Trestrail accepted for Heinlein, in absentia, an award given him by the convention, a wooden plaque with a pebbly stained-glass (plastic) insert representing a lambent Lens of Arisa, the Second Stage Lensman award.
Another chore Heinlein had moved up on the priority list was a persuasive letter for one of the small grassroots space organizations, which was quoted in a “guest editorial” in a Star Trek fanzine32—a usage he approved this time. Ever since Gerard O’Neill’s imaginative invention of space-habitat colonies at the Lagrange points (stable points in any orbit), the number of just-folks people who were taking an active interest in practical space affairs was growing into a movement. They had not yet had cause to flex their political muscles—but the time was clearly on the horizon, and there was a good test issue: The space shuttle was due to begin operational flights in July 1980, after three years of testing, and environmentalists were mounting protests to prevent Columbia from flying.
Bjo Trimble, a friend and correspondent with Heinlein since 1961, had organized an astonishing letter-writing campaign among science-fiction fans in 1967 when Star Trek was to be canceled at the end of its second season. The campaign had been successful in getting a third season for Star Trek.
That mobilization of opinion was the essence of political clout, and Heinlein thought it could be turned to good effect here. A similar letter-writing campaign among Trekkers (the name preferred by Star Trek fans) had gotten the first shuttle named Enterprise (the one that, ironically, never flew), so it was likely Trekkers would take a personal interest in this issue. Heinlein wrote to Trimble:
… The “environmentalists” are trying to put a stop to the space shuttle flights in So. Calif. I don’t know what they base their theories on, but they are making an attempt. So this is in the nature of being an SOS.…
… I think that it might be a good idea to get this story into the Star Trek papers, as soon as possible, and get a letter writing campaign started.… I intend to write to our local Congressman, and our two Senators, myself.
I’m sorry that I have to spread this bad news, but I think that if the Trekkers get the word they can stop it from happening.…33
The most important job before they left for Annapolis, and for the round-the-world cruise they had scheduled for the winter aboard the S.S. Rotterdam, was the proof sheets for the English edition of The Number of the Beast, which was going to issue as a hardcover from NEL weeks before the American illustrated trade paper first edition. The English edition would be the “definitive” first of this book.
The book was getting a good reception from publishers wherever it was marketed,34 but they were a little irritated by the glacial speed Fawcett-Columbine was making.35
30
NEW BEGINNINGS
Rotterdam departed on January 23, 1980, and they planned to be back in Santa Cruz by the first of May. This would be the first time they had been away from advanced medical facilities for any length of time, and Robert’s health was not perfectly restored, even yet: He still had problems with his balance and walked with a cane most of the time.
Rotterdam was almost a floating Chatauqua, with writers and artists and entertainers flown in for lectures and performances. The Apollo astronaut Wally Schirra was one of these. He and his wife were there for two weeks, much of it spent with the Heinleins. The Schirras were a very entertaining couple when they didn’t have to be on display.1 Taylor Caldwell was on that cruise as well, but did not connect with Heinlein. Ginny thought she was “haughty.”2
In addition to Hong Kong and Manila (for their first time), they called at Singapore, and were astonished at how developed the places had become over the last twenty-five years—“like Manhattan now. With their lack of space, they must grow upward, or cease to exist, I suppose, but I don’t have to like it.”3 The monkeys Ginny had once fed with bananas and peanuts at the Botanical Gardens had all been shot years before.4
By March they were on the other side of the world. They did not go ashore at India at all, remembering how they had both disliked the country the last time they were there—but they stopped in Sri Lanka for a couple of days to visit with Arthur C. Clarke. He chartered a plane and flew them over Sigiriya and Adam’s Peak and then on to the Great Barrier Reef, where Clarke showed them the location of the sunken treasure ship he had found, and they bombed the diver-instruction center with toilet paper—in the grand old RAF tradition, Clarke said (the Royal Air Force being his own service during World War II).5
Ginny was never comfortable flying over the ocean, so they turned around and went back to Colombo and Clarke’s home, which could only be described as a palace. In addition to his science (and science-fiction and film—and now television) activities, he was a formal consultant to the government of Sri Lanka and an important social and economic force on the island.
