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

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  Ginny concluded that the software that was available off the shelf would not be adequate for her purposes, so she threw herself into learning—at age sixty-five—computer programming, in CBASIC and MBASIC (and as preparation reviewed trig and calculus and boned Boolean algebra).

  By the time the de Camps visited them in November—finally getting to use the guest house that had been kept free of cats for Sprague for nearly fourteen years—the Heinleins were experts and old hands at computers by virtue of a trial by fire: The new book, Friday, had been cut and edited, printed out, copied, and placed in their agency’s hands by June. The Tandy Corporation was after them, wanting to market a computer game based on Starship Troopers, and gave them one of the new color TRS-80s. Ginny figured out how to operate it without referring to the instruction manual at all. She had a natural affinity, it seemed, for computers.

  Holt, Rinehart & Winston were to bring Friday out in June 1982 (with a periodical appearance of a selection in the September-October “double issue” of Science Fiction Digest32). Heinlein had made no less than thirty dedications for this book—three columns that would have filled the page in a normal typesize, of first names of the women in his life and in science fiction—and every one of them was going to be sent an autographed and inscribed copy. He also had to autograph five hundred copies of the first signature of the book he found on his doorstep in February for a luxury edition he had not known anything about.

  The dedications took priority. Ginny’s name, of course, led all the rest in his mind, for which reason he had given her last place in the list—“semper toujours,” one of their private jokes. When he broke open the cases of author copies that spring, he made a small ceremony of presenting her with one of the specially reserved copies as her personal copy. It was a ceremony he was to repeat with each succeeding book. He never gave any particular reason for this, but “[n]o one outside this house can really know how fully she shares in everything I do.”33

  In April 1982, Heinlein attended a small convention Jerry Pournelle organized in Los Angeles to discuss space development matters. After the initial successful meetings of the Citizens Advisory Council, Jim Ransome, who had helped Pournelle put together the invitation list, talked Pournelle into doing a Space Development Conference, for which he then enlisted the aid of the local (Los Angeles Science Fiction Society) convention runners. Milt Stevens was the cochair of the conference, held over the Easter weekend of 1982.34

  The Los Angeles Space Development Conference was more “public” than the Citizens Advisory Council and well attended. Following science-fiction convention traditions, the principal guest of honor was Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise, and Heinlein was the “fan guest of honor.” General Graham was also one of the invited guests, and he was astonished by the warm reception he was accorded there, as opposed to the chilly reception his ideas were generally given in the national press.

  It was a very productive conference, well attended by speakers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and space scientists from the University of Arizona, and other academics—and even the small but intense cadres of space development entrepreneurs that had already come into existence. It was also attended by the membership and board of directors of the L5 Society—which also had a very significant overlap with the Citizens Advisory Council.

  Heinlein’s fan guest of honor duties called for one formal presentation, and he also participated in a number of the informal discussions that took place and gave a number of book signings. At one point in general assembly, Heinlein stood up and essentially nominated attorney and space activist Arthur Dula to put on next year’s conference in Houston. No one was more surprised about this than Dula:

  One minute I was dozing quietly on stage as a useless L-5 board member (I was their lawyer—so I was essentially asleep), and the next minute I heard “… and you will do it, won’t you Art?” From Robert. My response was “Yes sir, what was it you wanted me to do?” I had never heard of the conference and had ignored the discussion about it.35

  Dula later took Heinlein aside and applied some of the moral leverage Heinlein had just given him, extracting a promise that he would be there in Houston.

