10. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 02/17/64.
11. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 02/17/64.
12. Quoted in RAH television spot for Goldwater Campaign, titled “Civil Rights 30 Second Spot,” October 6, 1964.
13. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 02/17/64.
14. Heinlein went on to write three radio commercials for the campaign, apparently never used. One of them dealt specifically with the “shoots from the hip” charge and used the “real straight shooter” language. The radio spots are published for the first time in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1.
15. RAH, letter to Larry and Caryl Heinlein, 07/19/64.
16. Virginia Heinlein, editorial note in Grumbles from the Grave, 212–13.
17. And these are much the same thoughts that later motivated Goldwater’s scathing denunciations of Jerry Falwell and the “Moral Majority.”
18. RAH, letter to Robert M. Laura, 08/02/64.
19. RAH, letter to Robert M. Laura, 08/02/64.
20. Robert M. Laura, letter to RAH, 08/04/64.
21. Undated index card in RAH’s hand, in Safety Deposit Box documents, RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
22. Heinlein is probably referring to President Johnson’s news conference on August 18. In August 23, 1964, letters to Lurton Blassingame and to his brother Rex, Heinlein refers to the incident as “recent.” President Johnson’s next news conference was not until August 26, 1964. A list of President Johnson’s news conferences is contained at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/news_conferences.php?year=1964 (accessed June 29, 2011).
23. RAH, letter to Rex, Kathleen, Karen Heinlein, 08/23/64.
24. RAH, letter to Clare Heinlein, 08/23/64.
25. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/23/64.
26. RAH, letter to Al G. Hill, 09/28/64.
27. RAH, letter to Al G. Hill, 09/28/64.
28. The first entry in Heinlein’s office journal for the “Garden of the Gods dinner” was on September 6, 1964.
29. For example, some of the Garden of the Gods dinner collections went to purchase Goldwater’s books, Victory and The Conscience of a Conservative for local distribution, per Heinlein’s Goldwater Campaign Log, Garden of the Gods subfile, entries for 9/10 and 9/11/64.
30. RAH, letter to Al G. Hill, 09/28/64.
31. RAH, letter to Al G. Hill, 09/28/64.
32. RAH, letter to Al G. Hill, 09/28/64.
33. The campaign speech is published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1.
34. Virginia Heinlein, interview with the author, Tape 4, Side B.
35. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/14/64.
36. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/11/64.
37. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 06/12/00.
19. That Dinkum Thinkum
1. Alexei Panshin, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/31/64. Panshin has posted many of the documents, including correspondence, relating to the preparation and publication of Heinlein in Dimension, and other matters, on his “Abyss of Wonder” website particularly in the “The Crities Lounge” page, http://www.panshin.com/crities/lounge.com.
2. Lurton Blassingame, letter to Alexei Panshin, 01/05/65.
3. Betsy Curtis was a fan friend, who had at Heinlein’s request accepted the Hugo for Stranger in a Strange Land.
4. Panshin’s letter to Sarge Smith, answered by Smith’s widow, is dated January 6, 1965.
5. Republished on Alexei Panshin’s website as “Sex in the Stories of Robert Heinlein.” Panshin gives a narrative of how the article came about in his prefatory “Introduction: Sex in Heinlein’s Stories” at http://www.panshin.com/critics-/Heinleinsex/sexintro.htm (accessed 03/04/2014).
6. The registered letter to Earl Kemp in Heinlein’s files is dated 02/02/65; Alexei Panshin gives the date in his web-published “The Story of Heinlein in Dimension” as 02/16/65. The entire essay is accessed through http://www.panshin.com/critics/StoryHiD/HiDcontents.html (accessed 03/04/2014).
