Podkayne of Mars offers an analogous problem. In those days, a strong, intelligent, young female protagonist was a bold, new idea. Heinlein created one but gave her a voice emetic in its cuteness, the condition later diagnosed as Gidget’s disease.
Heinlein believed in strong sexual dimorphism. That’s endemic even today, but there was more to it than that. The unusual part was that he really liked women and considered them better than men in many ways, and it was not the kind of soi-disant female supremacism that tells women to do the really important things like bearing and rearing and leave to mere men such trivialities as art, science, and power. He was enthusiastic about female physicists and female presidents. That may explain some of the sometimes apologetic affection for the old man often expressed by female sf readers who disagree with him about many other things.
One might also expect an sf prototype to display the cold-as-equations toughness that is supposed to characterize hard sf. Not Heinlein. Like his later characters, he talked macho but was an old sentimentalist not too far below the surface. In life, he wept at his weddings and at many funerals. His writer stand-in character, Jubal Harshaw, dictated a gooey tale of a little lame kitten at Christmas to his secretary, and both ended up with tears running down their cheeks, “bathed in catharsis of schmaltz,” and he himself can be assumed to have had that experience. If he could not end a story with the Wedding March, he was likely to end with Taps; many of his tales conclude with tributes to fallen heroes, including in Starship Troopers one who wasn’t even in the story. Perhaps this trait connects to his notorious sensitivity: ignoring critics when he could, behaving badly when he couldn’t, repeatedly treating them in his fiction as villains and parasites.
While Heinlein consistently emphasized the importance of recognizing the facts and using the scientific method, he also insisted that there were areas that that approach could not touch, including the nature of human consciousness and the final question of why there is anything rather than nothing. Distrust of organized religion was below the surface in everything he wrote, and as expressing such distrust became more acceptable, he did more and more of it. Nevertheless, he was also willing to question the assumption that science has a final answer to everything religion claims. Category fiction can be seen as a series of implicit agreements between writer and reader—the romance heroine will get her man, the detective will find the perpetrator—and some feel that Heinlein committed the biggest deal breaker ever when he set a scene of Stranger in a Strange Land in Heaven. Fans are still trying to explain that one away.
In general, Stranger is something more than a science fiction book. It has deficiencies as a well-told story, but Russell Blackford suggested considering it as an anatomy, a category defined by Northrop Frye as made up of large books in which the central plot is subsidiary to digressions, copias, lists, set pieces, parodies, and other sideshows. (It is an approach that works well in sf, used by, among others, John Brunner in Stand on Zanzibar and Paul Di Filippo in Ciphers.) Those looking for good parts have found much, including sexual alternatives, Martian blasphemy that turns out to be Hindu orthodoxy, and one of the great sf dreams—what A. E. van Vogt called a “Null-A language,” one that conforms to the way things are so much better than ordinary language that it can be used to manipulate the world from a safe distance (a verbal waldo, as it were).
The book’s failures are not in its imaginings but in what it accepted. Heinlein set out to question all the assumptions of his society, but no one ever does that. The notorious line is “Nine times out of ten when a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault.” That was, when the book was written, not only what almost everyone believed but also what the criminal law said. (We used to live in even more of a rape culture.)
One quality we might expect of an sf prototype is that he writes about action and adventure, that he follows the traditional injunction to show rather than tell. That is not Robert Heinlein. Clareson and Sanders note that throughout his career he skimped on the action to get to the parts he found more interesting. (It became particularly noticeable in Time Enough for Love with the crucial escape by the good guys taking place entirely offstage, but he’d been doing it all along.) They add that he took the same approach to writing about sex, continuing to spare the reader explicit descriptions long after the taboo on such had ended.
Heinlein was in his own way as oblique and evasive as Gene Wolfe. He told several people that Eunice in I Will Fear No Evil is black and that the book says so in so many words. Within the text of Stranger in a Strange Land, we are told that we have enough information to determine which of the women introduced Valentine Michael Smith to the joys of sex, but I read the book at least ten times in the ’60s, and I still don’t know whodunit. (The expanded version does not help.) Clareson and Sanders appear to have found the money quote in Fear (“That off-white sets off your skin”) but offer no guidance on the defloration issue.
Heinlein liked to present himself as a plain old storyteller competing for the reader’s beer money, with none of those fancy tricks the “literary” types use, and he has long been used as a stick to beat those who openly aim higher. Perhaps, though, in G.K. Chesterton’s image, the defenders who did so were picking up a boomerang. Gardner Dozois wrote a well-known fanzine article suggesting that many of the offenses traditional sf readers and writers found worst in the New Wave reached their highest fruition in the Heinlein of the ’70s and early ’80s.
Furthermore, Leon Stover did us a service by pointing out that Heinlein had his own mainstream sources: not John Dos Passos and Joseph Conrad but Vincent McHugh and James Branch Cabell. One could also note that his textual interaction with his own earlier characters had its precedents in literary fiction. The gatherings of his fictional clans in Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks through Walls reminded me of J.D. Salinger’s Glass family, though the Glasses eschewed the sexual goings-on of the Heinlein characters in favor of adoration of each other’s profound spiritual qualities. (I, for one, prefer Heinlein’s approach.) At around the time of Number, John Barth, then an academically respected figure (and one Heinlein is on record as admiring), brought the protagonists of all his earlier books together with the author himself in letters (1979).
