, though Heinlein had not written that in explicitly.

  What he had been explicit about, however, was that the boy was a Filipino. He had sprinkled the early part of the book with a lot of Spanish names, but mentioned close to the end that Tagalog was the boy’s milk-language. Perhaps because his editor had not noticed when he put in a Negro hero (in Tunnel in the Sky, 1955), Heinlein felt the need to be more explicit about this Asian hero (the first in science fiction).33

  He spent a couple of weeks cutting and polishing the manuscript and sent it to a professional typist early in December—which gave him a little time free to deal with the possible filmed plagiarism of The Puppet Masters.

  Over the 1958–59 holidays, almost two months into its national release, The Brain Eaters reached Colorado Springs, and Heinlein saw it on January 2, 1959. There really couldn’t be any doubt about it: “I counted too many identities of ‘gimmicks’ as well as the basic plot to be in any doubt in my mind about it.”34 Even worse, the production was very low quality, and they had ripped the guts out of the book, turning it into a hack weird-menace shudder-pulp story. “[T]he whole thing was done in such atrocious bad taste and with such wild illogic that the useless use of sex hardly stood out.”35

  On top of the continuing runaround he was getting from Jack Seaman’s successors over the profits (if any) from Project Moonbase, Blassingame was now telling him The Brain Eaters would kill the option-purchase deal they had been negotiating for The Puppet Masters. He would have to sue American International—just as soon as Blassingame could find the right lawyer to handle
it.

  Heinlein sent the clean retype of what was now titled Starship Soldier to Blassingame and, simultaneously, to Scribner, on January 10 and braced himself. He had done this one, he told Blassingame, as he had done Citizen of the Galaxy two years ago—written what was essentially an adult novel, but one his kids should find interesting.36 Blassingame liked it—it gave him a bang, he said, though it also sagged in places, bogging down in the middle with the lecturing.37

  The reaction from Dalgliesh, however, was a flat rejection. This was not adventure, she said, it was social commentary and the boys wouldn’t want it at all.38 He should put it away for a year, she told him: Perhaps he would feel differently about it after he had cooled down. She also enclosed a lengthy personal letter of rebuttal: “Having bounced the book,” Heinlein told Blassingame, “she now seems to want to continue the argument: she sent me a quite unnecessary (and snide!) letter, raising points better not raised over a manuscript she has returned. But I’m damned if I’ll fight with her.”39

  Dalgliesh had made one useful suggestion, though: He could try marketing it as an adult serial40 … but Doubleday passed it up as too juvenile (though admirably loaded with technique),41 and a week later John Campbell passed it up for Astounding. Again it was too juvenile.

  So it was too “adult” for the juvenile house and too “juvenile” for the adult publishers.

  That February, Heinlein made a loan to Ben Babb’s wife Betty Jane (Ben had been sick for a long time already, and they were in desperate straits). The “loan” (Robert and Ginny knew quite well it was a gift) was inconsiderable, and they were glad to be able to help. She had done the right thing in coming to him, Heinlein assured Betty Jane Babb—but he also cautioned her about keeping this kind of secret from her husband. It was the kind of thing that could be soul-destroying:

  A lot of wives … think they are being “faithful” as long as they don’t take a roll in the hay with some other male, no matter what they do to kill the spirit of the man they promised to cherish. They never get it through their silly heads that a mere roll in the hay could be no more important than a bad case of hangnails—certainly no worse than a bad cold—if they paid attention to the essence of the contract, “to love and cherish” come what may—buck him up and keep him going, somehow, against an unfriendly world.

  That is what marriage is all about—sex is at most a minor aspect of it: a partnership between two people, in which each places the other’s welfare as the paramount value in a shifting and uncertain world … There have been more than a few honest and loyal wives who have hit the streets to support sick husbands—and let us now have a moment of silence in honor of their gallant souls.42

  Immediately after receiving Dalgliesh’s rejection of Starship Soldier, Heinlein had tried to reply and found himself in the same round of write-and-tear-up-drafts that had made him jittery and insomniac after Citizen of the Galaxy. He had finally reached a draft of a letter he—and Ginny—could live with, explaining the points of his own experience and thinking that had gone into the book—and showing how Starship Soldier fit into the juvenile series he had been doing for the last twelve years. Something in that long letter43 apparently reached Dalgliesh in some fashion: She asked Blassingame to return the manuscript so she could reconsider it.

  In the meantime, Heinlein tried a “backchannel” letter to an acquaintance in the Scribner editorial board (identified in the correspondence only as “George” and “McM”) asking for an opinion as to why it had been rejected so summarily and suggested that he might be able to use the input to salvage the book for Scribner.44 A week later he heard back from George saying that he believed rejecting the book was the appropriate thing for Scribner to do: The story was weak, the didactic approach was weak, and it would not do his reputation any good. Couple those considerations to the objections certain to be raised by librarians—“and I don’t think it’s appropriate.”45

  Blassingame put it on the open market, and Fantasy & Science Fiction picked up the serial rights, requesting a condensation of the book to 20,000 words. The editor, Bob Mills, was jittery about it. Alfred Bester had talked Mills into letting him read the manuscript and wrote Heinlein a long letter first complimenting him on a crisply told story, but voicing his concern and Mills’s about the direction it was taking: He warned Robert not to fall into the jingoism trap Kipling had got himself into that “makes his name odious today as a thinker (but never as a writer)” and suggested a rebuttal story or two.46

  To Bester, Robert made a temperate reply: He and Mills certainly were free to say whatever they wished in print, “But I may not like what you have to say and I certainly will not answer it.” He abhorred personal arguments and had never—and would never—write anything for publication, or say anything in public “knocking my colleagues or their works.”47

  But if they were that jittery over it, they shouldn’t even be considering it: Heinlein told Blassingame to withdraw the book from F&SF and get the manuscript back.