The trip did them both a great deal of good, and they needed all the stamina the long rest gave them for Robert A. Heinlein Day in Butler, Missouri, on April 17, 1980. It was like something out of Heinlein’s story “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants”: “[T]he entire town turned out to greet their favorite son, the SF world’s first acknowledged Grand Master of the form.”6 The town council of Butler had installed signs on the main freeway entrances, north and south, boasting it was his birthplace, and a plaque at the site of his grandfather Lyle’s house. There were receptions and a reviewing stand built right in front of the courthouse, and a parade with two bands and a run of antique cars, and a commemorative dinner.
… [T]he chipper and jovial Heinlein privately began his day by visiting the Bates County Museum, then enjoyed a luncheon with relatives prior to speaking to students at Butler High School. He then sat in review while a brief parade consisting of a marching band, several theme floats and local groups wound its way around Butler Square to pay homage to their hometown hero, who accepted the tribute with smiles and applause, obviously pleased with the whole affair.… Following a semi-private dinner, the rejuvenated Heinlein attended a public meeting at the Butler Public Library, rounding off a thoroughly rewarding day for those lucky enough to have attended.7
A framed and illuminated version of the Missouri State Legislature’s formal proclamation of Robert Heinlein Day was presented to him, and Butler’s representative in Washington had it read into the Congressional Record, where it would be a permanent part of national history. And choicest of all, an article in a local paper headlined, “Top Hillbilly Author of Science Fiction Receives the John Glenn Parade at Butler, Missouri.”8 “Robert now says that he feels like a Hysterical Marker,” Ginny remarked to friends.9
Back in Santa Cruz in May, they found the usual accumulation of mail. The New English Library hardcover of The Number of the Beast was already out. “I hear that the British sales are proceeding apace,” Ginny wrote to friends, “and a friend told us yesterday that a dealer in Westwood [a suburb of Los Angeles] has imported 50 copies and is selling them at a round $25.00 each. Plus tax probably. It’s illegal, and against our contract, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to do about it.”10
The Fawcett release was put over to August, with Expanded Universe coming out in October. Fawcett had stopped communicating with them—did not even send out author copies. Ginny found out about the release by seeing the listing in the trade journals.11
When it was released in August, the Fawcett edition of The Number of the Beast was on three bestseller lists—Publisher’s Weekly, the New York Times Book Review, and B. Dalton’s bookstore list, where it had debuted at number ten and jumped up to number three in its first week. By August 17, it was in its third printing, with 145,000 copies,12 and a New York Times Book Review author profile based on a telephone interview designated it a bestseller, so that made it official.13 Two weeks later, the count was up to fifth printing and 193,000 copies.14
Some of the initial reviews were unpleasant15—but that was par for the course; the fan press typically got into print before the professional venues, and Heinlein had decided over the years that if the fans di
dn’t hate it, there was something wrong with it. They seemed disgruntled any time you didn’t give them a comfortable formula—“mixture as before”—and that he was no longer willing even to pretend to do.16
The New York Times Book Review got into press with its major review of The Number of the Beast, by Gerald Jonas, on September 24 (qualified unpleasantness). In his opening paragraph, Jonas used words like “hubris” and “seems bound to destroy his own brain child,” meaning science fiction—but followed by observations that did not actually seem to understand what was going on in the text very well.
… this novel consists almost entirely of dialogue in which it is impossible to tell who is speaking. This makes it difficult to follow the plot. But such difficulties, like everything else in the book, dissolve at the end into a long solipsistic set-piece in which Mr. Heinlein makes fun of science-fiction conventions, science-fiction readers, other science-fiction writers and his own penchant for solipsistic fiction … “The Number of the Beast” fails because it plays with ideas that it ultimately fails to respect.17
The book was already number one on the Quality Paperback bestseller lists. By that time, Heinlein’s fan mail—almost all very positive—had become “overwhelming”18: Somebody seemed to like it. They always got a bump in the mail when a new book came out, but this was unprecedented.