We will not stop hearing about Heinlein as the Good Old Days or Heinlein as the Bad Old Days, but he really is more interesting than that. A classic is a work that keeps on facilitating professional discourse production, according to the noted critic N. Mack Hobbs (as reported by Frederick C. Crews). By that standard, Robert A. Heinlein is a classic, and there is no chance that either the bio or the critical study will become the final word. They are, however, both essential reading for those of us who keep seeking more understanding of this complex and fascinating literary figure.
Arthur D. Hlavaty lives in Yonkers, New York.
Michael Swanwick
Six Untitled Tales Written in Mark Twain’s Library
I do not know why the curators of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, decided to allow writers to ply their craft in the great man’s library one Sunday morning in late March before the regular tours began. But when a friend alerted me to the opportunity, I immediately snagged it out of the air. Which is how I came to find myself sitting on a folding chair before a small wooden table along with twelve other writers, similarly disposed, quietly tapping away.
Samuel Clemens did not actually write in the library—that chore he performed in the billiard room—and I certainly was under no delusion that by some act of sympathetic magic I would absorb any special mana from his furniture and decorations. But it did make for a diverting two hours.
At the outset I could not help imagining the ghost of Samuel Clemens materializing behind me and leaning down to murmur, “Interesting. Do you also gather in groups to masturbate?” But, dismissing the fantasy, I got to work. Over the Internet, I initiated an interview with a writer whose name I will withhold until, in the ripeness of time, the thing is done. And on my wife’s laptop, which I
borrowed for the occasion (ink pens were not allowed, and my pencilmanship is dreadful), I began eleven stories of which I managed to complete six. The rest I may or may not return to someday. But those I finished in Mark Twain’s library are presented below.
1.
He sure didn’t look like much, this nondescript young man on the make. Mostly, he looked hungry. He’d been up all night, writing down lies to fob off as news for a regional paper that would be forgotten ten minutes after it folded, were it not for his presence. Or so our predictive metrics told us. In this, his original timeline, he was slated to die within the year of dysentery.
I was here to change that.
I sat down at the bar beside the man, and he politely moved his cigar to the far side of his plate of steak and eggs. I liked that. For reasons too complicated to go into here, the temporal authorities needed a major literary voice to help shore up the American national identity. We’d found the right fellow to embody that voice, and it was my job to slip a few protective drugs into his beer and then to turn him into an icon, no matter what his character was. But I was glad he was an all right guy. It bugged me to do favors for jerks like Hitler and Pol Pot.
“Say, pal,” I said. “I just got into Nevada from California, and my throat is dryer than the desert when the Devil drops by to rid himself of the chill back home. But I’m a little short of the ready stuff. Why don’t you buy me a drink?”
The young man turned to me, smiled in a way that suggested he was prepared to be imposed upon financially if I were to prove entertaining enough, and said, “Now, why should I do that?”
“I’ll tell you a story,” I said. “A real good one. About a celebrated jumping frog.”
2.
All boys grow up. Even Peter Pan left Neverland eventually, acquired a derby and a brolly, became something in the City, and spent the rest of his life amassing wealth, though J. M. Barrie left that part out of his book. So too with Tom Sawyer. After a rough start, bankruptcy, a dishonest partner who took him for everything, and a run on the banks that made a decade’s hard-won wealth disappear like the morning dew, he grew tough enough and ruthless enough to rack up a fortune—one which he held onto with an iron grip.
One day his secretary entered his office and said, “There’s a rough-looking man who insists on seeing you. He says his name is... Huckleberry?”
“Good lord!” Sawyer jumped to his feet. One hand went automatically to his paunch, while the other brushed back his thinning hair. For just a moment he was at an uncharacteristic loss. “Tell him ... I ... I mean ... Show him in, show him in!”
The man who entered—rawboned, sun-browned, with a backwoods grin—so clearly lived his life out-of-doors that he made the office with its fine appointments seem a transient dream. For an instant, the oak paneling and marble busts wavered in Sawyer’s sight, and underlying them, fleetly glimpsed, was the Missouri of his youth, the swimming holes and borrowed rowboats, the woods and caves and islands where they had recreated the Age of Chivalry in their childish imaginations.
“Huck Finn, as I live and breathe!” Sawyer exclaimed. “The last I heard of you, you’d lit out west into Indian Territory. Whatever brings you here?”
“Well, I reckon I hit it rich. Staked me a claim to a chunk of desert that held a seam of silver broader than a preacher’s buttocks, sold it for more money than I know what to do with, and now I’m looking for someplace safe to stash it. Heard you was peddlin’ investments, and so here I am.”
Sawyer’s eyes gleamed with avarice. He could see at a glance that his old friend was at heart still the same open, guileless, trusting boy he had always been. You could say that, in the absence of treachery and betrayal, he hadn’t really grown up yet.
