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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  I first became aware of just how thoroughly I had boxed myself in when editors of my soi-disant “adult” books started asking me to trim them down to suit my juvenile market. At that time I had to comply. But now I would like to find out if I can write about adult matters for adults, and get such writing published.

  However, I have no desire to write “main stream” stories such as The Catcher in The Rye, By Love Possessed, Peyton Place, The Man in The Grey Flannel Suit, Darkness at Noon, or On the Road. Whether these books are good or bad, they each represent a type which has been written more than enough; there is no point in my adding more to such categories—I want to do my own stuff, my own way.

  Perhaps I will flop at it. I don’t know. But such success as I have had has come from being original, not from writing “safe” stuff—in pulps, in movies, in slicks, in juveniles. In pulp SF I moved at once to the top of the field by writing about sociology, sex, politics, and religion at a time (1939) when these subjects were all taboo. Later I cracked the slicks with science fiction when it was taken for granted that SF was pulp and nothing but pulp. You will recall that my first juvenile was considered an experiment by the publisher—and a rather risky one.

  Lurton, I have never written “what was being written”—nor do I want to do so now. Oh, I suppose that, if it became financially necessary, I could imitate my own earlier work and do it well enough to sell. But I don’t want to. I hope this new and different book sells. But, whether it does or does not, I want my next book to be still different—neither an imitation of The Man from Mars, nor a careful “mixture as before” in imitation of my juveniles and my quasi-juveniles published as soi-disant “adult” SF books. I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to write about; none of them fits this pattern.26

  A bonus materialized when Roger Corman made his second payment on the Brain Eaters settlement, though the co-production arrangements for “If This Goes On—” had fallen through, and he did not pick up the other option.27

  Heinlein put off the next writing job to put a dam and catch basin in their arroyo, so they would not be so vulnerable to the area’s periodic droughts. He added a decorative stonework pool—stonework was his favorite form of exercise (other than sex of course)—with a geyser-like fountain. Ginny marked her approval of the work and its progress by fixing a flower in his hatband. Working at stonework again took more off his waist.

  I’m real purty. So is the pool, as I gave it a tumbled-boulders appearance with the engineering concealed, then used my irrigation pump to create a miniature jet d-eau, like the one in Geneve but only twenty feet high. I put spot lights on it at night. Total added cost: one shower head and ten feet of garden hose.28

  Midway through “Project Stonehenge,” Yuri Gagarin—a Russian cosmonaut—became the first human being to orbit the Earth, on April 12, 1961. Four years after Sputnik, the Russians were still making firsts in space—a prospect that could only be grim for mankind’s future. It was not until May 1961 that Alan Shepard became the first American to orbit the Earth. Ginny continued lecturing on their trip to the USSR, and Heinlein was not entirely off the hook for public speaking. Even as galley proofs for The Man from Mars arrived for correction, Heinlein complained about his own obligations:

  I have two speaking dates hanging over me—and I do mean “hanging over me.” Despite the fact that I can and do speak in public and rather enjoy it at the time despite the fact that I used to, as a politician, speak in public half a dozen times a day, now that I am a writer I find that the anticipation of a speaking date hangs over me, interferes with the work in hand by monopolizing my imagination—I think about what I am going to say instead of thinking about plots.

  .… every one of these overhead chores reduces the time I spend in original composition at this machine by exactly the amount of time lost; If I could avoid all correspondence and all public appearances I would at least double my real working time and have more time for fun as well.29

  One of those engagements was his guest of honor speech for the Worldcon coming up in September, but the other was more immediate: On April 29 the Oklahoma State Library Association was to present him with the Sequoyah Award for childrens’ literature, for Have Space Suit—Will Travel. Travel arrangements for that trip were inconvenient:

  Alva [Oklahoma] turns out to be like the post office in Brooklyn; you can’t get to it. No air service, other services impossible. Can drive, of course, but just far enough away to kill five days—three if we really knocked ourselves out, but neither one of us like to be on the highway when exhausted, especially at night.30

