In the Strange Land of Robert Heinlein (1984)
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Quoting from the review:
When it comes to more difficult issues, Mendlesohn neatly avoids the simplifications that frequently appear on both sides: “With Heinlein it’s always a case of being a little bit more complicated than it initially seems.”
Mendlesohn compares his vocal opposition to bigotry with the limitations of his nonwhite characters – whose racial identities are often reduced to “Easter eggs” in the text – and his lack of sensitivity toward institutional oppression: “Heinlein understands and opposes enslavement and colour prejudice, but he does not really see that racism has a wider infrastructure. He does not understand what we now frame as systemic racism.”
Elsewhere, Mendlesohn points out that Heinlein’s most famous aphorism on guns – “An armed society is a polite society” – falls apart in context, while their discussion of Heinlein’s “intensely personal” fascination with gender may inspire many readers to see his portrayal of women in a new light. Writing of his “yearning to get a real feeling for what women think, feel and want,” Mendlesohn concludes: “Heinlein made a conscious effort to think about what women were like, and how they thought about themselves. He tried to create for them a voice that was embodied and aware of being female in a male world. In these stories he also tried to make an argument about the possibilities for shifting that sense of self.”
This willingness to view a writer through the lens of the critic’s own time is just what we ought to expect from a serious evaluation of a figure in the main line of American literature, which is precisely how Heinlein is regarded by his fans. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein pays him the compliment of holding him to his own high standards.
[0]: https://locusmag.com/2019/05/alec-nevala-lee-reviews-the-ple...
I grew up reading Heinlein. I've read it all; the short stories, the juveniles, the late-period novels, the early and late nonfiction essays, the recently published "lost" works. I consider him and Asimov among my formative influences. I disagree with the critics the article cites about the quality of his post-surgery work; Friday is fantastic and Job, the book the profile is putatively about, is also great. They're just different from the Scribner's juveniles. In turn I like the juveniles, but they don't stick with me as much as his short stories, or his late novels like Friday (which did cyberpunk two years earlier and better than Neuromancer did), Job, or (as weird as they are) The Cat Who Walks Through Walls/To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
I very much think, however, that Stranger in a Strange Land can only be read with vicarious embarrassment.
I understand Heinlein is a culturally important figure in Science Fiction, but he should not be one of our heroes.
“Nor do I feel responsible for the generally low state of the Negro — as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved. Having traveled quite a bit in Africa, I know what she means. One thing is clear: Whether one speaks of technology or social institutions, ‘civilization’ was invented by us, not by the Negroes. As races, as cultures, we are five thousand years, about, ahead of them. Except for the culture, both institutions and technology, that they got from us, they would still be in the stone age, along with its slavery, cannibalism, tyranny, and utter lack of the concept we call ‘justice.’”
More in the same vein here:
https://worldsf.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/heinlein-and-racism...
Includes such evergreen classics as “neurological differences”, “white people are the ones actually discriminated against”, etc.
This is something a KKK member would say. And in fact, KKK members do say exactly this, 19:22 in this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN6Sb4SrK4c&t=547s#t=19m22s
(By the way, Soft White Underbelly is a compelling YouTube channel, describing itself as: "interviews and portraits of the human condition")
>Nor do I feel responsible for the generally low state of the Negro — as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved
If that Heinlein quote outrages you, this ought to make your head explode:
>Somewhere, sometime, maybe 400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I'll never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants somehow made it up to South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36 years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn't been forced to make that horrific voyage, I would not have been standing there that day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist -- a mere spectator -- watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have instead been one of them -- or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.
>Does that sound shocking? Does it sound almost like a justification for the terrible crime of slavery? Does it sound like this black man has forgotten his African roots? Of course it does, all that and more. And that is precisely why I have tried to keep the emotion buried so deep for so long. But as I sit before the computer screen, trying to sum up my time in Africa, I have decided I cannot lie to you, the reader. After three years traveling around this continent as a reporter for The Washington Post, I've become cynical, jaded. I have covered the famine and civil war in Somalia; I've seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire (hence the trucks dumping the bodies into pits); I've interviewed evil "warlords," I've encountered machete-wielding Hutu mass murderers; I've talked to a guy in a wig and a shower cap, smoking a joint and holding an AK-47, on a bridge just outside Monrovia. I've seen some cities in rubble because they had been bombed, and some cities in rubble because corrupt leaders had let them rot and decay. I've seen monumental greed and corruption, brutality, tyranny and evil.
>But even with all the good I've found here, my perceptions have been hopelessly skewed by the bad. My tour in Africa coincided with two of the world's worst tragedies, Somalia and Rwanda. I've had friends and colleagues killed, beaten to death by mobs, shot and left to bleed to death on a Mogadishu street.
