Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  The writing of “Evil Days” (which Campbell retitled “Methuselah’s Children”) marked an unnoticed watershed in the Heinleins’ life together. Gradually, Robert’s intense involvement with Leslyn as sounding board and story doctor had begun to taper off. His own “story sense” was becoming surer, but the feedback he was getting from Campbell—his editor—was more directly useful.

  The April issue of Unknown hit the stands, with “They,” and his mail from both fans and fellow writers continued to pick up, filled with compliments on how successfully he had pulled that one off. Ironically, his “offbeat” story “They” was his most successful so far. His ninth wedding anniversary, on March 28, made him reflective: “We think very highly of the institution of matrimony and believe it is here to stay. Since we have spent twenty-four hours a day, literally, in each other’s company during the major portion of that time, you may take it as laboratory tested and approved.”12 “[Leslyn] convinces me that there is something outside the ego besides otherness, enmity, and enigma.”13

  “Beyond Doubt” appeared in the April Astonishing, so his obligation to Elma Wentz was finally discharged. The early polls in Astounding showed “Sixth Column” in first place. He joined the Authors Guild on Jack Williamson’s recommendation.

  Revisions on the “Methuselah’s Children” serial slowed to a stop as he got the story refined to Campbell’s satisfaction, but Campbell shoveled a new idea at him, addressing his letter to “Dear Anson” [MacDonald]:

  While Bob’s on his vacation—and has a long novel coming up—maybe “you” can be mulling this one over for a novelette—which we most desperately need. We need half a dozen novelettes, as a matter of fact.

  Setup: the CT ships. The CT ships are employed in a form of meteor and asteroid mining—the deadliest, most dangerous going. And its rewards are, naturally, proportionate.

  CT stands for contraterrene—contraterrene matter.14

  Heinlein was not sure enough of his background in physics—contraterrene, or “anti,” matter had been possible in theory since Paul Dirac predicted the positive electron in 1929 but Heinlein wanted to think about it before agreeing on the series of stories. “I don’t have a story yet on contraterrene,” he told Campbell, “but I will get one I know.”

  … I’ve got to work out some major human problem to center the story around, some problem created by, or solved by, the peculiarities of contraterrene. If necessary, I suppose I could use some fairly stock plot against a background of contraterrene mining, but the gag is too good for that; unless you are immediately pressed for copy, I’ll turn it over in my mind for a few days before starting to write.15

  He asked Robert Cornog for another briefing, and they spent two days working through the fundamentals before Cornog was called to Washington, D.C., to consult on something or other hush-hush.16 Heinlein set the story idea aside. When it was ready, a story idea would drop out of the preparation—and it wouldn’t drop until it was ready.

  In May 1941, “Universe” and the Future History chart were published, as well as “Solution Unsatisfactory,” bylined Anson MacDonald. Since Astounding was going to a larger format, Campbell was in desperate need of material. Heinlein promised to start writing the sequel to “Universe” on June 1, whether or not he actually had anything to say—a safe promise, since he had chopped off the second half of a planned serial to make up “Universe.”17 He could start writing anytime he could work up interest in pounding the typewriter again. In the meantime, Heinlein sent Campbell the two stories he had revised for Pohl. Campbell actually bought the shortened (ten-thousand-word) version of “Patterns of Possibility,” which Heinlein had retitled “It’s Impossible!”—but Campbell apparently didn’t like even the retitle, as it appeared in the September 1941 issue under the somewhat misleading title “Elsewhere”18—and it was different enough from the “Anson MacDonald” or “Robert Heinlein” material to justify using the “new” pseudonym Heinlein had placed on the revision for Pohl’s use: Caleb Saunders.

  Heinlein immediately wrote up a gimmick story he had been working out in his head: all the characters in the story are the same person at different times of his life, made possible by using multiple overlapping loops-back of time travel.

  I have had a dirty suspicion since I was about six that all consciousness is one and that all the actors I see around me (including my enemies) are myself, at different points in the record’s grooves. I once partly explored this in a story called “By His Bootstraps.”19

  It was light entertainment. A puzzle story.