  They wound up chartering a plane: “leave here after breakfast, speak at a luncheon meeting, home the same night. Only one day’s work lost and, believe it or not, cheaper than driving, going by bus, train, or commercial air—quite a bit cheaper considering hotels, and enormously cheaper if my time is figured at any cash value.”31

  Starting in June, they had Jack Williamson as a temporary neighbor: He came to nearby Boulder, Colorado, to do ten weeks of coursework in preparation for his comprehensive doctoral oral examination in English literature (plus a class in Middle English).32 The neighborhood was not quite as idyllic as it had been, though: By the time Williamson got there, construction had started on the Cheyenne Mountain Combat Operations Center, which would coordinate all the telemetry for NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command). It also coordinated missiles and aircraft defense for the entire country.

  The Colorado Springs area had seen a considerable military buildup in the previous ten years, particularly since 1958 when the Air Force Academy went in.33 Overnight, NORAD would make Colorado Springs the number-one nuclear target in the United States.

  Putnam’s test-readers for Stranger in a Strange Land had been surprisingly enthusiastic about the book. The Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club released Stranger as its selection for June 1961—a month before the Putnam’s release—and word of mouth started.

  The early reviews were encouraging: Kirkus Reviews dwelled on the book’s comic aspects. Baker & Taylor, the world’s largest book distributor, compared Stranger (favorably) in the July 1961 Book Buyers Guide to “that best-seller of blessed memory,” Pat Frank’s Mr. Adam (1946). Putnam’s was very pleased with the advance orders stacking up before their release in July.34 It was beginning to look as though Stranger had a good chance.35

  Sprague and Catherine de Camp came by train for a visit in July—mostly to see Jack Williamson this trip—with their youngest son, Gerry, and a cousin. Ginny set up an impromptu cocktail party for the de Camps in the garage, since Sprague was allergic to cat dander and couldn’t spend any time in the house without breaking into alarming wheezing.36 Later, Robert took the boys to a nearby animal park where they could pet the tame deer.37

  Lucky Herzberger threw a fifty-fourth birthday party for Robert the next day. A few days later, the first fan letter arrived for Stranger: It was the best book—and the best science fiction—the fan had ever read.38 This was a pleasing change from the negativity over Starship Troopers. Although many people didn’t “get” what was going on in the book—including the reviewer Orville Prescott, for The New York Times (singularly clueless, even for a book reviewer: “A disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire and cheap eroticism”39)—the mail was overwhelmingly positive, and it apparently affected a lot of people very deeply. Heinlein was startled to learn, at the end of the month, that Putnam’s planned to place $1,000 ads promoting the book.40

  Two weeks after his birthday, Heinlein received an affirmation that he was making a real mark on working science. Some time previously, he had a short but satisfying exchange of letters with Harold Wooster. Wooster had noticed his coining of “xenobiology” in The Star Beast (1954), and they had a short etymological discussion comparing the Latinate “exo-” prefix used by some scientists for extraterrestrial subjects with the Greek root “xeno-” that Heinlein preferred. Wooster wrote a letter about their correspondence to th
e editors of Science, the weekly organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, quoting one letter almost in full.41

  Other of Heinlein’s coinings had become established over the years—“astrogation,” for example, and related words like “astrogator” (and, truth be told, he wasn’t absolutely sure he had coined “xenobiology” from scratch, though he was pretty sure of “xenic” for any extraterrestrial subject).42 He had had a certain amount of influence in the missile field just after World War II—he hadn’t been able to get his name attached (as the “Heinlein Grid”43) to the pole-to-pole, orange-slice orbit he had first described in 1947, but Robert Cornog had told him that his description of radio and radar-jamming techniques had been called the “Heinlein Effect” in in-house reports created by Northrup at Wright Field for Guided Missiles.44 Neither of those had caught on, but “Waldo” was in use for remote manipulators, and this was an even more solid acknowledgment of influence among working scientists.