And then in October, Ace/Putnam’s issued Expanded Universe, without fanfare, and the fan mail took another jump: They could not believe the amount and kind of mail that was coming in. They were getting the kind of letters solicited in the book, from anyone who possessed more current knowledge about conditions in the U.S. military and also inside the Soviet Union. Fred Pohl wrote about his recent trip there, and a Russian emigre, Mr. Pazan, wrote also. Joe and Gay Haldeman wrote about current conditions in the Navy. These letters were more or less expected, from within “the community,” though even the community contained surprises: L. Ron Hubbard wrote congratulating him on his rare continuing productivity (Hubbard himself had just finished a 450,000-word SF novel, he said, to mark his fiftieth year in science fiction).
The sheer quantity of mail was the least surprising thing about it: Many of these were from first-timers, with bizarrely detailed questions—about everything from economics to where Robert parted his hair. Clearly people were responding to the “interstitial” material much more strongly than anyone could have foreseen. They were responding to his voice and his public persona as they often in decades past had responded to him in person—coming to warm themselves in the fire of a personal charisma, helped along by an appeal to the reasonable and rational these readers found missing from their own lives as the gap between what we Americans actually do and what we allow to be said about it was widening again.
Ginny was in charge of answering this mail, but it was so overwhelmingly positive that she had to share it. Heinlein was “surprised and delighted” with the response.19 Ginny was to spend most of the next two years answering Expanded Universe’s mail while Heinlein worked on another project, complex and demanding.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in the November 1980 elections, Reagan’s transition team commissioned a number of white papers. Heinlein was among thirty or so scientists, military men, policy wonks, and science-fiction writers invited to help form the Citizens Advisory Council being put together by Jerry Pournelle to come up with a strategic defense recommendation for the Reagan administration.
Ten years earlier, Pournelle had cowritten with Stefan Possony and Francis X. (“Duke”) Kane a policy paper titled “The Strategy of Technology,” one chapter of which (“Assured Survival”) foresaw a strategic posture of defense, rather than of overwhelming aggressiveness. Such a defense posture was at last becoming technologically feasible—a way out of the ticking time bomb of Mutual Assured Destruction that had blighted the entire world since World War II.20 The Truman and Eisenhower—and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Ford and Carter—administrations had allowed themselves to be pressured into too many things that were not right for the American democracy: undeclared wars, “foreign aid” as almost naked bribery, and the revolting practice of propping up anti-Communist dictatorships in the third world. Self-sabotaging: These were the kind of realpolitik games you had to play if you wanted to be an imperial power on the world stage, but it left no room, either tactically or morally, for the much more important task history had charged America with, of being its pilot project in self-governance, of finding ways for a people to control their own lives without dictators or princes or prelates. That was a default twentieth-century America could never live down.
The first meeting was held at Larry Niven’s home in Tarzana in December 1980—Newt Gingrich and Hans Mark attending by telephone—to work out a strategic recommendation. In the following months, a consensus emerged among this and other policy groups around the country that broadened their task well beyond the initial briefing and recommendation for the transition.
The Citizen’s Advisory Council’s main business was to produce a number of technical reports and policy recommendations. They formed several smaller groups to work on specific problems. The small groups each generated a document that became raw material for the final report, which would be written and edited by Dr. Pournelle, as the council’s chair. Each paragraph of Dr. Pournelle’s draft was read aloud and critiqued by everyone present at the council meetings.
From the second meeting on, General Meyer21 brought in General Daniel O. Graham, the former director—now retired—of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was informally advising on military matters. General Graham became the Washington “point man” for the strategy the council worked out.