  That yarn has been received in a fashion that has amused me. I regarded it as a piece of pure hack-work myself, but it stood higher than a really serious story in the same issue. Some people have been quite upset by it, judging from the letters I received. It was based on two ideas: a wish to do a time story which faced, rather than avoided, the intellectual paradoxes inherent in an orthodox Euclid-Newton time theory, and secondly, a wish to embroider the theme that the Possible is not necessarily the Emotionally-Conceivable. You will see that the question of how in the hell Bob Wilson managed to furnish his own First Cause is structurally the same as the old dilemma: if God made the world, who made God?—which is a legitimate question (although usually dressed up in other language) and quite unanswerable in any emotionally convincing fashion.20

  But once that effort was concluded, on May 11, 1941, everything stopped for him:

  I am not writing at present. I went stale after finishing “By His Bootstraps.” (There is a small but noisy minority who contend that I went stale before finishing it.) I have returned to manual labor for a week or two, after having, for the first time in my life, spent a week staring at a typewriter and moaning. However, I expect to get to work on the “Universe” sequel around the 1st of June—unless I do a novelet first. That means one less story than I had previously indicated; sorry—the old hack refused to budge.21

  Although he never recorded what his manual labor amounted to, the timing is right for him to have designed and installed a sprinkler system that would “rain” on the house and lower the temperature.

  Heinlein had been invited to be the guest of honor for the third World Science Fiction Convention, or “WorldCon,” held in Denver over the Fourth of July weekend, for which he was expected to given an important speech, and he didn’t have any idea for it. The timing was awkward this year: Korzybski was going to give a seminar in Denver the following month. He and Leslyn would have to stick around for about six weeks to take in both events. It was time to get moving on the speech.

  There is only one thing to do in these circumstances: steal from the best. H. G. Wells had given a speech in 1902 titled “The Discovery of the Future,” about the social effects of technological change. Heinlein combined that idea with some propaganda about Korzybski, on the theory that he might be able to do the same thing for the 1940s: lay out the groundwork of the knowledge it would take to live in the future, picking up where Wells had left off with his three sociological fact books.

  In June, Heinlein started writing the “Universe” sequel, knowing it was as good as presold, and he could use the proceeds to underwrite the trip to Denver. His and Leslyn’s expenses were already covered, but he wanted to make a special loan to one of the local fans, Walter Daugherty. Daugherty was to be married at the end of June and go to the Denvention—that’s what the fans were calling this Denver WorldCon—for their honeymoon .22 “It’s the first time we have ever chaperoned a honeymoon,” he told Campbell.23

  Then came a burst of good news—the first good news about the European war in four years: Hitler had turned on his erstwhile ally, Stalin, and invaded Russia on June 21, along an 1,800-mile front. “Isn’t the news of the German-Russian war wonderful?” Leslyn wrote. “No matter which of them wins, it’s good for us.”24 That sent them off to Denver on June 27 in a burst of good cheer. They filled Skylark IV with luggage and Daugherty’s movie and phonograph recording equipment—he intended to record the convention f
or posterity.

  This was a good trip. They stopped at Boulder Dam and at the Grand Canyon to stretch their legs, and at Pikes Peak and the Garden of the Gods, Daugherty functioning as relief driver and general source of entertainment. At the Colorado Springs rest stop there were horses nearby, so Daugherty demonstrated his horsemanship for their approval and amusement.