“Put your trust in me,” Tom Sawyer said, “and I’ll make a man of you.”
3.
He called himself Captain Stormfield and said he’d just come to Earth on a comet. I doubted that, of course. But when you run into a man in uniform sitting in a spaceport bar, you figure either he’s a starship captain or else some spectacular variety of fraud. Frankly, being a connoisseur of eccentricity, I struck up a conversation with him hoping for the latter. “Here long?” I asked.
“No, no, a week or two, maybe a century at most. I got bored of Heaven and thought I’d check out the old haunts, see how they were doing.”
“Heaven. That out Betelgeuse way?”
The captain looked at me as if I were the most ignorant specimen of post-humanity imaginable and said, “No, I’m talking about the real Heaven—Pearly Gates, harps, clouds, the whole kit and caboodle. The place you go to after you die if you’re virtuous enough or else, as in my own case, inexplicably lucky.”
A tingle ran through me. I’d hooked a big one this time. “I thought that death was the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” I said carefully.
“That shows how little you know. In Heaven, you can have anything you want so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. I wanted to visit my old stomping grounds. So here I am.”
“Why aren’t there more reports of visitors from Heaven, then?” I hadn’t heard of a one.
Captain Stormfield looked abashed. “I guess I’m the first person to want to return.” Then he lit a cigar—I had to think far into deep storage to identify the object, and even then its declared purpose made not a lot of sense to me—and said, “I always did have low tastes.”
4.
The psychic stood in the center of the library. She wore scarves and large, dangling jewelry and far too much makeup. Her eyelids were two purple bruises. “Here,” she said. “The treasure is hidden somewhere in this room.”
“This room is a treasure,” the curator said.
“I am not speaking of gold. Nor jewels, no. I mean words. Words of the master.”
“We do have copies of his books.”
“Unpublished words!” The psychic struck a dramatic pose. “Words that—”
“Excuse me,” said the cameraman. “There was a flare of light from the window.” He adjusted the angle of his camera. “Can we get that again?”
The psychic took a deep breath, hit her mark, and said, “Here. The treasure is hidden somewhere in this room. A treasure of the immortal writer’s unfailingly immortal words.”
“Not every word that Mark Twain wrote was immortal,” the curator demurred. “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is a real stinker.” He was sorry to be involved in this debacle. But the board of trustees had decided that the Twain House needed publicity and so....
“Do you mind?” the psychic said. “I’m trying to work here.”
It was unfortunate that the show aired exactly one week after the assassination that the very same psychic had predicted on an earlier episode came to pass on the exact same day and precise same place she had said it would. Skeptics, of course, credited this to chance or conspiracy. Some suggested that the assassin had chosen that time and place precisely because she had predicted it, thinking it would guarantee him success.
No matter. In the popular mind there was no question of what should be done. A virtual hurricane of enthusiasm roused normally drowsy politicians from their stupor, pressure was applied, and in no time at all, the library was being ransacked on live TV. Paneling was ripped from walls, and wallpaper peeled away to examine the plaster underneath. The tiles of the hearth were dug up, and the bindings of every book were torn open. The rug was removed and the floorboards lifted one by one. Not an inch of the room was spared.
It was a dreadful mess, and nothing was found. Because, it was widely concluded, there was nothing to be found. Or else it was a conspiracy on the part of the museum. Which had a hell of a time raising the money to undo the damage because one group thought they were withholding something and the other thought they should never have gone along with the search in the first place.
Unnoticed in all the furor was the fact that the books had been so arranged that in a code of Clemens’s own devising the first words of thei
r titles spelled out a poem:
Lord, what fools are humankind,
In reason they are blind.
They harken to frauds
And worship false gods—
It’s easier than using one’s mind.
5.
James Thurber’s childhood home in Columbus had the rare fortune to be preserved as a museum and literary center. In consequence of which, twice a year it hosted a writer-in-residence who was housed in a furnished third-floor room and given the gift of time to work on his or her craft. That room, the very one from which Thurber’s grandfather (as described in My Life and Hard Times) threw shoes down the stairway to frighten away ghosts, subsequently knew many distinguished writers. But possibly the most honored and certainly the most frequent of these guests was Garrison Keillor.
One night, the first night of his third residency, Keillor was visited by the ghost of Mark Twain. He’d been lying abed, unable to sleep, thinking of the fate of literary humorists in America. So many of the greats were completely forgotten! Thurber himself grew year by year less well known, less beloved though his prose was still as fresh as the day it was written. It was a sobering subject for a man who was known and beloved as a humorist himself and the occasion for many dark thoughts.
A sudden chuckle, close at hand, brought Keillor bolt upright in the bed. Whipping his head to one side, he saw a ghostly pallor in the form of a whiskered gent in a white suit. He recognized the apparition immediately—who would not?—as Samuel Clemens, the man who wrote under the pseudonym of Mark Twain.
“You’re working yourself into a sweat, old hoss,” the revenant said genially, “and all to no purpose.”
The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue 310, June, 2014 Page 2