If Robert Heinlein could not achieve social change through his political efforts, perhaps he might achieve it through the pen, to gain that “new birth” that is so central to his fiction.
Anybody who has read Robert Heinlein will recognize that he offered provocative commentary on our society and advocated for radical social change. Indeed, his politics have often confused people. How could a man who supported the Socialist Upton Sinclair and the Democrat FDR become a supporter of arch-conservative Republicans Barry Goldwater and Jeanne Kirkpatrick? As Heinlein once explained to Alfred Bester in 1959, “I’ve simply changed from a soft-headed radical to a hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian…” Heinlein’s apparent change in politics makes sense if viewed this way: he saw problems that were not being solved and went to the political forces he believed had the greatest chance of solving them. In 1938, the most dangerous problem he perceived was the Great Depression, and he looked to FDR and Upton Sinclair for results; in 1959, it was nuclear war and communism (a hatred for which Heinlein developed before World War II, not with the Cold War). He supported Barry Goldwater in 1964 because he believed Goldwater would be far more effective against the Soviets than Lyndon Johnson.
Throughout his career, he would suggest solutions to the problems he perceived in society, always implicitly, if not explicitly. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” Heinlein’s writing does just that, stretching our minds, teaching us to think and learn, even while entertaining us. If we want to solve persistent problems, we have to think about them in new ways. In criticism of his later works, particularly from the time of Starship Troopers on, the most frequent objection is that Heinlein is “lecturing” the reader. If only all of our teachers could hold such wonderful seminars! As is evident in For Us, The Living, from the very beginning he wanted to present controversial ideas in his work. In writing for Astounding, he learned to produce commercial fiction, focusing on plot and characters and sheer story. Once he built an audience who would read whatever he wrote, he moved the challenging themes back to the forefront, as in this first novel. If readers were outraged by his ideas or by their presentation, so much the better.
Late in life, Robert Heinlein told bookseller Alice Massoglia that he was going to have to change his name and write under a new one. Shocked, she asked, “Why?” His answer: “Because I think I’ve insulted everybody I can as Robert Heinlein!” Heinlein wanted to provoke response in order to wake up his readers and lead them to really think about the issues at hand.
As Heinlein told Campbell, For Us, The Living was “entirely concerned with the origin of certain dominant human thought patterns and how they might change if changes in the economic and social matrix shifted the survival values of these dominant mores. It attempted to show that most ethical standards were relative—that the terms vice and virtue depended on the psychological matrices.” In this way, For Us, The Living reads more like one of his late novels, rather than one of his earlier works. The more didactic Heinlein of the later novels was always there, subdued in the Heinlein who wrote for Astounding and collected those paychecks. With the publication of For Us, The Living, the pattern of Heinlein’s career takes a completely different shape—the later novels are not an aberration but the completion of a full circle.
So what unusual ideas does Heinlein present in this novel?
Ever hear of the metric system? Clearly, Heinlein felt it was a better standard of measurement, as his future society uses it exclusively.
Heinlein also believed that English spelling needed to be streamlined and made more logical; hence, the use of phonetic spellings such as “Astronomikal Almanak and Efmerides” and “corectiv masaj.”
Interesting as well that Heinlein predicts a united Europe, although one different in governing structure and outcome than the one we see today. He also predicted a common European currency, which now exists as the euro.
In 1938, few people considered space travel anything but an insane fantasy. Here, as he so often did, Heinlein advocates rockets and space exploration. He was an avid follower of rocketry, even joining the American Interplanetary Society in 1931 (which became the American Rocket Society, later merged into the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). After his death, his third wife and widow, Virginia Heinlein, endowed the Robert Anson Heinlein Chair in Aerospace Engineering at the Annapolis Naval Academy.
For today’s readers (and for many in 1938), the most unfamiliar idea is that of his proposed economy. The economic program Heinlein advocates is not original to him, and is known by the name of Social Credit. He used the same economic system in Beyond This Horizon, where it is referred to as the “Social Dividend” paid to each member of that society.
