21. Miller, “The Wiswell Syndrome,” 158.
22. Heinlein used almost exactly this language in a letter to J. F. Bone, dated 03/12/77: “There was a period of almost fifteen years when I had strong reasons to feel that (save for a very small number of staunch friends) most of my colleagues in science fiction either disliked me or actively despised me.” The terminus ad quem of this fifteen-year period was the start of blood drives in 1976, which pushes the terminus a quo back to 1961–62, the peak of negative intramural commentary about Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land.
23. Grace Metalious (1924–64) was the author of Peyton Place (1956), a kind of soap opera, frank for the time about sexual matters, almost forgotten now.
24. RAH, letter to Ted Sturgeon, 03/05/62.
25. RAH, letter to Mrs. Thomas V. Bottoms, 09/10/73.
26. RAH, letter to John and Sherry Jackson, 12/10/68.
27. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Willis McNelly, 06/03/69.
28. RAH, letter to Mrs. Thomas V. Bottoms, 09/10/73.
29. Alexei Panshin’s earliest correspondence does not seem to have been preserved either in the general correspondence files or in the special “Panshin” file of the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz, so exact dating of this sequence has not been possible. Apparently the special “Panshin” file was begun in 1965, long after this time.
30. The origins of the entangled stories of “Gulf,” Stranger in a Strange Land, and Red Planet are told early in chapter 1 of this volume.
31. RAH, letter to Laurie A. MacDonald, 12/12/73.
32. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 11/21/61.
33. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/19/61.
34. Willy Ley, letter to RAH, 01/04/60.
35. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/12/99. Discussing the moment inside the Soviet Union when she and Heinlein got word that the international talks had broken off, Mrs. Heinlein remarked, “That summit had been the only reason that I agreed to go to the USSR.”
36. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 05/29/99.
37. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/21/60.
38. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/21/60.
39. Both Gladiator and Nightmare Alley have carnival sections, and much of the carny material in Stranger in a Strange Land appears to be derived from Nightmare Alley. Gladiator is the story of a superhuman who is irretrievably out of place among ordinary mortals. During Hugo Danner’s time working for a carnival, he suggestively meets a commercial artist named “Valentine”—who runs off with his (Hugo’s) inconvenient lover.
14. The Workers’ Paradise
1. RAH, letter to Nancy and Temple Fielding, 04/24/64.
2. RAH, letter to Gerry and Nan Crook, 10/11/60.
3. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.
4. RAH, letter to Gerry and Nan Crook, 10/11/60.
5. Aside from the comments found in “Inside InTourist” and “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth,’” Robert Heinlein rarely commented in detail about their experiences inside the Soviet Union. Nor did either Robert or Virginia Heinlein write contemporaneous letters to friends about the trip. Perhaps they both were overexposed and tired of the topic due to the public speaking done after their return to the United States. However, in a series of letters to the author late in 1999 and into 2000, Virginia Heinlein poured out her recollections. This correspondence, together with some comments to friends over the years, provides most of the available detail about the trip inside the USSR.
6. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 02/28/79.
7. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 03/09/79. The expression Mrs. Heinlein used, sedmoi etadz, is not a general Russian term and was probably a localism for sedmoi etazh, meaning seventh floor—apparently the Hotel Ukraine placed English-speaking tourists on its seventh floor.
8. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.
9. RAH, letter to Gerry and Nan Crook, 10/11/60.
10. Noted in Virginia Heinlein, letter to Mr. Pazan, 09/27/80.
11. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99. Dozens of StereoRealist slides of the May Day 1961 parade are preserved in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
12. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.
13. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.
14. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 6, Side A (March 1? 2000).
