Time Travelers Strictly Cash

by Spider Robinson

  (3) “Heinlein’s male characters are all him.” I understand this notion was first put forward by James Blish in an essay titled, “Heinlein, Son of Heinlein,” which I have not seen. But the notion was developed in detail by Panshin. As he sees it, there are three basic male personae Heinlein uses over and over again, the so-called Three-Stage Heinlein Individual. The first and youngest stage is the bright but naive youth; the second is the middle-aged man who knows how the world works; the third is the old man who knows how it works and why it works, knows how it got that way. All three, Panshin asserts, are really Heinlein in the thinnest of disguises. (Sounds like the average intelligent man to me.)

  No one ever does explain what, if anything, is wrong with this, but the implication seems to be that Heinlein is unable to get into the head of anyone who does not think like him. An interesting theory—if you overlook Dr. Ftaeml, Dr. Mahmoud, Memtok, David McKinnon, Andy Libby, all the characters in “Magic, Inc.” and “And He Built a Crooked House,” Noisy Rhysling, the couple in “It’s Great To Be Back,” Lorenzo Smythe, The Man Who Traveled in Elephants, Bill Lermer, Hugh Farnham, Jake Salomon, all the extremely aged characters in Time Enough For Love, all the extremely young characters in Tunnel In The Sky except Rod Walker, and all four protagonists of “The Number of the Beast—” (among many others). Major characters all, and none of them fits on the three-stage age/wisdom chart. (Neither, by the way, does Heinlein—who was displaying third-stage wisdom and insight in his early thirties.)

  If all the male Heinlein characters that can be forced into those three pigeonholes are Heinlein in thin disguise, why is it that I have no slightest difficulty in distinguishing (say) Juan Rico from Thorby, or Rufo from Dak Broadbent, or Waldo from Andy Libby, or Jubal Harshaw from Johann Smith? If Heinlein writes in characterizational monotone, why don’t I confuse Colonel Dubois, Colonel Baslim and Colonel Manning? Which of the four protagonists of “The Number of the Beast—” is the real Heinlein, and how do you know?

  To be sure, some generalizations can be made of the majority of Heinlein’s heroes—he seems fascinated by competence, for example, whereas writers like Pohl and Sheckley seem fascinated by incompetence. Is this a flaw in any of these three writers? If habitual use of a certain type of character is a literary sin, should we not apply the same standard to Alfred Bester, Kurt Vonnegut, Phil Dick, Larry Niven, Philip Roth, Raymond Chandler, P.G. Wodehouse, J.P. Donleavy and a thousand others?

  (4) “Heinlein doesn’t describe his protagonists physically.” After I have rattled off from memory extensive physical descriptions of Lazarus and Dora and Minerva Long, Scar Gordon, Jubal Harshaw and Eunice Branca, complainers of this type usually add, “unless the mechanics of the story require it.” Thus amended, I’ll chop it—as evidence of the subtlety of Heinlein’s genius. A maximum number of his readers can identify with his characters.

  What these types are usually complaining about is the absence of any poetry about physical appearance, stuff like, “Questing eyes like dwarf hazelnuts brooded above a strong yet amiable nose, from which depended twin parentheses framing a mouth like a pink Eskimo Pie. Magenta was his weskit, and his hair was the color of mild abstraction on a winter’s morning in Antigonish.” In Heinlein’s brand of fiction, a picture is seldom worth a thousand words—least of all a portrait.

  But I have to admit that Alexei Panshin put his finger on the fly in the ointment on p. 128 of Heinlein In Dimension: “…while the reader doesn’t notice the lack of description while he reads, afterwards individual characters aren’t likely to stand out in the mind.” In other words, if you leave anything to the reader’s imagination, you’ve lost better than half the critics right there. Which may be the best thing to do with them.

  (5) “Heinlein can’t plot.” One of my favorite parts of Heinlein In Dimension is the section on plot. On p. 153 Panshin argues that Heinlein’s earliest works are flawed because “they aren’t told crisply. They begin with an end in mind and eventually get there, but the route they take is a wandering one.” On the very next page Panshin criticizes Heinlein’s later work for not wandering, for telling him only those details necessary to the story.

