The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  In fact, Heinlein did need to write.

  In one year, from a standing start, Heinlein had turned out a truly prodigious amount of work—three short novels, four novelets, and seven short stories. And he had thought of at least a dozen stories more that he might write. He was just bubbling over with SF ideas.

  The stories Heinlein had written contained all sorts of formal knowledge and conscious cerebration, but they were also the most intensely personal body of work any SF writer had ever produced. As we’ve seen, they were full of long-cherished Heinlein dreams, and private references, and a great deal of autobiography, both disguised and overt.

  These were highly immediate stories. Previous science fiction stories of the future had either been brief visits or else were one-dimensional accounts. Heinlein, however, had put incredible effort into working out techniques that would allow the imagined future to feel plausible and lived-in.

  Finally, these were urgent stories. Again and again, they concerned dedicated men—overseers of society—who are plagued by nightmares and unspoken doubts and are on the very verge of cracking up under the awesome weight of their responsibilities. In “Blowups Happen,” for instance, he had written of his atomic engineers:

  They were selected not alone for their intelligence and technical training, but quite as much for their characters and sense of social responsibility. Sensitive men were needed—men who could fully appreciate the importance of the charge entrusted to them; no other sort would do. But the burden of responsibility was too great to be borne indefinitely by a sensitive man. It was, of necessity, a psychologically unstable condition. Insanity was an occupational disease.489

  And in “The Roads Must Roll,” he had written of his main character, the Chief Engineer of the Diego-Reno Roadtown: “He had carried too long the superhuman burden of kingship—which no sane mind can carry light-heartedly—and was at this moment perilously close to the frame of mind which sends captains down with their ships.”490

  But, of course, as we have also seen, in one early Heinlein story after another, society’s major institutions—business, politics, religion—are indicted as short-sighted, greedy, corrupt, dishonest, dangerous, and possibly outright evil. Common folk—the sort of little people who go “ ‘ridey-ridey home to their dinners’ ”491 via the rolling roads—are seen as easily duped, mesmerized by the moment, lost in the trivial and superficial aspects of life, oblivious to higher concerns. And when people of real knowledge do attempt to share their experience with society, ordinary citizens are apt to pay no attention, while the corrupt are likely to try to silence or kill them.

  It was a complex tangle of thought and feeling that Heinlein was being driven to try to sort out in these urgent, immediate, intense personal stories. He yearned to be an effective man of higher dedication, but he felt thwarted. He longed for a society deserving of his service, but saw instead a society of unworthiness and corruption. He wondered whether it was possible to be a Wellsian Samurai or something like it without being struck down for his pride or breaking under the strain. And he couldn’t make it all come out even.

  Some of the time, Heinlein might reassert the duty to society of the man of superior knowledge and ability. At other times, he might suggest the necessity for a revolution that would make society more worthy of its best men. And, in yet other moods—say, after a visit to his old boyhood surroundings in Kansas City—he might say to hell with society, and once again doubt the reality of anything and everything but himself.

  Science fiction allowed Heinlein a way to express all the different facets of this dilemma, and actually to get away with it. Who cared what sort of accusations or hypothetical possibilities or personal fantasies or outright heresies were uttered in stories in some pulp science fiction magazine? Now that Heinlein had both learned to write for Campbell and presented Campbell with his terms for continuing to write, there wasn’t anything he wanted to say that he couldn’t say as science fiction.

  What is more, science fiction stories offered Heinlein a means of working his way through his problem. As a boy reading Hugo Gernsback’s magazines, Heinlein had pinned his fondest hopes and expectations on a future that would be different from his present. And in growing up, he had found exactly that—a mid-Twentieth Century America that was not the same as the early Twentieth Century America into which he had been born.

  Western society had been undergoing an accelerating pace of change since the Age of Reason. But it was only now, with the transition to the new Atomic Age, that the pace had become rapid enough and insistent enough that it was possible for one man to point to the evidences of difference and say, “This is what change is. This is how it works.”

  Robert Heinlein was that rare individual. He knew that society was constantly undergoing outward and inward change. And he had the files of clippings he had been accumulating for the past ten years to prove it.

  The way that Heinlein found to deal with his great problem of matching his ambition, his talent and his energy to the needs of society was to combine his dilemma with his conviction of ongoing change and future difference. The new, mutable multiplex future that Heinlein had been working out for himself in stories like “ ‘If This Goes On—,’ ” “The Roads Must Roll,” and “Magic, Inc.” allowed him the possibility of imagining what worthy work might be for the man of superior intelligence, training, character and responsibility, and also to imagine what kind of society might support and not oppose him in doing it.

  And yet, Heinlein’s right hand was not aware of what his left hand was up to. On the conscious level of his mind, Heinlein could say that he was just doing it for the money, or for a limited period of time, and believe that was the truth.

  As a demonstration to Campbell and to himself that he was a strict pragmatist, Heinlein turned out the serial novel that Campbell immediately needed while he was still on his trip to the East Coast: Sixth Column, by Anson MacDonald (Astounding, Jan.-Mar. 1941). And it was a considerable testament to his skills that he was able to take Campbell’s old-fashioned plot about Oriental invaders combatted by American super-science and write it in such a way that it could pass for modern science fiction.