  The Heinleins had taken a suite on the fourth floor of the convention hotel, the Shirley-Savoy. When they checked in on July 2, two days before the convention was scheduled to start, they found a number of fans already there. The Heinleins opened their suite as an informal hospitality center for the preconvention activities, and worked hard at making the mostly teenaged fans feel comfortable. Shortly they had thirty young fans (boys, mostly) sprawled on the floor and spilling out into the hall (and consuming two cases of Coca-Cola).25

  The early WorldCons were not like today’s gigantic affairs: with only two hundred or so people, Robert and Leslyn were highly visible. He was probably the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan person the fans had ever come into contact with, and he seemed to them like something out of a movie.26 Forrest Ackerman was impressed by their easy hospitality—and particularly by the fact that Heinlein treated the black bellman who brought up their room-service order “like a normal human being.” That just wasn’t done then, crossing that social color line. Even his mannerisms and affectations—the bit of stagecraft business he did, lighting a cigarette to cover an incipient stammer—struck Ackerman as suave and sophisticated.27

  Heinlein’s personal stock with the convention members soared on the first day when he saved the sponsoring committee from embarrassment by offering to cover a $25 award that had been promised by a new science fiction magazine, Comet, but that had failed to materialize.28 And he had followed that up by a just-one-of-the-guys routine: there was a masquerade program for which he was caught unprepared. He got into the spirit of the thing, without a costume of any kind, entering the competition as “Adam Stink, the world’s most lifelike robot”—a parody of the robotic hero of Adam Link, a popular series by brothers Earl and Otto Binder, writing as Eando Binder. Leslyn’s costume was a subtle but definite psychological statement for anyone who could read it: she came in Oriental drag as Queen Niafer of Cabell’s Figures of Earth29—the “small dark thing” companion of Count Manuel of Poictesme, the very ordinary and small-minded wife of an artist-conqueror-redeemer.

  The masquerade smoothed the way into Heinlein’s speech. Ackerman introduced him, calling Heinlein the “Olaf Stapledon of American Science-fiction.” 30 Dr. Daugherty’s recording equipment started spinning, and Heinlein got up to give his own “Discovery of the Future.”31

  Heinlein had taken as his theme “time binding”—Korzybski’s 1922 insight about what distinguishes humans from animals: the ability to plan across time and to pass knowledge and other forms of wealth from generation to generation. He wove this into Doc Smith’s theme from the previous year at the Chicago convention: science fiction was socially useful, he said, because it trained its readers to know, on a very deep level, that tomorrow is going to be different. And with this knowledge, humankind at last possessed the tools to shape its own future. Science-fiction readers were thus at the leading edge of a great wave in human evolution—an important part of Wells’s Open Conspiracy.

  Science-fiction readers in 1941 were social outcasts. To be told—seriously—that they were personally an important element in human progress was apparently just as intoxicating for them as the same realization had been for Heinlein in 1930.32

  There is a certain type of personality, however, unfortunately common in science-fiction fandom, for which adoration is a red flag. A dozen or so of these boys—mostly Technocrats, Heinlein thought (though in another place he refers to New York fans, Futurians)33—followed him around and made a “steady and malicious effort” to whittle him to size. This irritation loomed large in his mind. “They were so rude that I did not enjoy [the guest-of-honor experience].”34 He wondered—for years—why the more socially adept fans didn’t rein them in.35

  On Sunday evening, the convention hosted a banquet for their guest of honor, and Heinlein made an impromptu thank-you speech, a soufflé he felt fell flat and wasn’t very funny, because he was “tired enough for twins by then.”36 He sat down, feeling defeated and hardly paying attention to the next speaker, Franklyn Brady, who surprised him with a present—seven of them, actually—for his birthday. Brady and Bill Deutsch had quietly passed the hat and took up a collection to honor him. Leslyn was in on the gag: she had told them what books he might appreciate.

  Up to that moment, Heinlein had thought that his time and effort had been wasted, that the science fiction fans despised and resented him. He was visibly shocked—and deeply touched—by this gesture of affection. “He was so filled with emotion that he came very close to tears. He was really thrilled.”37 Frank Brady “asked me to read the titles aloud,” Heinlein told Campbell later.

  I got all choked up and couldn’t do it.