  In “Gulf,” for instance, Heinlein spends one day in time and 36 pages in enrolling an agent. He then spends six months, skimmed over in another 30-odd pages, in training the agent. Then, just to end the story, he kills his agent off in a job that takes him one day, buzzed over in a mere 4 pages. The gradual loss of control is obvious.

  Presumably the significant and interesting parts of Panshin’s life come at steady, average speed. Or else he wanted the boring and irrelevant parts of Joe’s life thrown in to balance some imaginary set of scales. (Oh, and just to set the record straight, it is clearly stated in “Gulf” that Joe’s final mission takes him many days.)

  All written criticism I have seen of Heinlein’s plotting comes down to this same outraged plaint: that if you sit down and make an outline of the sequence of events in a Heinlein story, it will most likely not come out symmetrical and balanced. Right you are: it won’t. It will just seem to sort of ramble along, just like life does, and at the end, when you have reached the place where the author wanted you to go, you will look back at your tracks and fail to discern in them any mathematical pattern or regular geometric shape. If you keep looking, though, you’ll notice that they got you there in the shortest possible distance, as straightforwardly as the terrain allowed. And that you hurried.

  That they cannot be described by any simple equation is a sign of Heinlein’s excellence, not his weakness.

  (6) “Heinlein can’t write sex scenes.” This one usually kicks off an entertaining hour defining a “good sex scene.” Everybody disagrees with everybody on this, but most people I talk to can live with the following four requirements: a “good” sex scene should be believable, consensual (all parties consenting), a natural development of the story rather than a pasted-on attention-getter, and, hopefully, sexually arousing.

  In order: Heinlein has never described any sexual activity that would cause either Masters or Johnson even mild surprise. In forty-two books I can recall only one scene of even attempted rape (unsuccessful, fatally so) and two depictions of extremely mild spanking. I have found no instances of gratuitous sex, tacked on to make a dull story interesting, and I defy anyone to name one.

  As to the last point, if you have spent any time at all in a pornshop (and if you haven’t, why not? Aren’t you at all curious about people?) you’ll have noticed that none of the clientele is aroused by more than 5-10% of the available material. Yet it all sells or it wouldn’t be there. One man’s meat is another man’s person. Heinlein’s characters may not behave in bed the way you do—so what?

  It has been argued by some that “Heinlein suddenly started writing about sex after ignoring it for years…” They complain that all of Heinlein’s early heroes, at least, are Boy Scouts. Please examine any reasonably complete bibliography of early Heinlein—the one in the back of Heinlein In Dimension will do fine. Now: if you exclude from consideration (a) juvenile novels, in which Heinlein could not have written a sex scene, any more than any juveniles-novelist could have in the forties and fifties; (b) stories sold to John Campbell, from which Kay Tarrant cut all sex no matter who the author, (c) stories aimed at and sold to “respectable,” slick, non-sf markets which were already breaking enough taboos by buying science fiction at all; (d) tales in which no sex subplot was appropriate to the story; and (e) stories for Boy’s Life whose protagonists were supposed to be Boy Scouts; what you are left with as of 1961 is two novels and two short stories, all rife with sex. Don’t take my word, go look it up. In 1961, with the publication of Stranger In A Strange Land, Heinlein became one of the first sf writers to openly discuss sex at any length, and he has continued to do so since. (Note to historians: I know Farmer’s “The Lovers” came nine years earlier—but note that that story did not appear in book form until 1961, the same year as Stranger and a year after Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X.) I
know vanishingly few septuagenarians whose view of sex is half so liberal and enlightened as Heinlein’s—damn few people of any age, more’s the pity.

  (7) “Heinlein is preachy.” “preachy: inclined to preach.” “preach: to expound upon in writing or speech; especially, to urge acceptance of or compliance with (specified religious or moral principles).”