  But Heinlein’s heart would not really be involved in this mere job of work, and Sixth Column would be the only story idea he would ever accept from Campbell. Whether or not he consciously realized it, Heinlein needed to write the stories he had been writing and it was imperative for him to continue.

  He would find this out when the time came that he actually attempted to quit. In the summer of 1941, Campbell challenged the new order Heinlein had established by going so far as to reject a Heinlein story. And so, just as he had promised he would do, Heinlein set his science fiction aside and turned to other things.

  He would recall:

  I promptly retired—put in a new irrigation system—built a garden terrace—resumed serious photography, etc. This went on for about a month when I found that I was beginning to be vaguely ill: poor appetite, loss of weight, insomnia, jittery, absent-minded—much like the early symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis, and I thought, “Damn it, am I going to have still a third attack?”492

  But, in fact, it didn’t turn out to be tuberculosis yet again. Just as soon as Heinlein had made it evident to Campbell that his threat to quit was a serious one, and Campbell had unrejected the story in question, Heinlein went back to the typewriter. And instantly his symptoms disappeared.

  Heinlein was hooked—not just for now, but for a lifetime. He would write SF until the United States entered World War II and he got caught up in war work. And after the war, against his expectations, he would go back to science fiction writing—though mostly for other and better-paying markets than the Campbell Astounding. Heinlein would be a dominating figure in SF for the next forty years and more.

  The crucial intuitive leap of integration that first established him as that was made in the late summer of 1940, just as soon as Heinlein had finished proving to Campbell and himself what a rationa
l, competent, controlled fellow he really was by grinding out Sixth Column for the money to buy a car when he got home.

  With the check in his pocket, Heinlein set out for California. But along the way he stopped off in Jackson, Michigan to meet the last SF writing hero of his youth, Doc Smith. And it proved to be a very happy encounter. The two men, the old master of science fiction and the new, took an immediate liking to one another.

  Back home in Los Angeles, at the informal gatherings of SF writers that met at Heinlein’s home on Saturday nights, which he liked to call “the Mañana Literary Society,”493 Heinlein might point out, accurately enough, that the social and cultural dimensions of life were missing from the Lensman stories. But in the presence of Smith himself, Heinlein felt no inclination to be critical. He found himself genuinely impressed by the man’s largeness of character and by the breadth and depth of his practical skill and knowledge.

  So impressed was he, in fact, that on impulse he took Smith up on his offer to road-test and select a used car for him there in Michigan for the price of his Sixth Column check (plus, as it turned out, thirty-five cents in cash). The ’39 Chevy that Smith finally chose Heinlein dubbed Skylark Five. And so good a car did it prove to be that he was able to keep on driving it for the next dozen years.

  For his part, Doc Smith was sufficiently taken with Heinlein that he enrolled him as a member of “the Galactic Roamers,”494 the informal brain trust that read Smith’s Lensman stories in manuscript and offered him comment and special advice. This was a rare honor that had been accorded to no other SF writer of the younger generation.

  So, feeling like a member of the Galactic Patrol, Heinlein headed off toward California in Skylark Five. And on the way to Los Angeles, a momentous thing happened. Heinlein was struck by a particularly dazzling insight, one that took all of the varied work he had been publishing in Astounding and made a whole of it.

  In these stories from his first year of writing—along with “ ‘Let There Be Light—’ ” by Lyle Monroe—he had projected two separate future backgrounds.

  One was the middle-distance future he’d worked out years before, with the overthrow of the rule of the Prophets and the establishment of the Covenant. This extrapolation of the most tyrannous elements of his childhood into the future, and their utter defeat by the forces of freedom and rationality, was very important to Heinlein. It was no less than his psychic autobiography.

  The other future that he had been evolving for the coming half-century, with its sun-power screens, road-cities and atomic power plants, was less urgently powerful stuff—except for its climax with the death of old D.D. Harriman on the Moon. But it was much more detailed and plausible and varied.

  In fact, so much had Heinlein’s SF skill and insight grown during the last year that this near-range future was starting to make his other future of “ ‘If This Goes On—,’ ” “Coventry” and “Misfit” seem fuzzy, static and remote. It now seemed a much less likely development from the present. It was old-fashioned, utopian and romantic.

  Could it be possible to apply the new tricks and techniques of presentation he had been working out in such a way as to give this more distant future greater believability and substance? In “Magic, Inc.” he had managed to make spirit magic and tea-leaf reading and all sorts of other arrant nonsense seem the very stuff of tomorrow. Why couldn’t the Prophets and the Covenant be made as plausible as that?

  For that matter, what was to prevent the farther future from being made to seem every bit as immediate, detailed and self-consistent as the short-range future outlined on his wall chart?

