Although Stranger sold well by science-fiction book standards, it is not likely that it would have appeared on any bestseller lists as early as 1962 or 1963. The period of the book’s exceptional sales did not commence until 1967.
7. Years later, Heinlein reviewed the book’s publication history for a mutual friend, who reported that Stranger in a Strange Land had “flopped”:
“—and flopped.” Hrrumph! Ginny is now so spoiled that she thinks a book should always earn at least $40,000 the first year of publication, or I’m slipping. I forced her to look at the records (her own work), which show clearly that SIASL was the most successful book in every way in its first year of all the books I had written up to that time: Publisher recovered his full investment including my advance in less than six months, hardcover sales at list price 1st cy ra. 6700, hardcover bookclub sales over 32,000, gross to us 1st 12 months $4,694.70—and the book took the Hugo. But what she remembers is that it took ca. 3 more years for the general public of nonscience-fiction readers to discover it … [sic] then the pb sales took off like a rocket … [sic] and all of my books have sold to the general public ever since, with a result that quintupled our income ahead of taxes. “Flopped—” I pause to shudder in indignation.
RAH, letter to Laura Haywood, undated but marked “ca. Dec 73” in RAH’s hand.
8. RAH, letter to Judith Merril, 11/07/62.
9. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Misc Notes (9/4–9/8/01) Tape A, Side A.
10. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Misc Notes (9/4–9/8/01) Tape A, Side A.
11. RAH, letter to Poul and Karen Anderson, 11/18/62.
12. RAH, letter to Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm, 11/17/62.
13. RAH, letter to Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm, 11/17/62.
14. Peter Israel, letter to RAH, 12/18/62.
15. RAH, letter to Mary Collin, 03/04/63.
16. RAH, letter to Mary Collin, 03/04/63.
17. Heinlein’s outline for Grand Slam (Farnham’s Freehold) in the RAH Archive, UC, Santa Cruz, begins: “Story starts ca. 1963 or any year shortly thereafter during a Cold War crisis similar to Cuban Crisis 1962.” Although the notes deal only with the characters of the book and never reach plot details, racial attitudes are included in character descriptions, and in a three-page discarded opening dated 31 January 1963 and marked “False Start,” they are one short of two tables for Bridge after a dinner party, and “Hubert” hesitantly suggests to another guest, “Ace Connolly,” that they ask Joseph to sit in as fourth for the second table:
Connolly looked still more surprised. “You’re saying that that … [sic] colored man … [sic] plays contract?”
“He plays. I haven’t suggested it to him tonight. He may wish to, I don’t know. He may need to study.”
Connolly blinked and looked at his wife. She said, “It’s up to you, Ace.” He said slowly, “Why, I suppose there’s no harm in it, but—well, look, you know I don’t like to play unless there is a little something up, and we couldn’t very well play for our usual stakes, now, could we? I mean to say, suppose I win some money off him. All I can say is, ‘That’s all right, boy. Forget it.’ See what I mean?”
“Yes, I see. Joseph and I can play as a team.”
“Meaning you’ll pick up his losses?”
“Meaning my arrangements with Joseph won’t be your problem. We’ll play a set game against you and Babe if you like. You’re used to each other’s play.”
Farnham’s son broke in. “Ace, you’re being set up as a sucker. Don’t underrate that dinge Pop’s got in the kitchen. He’s got trumps up his sleeve and aces in both shoes, every time. You’re about to help pay off the mortgage.”
The themes of atomic attack and racial politics thus appear joined on the first full page of the book. The conclusion(s) that (a) these themes had been on his mind for some time as the story was generated and (b) that the themes are to be developed together (in the way that both religious hypocrisy and sexual hypocrisy had been developed together in Stranger in a Strange Land) seems inescapable.
Furthermore, that the themes are to be dealt with in ironic inversion is suggested by the story materials, since they will be at ground zero of an atomic attack but are unharmed. The later inversions displaying racial attitudes ranging from “country club liberalism” to plantation slavery are thus foreshadowed on the first pages.
18. Leon Stover, Science Fiction Between Wells and Heinlein (Macfarland, 2002): 126.
19. Although Heinlein never mentioned reading Philip Wylie’s Triumph (Beyond Armageddon), the book was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in October 1962, just as the Cuban missile crisis got under way. Resemblances of Farnham’s Freehold to Triumph are rather superficial, and they are quite different kinds of books, as Triumph is a straightforward novel with some pulpish overtones, while Farnham’s Freehold is a satire—but it is not impossible that Wylie’s serial might have started the train of thought that led eventually to Heinlein’s book.
If Triumph was an “influence” it is not for the alcoholic wife in both books, but for the mixed-race grouping and the observation:
… people below the equator should come through in good shape! The air doesn’t exchange across the equator fast enough to endanger them. What I mean is merely the USSR will be a graveyard. Europe, too, undoubtedly. The North Temperate Zone pretty much clear around the globe. Except where people can hold out in shelters comparable to this, or in certain military bases underground. And so on. Submarines. They will be safe (61–62).