  Look: the classic task of fiction is to create a character or characters, give he-she-or-them a problem or problems, and then show his-her-their struggle to find a solution or solutions. If it doesn’t do that, comparatively few people will pay cash for the privilege of reading it. (Rail if you will about “archaic rules stifling creative freedom”: that’s the way readers are wired up, and we exist for their benefit.) Now: if the solution proposed does not involve a moral principle (extremely difficult to pull off), you have a cook-book, a how-to manual, Spaceship Repair for the Compleat Idiot. If no optimal solution is suggested, if the problem is left unsolved, there are three possibilities: either the writer is propounding the moral principle that some problems have no optimal solutions (e.g. “Solution Unsatisfactory” by R.A.H.), or the writer is suggesting that somebody should find a solution to this dilemma because it beats the hell out of him, or the writer has simply been telling you series of pointless and depressing anecdotes, speaking at great length without saying anything (e.g. most of modern mainstream litracha). Perhaps this is an enviable skill, for a politician, say, but is it really a requirement of good fiction?

  Exclude the above cases and what you have left is a majority of all the fiction ever written, and the overwhelming majority of the good fiction.

  But one of the oddities of humans is that while we all want our fiction to propose solutions to moral dilemmas, we do not want to admit it. Our writers are supposed to answer the question, “What is moral behavior?”—but they’d better not let us catch them palming that card. (Actually, Orson and I are just good friends.) The pill must be heavily sugar-coated if we are to swallow it. (I am not putting down people. I’m a people. That bald apes can be cajoled into moral speculation by any means at all is a miracle, God’s blessing on us all. Literature is the antithesis of authoritarianism and of most organized religions—which seek to replace moral speculation with laws—and in that cause we should all be happy to plunge our arms up to the shoulders in sugar.)

  And so, when I’ve finished explaining that “preachy” is a complimentary thing to call a writer, the people who made the charge usually backpedal and say that what they meant was

  (8) “Heinlein lectures at the expense of his fiction.” Here, at last, we come to something a little more than noise. This, if proved, would seem a genuine and serious literary indictment.

  Robert Heinlein himself said in 1950:

  A science fiction writer may have, and often does have, other motivations in addition to pursuit of profit. He may wish to create “art for art’s sake,” he may want to warn the world against a course he feels disastrous (Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World—but please note that each is intensely entertaining, and that each made stacks of money), he may wish to urge the human race toward a course which he considers desirable (Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, Wells’ Men Like Gods), he may wish to instruct, to uplift, or even to dazzle. But the science fiction writer—any fiction writer—must keep entertainment consciously in mind as his prime purpose…or he may find himself back dragging that old cotton sack.

  (from “Pandora’s Box,” reprinted in Expanded Universe)

  The change is that in his most recent works, Robert Heinlein has subordinated entertainment to preaching, that he has, as Theodore Sturgeon once said of H.G. Wells’ later work, “sold his birthright for a pot of message.” In evidence the prosecution adduces I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough For Love, the second and third most recent Heinlein novels, and when “The Number of the Beast—” becomes generally available, they’ll probably add that one too.

  Look: nobody wants to be lectured to, right? That is, no one wants to be lectured to by some jerk who doesn’t know any more than they do. But do not good people, responsible people, enlightened citizens, want to be lectured to by someone who knows more than they do? Have we really been following Heinlein for forty years because he does great card tricks? Only?

  Defense is willing to stipulate that, proportionately speaking, all three of People’s Exhibits tend to be—by comparison with early Heinlein—rather long on talk and short on action (Time Enough For Love perhaps least so of the three). Defense wishes to know, however, what if anything is wrong with that, and offers for consideration Venus Plus X, Triton, Camp Concentration and The Thurb Revolution.

  I Will Fear No Evil concerns a man whose brain is transplanted into the body of a healthy and horny woman; to his shock, he learns that the body’s original personality, its soul, is still present in his new skull (or perhaps, as Heinlein is careful not to rule out, he has a sustained and complex hallucination to that effect.). She teaches him about how to be female, and in the process learns something of what it’s like to be male. Is there any conceivable way to handle this theme without lots of internal dialogue, lots of sharing of opinions and experiences, and a minimum of fast-paced action? Or is the theme itself somehow illegitimate for sf?

