50. Denis Paradis, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 05/03/78.
51. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 12/11/99.
52. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 12/11/99.
53. Heinlein had had the first of a series of Transient Ischemic Attacks—warning signs that a stroke is imminent. The timing of this TIA is not dated with specificity. Mrs. Heinlein mentioned only that he had had a TIA earlier, while writing. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 09/20/00 and Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 3, Tape A, Side A (March 1?, 2001).
54. David Lee Powell, “Robert Anson Heinlein, Grandmaster One, 1907-1988,” http://archive.is/rxOfD (accessed 03/04/2014).
55. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 03/09/79.
56. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 03/09/79.
57. McAleer, Visionary (2010), 223, quoting Asimov’s recollections.
58. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Judy-Lynn del Rey, 10/25/77.
59. In taped interviews with the author in 2000 and 2001, Mrs. Heinlein claimed not to remember any specifics about the book or her initial experience of reading it, except that she told Heinlein at the time it was “not best work.” But she did say that the author’s reactions to the manuscript, reading it in 2002 when it was still sealed, “validated” her opinion. “Competent yard goods” and “not a Heinlein novel” was the language used in the author’s report to Mrs. Heinlein, which prompted the “validated” remark in Second Series, Tape B, Side B.
60. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 07/14/00.
61. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 2, Tape B, Side B.
62. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side A.
63. RAH, letter to L. Ron Hubbard, 07/14/78.
28. “Human Vegetable”
1. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 4, Side B.
2. Virginia Heinlein, letter to “Ginger and Roger,” 03/15/78.
3. The blood drive handbook was never finished, but it was put into publishable form for the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii, Nonfiction 2.
4. Virginia Heinlein, letter to W. G. Hagglund, 02/10/78.
5. RAH, “Spinoff,” Expanded Universe, 507.
6. Rita Bottoms, Oral History, online in PDF format, at http://digitalcollections.ucsc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p265101coll13/id/3650 (accessed 03/04/2014). “Honey” was their private nickname for Rita, who had become a very good friend, not a patronizing characterization.
7. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Second Series, Tape B, Side B (September 10? 2000).
8. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Third Series, Tape A, Side A (March 27, 2001).
9. Robert A. Heinlein, full text of “Some Applications of Space Technology for the Elderly and the Handicapped” presented before the Joint Session of the House Select Committee on Aging and the House Committee on Science and Technology on July 19, 1979. An edited and somewhat condensed form of this testimony was published in Expanded Universe as “Spinoff.”
10. Jack Williamson, “Who Was Robert Heinlein?” Requiem, Yoji Kondo, ed.: 335. The incident is also mentioned in Jack Williamson: “On Heinlein’s Friday,” Science Fiction Digest, I:4 (Sept.–Oct. 1982): 26.
11. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Second Series, Tape B, Side B (September 10? 2000).
12. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 05/10/78.
13. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side B (March 2? 2000).
14. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Third Series, Tape B, Side A (March 27, 2001).
15. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 05/10/78.
16. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 09/20/00.
17. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side A.
18. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 05/10/78.
19. Heinlein left no direct testimony about his process going from Panki Barsoom to The Number of the Beast, but speaking of Heinlein’s final illness, Mrs. Heinlein remarked that “always before” he had been eager to get back to writing. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Third Series, Tape A, Side A (March 27, 2001). The truth of this is suggested by the speed with which he began working on the new manuscript—mid-May, just two weeks following the surgery.
20. RAH, letter to Yoji Kondo, 08/30/78.
21. Heinlein’s desk-drawer “laboratory” was probably among the material burned at the time of the move from Bonny Doon to Carmel in 1987. The shelf of porn was apparently also destroyed at some time, as none of it came to the RAH Archive (which received, by Virginia Heinlein’s will, all of the Heinleins’ personal property). A brief description of one such story, written by Heinlein for Leslyn before their divorce in 1947, was given by Grace Dugan Sang Wurtz in a letter to the author, 03/07/11:
Did you know that Bob Heinlein was also a writer of porn?
I say that to get your attention. He didn’t sell porn stories but he wrote at least a couple soft porn stories for Leslyn. When Henry Sang and I were living with Bob and Leslyn on Lookout Mountain [in spring of 1946], Bob and I were often left our own devices while Leslyn was at work with Henry trying to make his stories marketable. They worked in the back of the house on the porch, and Bob and I spread things out on the dining room table, and did our sketches and readings. Bob also had written a cutesy-pie story about Willis (more about him later) a baby possum, who lived in Bob’s navel. The porn story I remember had to do with a threesome involving a man, his young wife, and his mother-in-law. It was the older woman who was the hottest participant. Was this maybe to introduce the idea of a younger junior wife?
22. This material is taken up in chapter 10, Vintage Season, supra, which deals with the mid-1950s.
23. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Margo Fisher, 08/04/78.
24. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side B.
25. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Margo Fisher, 01/05/79.