  The reviews on Friday were wonderfully divided, in a peculiar way: As with each book in the last ten years especially, the mainstream press received it as simply the workproduct of a master craftsman of the genre and went on from there. The New York Times Book Review review was by H. Bruce Franklin36—unsurprisingly jaundiced, and essentially a codicil to his Oxford University Press book that had been out for a year. Franklin managed to miss or ignore the Robinson Crusoe and Candide references carried by the rape of Friday and the balkanization of the United States—and all the irony and satire, and thus the implications of Friday’s end-of-book Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

  The genre press was absolutely schizophrenic about the book: Some parts of the story tickled the genre-readers’ appetite for safe and familiar formula science fiction, and other parts could not be fit in with their preconceptions. It simply confirmed what had been obvious for years now: Heinlein’s natural evolution as a writer had again taken him outside genre comfort zones—as it had with the Post stories and with the juveniles and with Destination Moon and with Stranger in a Strange Land, all rejected in their time by the fan press. Challenging preconceptions was what it was all about, then and now. All the disgruntled fan comments about “old Heinlein” and the bad, new Heinlein37 can be summed up by Don Marquis’s perceptive remark: “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

  Holt, Rinehart set up a special guest appearance for him at the ABA (American Bookseller’s Association) in Anaheim the last weekend in May 1982, just before the book was formally published. It was already on the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list, debuting at number nine. Their flight was delayed, so they arrived late on June 2, 1982, and found that the convention management was holding the floor open past 5:00 P.M. just for Robert A. Heinlein—and for the long, long line of fans waiting to get an autograph. The entire floor of the huge convention burst into spontaneous applause as they entered, Robert on Ginny’s arm, jaunty with his cane.38 His name was on a gigantic poster in letters a foot high. They were both astonished—this was the first time Robert and Ginny had encountered anything like this.39 He signed four hundred copies of Friday in the hour the convention management kept the door open for him.

  The fan press might be qualifiedly disgruntled (less qualifiedly as time went on), but this experience was overwhelmingly positive feedback—from exactly the people he wanted to reach—that Heinlein was doing something right.

  He was already contemplating another novel, and in the nature of things, this one would probably come out in 1984, an iconic year for science fiction: George Orwell’s 1984 had been the gold standard for “literary” science fiction through most of Heinlein’s career. But Ginny had proposed two longish trips, back to back, and there was fallout from the Citizens Advisory Council generating work, as well.

  Early in June 1982, Heinlein received a telegram from Robert Himber, editor of Survive! magazine. They were planning for one of their fall issues a short exposition of General Graham’s High Frontier concept.40 The facts were covered: What they needed was something that gave the meaning and significance of it—the emotional dimensions of High Frontier. Jerry Pournelle had recommended they get in touch with him. They asked for it on an unfortunately short (ten-day) deadline.

  Heinlein knew General Graham had a book on High Frontier coming out later in 1982, and it would be useful to keep the pot keeled. He agreed to write a short piece, on the condition it not be editorially changed:41 There was simply no time in this telescoped schedule for an editing cycle.

  Heinlein crafted a very careful performance piece, 611 words in letter form for maximum impact and aimed directly at the hardest-shelled status-quo-tarians:

  “High Frontier” is the best news I have heard since VJ Day.
<
br />   For endless unhappy years the United States has had no defense policy. We had something called a defense policy … [sic] but in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg”.…

  High Frontier places a bullet-proof vest on our bare chest.… It is so utterly peaceful that the most devout pacifist can support it with a clear conscience—indeed must support it once he understands it … [sic] as it tends to stop wars from happening and to save lives if war does happen.42

  General Graham was so pleased with the piece that he asked to use it as the introduction for his book, High Frontier: A Strategy for National Survival.43 A few months later, Heinlein made a short appearance on one of the High Frontier’s informational videotapes.

  The previous September, Ginny had booked an Orient trip on the Royal Viking Line—Japan, where he would get a chance to meet his publisher (Japan had already become one of his best international markets), Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila for the first time, and Saipan (Ginny was less than thrilled about the dip into Communist China).

  For decades, Robert had wanted to visit Antarctica, the last really unexplored continent left on Earth, barely touched by human habitation at all. There was one organization mounting tours, but they had suspended operations while Britain and Argentina were at war in the South Atlantic. Now a new tour group was being organized for ordinary people—somewhat inconveniently scheduled for the end of January 1983, just a couple of months after the Heinleins would be getting back from the Far East. But Heinlein was seventy-five years old: He seized the opportunity.