  All in a flash, then, Heinlein saw that his wall chart could be extended well beyond fifty years; and also that the future waiting there just might be—why not?—the world of “ ‘If This Goes On—.’ ” He could actually combine the old future of his historical outline and the new future of his wall chart. His two futures might be one future!

  The wall chart would then have more extension, while the future of the Prophets would take on greater definition; one set of stories would give support and credence to the other. Not only that, but this new combined future would necessarily be not merely a place of change, but of change after change after change. Now wouldn’t that be something!

  Oh, some things would get lost in the process. He would have to kill off the rolling roads. There certainly could be no place for road-cities in the world of the Prophets. Space travel would have to be imagined as starting with Harriman, then stopping for a time, and then starting up again under the Covenant. And the rule of the Prophets couldn’t possibly appear as total, overwhelming and demonic as once it had. Instead of being the future, it would only be an episode, just one phase in a kaleidoscopic, ever-changing future of multiplicity.

  But these losses would be as nothing next to what would be gained: a future that wasn’t all of one piece. This future would have room for rolling roads and for Prophets armed with spears and vortex guns and for the libertarian society of the Covenant. And more besides. Almost anything you cared to put in could find its place in the framework.

  In order to make his two sets of stories fit together, Heinlein radically reworked and expanded his wall chart when he got home. In this new form, it covered two hundred years, marked off in decades from 1940 to 2140. Eight written stories were included, from “Life-Line” in more-or-less the immediate present to “Misfit” in 2105 or thereabouts.

  In itself, this chart was a brilliant, multifaceted work of modern science fiction, both plausible and mysterious:

  The main body of the chart was divided into a number of different areas presenting biographical, technical, social, economic and historical information. There were lines measuring off the life-spans of his various characters and the periods of use of different inventions. There were notations of particular achievements and innovations. There was one vertical column devoted to sociological notes, and another reserved for general remarks.

  Looking at the chart, it was possible to see that Douglas and Martin, the inventors of the sun-power screens, were imagined as dying together around 1985. The rolling roads existed for about fifty years, from 1955 until just after the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. And, as Heinlein worked it out, the life of Nehemiah Scudder, the First Prophet, necessarily had to be short. He was born around 1985 and was dead shortly after 2015.

  A large number of facts and events that existed as yet only in Heinlein’s imagination, but not in his stories, were noted on the chart: “The ‘FALSE DAWN,’ 1960-70 . . . the Voorhis financial proposals . . . Revolution in Little America . . . The Travel Unit and the Fighting Unit . . . Parastatic engineering . . . the end of human adolescence and the beginning of first mature culture.”495 And a great deal more.

  Even after Heinlein had finished integrating his further future into his wall chart, however, a considerable problem still existed. The fit between the two sets of stories really wasn’t all that snug.

  “Requiem” was the last in time of Heinlein’s five near-future stories. But if old D.D. Harriman had been a reader of the Electrical Experimenter as a boy, there was no way this story could take place much later than 1990.

  “ ‘If This Goes On—’ ” was the earliest in time of Heinlein’s three middle-distance stories. And there we had been told that the era of the Prophets had lasted “for many generations.”496 The absolute earliest moment that Heinlein dared to place “ ‘If This Goes On—’ ” was around 2070.

  This left a considerable hole—an eighty-year blank spot from 1990 to 2070—right in the center of a two-hundred-year history. But this gap seemed like no particular problem to Heinlein. Such was his confidence at this moment that it seemed to him there was nothing he couldn’t put in his chart. He could throw off the most outrageous sort of idea, employ almost any kind of plot, leap anywhere in space and time, and still make it all part of his great schema.

  And he set out to demonstrate as much to himself in the next three stories he wrote:

  The
first of these was “ ‘And He Built a Crooked House’ ” (Astounding, Feb. 1941), a mathematical jape about a contemporary Los Angeles house built in the shape of an unfolded tesseract, or four-dimensional super-cube. When an earthquake jolts the house into its “normal” configuration, it becomes a place of irrationality, offering doorways into alternate worlds and strange, frightening glimpses of the back of one’s own head.

  Although this story had no ties to any other Heinlein story, he entered it on his chart anyway, right after “Life-Line.” When the charted stories were published in book form after the war, Heinlein would have second thoughts about including “ ‘And He Built a Crooked House’ ”—but right now such was his mood that he saw no reason not to put it in.

  The next story that Heinlein wrote after his return to Los Angeles was his proof that the gap in the chart could be filled in. This was a novelet called “Logic of Empire” (Astounding, Mar. 1941), set around the year 2010.

  Taken as an independent story, “Logic of Empire” was a bit of a mess. It combined two standard Thirties story formulas—the tale of the man of privilege who gets a taste of what real life is like, and the space opera story about slavery on some other planet—and turned them into something like a lecture in economics:

  Heinlein’s protagonist, lawyer Humphrey Wingate, begins by doubting that slavery actually exists on Venus, and then learns better at first hand when he signs himself up for a term of service while on a drunken lark. But when he has escaped from servitude in the swamps of Venus and returns to Earth to try to tell about what he has experienced, nobody really wants to hear it.