To be very blunt about it, we can’t stand Kirby McCauley—he’s always away and often very careless about things … I know many people who swear by Kirby McCauley, but I’ve found his carelessness too difficult to put up with …
26. George Edgar Slusser, Classic Years of Robert A. Heinlein (1976) and Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger In His Own Land (1977). Both Riverside, Calif.: Borgo Press.
27. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. Robert A. Heinlein (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1978).
28. H. Bruce Franklin, letter to RAH, 06/01/78; Virginia Heinlein, letter to H. Bruce Franklin, 06/12/78.
29. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 01/20/79.
30. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Margo Fisher, 08/04/78.
31. Rita Bottoms, personal discussions with the author, supplementing her oral history materials, from September through November 2005.
32. Rita Bottoms, personal conversation with the author on January 25, 2006, supplemented on January 28, 2006.
33. Rita Bottoms, Oral History, 62.
34. Rita Bottoms, Oral History, 61.
35. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 05/31/99.
36. RAH, letter to Cpl. Suzanne Deladrier, 08/30/78. David Silver, onetime president of the Heinlein Society, has argued that the interview with H. Bruce Franklin shaped and to some extent motivated all the writing that was to follow for the rest of Heinlein’s life. It gave him, Silver claims, a vision of his antagonist—not Franklin himself, but the whole complex of ideas that were taking his society down. David Silver: “Blame It All on H. Bruce Franklin,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 16 (January 2005); “The Lonely Silver Rain,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 17 (July 2005).
37. The author’s observation, not Mrs. Heinlein’s. In a manuscript note by the editor of this biography in about April 2011, David Hartwell mentioned that he was an editor at Putnam’s a
t the time The Notebooks of Lazarus Long came “over the transom,” and Minton told Hartwell he published this quality paperback as “a favor to RAH.” Hartwell wrote the introduction.
38. Mrs. Heinlein mentioned this incident several times in the first series of taped interviews with the author: Tape 3, Side A; Tape 4, Side A; and Tape 9, Side B (last few days of February 2000). It was also memorialized nearly contemporaneously in Virginia Heinlein, letter to Balls Clipping Service, 12/19/79 (a year after the initial publication).
39. Donald A. Wollheim (1914–90) was a leading editor and publisher of science fiction (as well as a writer); he had edited the very first paperback anthology of science fiction in 1943. Afer leaving Ace in 1971, he established DAW Books, the first mass-market specialty science fiction and fantasy publishing house.
40. RAH, memo to Eleanor Wood, marked “W’s Pending File,” 09/25/78.
41. RAH and Virginia Heinlein, letter to Eleanor Wood, 09/24/78.
42. Virginia Heinlein, letter to “Ginger and Richard,” 09/24/78. The name of the small press is not referenced in the correspondence, but their acquaintance may have been made in conjunction with the blood drives, as correspondence to and from them begins appearing in 1977.
43. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 10/03/78.
44. RAH, The Number of the Beast (London: New English Library, 1980), 14.
45. James D. Gifford, Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion, 137–8.
46. Both quotation and information about Heinlein being worn out from working fourteen-hour days from Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 12/17/78.
29. Traveling Road Show
1. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 01/20/79.
In 1975, Heinlein had written a kind of short-story/letter of thanks to George Zebrowski and Thomas N. Scortia, the editors of Human Machines, an anthology of cyborg stories, who had dedicated the book to him. It was a fictional complaint to the manufacturers of his body. The story is published for the first time as “Complaint,” the concluding work of the Virginia Edition vol. xxxiv, New Worlds to Conquer: The Short Fiction of Robert A. Heinlein 1942–1975.
2. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 01/06/79.
3. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 01/20/79.
4. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Dick Mandelkorn, 05/07/79.
5. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 03/15/79; Virginia Heinlein, letter to Margo Fisher, 02/11/81.
6. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side A (February 27? 2000).
7. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 03/07/79.
8. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Hart Sprager, 10/13/79.
9. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 03/08/79.
10. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 03/09/79.
11. There was hardly any improvement, though, in the quality of representation. In August Heinlein received two letters, a copy of a letter from Art Cabot to Bob Bookman, 08/08/79, complaining of delays in responding to a query about availability of rights for “Project Nightmare” and from Vic Smith to Mr. Heinlein, also 8/9/79:
In your letter of June 5, 1979, you advised me to contact Mr. Bob Bookman of International Creative Management regarding the purchase of film rights to your novels Star Beast and HSSWT.
I have sent letters and made phone calls with no response. On my most recent phone call the secretary asked, “Heinlein, who?”
12. Virginia Heinlein to Perry Chapdelaine, 02/16/79. Chapdelaine did continue with his project, bringing out two volumes of Campbell letters, which were a success d’estime. Mrs. Heinlein did print excerpts from some of the Heinlein-Campbell correspondence in Grumbles from the Grave (1989)—without, it appears, obtaining permissions from Chapdelaine as the intellectual property rights holder.