  So he was in an expansive mood when Sam Moskowitz’s “Robert A. Heinlein, Man, Myth or Monster” appeared in the June 1961 issue of Amazing—“a swell job,” he told SaM (in spite of the ludicrous title the editor had given it)—the best and most level-headed job he could have anticipated. “You even managed to teach me some things about myself that I had not consciously been aware of.… I greatly appreciate the meticulous care you took not to invade my privacy.”45

  Reaction to Stranger inside the SF field—if Stranger was in any realistic sense “inside” science fiction—was coming in very mixed. The fan letters were overwhelmingly positive, and several of his colleagues (including dedicatee Philip José Farmer) wrote approvingly about the book’s “experimental” qualities. Fred Pohl commissioned a correspondingly experimental extended review for Galaxy from Algis Budrys.46

  Budrys began writing science fiction in the early 1950s. His 1958 Cold War novel Who? was adapted for the screen in 1973, starring Elliot Gould as Sean Rogers, and his 1960 novella “Rogue Moon” was nominated for a Hugo Award. When the review came in, it looked a little too experimental, a little too self-conscious a performance. Pohl queried Heinlein for a rebuttal.

  Heinlein had managed to be a science-fiction writer for more than twenty years without ever saying a critical word about a colleague in public, and he was not about to start now. Furthermore, there just wasn’t any point in trying to explain a book to someone who didn’t get it from reading it. Budrys had managed to talk about the book for three thousand words, blathering on about reincarnation (a subject that was not actually in the book in any significant way47), without ever once noting that the central character was engaged in a quest—a religious quest—“and that he found his answer in sexual human love … [sic] I have just searched through his ms. word for word—and do you know, there is no word about, no inkling of any sort that Stranger has any sex in it.”48 Between Heinlein’s comments and Pohl’s own reservations about the review—whether it actually represented Budrys’s views or was mainly a “performance piece”—Pohl decided not to run it.

  Heinlein had a chance to meet Budrys in person two weeks later, at SeaCon, the 1961 World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle, Washington. Budrys was a Lithuanian patriot, and Heinlein wanted feedback from him about the section of his guest of honor speech that was about the long history of Lithuania, crushed out of pravda = official truth inside the Soviet Union.49 Harlan Ellison was toastmaster that year, which represented a chance to meet another colleague—and a very promising one—for the first time (he wrote Ellison a fan letter about Final Shtick when he got home).50

  But shortly after arriving in Seattle, a case of the sniffles turned into influenza, and the flu was threatening to turn into something more serious: He had that “drowning from the inside” feeling that might presage pneumonia.

  Alan E. Nourse, the fan Sprague de Camp had introduced him to in Philadelphia years ago, had become a doctor and a professional writer.51 Nourse’s fast action with hypo and pills kept Robert on his feet enough to give his speech on Monday, September 4.

  Heinlein had given the committee an open-ended title, “The Future Revisited.” That title played off his 1941 speech, “Discovery of the Future,” but when he fleshed out the speech, just days before leaving for Seattle, he compared the jittery state of the world in 1961 with his prior guest of honor speech, given on the verge of World War II,52 and then talked about the current situation in terms of the likeliest alternatives, concentrating on the nuclear war that everyone anticipated:

  … very few Americans are prepared to stay alive while the fallout cools down. Nor am I criticizing, please note … My wife and I have no fallout protection of any sort. I’m not proud of it, I’m not ashamed of it—I’m simply in the same boat as almost everybody else and have paid as little attention to the warnings.… This is how it is. We are not now prepared to live through a heavy attack—and those figures of a third or maybe a half of us dead stand—unless we do prepare. If we do, and from what I’ve seen of American temperament I doubt if we will prepare.