>Now, after three years, I'm beaten down and tired. And I'm no longer even going to pretend to block that feeling from my mind. I empathize with Africa's pain. I recoil in horror at the mindless waste of human life, and human potential. I salute the gallantry and dignity and sheer perseverance of the Africans. But most of all, I feel secretly glad that my ancestor made it out -- because, now, I am not one of them.
—Keith B. Richburg (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Richburg>) of The Washington Post, 1995 (<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/richburg...>)
The man was born in 1907. That is so long ago that he was discharged from the Navy because he caught Tuberculosis in the days before antibiotics were developed.
Of course people raised that long ago were taught things that we find ridiculous today.
Casting off those sorts of cultural prejudices and thinking for yourself became a theme in his later works.
Apparently he didn't take his own themes to heart, then
That some people do want to be parents?
Someone else mentioned The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, a detective story Heinlein wrote in 1942.
The detective's wife is called out in the story as being the brains of the outfit, a very progressive notion in 1942.
Exceptionally competent women have been a staple in Heinlein stories forever.
I think what people would most likely object to is the implication that every woman should want that.
The closest he gets is the characterization that's it's natural to women to have babies because their bodies are capable of it, and most women do or at least want to. That shouldn't even be controversial because it's borne out by all of human history.
No, its pretty directly in his interview response, not his work: “I don't think there's much future in a gal who's thoroughly opposed to having babies.”
This part of the article _striongly_ reminded me of that:
In 1978, he suffered a near stroke from a blocked carotid artery that temporarily paralyzed one side of his body and left him to choose between the Damocles sword of massive seizure or the scalpel of a risky operation. He took the surgery, beat the odds, and immediately wrote "The Number of the Beast" (1980) -- four lubricious characters on a romp through various universes -- "to see if my brain would work." (Many critics said No.)
As a kid, I loved Have Spacesuit Will Travel. But even as a 14-15 year old I understood Number Of The Beast was not the same...
It was definitely different than what came before it, though.
One is a Scribner's juvenile, and the other is a novel written for adults.
Anyway, Friday is a post-carotid artery novel and is fantastic. Job, the novel the article discusses, is also great. They're just different from his earlier works.
You may be offended at the stereotype. And he'd be dead wrong to say that this is what most women either are like or would want to be. But it is an archetype that describes what some women really are like, and really do want. That's reality, and there is no sense in being offended at it.
For the record, I was argued into this position by my wife. At first I had rejected Heinlein because of how he treated his female characters. But she (engineering degree from CalTech, working software developer for 20 years) made that point that she should have the right to decide what she wants. And what she wants happens to match what Heinlein's women try to be an archetype of.
Nobody should be pushed to fit that or any other stereotype. But they should be free to choose it. And anyone who wants to read a fictionalized version of it, should be free to do that as well.
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects
Oh?
Hazel Meade Stone / Gwen Novak
Wyoming Knott
Podkayne Fries
Even Grace Cormet isn't subservient, although she fakes it on duty.
If anything, parts of his novels dont work well today because what was radical at the time isn't today. A long winded argument on why pre-marital sex should be acceptable, just isn't interesting anymore.
Of course he wrote plenty of stuff still taboo (and rightfully so, imo) e.g. all the incest.
The entire point of the incest taboo is to avoid those genetic consequences.
Do we still need an incest taboo in that case?
That's just the sort of deeply held cultural value that Heinlein wanted people to be willing to think about for themself.
Heinlein didn't advocate for incest or for polygamy.
He wanted to convince people to think for themselves, even when the thing you are thinking about is an "unquestionable" cultural belief.
In any case, i'm a believer in free speech, i don't object to him writing on such a topic, im just unconvinced.
As far as thinking for oneself, not on the incest subject, but i agree about the author generally. starship troopers is a novel where i heartily disagree with what is espoused. However reading it forced me to really think about why i disagree and what i really believe instead and why. It really helped me examine my own beliefs, which made it a very positive reading experience.
He wasn't trying to convince you to do anything except to reconsider the views you absorbed from your culture without conscious thought
I'm also unsure that was fully his goal. If so wouldn't other books or even other characters on the same book have opposing or different (yet still radical) views on the topic, instead of most of his characters all having really similar views?
Motherhood sometimes, but “appalling subservience” is pretty far from my recollection of any of Heinlein’s major female characters.
Everyone's entitled to an opinion, I suppose. But something tells me that keeping company with Heinlein, Asimov, and the other greats now deemed problematic would be far better than with these "others".
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."