7. RAH, letter to Lloyd Biggle, 09/03/76.
8. RAH, letter to John and Sherry Jackson, 12/10/68.
9. RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 07/15/65.
10. A good short discussion of the “Breen Boondoggle” can be found at “Dr. Gafia’s Fan Terms.” This glossary of “fan-speak” discusses the Breen Boondoggle as one of three “Exclusion Acts” that all drew negative response from fandom at large:
[In 1964] the Pacificon Committee chose to ban Walter Breen; the committee announced their intention before the Worldcon was held, explaining that they had been advised that they might be held liable if Breen were to seduce an underage male fan there, but also plunging all of active fandom into war. At around the same time, he was blackballed by the 13 members of FAPA [the Fantasy Amateur Press Association] needed to drop him from their waiting list, but within a very short period of time more than half FAPA’s 65 members over-rode it and voted to reinstate him (the argument being that, whatever his sexual orientation might be, Walter was unlikely to seduce anyone in a organization whose activities take place via the mails) … Despite protests and even outright boycotts by some, Breen was not allowed to attend the Pacificon. Worldcon Chairman Bill Donaho outlined the committee’s actions, detailing incidents which had been observed regarding Walter that fell short of seducing youths but nonetheless gave some people pause, in a pre-convention fanzine called The Boondoggle. The resulting fandomwide War is thus often referred to as the Boondoggle or the Breen Boondoggle … Breen did write the authoritative book on man-boy love and ultimately died in prison a convicted pederast. But even 40 years after the event, the sole point fans on both sides can agree upon is that the resulting feud had long-lasting effects, tore the fabric of the microcosm beyond repair and led to a proliferation of mutually exclusive private apas [“amateur press associations”] where the opposing forces retired to lick their wounds and assure themselves that they had been undeniably right while the other side had been unmistakably wrong.
http://fanac.org/Fannish_Reference_Works/Fan_terms/Fan_terms-03.html (accessed 07/01/2011).
11. RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 07/15/65.
12. It is very likely that the Heinleins were attending as well, though there is no direct evidence to this effect.
13. Transcription of Dr. Jerry Pournelle’s presentation at the October 8, 1988 NASA Distinguished Public Service Awards Ceremony—from videotape provided by Virginia Heinlein. The videotape of the presentation is considerably more extensive than Dr. Pournelle’s published remarks in Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo.
14. Transcription of Jerry Pournelle’s presentation at the October 8, 1988, NASA Distinguished Public Service Awards Ceremony—from videotape provided by Ginny Heinlein.
15. This anecdote is also told in Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 12/26/85; see also Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series III, Tape B, Side B (March 27, 2001).
16. Jerry Pournelle, e-mail to the author, 10/12/05.
17. RAH, letter to Herb Caen, 06/22/76. Pournelle’s visit was in December 1964; Heinlein’s earliest outline-notes for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress are dated 2/24/65. It is impossible to say just how long Heinlein had been working up the basic ideas: By the time he wrote notes about a story, he had been working at synthesizing his background for some time already. Heinlein’s working records typically deal only with actual writing on the projects, not with the prewriting development process. The making of such written outline-notes is often, in fact, the very last stage of the development process, and it is not unusual to see him begin the actual writing during the outline, whole passages of dialogue and suchlike. Typically if he reached this stage during the outline, he would leave off the outline and simply begin the manuscript.
18. From Heinlein’s draft Answers to Interrogatories in the Puppet Masters plagiarism suit against Roger Corman and The Brain Eaters, dated 10/13/60:
I keep with me at all times 3 x 5 file cards on which I make notes—at my bedside, in my bath,
at my dining table, at my desk, and everywhere, and I invariably have them on my person whenever I am away from home, whether for fifteen minutes or six months. An idea for a story is jotted down on such a card and presently is filed under an appropriate category, in my desk. When enough notes have accumulated around an idea to cause me to think of it as an emergent story, I pull those cards out of category files, assign a working title, and give it a file separator with the working title written on the index. Thereafter, new notes are added to the bundle as they occur to me. At the present time I am filing notes under sixteen categories and under fifty-three working titles.