15. RAH, “The Future Revisited,” Yoji Kondo, ed., 168–97, at 190.
16. Powers (1929–77) was tried in a Soviet court in August 1960 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for espionage. A digital file of his final plea in the trial is available online at www.history.com/speeches/powers-makes-final-plea-before-moscow-court#francis-gary-powers-released-by-soviets (accessed 03/04/2014). Eighteen months later (February 10, 1962), he and an American student were exchanged at the Glienicke Bridge between East and West Berlin for Soviet spy KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher (Rudolf Abel). Although criticized for his handling of the matter, Powers was later absolved of any wrongdoing. He cowrote a book about the incident, Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident, published in 1970. While working as a traffic helicopter pilot for a local news station in Los Angeles, he died in a helicopter crash in 1977, age fifty-eight.
17. David Hartwell recalled from a conversation with the Heinleins that took place “at some point in the 1970s” that they said they were sitting alone in a restaurant when the announcement about the U-2 incident—stressing that the United States was spying on the USSR—was piped in over the music system: “I recall Robert saying that they looked at each other and both stood up and sang the National Anthem. And then left. ‘What else could we have done but that?’ was the way he ended the anecdote.” David Hartwell, e-mail to the author, 06/27/12. Perhaps the Heinleins were summoned to the InTourist office from their meal—or perhaps Heinlein has conflated this with the later incident at which they received the news that the Paris summit had collapsed, infra.
18. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Misc Notes (9/8/01) Tape B, Side A.
19. Portion marked 8 November 1999 of Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.
20. Except as otherwise noted, information in this and the following paragraph from RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/19/61.
21. Virginia Heinlein’s expression. Vorkuta, a coal-mining town north of the Arctic Circle, in the Siberian region of Russia, was founded around one of the most “public” of the Gulag installations (Gulag is a Russian acroynm for the phrase “Main Administration of Correction-through-Labor Camps”). Here Mrs. Heinlein means Vorkuta as synecdoche for the entire Gulag system.
22. Portion marked 8 November 1999 of Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.
23. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/19/61.
24. Portion marked 8 November 1999 of Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99.
25. Virginia Heinlein, letter to “Mr. Pazan,” 09/27/80.
26. RAH, “The Future Revisited,” in Requiem, Yoji Kondo, ed., 168–97 at 189.
27. Portion stricken from Heinlein’s original draft of “Appointment in Space,” significantly cut and published in Popular Mechanics Magazine as “All Aboard the Gemini,” September 2, 1962.
28. Portion stricken from Heinlein’s original draft of “Appointment in Space,” significantly cut and published in Popular Mechanics Magazine as “All Aboard the Gemini,” September 2, 1962.
29. Lenin had been exiled from Siberia to Switzerland in 1900.
30. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/12/99.
31. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/12/99.
32. RAH, “The Future Revisited,” in Requiem, Yoji Kondo, ed., 168–97 at 190.
33. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/12/99.
34. RAH, “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth,’” The American Mercury (October 1960); Expanded Universe (1980). The Virginia Edition vol. xxxi, 375, 377.
35. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 05/27/00.
36. “Inside InTourist” Heinlein expanded to 8,800 words when he got back to Colorado Springs, but the article never found a commercial publisher. In 1979, Heinlein cut the piece to about 5,000 words for inclusion with “‘Pravda’ Means ‘Truth’” in Expanded Universe. Although in most instances the fullest version of articles were used for the Virginia Edition, Expanded Universe was taken into the series as vol. xxxi, without any changes, as it was found impossible to edit the book or break out its contents because of the surrounding commentary Heinlein wrote. Consequently, the original 8,800-word version has never been published anywhere.
37. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 04/05/89.
38. The exact date of the visit to Point Barrow was not recorded, but a newspaper article, Fairbanks Daily News clipping written by Jay K. Kennedy, “Author of Science Fiction Visits Pt. Barrow Region,” Fairbanks Daily News (07/27/60), says simply “returned last week from Scandinavian countries with Wine Alaska Airlines.”
39. RAH, “A U.S. Citizen Thinks About Canada,” Canada and the World (April 1975).
40. The exact date of Heinlein’s return to Colorado Springs is not recorded; however, a letter written by Virginia Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame does not mention Heinlein’s presence on August 9, 1960, and Heinlein’s own next letter, also to Lurton Blassingame, is dated August 16, 1960.
