Locus, July 2014

by Locus Publications

  Yet the danger has much deeper roots, shown in a succession of Intervals that trace it to a feat of magic in medieval Paris. Leigh starts with genuine historic figures Nicholas and Perenelle Flanel, turns the husband’s purported interest in alchemy to an obsession with rediscovering the elixir of immortality, and imagines the pair at work, together and apart. His Perenelle (who will become Camille) may read the future from tarot cards, but she’s the pragmatist, testing potions with ingredients drawn from enigmatic old texts about the Life Force. Nicholas (soon revealed as the New York killer, though his current persona takes longer to discover) prefers spellcraft, and has some success as a mage. Their different skills and perspectives lead her to find the true secret of the elixir, while he learns just enough to conjure up a rough equivalent.

  Over the course of the next centuries, she reinvents herself in a series of give-and-take relationships, inspiring creative people – many artistically gifted, like the sculptor Bernini, composer Vivaldi, poet Blake, and painter Turner, others bold theorists whose ideas shake up politics and culture – and drawing on the energies of their ‘‘green heart.’’ Meanwhile, Nicholas and his later avatars feed upon the polluting fuel of human pain. Busiest and most overtly active in times of massive unrest, from the French Revolution to WWII, the monster can’t break entirely free from the muse (whose liaisons he senses as keenly as he loathes them). But if he could gain full access to her knowledge, he’d happily destroy her.

  What delights him saddens her. After some of Camille’s friends in the Calliope Group return from watching silent film Nosferatu, they exchange views on vampirism. One asks the photographer, ‘‘Would you accept the offer? Eternal life for a few minor quirks like needing to drink blood and really slather on the sunscreen?’’ Without revealing the truth of her own prolonged existence, Camille provides a different take on immortality:

  Watch every last one of the people you love grow old and die while you live on. … Experiencing every bit of the horrible nastiness the human race can inflict on itself, up close and personal. Eternally hiding what you are because you’re different and they’d tear you apart if they found out….

  Passages like these, exploring the subject from within, keep Immortal Muse from becoming a blatant ecological parable of exploitation vs. bio-sustainability. Although the victims of New York’s ‘‘Black Fire Killer’’ end up mysteriously charred, while her own casual acquaintances tend to benefit from the contact, she feels her difference much as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein experienced the consequences of his maker’s Faustian bargain. While the creature who used to be her husband lacks all sense of ethics and regards human suffering as fodder, she’s doomed to share the pain.

  •

  In Delia’s Shadow, Jamie Lee Moyer combined a murder mystery with lingering ghosts in San Francisco early in the 20th century. A Barricade in Hell returns to Delia Martin and that city, not fully recovered ten years after the Quake, but modernizing with the nation. Though America still stands aloof from WWI, the menace seems to grow. Some volunteer fighters have already seen the horrors of its battlefields. Survivors return plagued by the affliction that gives the book its title: ‘‘‘Shell-shock’ the doctors called it. Such an innocuous name for minds shattered on a barricade in hell.’’

  Delia’s acute sensitivity to the presence of ghosts provides unwelcome glimpses of their inner hells, and she bears scars from her own tragedy, as shown in the previous book. But she’s still inexperienced enough to feel helpless before the prospect of war, suffer the manipulations of a trickster, and struggle vainly to interpret the young ghost who haunts her with a barrage of nursery rhymes (what does this spirit want?).

  The manipulator lurks behind the spiritualist and outspoken pacifist known only as Miss Fontaine, new favorite of the wealthy elite on Nob Hill. While Delia can’t criticize the message, she’s shies from the fervor of Miss Fontaine’s disciples. Her friend Gabe (third-person viewpoint character in alternating chapters with her first-person accounts) gets hints that something’s wrong when people start disappearing. Workers hired to help set up the pacifist’s public appearances never take their final paychecks, and a few turn up as corpses in the Bay. If a fiendish murderer is at work, his latest victim may be an innocent debutante.

  As in Leigh’s book, the most powerful killer – and the most haunting presence – here is the human appetite for violence, the forces that erupt in war.

  –Faren Miller

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  REVIEWS BY RUSSELL LETSON

  Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2, 1948-1988: The Man Who Learned Better, William H. Patterson, Jr. (Tor 978-07653-1961-6, $34.99, 643pp, hc) June 2014.

