I consider Heinlein to be my spiritual father, even though our political ideologies are totally at variance. Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me… he knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love.
(italics mine—SR)
Full disclosure here; Robert Heinlein has given me, personally, an autograph, a few gracious words, and a couple of hours of conversation. Directly. But when I was five he taught me, with the first and weakest of his juveniles, three essential things: to make up my own mind, always; to think it through before doing so; to get the facts before thinking. Perhaps someone else would have taught me those things sooner or later; that's irrelevant: it was Heinlein who did it. That is who and what I love.
Free speech gives people the right to knock who and what I love; it also give me the right to rebut.
Not to "defend". As to the work, there it stands, invulnerable to noise made about it. As to the man, he once said that "It is impossible to insult a man who is not unsure of himself." Fleas can't bite him. Nor is there any need to defend his literary reputation; people who read what critics tell them to deserve what they get.
No, I accepted this commission because I'm personally annoyed. I grow weary of hearing someone I love slandered; I have wasted too many hours at convention parties arguing with loud nits, seen one too many alleged "reference books" take time out to criticize Heinlein's alleged political views and literary sins, heard one too many talentless writers make speeches that take potshots at the man who made it possible for them to avoid honest work. At the next convention party I want to be able to simply hand that loud nit a copy of Destinies and go back to having fun.
So let us consider the most common charges made against Heinlein. I arrange these in order of intelligence, with the most brainless first.
I. PERSONAL LAPSES
(Note: all these are most-brainless, as not one of the critics is in any position to know anything about Heinlein the man. The man they attack is the one they infer from his fiction: a mug's game.)
1) "Heinlein is a fascist." This is the most popular Heinlein shibboleth in fandom, particularly among the young—and, of course, exclusively among the ignorant. I seldom bother to reply, but in this instance I am being paid. Dear sir or madam: kindly go to the library; look up the dictionary definition of fascism. For good measure, read the history of fascism, asking the librarian to help you with any big words. Then read the works of Robert Heinlein, as you have plainly not done yet. If out of 42 books you can produce one shred of evidence that Heinlein—or any of his protagonists—is a fascist, I'll eat my copy of Heinlein In Dimension.
2) "Heinlein is a male chauvinist." This is the second most common charge these days. That's right, Heinlein populates his books with dumb, weak, incompetent women. Like Sister Maggie in "If This Goes On—"; Dr. Mary Lou Martin in "Let There Be Light"; Mary Sperling in Methuselah's Children; Grace Cormet in "—We Also Walk Dogs"; Longcourt Phyllis in Behond This Horizon; Cynthia Craig in "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag"; Karen in "Gulf'; Gloria McNye in "Delilah And The Space-Rigger"; Allucquere in The Puppet Masters; Hazel and Edith Stone in The Rolling Stones; Betty in The Star Beast; all the women in Tunnel In The Sky; Penny in Double Star; Pee Wee and the Mother Thing in Have Spacesuit—Will Travel; Jill Boardman, Becky Vesant, Patty Paiwonski, Anne, Miriam and Dorcas in Stranger In A Strange Land; Star, the Empress of Twenty Universes, in Glory Road; Wyoh, Mimi, Sidris and Gospazha Michelle Holmes in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress; Eunice and Joan Eunice in I Will Fear No Evil; Ishtar, Tamara, Minerva, Hamadryad, Dora, Helen Mayberry, Llita, Laz, Lor and Maureen Smith in Time Enough For Love; and Dejah Thoris, Hilda Corners, Gay Deceiver and Elizabeth Long in "The Number of the Beast—". (…an incomplete list, off the top of my head)
Brainless cupcakes all, eh? (Virtually every one of them is a world-class expert in at least one demanding and competitive field; the exceptions plainly will be as soon as they grow up. Madame Curie would have enjoyed chatting with any one of them.) Helpless housewives! (Any one of them could take Wonder Woman three falls out of three, and polish off Jirel of Joiry for dessert.)