  In the month remaining before the first trip, he finished up his research for his new book, reading in the Bible for weeks before starting to write.44 Everyone else who was taking note of the date would probably be writing political sermons about 1984, which left sex and religion as topics offensive enough to offer the correct toes to be stepped on. He had done sex, but not religion for a while—and the cultural changes since 1961 offered a gigantic target, in the “family values” attempt to roll back the Enlightenment.

  Something Isaac Asimov had written to him forty-three years ago provided the first kick of inspiration: “… you had better like this one,” he wrote Asimov the next summer,

  as you are its godfather. This is one of the best kept secrets in SF. Yes, you. Do you recall writing a letter to me in October 1939 (give or take a decade) in which you were discussing the fact that Jehovah had all the best press agents and that Satan wasn’t getting a fair shake? That letter from you has been in the vaults of McHenry Library, U of Calif, these many years45 but I did not need to refer to it; the subversive doctrine in it had been working in my mind all these decades and finally bore fruit in Job. All through these forty-odd years I had intended to write a story based on the idea you handed me. But it needed the right time, the right cultural milieu.46

  He took a page from James Branch Cabell’s multiple worlds of myth in Jurgen and wrote another Comedy of Justice, with a good Mark-Twainish visit to Captain Stormfield’s version of The Heaven of Jurgen’s Grandmother. Into the mix went the biblical book of Job and its trial of humanity, ironically inverted: He took another “righteous man, beloved of God,” and let Jehovah put him through trials—and then turn the tables and have that self-righteous prig be judged by the Maker of Things As They Are for his conscienceless violation of the laws of esthetics.47

  At the beginning of August 1982, he started writing, drawing on a religious rite that would probably sneak past most of his readers’ censors—a fire-walking demonstration he and Ginny had witnessed on one of their South Seas trips in previous years. He left off writing on the last day of August. Ginny arranged with Denis Paradis’s friend Paul Edmonds to come from Canada to house-sit for them from mid-January until they returned in March.

  From San Francisco to Hawaii, to Japan, where they would have time to do a little exploring. Their stateroom was far forward, and the bow would come up occasionally and slap down on the next wave—noisy. But Heinlein found their forward port had a wonderful view: It was where the stewardesses sunbathed.

  The Japanese publisher, Hayakawa Shobo, laid out the red carpet for them, and from the beginning the hospitality was more personal than professional—though there was professional stuff in abundance. They got to know Hiroshi Hayakawa’s entire family.48 On their first day in Yokohama, they were blinded by the continuous popping of flashes from the representatives of major Japanese news magazines. Japanese science-fiction writer Tetsu Yano had taken a room in their hotel, since he would function as their principal translator—very necessary, as Japanese was not among Ginny’s languages.

  That evening, they were taken to a very large wedding reception in Tokyo (over the extremely crowded toll road between Yokohama and Tokyo, at rushawa, which gave Ginny the jim-jams. In the United States, “bumper-to-bumper” traffic still has some spacing between the cars; in Japan, “bumper-to-bumper” was almost touching, at 70 mph. She kept her eyes squeezed shut much of the trip.

  This wedding was for the well-known illustrator and comic book artist Go Nagai. They take graphic novels very seriously in Japan. They take weddings very seriously in Japan as well: It was jammed. The entire function space of the hotel was taken over with samples of Nagai’s work near the entrance and more than a thousand guests, with unending tables of delicacies and a bar at least twenty-five feet long. There were platoons of geishas, ravishing, dressed in brilliantly colored silk kimonos (matching the bride’s mother, but not the bride, who wore, as did all the men in the wedding party, Western dress). Their personal geisha was elegant and made it her job to keep their plates filled with especially tasty things.