  The other part that makes up the ninety percent of all of our possible futures is simpler, slower—and just as deadly in the long run. In due course, with no more than minor brush wars unfelt by any but the poor blokes who get killed in them, the United States will find itself in a situation where the simplest, easiest, and safest thing to do will be to surrender … the idea is that the Kremlin will be giving the orders here rather than Washington.… The laddies who liquidated the trouble in the Ukraine [a “planned famine” in 1932–33 called the “Ukrainian genocide”] and used tanks on the school boys of Budapest [Hungarian Revolution, 1956] won’t hesitate to liquidate the bourgeois mentality here …53

  American history might be wiped out, the way Soviet pravda had wiped out Lithuania’s. “Freedom and democracy we can lose … and then regain them in time. Not in your time and mine, probably—but when the human race needs these factors, we’ll use them again.”54

  In order to deal realistically with the dangers, he urged them to “[t]reat the world the way a research scientist treats a problem—examine the data, try to organize, try to predict coldly and logically.”55 And the point that most clouds the picture is the picture of the enemy as villains:

  Let me repeat it like a radio commercial: Communists are not villains!

  They are devout, moral, very moralistic, kind, humane, and utterly convinced—by their standards! And they live by their standards!.… Until you learn this one thing about Communists, you have no chance of reading and understanding the Cold Equations.

  Communists are nice people, almost all of them. They are sincere, they are true believers—and they won’t be seduced by sirloin steaks.56

  If the American people and in particular American political leaders took the trouble to try to learn the mind and methods and high moral standards of their enemy, we would not behave as foolishly as we do.57

  Heinlein was given an ovation—but he was running a temperature and wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t just lapsed into incoherence:

  … all I remember of it is the room moving slowly around me like a turn table (and once almost falling off the platform) while I tried fuzzily to pull myself together and remember what it was I had intended to say and in what order—and then a horrid feeling when it was over that I had certainly forgotten the logical sequence …58

  He invited the entire convention—three hundred fans—back to the suite he and Ginny had taken for an informal “at-home” reception and went to change, drenched with fever sweat.

  It was a disturbing speech—deliberately, of course. And, of course, what most of the audience heard was “it’s all over”—not what he said at all. F. M. Busby, one of the convention’s organizers who was later to be a science-fiction writer himself,59 was in the audience and told Heinlein, “You overestimated the ability of the audience to ‘fill in the punchlines.’” Years later, Busby reported publicly on the reaction:

  It was pretty obvious to me that the
speech was intended to have a deliberate effect and to rouse a specific response; I asked Heinlein about this, and in such a way as not to tip off my guess unless it turned out to be correct. As I’d guessed, his idea was to shatter complacency and to spark the listener to insist and act upon the third (unstated) alternative; that we can tough it out without either precipitating Atomigeddon or surrendering. About 10% of the audience responded in that fashion and not one of them seemed to realise that he was doing anything but refuting Heinlein.60

  When Heinlein got back to his room after his guest of honor talk, he showered quickly and had just time before people started arriving to get on the long yellow corduroy bathrobe Ginny had made. He gave up the attempt to dress and rolled with the situation, receiving, like Thomas Jefferson, in his dressing gown.

  They did have very nearly the entire convention in their suite at one time or another during the night, including Jerry Pournelle, a young engineer from Boeing—a very stimulating person—who wanted to quit his job and take up writing as a living. Later, Pournelle wrote that he was happy to see Heinlein introducing SF fans to “Grand Strategy.”61 Within a few years, Pournelle would be working with think tanks and policy wonks himself.62

  Heinlein was also happy to renew his professional acquaintances, especially with Poul Anderson and his pretty young wife, Karen. Karen camped at his feet when he sat down, gazing up at “God in a yellow bathrobe.”63

  Somehow Heinlein got through the convention—enjoying himself though not getting nearly enough rest, in Ginny’s opinion.

  I conceive it to be the g. of h.’s job to make himself available and to be sociable, rather than necessarily attending the formal meetings—and everybody was nice to us.… and we had a wonderful time.64 I had a good time in spite of being sick and getting sicker as the convention progressed. But I’m vague about what happened.65