  I don’t know whether he [Mills] got cold feet on his own, and then called in Alfie Bester and suggested that Alfie write a rebuttal, or whether it was the other way around—cold feet contracted from Alfie after he let Alfie read it. It doesn’t really matter which was cause and which was effect; the end result was that he asked Alfie to write a rebuttal to my story and asked me if I would mind if he introduced my story with a statement that he, the editor, totally disagreed with it.

  Well, I do mind, on both points. It is all right for the umpire to wear a plain blue suit, but when he puts on the other team’s uniform and tells the cash customers that he is agin me from scratch, that is another matter entirely—and when I find that the umpire is coaching the opposition against me, then I know I’m in the wrong ball park.48

  Shortly after Miss Dalgliesh had bounced Starship Soldier the first time, Heinlein had received an inquiry from a Hollywood-based television producer, Tom Swicegood, who was the president of Pine-Key Productions. He and his partner, Jim Doherty, were working on a half-hour SF series for fall 1959, Crater Base One, and wanted one or more Heinlein stories for the series.49 Things run in cycles, especially in television, and this season another production company, Ziv-TV, had another half-hour space show in collaboration with Ivan Tors, Men Into Space—about the colonization and settlement of the Moon50 (with newcomer Angie Dickinson in the pilot, which aired in September 1959).

  Heinlein was cautiously interested: He had been badly burned twice by Hollywood. But the series “bible” he found encouraging.51 In the Producer’s Notes section of the bible he found among the instructions to writers:

  CRATER BASE ONE is a new kind of television format. It is not a detective story in a moon setting. Nor is it a hide-and-seek cowboy story which is doctored up by placing the hero inside a space suit and sending him off to “get the bad guys.” Rather, CRATER BASE ONE is the story of intelligent pioneers in a very hostile world, living only in the minds of men with imagination.

  We need adult stories, the key to which is characterization. A believable, interesting character is far and away the best approach to what we want. Two-dimensional characters are for kid shows.

  Any comparison between CRATER BASE ONE and shows like FLASH GORDON, CAPTAIN VIDEO, etc., is absolutely not desired … [sic] Our stories, sets, costumes, and other details are to be handled with realistic honesty throughout.52

  The background was thoughtfully worked out, Heinlein thought—tangled international jurisdictions over the Moon base seemed to be the key issue in the series53—but he found the pilot script frankly incompetent: Not only was it dull, lacking in dramatic values, but it didn’t make any coherent use of the series premises. It was hard to believe that it had come from the same shop as the bible.54

  Swicegood’s initial proposal to Heinlein was for an outline of a story from him, five to ten pages—for which he was to be paid a flat fee plus residuals.55 Unfortunately, the sample contracts Swicegood sent him would require him to join the Screen Writers Guild
. The Authors Guild used to have reciprocity with the SWG, but Heinlein didn’t know if that was still the case—and he thought it absurd to have to join a union just to work on the series. And in any case he didn’t like the “closed shop” aspect of the thing.

  Writing is not bricklaying and I am of the opinion that my grocer should be as free to write anything he wants to write and to sell it in any market as I am—even though I am a dues-paid-up member of my guild and he is not, i.e., I don’t own the writing trade and I don’t think anyone, or any group, should be allowed to own it, or any part of it, or to require anyone to pay a fee nor to submit to a set of rules in order to compete with me or my colleagues in the market. Writing, like speech, is a basic freedom … [sic] and not merely my way of making a living.56

  Swicegood suggested they pay him for one story, and he could see how it worked out: He would in any case have been paid for the work.57 Heinlein forwarded the contract to Lurton Blassingame (his relationship with Ned Brown he thought was coming to an end) for review. He decided instead to do the work “on spec” and suggested a dozen technically trained SF writers who could be approached for a series like this.58

  Heinlein never did produce an outline (a conventional stage of television series writing). Probably the process of thinking in visual screens so the story could be translated into a script—so that he could then write a narrative story—was too cumbersome, and he was preoccupied in March 1959 with assembling a collection for Gnome Press of miscellaneous, more-or-less science-fiction stories he had written since taking up writing again after the war, The Menace from Earth.59 But on April 11, 1959, before going off to Las Vegas for the World Congress of Flight,60 he mailed a twenty-eight-page script to Swicegood that reused one of his own titles, “Nothing Ever Happens On the Moon.” This original story had nothing in common with the Boy Scout novelette he had written ten years earlier; instead, it had a funding committee VIP trapped on the Moon during a destructive quake, a scenario that would give plenty of room for exposition of the complicated situation in the Crater Base One bible.61