A story may remain germinating for days only, or for years—two of my current working titles are more than twenty years old. But once I start to write a story the first draft usually is completed in a fairly short time. Thereafter I spend time as necessary in cutting, revising, and polishing. Then the opus is smooth-typed and sent to market.
One of those long-standing working titles must have been “Da Capo,” which was not actually written until 1971. Heinlein’s file of idea index cards filled two long file trays by the time of his death, and the cards pulled for the last novels sometimes might exceed five hundred in number.
19. Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to David Wright, Sr. (cc. the author), 01/03/01.
20. Later, the editor at Book of Knowledge chopped up the “expert” piece they had commissioned and rewrote it. The original encyclopedia article as Heinlein wrote it is published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1.
21. Heinlein had talked about the gravity gauge—i.e., the advantage enjoyed by anyone at the “top” of a gravity well—in his May 1948 talk at the Book Breakfast of the [Los Angeles] County Librarians’ Association. See Learning Curve, 455.
22. RAH, letter to Mr. John Zube, 10/08/71.
23. H. G. Wells, Phoenix: How to Rebuild the World: A Summary of the Inescapable Conditions of World Reorganization (Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius, 1942), 6. Heinlein never referenced or specifically mentioned reading this book, but the shape of the Future History Space Patrol (which did not exist in the prewar Future History stories) may have been suggested by Phoenix—and in any case Heinlein’s thinking was so generally Wellsian that he may have arrived at these Wellsian notions independently.
24. H. G. Wells, The World of William Clissold (1926), 189.
25. Heinlein’s draft notes for Opus. 152, RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
26. The Brass Cannon title was inspired by the brass signaling gun Mrs. Heinlein had bought on their recent visit in New Orleans, and specifically for an old tall tale of which Heinlein was fond. Jerry Pournelle recalled Heinlein’s telling of the story when he visited in 1964:
I look over at the fireplace, and pointed at me was a cannon. And I said, “Robert, what is this?”
And he said, “Well, don’t you know the story?”
And I said “No.”
And he said, “Well, there was this fellow once who had been a—had a sinecure. He had a political job. He was someone’s brother-in-law, and they gave him the job of polishing the brass cannon on the courthouse steps. And he got paid on the order of $100 a week for doing this, and he did this for years.
“And one day he came home and he said to his wife, ‘Dear, I have quit my job.’
“And she said ‘You quit your job? How could you—You’re too stupid to do anything else. What do you mean, you quit your job?’
“And he said ‘Well, I didn’t see any future in it so I bought my own brass cannon and I’m going into business for myself.’”
And Robert pointed to this thing and said, “That’s the cannon.”
And I said, “Could you point it in a slightly different direction?”
And I went to sleep, and I slept pretty soundly.
Transcription of Dr. Jerry Pournelle’s presentation at the October 8, 1988 NASA Distinguished Public Service Awards Ceremony—from videotape provided by Virginia Heinlein.
27. Mrs. Heinlein designated the gun to be bequeathed to friend and science-fiction writer Brad Linaweaver, and after Mrs. Heinlein’s death Linaweaver had it reconditioned and fired in honor of Robert and Virginia Heinlein for the Heinlein Centennial celebration in 2007. A short (nine-minute) video of the test firing a few weeks before the Centennial is on YouTube as “Brad Linaweaver presents Robert A Heinlein’s Brass Cannon” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZVauT_rZdk (Accessed 10/01/12).
28. RAH, handwritten index cards kept in his own safety-deposit box by his wife after his death and delivered to the RAH Archive by Art Dula on February 5, 2003.
29. The occasion was Heinlein’s appearance at Young Men’s/Young Women’s Hebrew Association in New York on May 29, 1973, and the witness was Tom Collins, who recorded his impressions in his fanzine, Transient #31 (1974?) as “Tonight I Met Heinlein.” The article has been web-published by Alexei Panshin on http://www.panshin.com/critics/Showdown/tomcollins.html (accessed 03/04/2014).