Midway into the production of the Virginia Edition, Geo Rule, on behalf of the Heinlein Society, re-established contact with Chapdelaine, and an agreement was struck with the Heinlein Prize Trust, as owners of the Heinlein intellectual property rights, to bring out a volume of both sides of the Heinlein-Campbell correspondence as the first of the Virginia Edition’s three volumes of letters, volumes xxxix (Correspondence of John W. Campbell, Jr., and Robert A. Heinlein), xl (Letters 2 [1923–60]), and xli (Letters 3 [1960–87]). Those volumes were issued in 2011.
13. David Hartwell, editor for this biography, was a participant in the Number of the Beast auction and indicates the auction was not quite the triumph Ginny represented (saying that the invited publishers were falling all over themselves to bid—Virginia Heinlein to George Warren, 03/09/79). Hartwell was at that time working for the Pocket Books division of Simon & Schuster and placed a bid for the science-fiction line that would, in 1981, be named “Timescape” Books. In Hartwell’s recollection,
The manuscript was generally received poorly and Putnam’s had no interest in paying the price, which was why it went to auction. Still, then, no one else came to play until I bid because it was generally assessed as a bad book and/or uncommercial. I knew that was not the case … it would be a bestseller because there was a five million person Heinlein audience who still read new work by him in the late 1970s because they grew up reading him (I did my own math). Fawcett bid because I was very credible and if I bid, then they should too. This has happened to me a fair amount in my career. Their editor, whom I knew, knew nothing about Heinlein or SF and was assigned the book.
E-mail from David Hartwell to the author, 08/05/11, 2:41 P.M. Hartwell also recalled a “no edits” condition. The amounts of the bids were identical, varying only in the terms for paying out the amount. Hartwell (same e-mail): “I was very frustrated when my boss required a long payout to a writer who was ill.”
Eleanor Wood, who conducted the auction suggests a different recollection. In the first place, it was not, strictly speaking, an auction:
Heinlein had gotten grossly undervalued advances … I don’t call it an auction, in that I didn’t take a floor.
It was simply a multiple submission, with what we hoped to receive.
We didn’t get it, so took the next best offer. Nothing really out of line.
And I can’t recall including the “no edits” in any submission letter.
(Eleanor Wood sequence of e-mails with the author, 08/12/11.)
Earlier in the same e-mail discussion sequence, Mrs. Wood explained: “As I recall, I asked for a million dollars, which Putnam refused to pay, so I then made a multiple submission. The asking price presented to Putnam’s was $1 million.” She also commented, “An auction, at least in the past, had very specific rules, and this wasn’t as formal as an ‘auction.’ I don’t mind it being called that, but someone might step forward and complain it wasn’t a ‘real auction.’”
In the second place, Hartwell might or might not have known that Fawcett had already submitted its bid.
David’s was definitely not the first bid. Arlene Friedman [of Fawcett] made the first bid. Then I waited—I can’t recall exactly how long—until David finally got approval to offer the same amount of money with less advantageous terms.
I think the deal was no edits without the author’s approval, but perhaps I’m not remembering correctly on that point.
(Eleanor Wood sequence of e-mails with the author, 08/12/11.)
“No edits without author’s approval” would be much more in line with Heinlein’s usual practices.
14. Locus magazine XII:5, whole number 222 (June 1979), at 1: “Heinlein $$ set record.”
15. This interview seems never to have been used or even finalized (Mr. Bova was not able to recall in 2010 why this was the case). A corrected raw transcription of the interview was found among Heinlein’s papers and was published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii, Nonfiction 2, as “Telephone Interview with Ben Bova.”
16. RAH, letter to Ben Bova, 07/27/79.
17. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side A (February 28? 2000).<
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18. Chase Econometrics Associates, Inc. “The Economic Impact of NASA R&D Spending: Preliminary Executive Summary” (April 1975).
This report subsequently came under methodological attack (see, e.g., “NASA Technological Spinoff Fables” http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/jp_950525.htm, accessed 08/10/11), though some of the critical arguments seem more questionable than the study’s original methodology, examining only some categories of direct spending, omitting consideration of technology transfer effects differentiating between NASA spending and other sorts of government spending, and also omitting to consider secondary economic effects (an example of a secondary economic effect would be an increase in NASA’s share of the market for medical computers that comes about because of the NASA-driven medical telemetry developed for astronauts).
Whether one can legitimately account the microprocessor market to NASA technology transfer (the base market came from Defense investment) seems to be an arbitrary matter of where one draws the line in a cascade of secondary effects—when it is the existence of the cascade that is the significant point.
Heinlein spoke directly to this point in his testimony:
But this I must say: NASA’s presentation is extremely modest; it cites only 46 applications—whereas I know there are hundreds. Often one bit of research results in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations; each generation usually has multiple applications—spinoffs have spinoffs, branching out like a tree. To get a feeling for this, think of the endless applications of Lee de Forrest’s vacuum tube, Dr. Shockley’s transistor.
Here is an easy way to spot space-research spinoffs: If it involves microminiaturization of any sort, minicomputers, miniaturized long-life power sources, highly reliable microswitches, remotely-controlled manipulators, image enhancers, small and sophisticated robotics or cybernetics, then, no matter where you find the item, at a critical point in its development it was part of our space program.
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 81