But they had a second, and even more direct, line to President Reagan: The new national security adviser was Dr. Richard V. Allen—Dr. Possony’s longtime colleague at the Hoover Institute. “Our papers went from Dick Allen direct to Reagan who read them all,” Pournelle recalled: “One Page Summary, Executive Summary, Summary, and Support documents, the whole damned thing.”22 Phrases—even whole sentences—from those reports were used by the president in later speeches.23
Being in the company of the best brings out the best in one “… but in that company no one was going to stand out very far. Everyone on that team pulled his weight or wasn’t invited to the next meeting. Robert was invited to all of the meetings.”24 He came: The possibility of an effective actual defense against nuclear weaponry was worth pursuing.
And, the more you do, the more you find you can do: Heinlein was writing again by December—a new novel, kicked off by something Ginny had said about “Gulf,” written thirty years earlier: Kettle Belly Baldwin, she said, had been one of his juiciest characters, and he hadn’t done nearly as much with him as he could have.25 Heinlein seems to have combined that comment with a bit he had mentioned in passing in Time Enough for Love, about assembling people out of genes from many different sources: His protagonist was a composite of the genes of both Gail and Joe Green, who had never had a chance to procreate in “Gulf.” His protagonist for Friday is a genetic composite of the best of humanity, in a balkanized United States, which symbolically reflects Friday’s own genetic balkanization—a true human who is nevertheless a true superhuman and who gains interior unity by the end of the book. Friday naturally led back to the subject of bigotry—and in the era of the Equal Rights Amendment, who better to represent humanity as a whole and the damage done by bigotry—and the possibility of self-healing that had always fascinated him—than a woman, Friday.
His last several books had started off in dialogue with the small world of science fiction. This one started off from a base in general literature, with one of the “strong fabulist” fantasy worlds of English literature: Robinson Crusoe. His female protagonist was Crusoe’s Friday—his hewer of wood and drawer of water—with a touch of Cunegonde from Voltaire’s Candide.26 Friday wanders around the world as Candide did, and gave Heinlein a kaleidoscope of situations to reflect back on his central problem. He mad
e an elaborate timeline specifying the locations of each—and noted that there were a few locations he did not know directly: “Must visit Vicksburg, Winnipeg, & border below Winnepeg.”27 And late in the year, that is just what he did as research for the book: visit the places he did not know firsthand, traveling by himself for the first time in decades.28
He started writing in November 1980, while Ginny began researching the current generation of computers to replace typewriters and paper files. During the startup period, Heinlein dealt with a minor vexation: Ben Bova had commissioned Alexei Panshin to review Expanded Universe for the April 1981 issue of Omni. Bova sent them an advance courtesy copy of the review. Normally, Heinlein made a point of not paying attention to reviews (“reviews good or bad distract a writer’s mind from current work”29). This Panshin piece, clearly polemical on its surface, extracted quotations and twisted the readings to make a case that Heinlein was a hypocritical bully. Disagreements and bad reviews were one thing—but this was simply malicious. Robert told Ginny, and she relayed to Ben Bova by phone, that this hatchet job was so pernicious, so dishonest on its face, that if Bova published it, Robert would never deal with him again.
Heinlein finished Friday in late March—just in time for the April 1981 issue of Omni. Bova had made his choice. Heinlein never dealt with Omni or Bova again.
Heinlein wanted to try copyediting his new book on a computer or word processor, and Ginny found the computer she wanted for both of them (they had already established the habit of buying duplicate typewriters and continued the practice with computers)—a Zenith Z89 with gargantuan 64 KB of internal memory (most personal computers at that time had 16 KB of RAM). It arrived on April 2—two huge boxes with a Sprint Qume printer and wires and cables and Magic Wand word processing software. This time of year, exactly forty-two years before, he was banging out his first commercial story on a rickety portable typer—manual. Once he had the computer set up, he retyped the current manuscript, entering it into memory, and edited it with Magic Wand. That first day, he had the search-and-replace function chug-chugging through the part he had already “input.”30 That kind of minor revision (changing a character’s name throughout) would have occasioned a complete, tedious read-through and a full retype of the entire manuscript—literally a couple of months’ work, providing he could hunt down a reliable typist in the first place, which was by no means certain. “This frees me from the tyranny of typists!” he exclaimed.31
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 54