Heinlein’s interpretation of Social Credit Theory was that financial panics and the entire boom and bust cycle are caused by the relationship between production and consumption. Economists recognize that when consumption falls behind production, nothing good can follow. The Great Depression was caused in large part by overproduction in the twenties, followed by layoffs and the resulting decrease in consumption. Farming constantly overproduced, as did other “sick industries” such as textiles and coal mining. FDR’s solution was to pay farmers not to produce—which we have continued to do, although the recipients are mostly agricultural corporations these days and not individual farmers. As Heinlein looked around him in the thirties, what he saw were failed attempts to restore consumption. He pointed out, in For Us, The Living, that FDR had attempted to hand out direct relief and to provide public works, but as we now know, only the massive expenditures of World War II ended the Great Depression—by putting everybody back to work, thus allowing them to consume the goods being offered. Direct relief and public works were simply not enough.
For Heinlein, Social Credit seemed a much better solution.
The economist C. H. Douglas had first proposed the idea of Social Credit in the twenties, and with the onslaught of the Depression, his ideas caught fire in Alberta, Canada. The Alberta Social Credit Party took control of Alberta’s government in 1935, and Douglas became their economic adviser. Eventually, Alberta’s attempts to implement Social Credit were shut down by the courts. But when Heinlein wrote this novel, there were Social Credit factions in the United States as well, including Los Angeles.
Heinlein’s version of Social Credit argues that banks constantly used the power of the fractional reserve to profit by manufacturing money out of thin air, by “fiat.” Banks were (and are) required by federal law to keep only a fraction of their total loans on reserve at any time; they could thus manipulate the money supply with impunity. By loaning out money that literally does not exist, and gaining in return actual cash, banks gather enormous profits. Abraham Lincoln once said, “If the American people knew tonight exactly how the monetary and banking system worked, there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” If you took away that power from the banks by ending the fractional reserve system, and instead let the government do the exact same thing for the good of the people, you could permanently resolve the disparities between production and consumption. By simply giving people the amount of money necessary to spring over the gap between available production and power to consume, you could end the boom and bust business cycle permanently, and free people to pursue their own interests.
Until a society fully implements Social Credit, who can speak to the truth of this argument?
But Heinlein believed in it, as late as 1942 in Beyond This Horizon. And Lazarus Long uses the power of the fractional reserve when he works as a banker in Time Enough for Love, so Heinlein clearly hadn’t changed his mind about the way banks functioned by the early seventies.
Similarly, he never changed his mind as to the importance of an individual’s right to freedom and privacy. Throughout his entire canon, he argues extensively for the need of the government to remain out of the private affairs of individuals; it is most explicit in Fo
r Us, The Living when he suggests that the cornerstone of his future government is the constitutional recognition of the right to privacy. In this novel, a citizen should be allowed to do whatever he wishes, unless he harms another citizen. What he does in the “private sphere” is simply nobody else’s business.
Heinlein’s own life was predicated upon this distinction. His marriage to his second wife, Leslyn, was forced to take a dual character. In public, they were the polite couple, genteel, dedicated to public service, “moral” to a fault. In private, they had an open marriage, as Perry and Diana do in this novel, once Perry’s jealousy is cured. They also pursued nude photography and actively attended nudist camps, as did several other science fiction writers, including Theodore Sturgeon. Catherine de Camp posed nude for Heinlein, and her picture was shown at a party with the de Camps and Isaac Asimov in attendance. After Heinlein’s divorce from Leslyn in 1948, he repeatedly went out of his way to erase their marriage from any public mention. Heinlein’s furious insistence on his own privacy, and the shrouding of his past from public inquiry, rests at least in part from a need to protect his public reputation as a political figure and as a writer—and throughout much of the 1950s, his major reputation outside the science fiction community (and most significant income) was that of a writer of children’s books.