30. RAH, letter to John Conlan, undated but after 05/25/73.
31. RAH, letter to Walter Minton, 04/19/64.
32. RAH, letter to Peter Israel, 07/13/65.
33. John W. Campbell, letter to RAH, 07/06/65.
34. Walter Minton, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 02/20/67.
35. There is no indication in the correspondence how the new title came to be; on July 15, Heinlein opens discussions with Peter Israel about a new title; on August 5, his new editor, William Targ, refers to it by the Harsh Mistress name. Since Heinlein was lining up a trip to New York in the last two weeks of July 1965 (in connection with the Herman Kahn seminar on “The Next Ten Years”), possibly the new title was arrived at by telephone, or in person, instead of by correspondence.
36. RAH, letter to Karen Heinlein, 08/06/65.
37. RAH, letter to Lt. Sandra Fulton, U.S. Navy, 08/07/65.
38. Heinlein’s editor at Ace is never specifically mentioned in the correspondence, but in a letter to Lurton Blassingame dated 06/21/65, he says Terry Carr is being too fussy about a paperback anthology he has no enthusiasm for, having rejected “Three Brave Men” as not-science-fiction. It is presumed this anthology was Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein (Ace, 1966), because there were no other anthologies in process at this point.
39. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/21/65.
40. RAH, letter to Peggy and Count (Lurton) Blassingame, 08/06/65.
41. RAH, letter to Karen Heinlein, 08/06/65.
42. RAH, letter to Lt. Sandra Fulton, USN, 08/07/65.
43. RAH, letter to “Sandy” Fulton, 09/26/65.
44. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/09/65.
45. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/11/65.
46. Cal Laning, letter to RAH, 10/09/65, reporting that Arwine had passed away “yesterday.”
47. RAH, letter to Clifford D. Simak, 10/05/65.
48. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 3, Tape B, Side A (March 27, 2001).
49. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 3, Tape B, Side A (March 27, 2001).
50. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/10/65.
51. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 4/19/00.
52. Harlan Ellison, letter to RAH, 10/19/65.
53. RAH, letter to Bjo and John Trimble, 11/30/65.
54. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/30/65.
55. Walter Minton, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 02/20/67. In this letter Minton said they originally ordered seventy-five hundred copies of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, of which only seven thousand were actually printed and bound. Putnam’s was afraid Harsh Mistress would also be passed over for young adult markets because of the “rather unusual family system.”
56. RAH, Journal, “The Road to Bonny Doon,” 12/19/65.
57. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 11/30/65.
58. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 3, Tape B, Side A (March 27, 2001).
20. House-building—Again!
1. RAH,
letter to Lurton Blassingame, 02/01/66.
2. Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to the author, 05/21/00.
3. Redwoods grow in concentric rings and their litter makes the soil in the center of the ring so acidic that only highly resistant plants can grow there. The walled-in spaces are called “cathedrals.” Nothing competes with redwoods for sun.
4. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 6, Side B.
5. RAH, Journal, “The Road to Bonny Doon,” 01/11/66.
6. RAH, Journal, “The Road to Bonny Doon,” 01/12/66.
7. RAH, “The Heinlein Interview.” The Robert A. Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleinana, J. Neil Schulman, ed., 166.
8. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Michael J. Cronin, EVP of Productivity Systems Division, Computervision Corporation, 03/11/79.
9. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 10/20/99.
10. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame (second letter of the same date, continuation), 02/01/66.
11. RAH, letter to Elisabeth Price, 11/21/67.
12. RAH, letter to Elisabeth Price, 11/21/67.
13. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame (second letter of the same date, continuation), 02/01/66.
14. RAH, telephone interview with Ben Bova, 06/29/79.
15. RAH, letter to Peggy Blassingame, 04/06/66.
16. RAH, letter to Peggy Blassingame, 04/06/66.
17. Harlan Ellison, letter to RAH, 07/25/66.
18. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/01/66.
19. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/01/66.
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