41. RAH, letter to E. E. “Doc” Smith, 08/15/60.
42. Blassingame was an exception to the general rule, as Heinlein told Walter Minton at a time when Minton, too, was moving into the status of intimate (after a somewhat rocky start to their relationship):
Lurton Blassingame is a special case; he and I are the same age near enough not to matter and we have been partners so very long that we are twin brothers in many ways. I was speaking of where I must look to find new friends to replace, in part, the older mentors I can never replace in full. (RAH, letter to Walter Minton, 12/31/73.)
15. Scissorbill Paradise
1. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Misc Notes (09/08/01), Tape B, Side A. Aside from a few mentions in correspondence, the speaking engagements about the trip to Russia were not memorialized, so it is not possible to be more specific.
2. Sam Moskowitz, “Robert A. Heinlein,” Seekers of Tomorrow (New York: The World Publishing Co., 1966), 189.
3. RAH, letter to Earl and Nancy Kemp, 09/09/61.
4. In a letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/19/60, Heinlein discusses publishers’ exploitation of the Hugo Award.
5. RAH, letter to Earl and Nancy Kemp, 09/09/61.
6. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 11/21/61. In this letter, Heinlein said “a long, long time,” though precisely when and on what occasion they began corresponding is not preserved. Smith was then archaeology curator of the Firelands Museum in Ohio.
References to Sarge Smith begin showing up in Heinlein’s correspondence with others only in 1960 and 1961. The entire discussion of Smith in the letter to Bjo Trimble is as follows:
Do you remember Arthur George Smith, at the Pittcon? “Sarge” Smith, an elderly man with a bald head, a big, fat belly, and a most remarkable “Grand Duke Alexander” beard, bifurcate—the biggest beard among many beards there. Sarge is my closest friend, is the man to whom I dedicated Starship Troopers, and any resemblance between him and Jubal Harshaw is no accident.
But, although he has held that supreme status with me for a long, long time, I met him in the flesh first at the Pittcon and have been in his presence a total of no more than six hours. But my file of Sarge Smith letters would weigh down a small pony. Neither of us is a good typist, neither of us likes to type … and neither of us really has time for much correspondence. But our association must needs be by mail, so we write each other long-winded letters as time permits … broken by long gaps when I write stories or when he is busy with his lecture series or his sorting of ancient bones.
Heinlein’s file of his correspondence with Sarge Smith was kept separate from his general correspondence, presumably because of its intimate nature, and the file was lost some time after Heinlein’s death. (Archivist Rita Bottoms remembered seeing it in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz, around the time Virginia Heinlein put together Grumbles from the Grave in 1988 and 1989.) The Sarge Smith file containing his copies of the correspondence was destroyed in a family fight.
This is also the file Alexei Panshin obtained in 1964 and 1965 from Sarge Smith’s widow, and which resulted in Heinlein’s permanent anathematizing of Panshin, as will emerge later in the narrative.
7. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 09/20/60.
8. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/21/50. The relevant portion of this letter is excerpted in Grumbles from the Grave at 227.
9. Howard Cady, letter to RAH, 10/14/60.
10. Thirty years later, long after Walter Minton had left Putnam’s—and after Heinlein’s death—Minton told Virginia Heinlein that the severe cutting had been imposed by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club. “I never knew that the cutting on Stranger was required by the Doubleday science-fiction editor,” Mrs. Heinlein replied to Minton.
Nor, I think, did Robert. He was given specific instructions by Mr. Cady, and followed those instructions. Probably he wouldn’t have been so eager to let the SF Book Club publish it, if he had known.” (Virginia Heinlein, letter to Walter Minton, 10/29/90.)
11. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/10/61.
12. Handwritten record in Robert Heinlein’s hand, of telephone call with Roger Corman, 10/16/60, stapled to two-page typewritten memorandum to Lurton Blassingame and Harold Fendler.
13. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/10/60.
14. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 10/28/60. Stine’s work on the Dean Drive came to nothing, his son William Stine told the author in telephone calls and emails in October 2013.
15. RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 12/04/60.
16. In 1960 and 1961, Ronald Reagan was still a Democrat. He switched party affiliations and became a Republican in 1962.
17. RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 04/03/60.
18. RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 12/04/60. The term “libertarian” was a general descriptor in 1960 and had not taken on the specific ideological coloration it would acquire in the 1970s.
19. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/27/61; a portion of this letter is published in Grumbles from the Grave, 232.
20. Sam Moskowitz, letter to RAH, 01/22/61.
21. RAH, letter to Sam Moskowitz, 01/25/61.
22. RAH, letter to Sam Moskowitz, 01/25/61.
23. RAH, letter to Sam Moskowitz, 01/25/61.
24. RAH, letter to Howard Cady, 02/21/61.
25. RAH, letter to Howard Cady, 03/06/61.
26. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/08/60.
27. Harold Fendler, letter to RAH, 03/21/61.
28. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/19/61.
29. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/10/61.
30. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/10/61.
31. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/10/61. No publication of Heinlein’s remarks on this occasion has been found.
32. Jack Williamson, letter to RAH, 07/03/61.
33. The Air Force Academy’s first class (Class of 1959) started training at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver in 1955, but in 1958 they moved to the newly completed Colorado Springs facilities.
34. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 06/21/61.
35. Howard Cady, letter to RAH, 07/06/61.
36. L. Sprague de Camp, Time and Chance: An Autobiography (Hampton Falls, New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant, 1996), 285.
37. Catherine Crook de Camp, “The Robert A. Heinlein I Knew,” Locus (July 1988): 40.
38. Terry Sproat, letter to RAH, 07/10/61.
39. August 4, 1961.
40. RAH, letter to Howard Cady, 08/29/61.
41. Harold Wooster, letter titled “Xenobiology” in Science 124 (07/2
1/61): 223, 225.
42. RAH, letter to “Howard” [possibly Harold Wooster], 03/23/61.
43. See, e.g., RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 04/20/47, and RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 07/17/47.
44. Reported in RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 01/19/46: “Two major fields of research are the controls and guidance of G[uided] M[issiles], and the jamming of such controls and guidance. (The so-called “Heinlein Effect” he [Cornog] tells me has been incorporated into Northrup reports on GM…)”
45. RAH, letter to Sam Moskowitz, 07/22/61.
46. Algis J. Budrys (1931–2008), born in Königsberg, East Prussia, was a son of the Consul-General of Lithuania. The family was sent to the United States in 1936. Lithuania was conquered by the USSR in World War II, though the United States recognized only the Lithuanian government-in-exile.
Budrys had yet to begin the reviewing which would ultimately earn him recognition as an important science-fiction scholar (and recipient of the Pilgrim Award for contributions to SF scholarship).
47. One character, Mrs. Douglas, dies and then “reincarnates,” but this is given as a situation-driven divine choice (since Mrs. Douglas, too, is God) for a heavenly “field agent,” not a natural or even common pathway for souls.
48. RAH, letter to Fred Pohl, 08/20/61 (cover letter to Pohl dated 08/19/61).
49. RAH, letter to Algis J. Budrys, 09/06/61.
50. RAH, letter to Harlan Ellison, 09/06/61.
51. Alan E. Nourse, M.D. (1928–92) wrote science fiction professionally while going to medical school, which included the well-regarded juvenile novel Trouble on Titan (1954). While in private practice from 1958 to 1963, Nourse continued to write science fiction, including what is perhaps his best-known science fiction novel, Star Surgeon (1958), and then branched out to nonfiction books. After retiring from medicine in 1963, Nourse produced a contemporary-scene novel, Intern (1965), written as “Dr. X,” and a monthly column of medical advice for Good Housekeeping magazine.
In 1974 Nourse wrote another well-regarded science-fiction novel, The Bladerunner, which provided the title for the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (the story was prominently sourced from elements in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but an intermediate screenwriter, Hampton Francher, used a 1979 William S. Burroughs screenplay of Nourse’s book in his revisions to an earlier script and kept the name).
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