  Looking through my files (and memories) as I prepared to review this second volume of William H. Patterson’s biography, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, I note that I myself have been reading Heinlein for just short of 60 years, writing about him on and off for nearly 40, and reviewing books by and about him in these pages for more than 20 (starting with the restored/uncut edition of Stranger in a Strange Land in 1991). That doesn’t even count reviews of fiction by other writers who clearly and explicitly took both craft and subject-matter cues from the Old Man’s work: Joe Haldeman, John Varley, Spider Robinson, Charles Sheffield, Charles Stross, and (just to be really up-to-date) Linda Nagata.

  All that reading and reacting and reflecting generated long lists of questions and curiosities about the man and the writer, and one might expect that with the completion of Patterson’s project, most of a longtime Heinlein-watcher’s questions might have been answered or at least addressed. But even a double stack of facts 1,300 (very detailed and minutely documented) pages high does not necessarily get all the way to the heart of the writer or the man.

  This second volume covers the last half of Heinlein’s life, a 40-year stretch that saw his markets and ambitions expand beyond the SF pulp magazines to include the slicks, film, television, YA books, the infant SF-hardcover market, and eventually the fat, bestselling novels that gave him some visibility in the general culture. But this is not a literary biography in the usual sense, though it does cover the kinds of logistical and life-circumstances data that such a work would require. Instead, it provides a detailed, sometimes day-to-day account of Heinlein’s working and personal life, all intertwined: when he started writing projects, how he recorded his ideas, how he designed and built their Colorado Springs house, what the weather was like, what visitors he and Virginia entertained, what trips they took, what medical crises they weathered, what his advances and royalty statements were. There is relatively little commentary on the fiction itself beyond accounts of sales figures, royalty statements, and Heinlein’s (generally angry or dismissive) reactions to reviews or criticism.

  I take the big question addressed in Volume 1 to be, ‘‘Where did this surprisingly able SF writer who popped up in 1939 come from?’’ Volume 2 is not so easily summed up, but for me the equivalent question would be, ‘‘How did the man who wrote those early stories become the figure whose reputation is a hot-button culture-wars issue even today?’’ And make no mistake, mentioning Heinlein in an on-line discussion can generate as much heat as light. Google up some comment threads if you don’t believe me.

  Heinlein strongly resisted all attempts to place his life and work in any framework, particularly the three-stage model proposed by Alexei Panshin in the much-detested (by Heinlein and his most avid partisans) Heinlein in Dimension, and Patterson seems reluctant to argue with that position. Nevertheless, the book’s terminal subtitle, ‘‘The Man Who Learned Better,’’ suggests that there is indeed some kind of change in Heinlein in this period, a knee in the learning curve. And, despite Heinlein’s disclaimers, there were certainly divides in his working and personal lives, changes initiated in the immediate post-war years and documented in Volume 1. His professional attention was moving beyond pulp SF magazines toward ‘‘juvenile’’ hardcover novels and general
-interest magazines, and he was also working on the screenplay that would become Destination Moon. The magazine and book markets not only paid better but offered a way out of the narrow culture of SF fandom, with which he would develop a touchy relationship.

  And, more crucially, Heinlein had found in his third wife, Virginia Gerstenfeld, someone whose personality, values, and work ethic reinforced (or even redirected) his own. Heinlein clearly welcomed full partnership and collaboration in his domestic life – his second wife, Leslyn MacDonald, had been cheerleader, first reader, and story doctor as well as lover. After that marriage imploded, Virginia was able to take up those support functions, and one wonders what Heinlein’s career and daily life would have been like without such a partner. Heinlein might object to imposing stages or schemata on his literary output, but it is hard not to see this once-hidden domestic history as a turning point in nearly every other aspect of his life. While Heinlein the writer dealt with the challenges of new markets and audiences, Heinlein the citizen found issues and causes to engage in and sometimes become engulfed by: the threat of nuclear war, inadequate American responses to the dangers of Soviet expansionism, and the imperative to develop space travel.

  Patterson avoids a developmental-or psychological-stages approach, but his account contains several implicit narrative and thematic through-lines. One is the slow, halting progress on the book initially called The Man from Mars, which became The Heretic, which became Stranger in a Strange Land. In 1949, as Heinlein was fishing around for a way to write what would become ‘‘Gulf’’ for John Campbell at Astounding, Virginia suggested a satirical story about ‘‘a human Mowgli raised, not by animals, but by aliens and then returned to Earth.’’ Heinlein took down some notes, drafted two chapters, and later sent a letter to Campbell that included, Patterson reports, ‘‘all the fundamental ideas’’ for the novel. The actual writing was a start-and-stop process that occupied a decade, and when the book was finally complete, it would make him rich. Another long-running project with its roots in the late 1940s was the filling-in of the blanks on the Future History chart, which would eventually bring forth first The Past Through Tomorrow and then Time Enough for Love.