I think one could perhaps make an excellent case for Heinlein as a female chauvinist. He has repeatedly insisted that women average smarter, more practical and more courageous than men. He consistently underscores their biological and emotional superiority. He married a woman he proudly described to me as "smarter, better educated and more sensible than I am." In his latest book, Expanded Universe—the immediate occasion for this article—he suggests without the slightest visible trace of irony that the franchise be taken away from men and given exclusively to women. He consistently created strong, intelligent, capable, independent, sexually aggressive women characters for a quarter of a century before it was made a requirement, right down to his supporting casts.
Clearly we are still in the area of delusions which can be cured simply by reading Heinlein while awake.
3) "Heinlein is a closet fag." Now, this one I have
only run into twice, but I include it here because of its
truly awesome silliness, and because one of its proponents is Thomas Disch. In a speech aptly titled, "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction," reprinted in Peter Nicholls' Explorations of the Marvelous, Disch asserts, with the most specious arguments imaginable, that there is an unconscious homosexual theme in Starship Troopers. He apparently feels a) that everyone in the book is an obvious fag (because they all act so macho, and we all know that all macho men are really fags, right? Besides, some of them wear jewelry, as real men have never done in all history.); b) that Heinlein is clearly unaware of this (because he never overtly raises the issue of the sex habits of infantry in a book intended for children and published in 1962), and c) that a) and b), stipulated and taken together, would constitute some kind of successful slap at Heinlein or his book or soldiers… or something. Disch's sneers at "swaggering leather boys" (I can find no instance in the book of anyone wearing leather) simply mystify me.
The second proponent of this theory was a young woman at an sf convention party, ill-smelling and as ugly as she could make herself, who insisted that Time Enough For Love proved that Heinlein wanted to fuck himself. I urged her to give it a try, and went to another party.
4) "Heinlein is right wing." This is not always a semantic confusion similar to the "fascist" babble cited above; occasionally the loud nit in question actually has some idea of what "right-wing" means, and is able to stretch the definition to fit a man who bitterly opposes military conscription, supports consensual sexual freedom and women's ownership of their bellies, delights in unconventional marriage customs, champions massive expenditures for scientific research, suggests radical experiments in government; and has written with apparent approval of anarchists, communists, socialists, technocrats, limited-franchise-republicans, emperors and empresses, capitalists, dictators, thieves, whores, charlatans and even career civil servants. (Mr. Kiku in The Star Beast). If this indeed be conservatism, then Teddy Kennedy is a liberal, and I am Marie of Roumania.
And if there were anything to the allegation, when exactly was it that the conservative viewpoint was proven unfit for literary consumption? I missed it.
5) "Heinlein is an authoritarian." To be sure, respect for law and order is one of Lazarus Long's most noticeable characteristics. Likewise Jubal Harshaw, Deety Burroughs, Fader McGee, Noisy Rhysling, John Lyle, Jim Marlowe, Wyoming Knott, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly-Davis, Prof de la Paz and Dak Broadbent. In his latest novel, "The Number of the Beast—", Heinlein see
ms to reveal himself authoritarian to the extent that he suggests a lifeboat can have only one captain at a time. He also suggests that the captain be elected, by unanimous vote.
6) "Heinlein is a libertarian." Horrors, no! How dreadful. Myself, I'm a serf. (I know it sounds crazy, but I've heard "libertarian" used as a pejorative a few times lately.)
7) "Heinlein is an elitist." Well, now. If by that you mean that he believes some people are of more value to their species than others, I'm inclined to agree—with you and with him. If you mean he believes a learned man's opinion is likely to be worth more than that of an ignoramus, again I'll go along. If by "elitist" you mean that Heinlein believes the strong should rule the weak, I strongly disagree. (Remember frail old Professor de la Paz, and Waldo, and recall that Heinlein himself was declared "permanently and totally disabled" in 1934.) If you mean he believes the wealthy should exploit the poor, I refer you to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and I Will Fear No Evil. If you mean he believes the wise should rule the foolish and the competent rule the incompetent, again I plead guilty to the same offense. Somebody's got to drive—should it not be the best driver?
How do you pick the best driver? Well, Heinlein has given us a multiplicity of interesting and mutually exclusive suggestions; why not examine them?