Yet when he wrote For Us, The Living, he crusaded for this revolution in privacy, sexuality, and economic consistency.
When he couldn’t get it published, he took up the fight in the science fiction pulps.
These magazines would never have allowed him to write openly about sexual issues. In fact, Astounding edited out all sexual references, leading some of its contributors to look for ways to evade the puritanical restrictions, as when one writer inserted a reference to a “ball-bearing mouse trap” (a tomcat) and another used alien names that when pronounced correctly were sexual terms in other languages. But while sex was forbidden, Heinlein would still be able to crusade on issues of privacy, politics, religion—and do so while being paid for it.
Now we return to the matter of rejections. Heinlein’s first two submissions to John W. Campbell in April and May of 1939 were accepted. Six of his next stories—“Let There Be Light,” “Elsewhen,” “Pied Piper,” “My Object All Sublime,” “Beyond Doubt,” and “Lost Legacy”—were rejected. How frustrating for a writer who had already made two sales right out of the starting gate! And his novel, his social revolution, was dead in the publishing waters—by itself, the sexual freedom the novel embraces would have sunk it for mainstream publishers in 1939.
Heinlein, perhaps frustrated, but clearly determined, decided to reshape the material in For Us, The Living. The concept of a future history is often cited as Heinlein’s greatest contribution to science fiction and remains the core concept of this novel. By lifting, revising, and expanding the most compelling ideas from For Us, The Living and turning them into stories, Heinlein found a way to break the dry spell with Campbell. Once he became dominant in the pulps, he was able to stretch the boundaries farther and farther with each tale.
Heinlein always found a way to open up science fiction to wider possibilities. After the war, he was the first science fiction pulp writer to break into the “slicks” of the mainstream. He was the first science fiction writer since H. G. Wells to write a screenplay for a Hollywood movie, the first American film to realistically depict a moon shot: Destination Moon. He was the first science fiction writer to begin a series of juveniles that would educate entire generations of readers to love science fiction and outer space. His later novels continually challenged the very definition of science fiction, provoking anger and debate—and, as always, a legion of imitators.
Throughout his career, Heinlein mentored other writers, particularly those just starting out. One of his five rules for writing compiled in “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” stated, “You must keep it on the market until sold.” Not having everything published gnawed at him, and as he once wrote to science fiction editor and writer Frederik Pohl in 1940, the stories “sit here and shame me.” The six rejected stories were submitted elsewhere until finally sold—although a story-hungry Campbell actually bought one that he had initially turned down, “Elsewhen.”
So why has For Us, The Living never been published…until now?
Shortly before Heinlein’s death, as he and his beloved wife, Virginia, were preparing for his final days, their copies of this unpublished manuscript were destroyed.
By now, having read the novel, longtime fans may have noticed that some of Heinlein’s earliest stories (and a few of his later ones) were mined from For Us, The Living. In a way, much of this novel has indeed been published, as “If This Goes On—,” “The Roads Must Roll,” “Coventry,” and Beyond This Horizon, the most obvious extractions. Perhaps Heinlein thought there was no point in publishing a novel that had already been stripped and resold…but his fans know better. His entire Future History, published primarily in The Past Through Tomorrow, uses recurring characters and themes, and the later novels are often a constant blending from previous works. No, there must be another reason.
Robert Heinlein often spoke disparagingly of his writing, rejecting the idea that his work was anything more than just “stories.” That posture was a good defense against both the fans who wanted him to be their guru and the few literary critics who chose to write negatively about him. Heinlein showed in The Number of the Beast that he had little love for literary critics—he isolated them in an inescapable room, wherein they might practice their vicious and cannibalistic art on one another until they could escape by actually reading the books they were criticizing. The few books published about Heinlein before his death did not give him much reason for respect, given their persistent factual errors and ax-grinding interpretations. So the Heinleins had few expectations that his work would ever receive acceptance outside of the science fiction readership.