  Between the starts and stops of Stranger and the Future History development, there are other through-lines: periods of intense political and public-policy activism; world travel; health crises; trips to Hollywood to work on Destination Moon; wrangles with editors, unauthorized agents, and dodgy publishers; annual negotiations with his Scribner’s editor Alice Dalgliesh over the content of the juveniles; house-building. Through the early 1950s, Heinlein was busy, in demand, and by most measures a successful freelance writer. But because he was freelance, he was always on the hustle, hitting deadlines and devising the next project, with nothing but his own industry to assure that contractors, doctors, and the IRS got paid on time.

  Yet he still made time for political and public-policy activism. Locating or labeling Heinlein’s politics is an old parlor game, and since he expressed his most heartfelt civic and political values out in public, it is not one that is hard to play. Patterson’s accounts of the couple’s opinions and activities (for Robert did not march alone in these matters) provide welcome detail and nuance and should make us careful about pasting on simple labels. (‘‘Libertarian’’ is the least misleading, if we add a string of asterisks indicating which flavors most closely match Heinlein’s.) The ‘‘world-saver’’ essays he produced in the immediate post-war years about atomic war and the need for a space navy (see Volume 1) were not opportunistic or sensationalist journalism, but expressions of genuine concern, and later campaigns and causes were driven by a similar kind of worst-case scenario-building. He was convinced that the dangers presented by the Soviet Union and international communism were dire and that a nuclear war – which we might lose – was a real possibility. He publicly advocated the building of private fallout shelters and installed one on his property. In the late 1950s, he viewed the nuclear disarmament and test-ban movements as at best delusional and at worst amounting to an ‘‘abject surrender to tyranny,’’ so he and Virginia mounted the Patrick Henry League ad and letter campaign in response. That activity led to a culling of friends, acquaintances, and business associates who disagreed or were lukewarm – ‘‘ditherers’’ and ‘‘pacifists’’ (Patterson’s characterizations of H.L. Gold, John Campbell, and Robert Bloch). Heinlein would later draw a similar line in the dirt when Arthur C. Clarke disagreed with him about the wisdom and feasibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative. This prickly, inflexible, friendship-ending side of Heinlein’s character has not been a secret for a long time, as a reading of even the memorial encomia published in these pages (in June and July 1988) will confirm.

  On the other hand, in 1949 Heinlein defended an old friend who was being accused of having communist sympathies, and later he decried security investigations that had ‘‘roughly the scientific accuracy of witch smelling.’’ Nor did he much like Joe McCarthy (‘‘a revolting son of a bitch, with no regard for truth, justice, nor civil rights,’’ according to a 1956 letter), or overzealous commie-hunting in general, despite his certainty that there were indeed communist agents in government. The Heinleins were around for the founding of the John Birch Society (sparked by Virginia’s interest) but limited their early involvement with it and finally stepped away because, ironically enough, founder Robert Welch ‘‘would not tolerate any kind of deviation from his own odd take on the political situation – and his take did not coincide with either of theirs. He would not even listen to divergent input.’’

  The hardening of Heinlein’s opinions on geopolitics led to the writing, in 1958, of the book that many people see as most revelatory of his political philosophy: Starship Troopers. Initially meant for the Scribner’s juvenile line, Heinlein knew that it was ‘‘likely to displease quite a few people.’’ In fact, it proved to be the final straw for writer, editor, and publisher in a relationship that had been growing increasingly uncomfortable. The novel’s reception in and outside of the SF community says as much about the cultural moment as it does about the book itself. Among SF writers, the book became something of a hot button, and Heinlein wrote in a letter that he came to believe that ‘‘most of my colleagues in science fiction either disliked me or actively despised me.’’ The Starship Troopers discussion was not quite that two-dimensional, as a read through the comments in Theodore Cogswell’s fanzine-for-pros Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies (PITFCS for short) should make clear. (NESFA Press has reprinted all but one issue of PITFCS. A side irony: the Starship Troopers discussion is available online via Alexei Panshin’s website.)