8) "Heinlein is a militarist." Bearing in mind that he abhors the draft, this is indeed one of his proudest boasts. Can there really be people so naive as to think that their way of life would survive the magic disappearance of their armed forces by as much as a month? Evidently; I meet 'em all over.
9) "Heinlein is a patriot." (Actually, they always say "superpatriot." To them there is no other kind of patriot.) Anyone who sneers at patriotism—and continues to live in the society whose supporters he scorns—is a parasite, a fraud, or a fool. Often all three.
Patriotism does not mean that you think your country is perfect, or blameless, or even particularly likeable on balance; nor does it mean that you serve it blindly, go where it tells you to go and kill whom it tells you to kill. It means that you are committed to keeping it alive and making it better, that you will do whatever seems necessary (up to and including dying) to protect it whenever you, personally, perceive a mortal threat to it, military or otherwise. This is something to be ashamed of? I think Heinlein has made it abundantly clear that in any hypothetical showdown between species patriotism and national patriotism the former, for him, would win hands down.
10) "Heinlein is an atheist," or "agnostic," or "solipsist," or "closetfundamentalist," or "hedonistic Calvinist," or… Robert Heinlein has consistently refused
to discuss his personal religious beliefs; in one of his
stories a character convincingly argues that it is impossible to do so meaningfully. Yet everyone is sure they
know where he stands. I sure don't. The one thing I've
never heard him called (yet) is a closet Catholic (nor am
I suggesting it for a moment), but in my new anthology,
The Best of All Possible Worlds, you will
find a story Heinlein selected as one of his personal all-
time favorites, a deeply religious tale by Anatole France
(himself generally labeled an agnostic) called "Our
Lady's Juggler," which I first heard in Our Lady of Refuge grammar school in the Bronx, so long ago that I'd
forgotten it until Heinlein jogged my memory.
In any event his theology is none of anybody's damned business. God knows it's not a valid reason to criticize his fiction.
11) "Heinlein is opinionated." Of course, I can't speak
for him, but I suspect he would be willing to accept this
compliment. The people who offer it as an insult are
always, of course, as free of opinions themselves as a
newborn chicken.
Enough of personal lapses. What are the indictments that have been handed down against Heinlein's work, his failures as a science fiction writer? Again, we shall consider the most bone-headed charges first.
II. LITERARY LAPSES
1) "Heinlein uses slang." Sorry. Flat wrong. It is very seldom that one of his characters uses slang or argot; he in authorial voice never does. What he uses that is miscalled "slang" are idiom and colloquialism. I won't argue the (to me self-evident) point that a writer is supposed to preserve them—not at this time, anyway. I'll simply note that you can't very well criticize a man's use of a language whose terminology you don't know yourself.
2) "Heinlein can't create believable women characters. " There's an easy way to support this claim: simply disbelieve in all Heinlein's female characters, and maintain that all those who believe them are gullible. You'll have a problem, though: several of Heinlein's women bear a striking resemblance to his wife Virginia, you'll have to disbelieve in her, too—which could get you killed if your paths cross. Also, there's a lady I once lived with for a long time, who used to haunt the magazine stores when I Will Fear No Evil was being serialized in Galaxy, because she could not wait to read the further adventures of the "unbelievable" character with whom she identified so strongly—you'll have to disbelieve in her, too.
Oddly, this complaint comes most often from radical feminists. Examination shows that Heinlein's female characters are almost invariably highly intelligent, educated, competent, practical, resourceful, courageous, independent, sexually aggressive and sufficiently personally secure to be able to stroke their men's egos as often as their own get stroked. I will—reluctantly— concede that this does not sound like the average woman as I have known her, but I am bemused to find myself in the position of trying to convince feminists that such women can in fact exist.
I think I know what enrages the radicals: two universal characteristics of Heinlein heroines that I left out of the above list. They are always beautiful and proud of it (regardless of whether they happen to be pretty), and they are often strongly interested in having babies. None of them bitterly regrets and resents having been born female—which of course makes them not only traitors to their exploited sex, but unbelievable.
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 heros—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.
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