  Here is what they gave me:

  The People, Yes—Carl Sandburg

  The Prairie Years—Carl Sandburg

  Young Adventure—Benét

  John Brown’s Body—Benét

  Stargazer: The Biography of Galileo38

  Experiment in Autobiography—H. G. Wells

  The Oracles of Nostradamus.39

  An eighth book—Stephen Vincent Benét’s collection Thirteen O’Clock—had to follow him home, as Bill Deutsch could not find a copy for sale in Denver.

  Once the convention was over, the Heinleins had to make a decision: could they stay in Denver for the General Semantics seminar Korzybski was giving in five weeks or should they go back to Los Angeles and make a second trip to Denver? Ultimately, Robert and Leslyn decided against attending the seminar at all—possibly because they didn’t have progress to report on the projects Robert was theoretically working on.40

  We hoped to be able to attend both conventions (as Guest of honor we couldn’t very well cut the first one but we couldn’t afford to stay in Denver a whole month. We also didn’t want to stay any longer than we could help as we lived there once!)41

  They returned to Hollywood by way of Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, the Great Salt Desert, Reno, the Donner Pass, and the Sacramento Valley.

  On the day they arrived back in Hollywood,42 Heinlein was interviewed for a local writers’ magazine. “Doc” Lowndes (whom they had met in Denver and who was now editing the pulp magazines Future and Science Fiction) returned “‘My Object All Sublime,’” saying it was too long—but he could use a story at four thousand words. That was the last of Heinlein’s unsold stories from spring 1939. He could cut this story to make the sale, but the prospect did not inspire any immediate interest. He was having trouble settling on any idea good enough to write.43

  Willard G. Hawkins, who had been at Denvention, worked for the World Press and thought the transcript of his speech could be placed with Author & Journalist magazine, for which he did the printing and publishing. Doc Smith wrote saying he was ready to come to California and work on the collaborative novel they had talked about last year. Smith sketched out his ideas for a 100,000-word book with a naval—or perhaps merchant marine—background, which would make use of Heinlein’s experience base. They could include a subplot dealing with the hidden international spies and saboteurs, so-called “fifth columnists,” and flesh out the story with

  Some open struggles, a few fist-fights and gun-fights. Possibly a trainwreck and/or near the climax, a torpedoing or some such disaster. These things, and whatever incidental mayhem seems to be indicated, would be my dish.44

  Heinlein countered with a suggestion for a food-service background, as Doc Smith was a cereal chemist, but there was a lot of work to do before the rough ideas they were kicking around could be turned into a story.

  Photos of the convention began to arrive, sent by the other camera bugs he had met at the Denvention, and that was entertaining.45
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br />   In his doldrums, Heinlein drifted into an extended “political” correspondence with Doc Lowndes, who had represented himself as a Technocrat/pacifist. It was probably this discussion of the Technate and its potential for brutal, insect totalitarianism that tickled something in Heinlein’s mind, something that started with the Selenites in H. G. Wells’s very ambiguous First Men in the Moon but went … somewhere else. He felt a story coming on—“a strong new idea (oh, fairly new, anyhow),” he told Campbell46—and with the weird, atmospheric quality that had caught so much attention with “They.”

  No matter whether writers portrayed aliens as conquerors or victims or as wise “elder brothers,” they always used the underlying assumption that there would be a rough parity between humans and aliens. Some of Charles Fort’s ideas suggested an entirely new direction to take such a story, picturing aliens so far above us intellectually that they might not even interact with human beings—any more than we interact with goldfish in a bowl.47 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had touched on some of this atmosphere in his Post story, “The Horror of the Heights.”

  He finished the story in a week and a half, retitling it “Creation Took Eight Days” (since his original title, “Goldfish Bowl,” might reveal too much about the story to the readers), to suggest higher orders of creation than the human. This, he thought, was one of the strongest things he had ever written—groundbreaking and “daring,”48 just the kind of thing Campbell wanted for Astounding. It went off to him on August 11, 1941.49

  Ten days later (the letter is dated August 21, 1941), Heinlein received a very odd letter from Campbell, headed “Dear Mr. Heinlein.” That was strange to begin with: they had been on first-name basis since last June.