  Dealing with these sometimes-intertwined matters makes this volume more crowded (even cluttered) and, I think, more partisan than the first, more embedded in the Heinleinian (and Virginian) point of view, with fewer parallax corrections from other angles. There were times when I wasn’t sure whether I was hearing a deliberate simulation/presentation of the Robert/Virginia viewpoints or the biographer’s identification or agreement with it. It shows up in matters both political and personal. When some particular offense against Heinlein’s sensibilities is reported, the source often has its own set of biases, and these are not always addressed.

  For example, Leon Stover informed Heinlein that scholar H. Bruce Franklin (‘‘that Marxist s.o.b. whose name I retch to mention’’) had personally torpedoed a proposed panel on Heinlein at the Modern Language Association conference. The accusation and the snotty aside are found in one of Stover’s letters, but there is no second source or confirmation for the accuracy of the allegation itself. Similarly, when Heinlein settled on Stover as ‘‘a possible biographer,’’ Patterson writes that Stover ‘‘was the first commentator in Heinlein’s experience who seemed at all able to see some of the major thematic currents in his work, to understand even a little of who he was as a human being.’’ (My emphasis.) The endnote for this passage does not indicate whether this sentiment about critical re
ception and perception belongs to Heinlein, or Patterson, or both. And while Heinlein’s aversion to being commented on and his low opinion of reviewers and scholars is well documented, a biographer should know that by the time this occurred (1987), reasonably positive academic work on Heinlein had been in print for at least a decade.

  Heinlein’s relationship with the commentariat, whether fannish, journalistic, or academic, was at best strained and uncomfortable and at worst hostile and dismissive – not always without cause. In the late 1940s, Forrest Ackerman made a point of sending along negative reviews from the fanzines and complained about Heinlein’s aiming of stories at a general readership unfamiliar with the traditions of SF. Perhaps as a result, Heinlein came to see fandom as harboring an annoying minority of ‘‘poisonous jerks’’ and distanced himself from it. His take on reviewers and critics was only marginally better. A career-overview essay by Sam Moskowitz might be barely tolerable, but reviews and critiques by James Blish, Algis Budrys, and especially Alexei Panshin angered Heinlein greatly. (To this day Panshin remains a bugaboo among Heinleinistas.) Heinlein managed to talk Galaxy’s Frederik Pohl out of running a long review of Stranger by Budrys, whom he believed ‘‘didn’t get it.’’ Heinlein did not make Budrys an unperson, but years later, when friend and supportive editor Ben Bova declined to spike an Omni review of Expanded Universe by the detested Panshin, Heinlein cut both the magazine and its editor out of his professional life.

  I have not run searches on the Kindle text of my review copy for all possible terms referring to reviews, criticism, scholarship, and so on, but my horseback estimate is that, aside from mentions of good reviews (sometimes in the aggregate), Patterson’s treatment of commentary emphasizes Heinlein’s complaints, resentments, and feelings of having been insulted, misunderstood, or having had his privacy invaded.

  There is another, more titillating parlor game for Heinlein watchers: the attempt to figure out the amatory arrangements of the Heinlein household(s) and the stresses and rearrangements that led to his divorce from Leslyn and remarriage to Virginia. The first volume of the biography, drawing strongly on Robert James’s research, revealed much about the marriage to Leslyn and its breakup. Virginia’s death freed Patterson to deal more freely with ‘‘some things she would not care to have written about,’’ and after the publication of The Learning Curve, new information not dependent on Virginia’s recollections surfaced. (Side note: The late Fred Pohl offers a take on the Leslyn-to-Virginia transition and the pre-and post-Ginny Heinlein that suffers from no such delicacy, though it lacks the documentary underpinnings of Patterson’s. Pohl also offers a different view of the role of editors in Heinlein’s career. See his breezy, perceptive, and not-unsympathetic introduction to The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction by Thomas Clareson & Joe Sanders.) In an Appendix rather mischievously titled ‘‘The Good Stuff’’, Patterson reproduces substantial sections of two letters from a close Heinlein family friend, describing Robert’s and Leslyn’s demeanors during the divorce and also looking back at the ménage a trois period with Virginia that preceded it. The Appendix includes about seven pages of this correspondence plus a letter from Heinlein dealing with the same matters. For me, the money quote comes in the middle of Grace Dugan Sang’s long letter to Theodore Sturgeon: ‘‘Volumes, I suppose, could be written about the Heinleins, and their curious relationship, and no one would know what they were really like.’’