  Time Enough For Love concerns the oldest man in the Galaxy (by a wide margin), who has lived so long that he no longer longs to live. But his descendants (and by inescapable mathematical logic most of the humans living by that point are his descendants) will not let him die, and seek to restore his zest for living by three perfectly reasonable means: they encourage him to talk about the Old Days, they find him something new to do, and they smother him with love and respect. Do not all of these involve a lot of conversation? As I mentioned above, this book has action aplenty, when Lazarus gets around to reminiscing (and lying); that attempted-rape scene, for instance, is a small masterpiece, almost a textbook course in how to handle a fight scene.

  But who says that ideas are not as entertaining as fast-paced action?

  “The Number of the Beast—” (I know, on the cover of the book it says The Number of the Beast, without quotes or dash; that is the publishers’ title. I prefer Heinlein’s.) I hesitate to discuss this book as it is unlikely you can have read it by now and I don’t want to spoil any surprises (of which there are many). But I will note that there is more action here than in the last two books put together, and—since all four protagonists are extraordinarily educated people, who love to argue—a whole lot of lively and spirited dialogue. I also note that its basic premise is utterly, delightfully preposterous—and that I do not believe it can be disproved. (Maybe Heinlein and Phil Dick aren’t that far apart after all.) It held my attention most firmly right up to the last page, and indeed holds it yet.

  Let me offer some more bits of evidence.

  One: According to a press release which chanced to land on my desk last week, three of Berkley Publishing Company’s top ten all-time best-selling sf titles are Stranger In A Strange Land, Time Enough For Love, and I Will Fear No Evil.

  Two: In the six years since it appeared in paperback, Time Enough For Love has gone through thirteen printings—a feat it took both Stranger In A Strange Land and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress ten years apiece to achieve.

  Three: Gregg Press, a highly selective publishing house which brings out quality hardcover editions of what it considers to be the finest in sf, has already printed an edition of I Will Fear No Evil, designed to survive a thousand readings. It is one of the youngest books on the Gregg List.

  Four: The Notebooks Of Lazarus Long, a 62-page excerpt from Time Enough For Love comprising absolutely nothing but opinions, without a shred of action, narrative or drama, is selling quite briskly in a five-dollar paperback edition, partially hand-lettered by D.F. Vassallo. I know of no parallel to this in all sf (unless you consider Tolkien “sf”).

  Five: Heinlein’s latest novel, “The Number of the Beast—”, purchased by editors who, you can assume, knew quite well the
dollars-and-cents track record of Heinlein’s last few books, fetched an all-time genre-record-breaking half a million dollars.

  Plainly the old man has lost his touch, eh? Mobs of customers, outraged at his failure to entertain them, are attempting to drown him in dollars.

  What’s that? You there in the back row, speak up. You say you aren’t entertained, and that proves Heinlein isn’t entertaining? Say, aren’t you the same person I saw trying to convince that guy from the New York Times that sf is not juvenile brainless adventure but the literature of ideas? Social relevance and all that?

  What that fellow in the back row means is not that ideas and opinions do not belong in a science fiction novel. He means he disagrees with some of Heinlein’s opinions. (Even that isn’t strictly accurate. From the noise and heat he generates in venting his disagreement, it’s obvious that he hates and bitterly resents Heinlein’s opinions.)

  I know of many cases in which critics have disagreed with, or vilified, or forcefully attacked Robert Heinlein’s opinions. A few were even able to accurately identify those opinions.11 I know of none who has succeeded in disproving, demonstrating to be false, a single one of them. I’m sure it could happen, but I’m still waiting to see it.

  Defense’s arms are weary from hauling exhibits up to the bench; perhaps this is the point at which Defense should rest.

  Instead I will reverse myself, plead guilty with an explanation, and throw myself on the mercy of the court. I declare that I do think the sugar-coating on Heinlein’s last few books is (comparatively) thin, and not by accident or by failure of craft. I believe there is a good reason why the plots of the last three books allow and require their protagonists to preach at length. Moral, spiritual, political and historical lessons which he once would have spent at least a novelette developing are lately fired off at the approximate rate of a half dozen per conversation. That his books do not therefore fall apart the way Wells’ last books did is only because Heinlein is incapable of writing dull. Over four decades it has become increasingly evident that he is not the “pure entertainment” song and dance man he has always claimed to be, that he has sermons to preach—and the customers keep coming by the carload. Furthermore, with the passing of those four decades, the urgency of his message has grown.