  Many of the guests were science-fiction fans and writers, cartoonists and illustrators. Almost the entirety of the Japan Sci-Fi Writers Club was there to meet Heinlein.49 All evening long he was politely buttonholed by earnest men, almost all over forty, who told him he was their “spiritual father.” Odd and very touching.50

  Dr. Yano had told his friend, the eminent Manga artist Osamu Tezuka (creator of the popular Astro Boy series), that the Heinleins would be at the wedding just two hours beforehand, and Tezuka made a special effort to be there and meet him. This is somewhat equivalent to being sought out by Walt Disney. Tezuka told Robert his books had spurred him on for forty years. When the evening ended, Tezuka loaned them his car and chauffeur for the drive back to the ship.

  They went to Kobe and took the bullet train to Kyoto—160 miles per hour—to meet Yumiko Shibayama and Naomi Kameda. Heinlein had been corresponding with both for some years, and Ms. Shibayama, who described herself as Heinlein’s number one fan, was the model for a character in Friday, Shizuko.

  Ginny had reluctantly consented to visit Communist China now because they were in a period of “liberal” reform they were calling their “Second Revolution,” and international tourists had been able to visit since about 1978. The goal was to achieve “The Four Modernizations” of agriculture, industry, science, and national defense. This was an old dance with many repeats and far too many off-with-da-capos—but it made travel there briefly possible.

  They found Communist China quite as crowded as they had expected—Shanghai was jammed with traffic and bicycles—but surprisingly much more pleasant than the Soviet Union had been twenty years earlier.51 They had expected to see poverty and misery and soul-destroying regimentation—but the Cultural Revolution did not seem to have done the same damage to the spirit of the Chinese that Stalinism had done to the Russians. They had not notified anyone they were coming to China, but word apparently got around the usual underground channels. The Shanghai Foreign Language Institute asked Robert to speak, and they got a chance to meet a host of Chinese science-fiction writers.

  On another day, they were invited to give an informal talk at the Shanghai Institute of Science. There was one would-be defector there, and Robert and Ginny sat in a corner and talked with him, surprised at the frankness of his dissent from government policies. It gave them a strange sen
se of déjà vu, since the last time they had done something like this was skulking in an alley in Leningrad.52

  Mainland China gave them a great deal to think about, and in too short a time their ship moved on to Hong Kong—“one vast shopping center”—that pleased some of their shipmates more.

  The shopping in Manila was not so impressive—but Robert and Ginny were not there to buy clothing and fripperies. They took a city tour that ended up at the American Cemetery, among the graves of the nearly twenty thousand Americans killed during the Japanese occupation in World War II. “Both of us,” Ginny wrote, “found ourselves in tears since we have always felt far closer to the war in the Pacific than we felt to that in Europe. Personally, I found myself recalling things I had read many years ago, and had a deep emotional catharsis.”53 Perhaps Robert had more than reading to fuel his own feelings: Mark Hubbard, his brother-in-law (through Leslyn, who had passed away in 1981, though Heinlein might not have been aware of this fact) was not there—he had been shot and burned alive in Bilibid Prison on Christmas Day of 1944.54 Hubbard was another of those men who formed an example for Heinlein of what it means to be a human being. “This is how a man dies—this is how a man lives.” Of Hubbard he wrote to Poul Anderson, “This is how a man gets to Valhalla”55—the warrior paradise of Norse mythology.

  They had little time to assimilate this moving experience, though: With the Antarctic trip coming up in January, they could not dally on their way home. They barely had time to answer the fan mail that had stacked up. It was not possible to write to all their friends; instead Ginny wrote a single longish trip report—the first time she had tried this particular letter format—and sent it around to the various friends she would normally chat with about it. Heinlein went back to fiddling with the novel he had been putting together, though he had a hard time getting back into the swing of it—he was really too long away from it.56 By mid-December Ginny had purchased the necessary heavy clothing for the trip, layered for warmth, and Robert had a new parka and felt-lined snow boots.