Before her death in January 2003, Virginia “Ginny” Heinlein came to realize that her husband’s work is now being treated in contexts wider than science fiction. Scholars are beginning to recognize the connections between Heinlein’s writing and that of Voltaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome, Rudyard Kipling, and James Branch Cabell, among others. She began to realize that the shroud of privacy surrounding their lives could finally be lifted, in order to help the literary reappraisal now taking hold. She authorized and collaborated on a full biography of Robert Heinlein, which is being written by William Patterson, the editor of the Heinlein Journal. She aided many other researchers, including Philip Owenby and Marie Ormes for their doctoral dissertations and me in my own research into the life of Leslyn Heinlein. Ginny helped found and support The Heinlein Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to furthering her husband’s goals, including education, blood drives, space exploration, and eventually, publishing a scholarly edition of the Heinlein canon (you can join this noble cause at www.heinleinsociety.org).
In short, Ginny decided her husband’s work and life should be treated openly and fully.
However, Ginny died before she knew that a single copy of For Us, The Living had survived. On Thanksgiving Day, 2002, weakened by a difficult recovery from pneumonia earlier that year, she broke her hip. She seemed to be recovering from her surgery and was to be released the week that I received a copy of For Us, The Living in the mail. I was looking forward to discussing my discovery with her when she suddenly passed away in January 2003.
Major writers often leave behind unpublished works. Heinlein himself had two unpublished nonfiction books released posthumously: How to Be a Politician (published as Take Back Your Government!) and Tramp Royale. Hemingway has had no fewer than four major books published after his death. Heinlein’s favorite writer, Mark Twain, had several books published after his death, including the masterpiece The Mysterious Stranger. Literary scholars treat these works in their proper context, as pieces of the larger puzzle that comprise the writer’s entire output.
As the
first step in the fifty-year writing career of Robert Heinlein, For Us, The Living is like looking at Neil Armstrong’s first footprint on the moon—a footprint Robert Heinlein played no small part in making possible, with his fiction glorifying space travel, and his work on Destination Moon.
And that is how I believe Ginny would have come to see it: as the beginning, deserving of preservation.
So how did this manuscript survive?
Shortly before his death, Robert Heinlein decided he wanted his biography to be written. Dr. Leon Stover, an expert on H. G. Wells, had written a book on Heinlein that, by and large, Heinlein liked. After his death, Ginny informed Dr. Stover that he was to be the authorized biographer. Dr. Stover immediately began contacting Heinlein’s surviving friends with the estate’s full approval. One of those friends was the highly decorated Admiral Caleb Laning, Heinlein’s best friend at the Naval Academy and his coauthor on two post-World War II nonfiction essays. Cal Laning had kept fifty years’ of correspondence with Heinlein intact, and he handed this treasure trove over to Dr. Stover for use in the authorized biography.
But Dr. Stover and Ginny Heinlein soon had a falling out, and she revoked his permission to write the biography.
For the next decade, nothing further happened.
Through my research and contacts with those who knew Leslyn Heinlein, I found myself in possession of a partial manuscript of Dr. Stover’s unpublished biography. In the few pages I had, Dr. Stover mentioned his possession of the manuscript of For Us, The Living, apparently given to him by Cal Laning.
Attempts to contact Dr. Stover failed, but I had the name of his student assistant, Michael Hunter. Hunter was quite surprised that I had found him, but forthright in discussing his work with Dr. Stover. When Hunter was a senior, Dr. Stover had asked him to read the novel, make a synopsis for use in the biography, and use it in a student project connecting Heinlein’s first novel to both H. G. Wells and to Heinlein’s later writings. Hunter never did anything with his copy of the manuscript, under the assumption that Dr. Stover’s biography would soon be published and Heinlein’s first novel revealed to the world. Life went on, and he never heard from Dr. Stover again.
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