20. Alan Nourse, M.D., letter to RAH, 04/02/63.
21. RAH, letter to Peggy Blassingame, 07/23/63.
22. RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 08/08/63.
23. RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 08/08/63.
24. RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 08/08/63.
25. RAH, letter to Bill Corson, 08/09/63. Corson had offered to make Heinlein a loan to finance Ginny’s treatment. Heinlein thanked him, saying, “I think this is the first time in my life that anyone ever offered to lend me money.”
26. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 02/17/64.
27. RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 08/08/63.
28. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 5, Side B.
29. Howie [given name] Horwitz (1918–76) was the uncle of future science fiction and fantasy writer Alan Dean Foster. Foster’s first sale was to August Derleth in 1968.
30. William Dozier (1908–91) was actually the senior member of the producing partnership, but all of Heinlein’s day-to-day dealings were with Howie Horwitz. Television writer Mike Cassutt spoke with Dozier about this project in 1989, and “… he said he knew ‘Robert’ but didn’t actually work with him on the project, suggesting again that it was Howie’s baby.” Mike Cassutt, e-mail to the author, 09/22/05.
31. In RAH, letter to Howie Horwitz, 01/02/64. That observation was written by Virginia Kidd (“Blish” at the time) in a fanzine review of “Gulf” titled “A Gaudy Notion,” the manuscript of which is preserved in the Opus 73 file of the RAH Archive at UC Santa Cruz, with no indication of where it was published: “… two hundred words of pure and calculated artistic excellence built briefly into the best goddam climax of any science-fiction story I ever read, bar none.”
32. RAH, pilot script, The Adventure of the Man Who Wasn’t There for the series The Twenty-Second Century. RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz and the Virginia Edition, vol. xlv, Screenplays 2.
33. Nominally scripts are supposed to run one minute of film for each page of script, forty-four minutes per hour, leaving time for commercials; Heinlein’s 141-page script would imply a three-and-a-half-hour run time. Heinlein’s original script is published for the first time in the Virginia Edition, vol. xlv, Screenplays 2. Heinlein’s December 1963 cleanup, following the first set of producer’s notes he received, was 97 pages. Between the first draft and the December revision, the protagonist’s name went from Genro to Kenro.
3
4. Claude V. Ricketts (1906–64) was the Class of 1929’s first four-star, and he had been gunnery officer on board USS West Virginia during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ricketts Hall on the USNA campus is named for him. Later he was the Vice Chief of Naval Operations. Aside from the fact that Rear Admiral Buck Brandley was a flyer with Lexington, little is known about him. He was still living in 1973 when Heinlein recommended Admiral King’s biographer contact Brandley. Similarly, all that is known about “Al” Loomis is that he was on the Naval Academy’s fencing squad at the same time as Heinlein.
35. David Hartwell, e-mail to the author, 06/27/12. Hartwell concludes: “Ginny expressed great admiration for Robert’s ability to get his friends to play such games.” It was, indeed, an astonishing feat of persuasion—comparable in some ways to their memorable “bikini party” in 1955 (covered in chapter 10 of this volume), in which Heinlein had persuaded all the women to try on Ginny’s imported bikini swimsuit—while he photographed them all.
36. RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 12/25/63.
37. RAH, letter to Sarge Smith, 12/22/63. This letter was fortuitously preserved in Heinlein’s “Story Notes” file.
38. Kenneth E. BeLieu (1914–2001) was Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1961–65, when he became Under Secretary of the Navy. Interestingly, BeLieu originally enlisted in the Army and fought in World War II and the Korean War (in which he lost his left leg below the knee). BeLieu retired from the Army in 1955 with the rank of Colonel and served as a professional Senate staff member for the Committee on Armed Services. He was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President Kennedy. After working in the private sector, BeLieu was appointed Under Secretary of the Army by President Nixon, from 1971–73. He retired from the government in 1979 and became a professional consultant.
39. RAH, letter to Francis Ware, 11/21/63.
40. Howie Horwitz, letter to RAH, 12/30/63.
41. RAH, letter to Howie Horwitz, 01/01/64.
42. RAH, letter to Howie Horwitz, 01/02/64.
43. Howie Horwitz, letter to RAH, 01/06/64.
44. RAH, letter to Howie Horwitz, 01/08/64.
45. RAH, letter to Ned Brown, 01/17/64.
46. RAH, letter to Ned Brown, 01/17/64.
47. RAH, letter to Howie Horwitz, 01/01/64.
48. Eric Clough, letter to RAH, 01/27/64.
49. These are “guesstimates” based on the amount of the royalty payment, since Putnam’s royalty statements did not detail by unit sales, or even by issue, but combined all formats together, so that a single number was a composite of an author’s royalties for hardcover sales, Putnam’s share of paperback sales, and Putnam’s share of Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club sales for the period. The SF Book Club royalties in this period were about five cents per unit, whereas paperback royalties might have been as much as (half of) six or seven cents per unit, and the diminishing number of hardcover sales probably about twenty-five cents.
50. Ned Brown, letter to RAH, 05/05/64.
51. RAH, letter to Ned Brown, 06/04/64.
52. Heinlein complains specifically of this set of practices in his analysis to Blassingame of the proposed Doubleday contract on 07/29/64: “… Lurton, I have been trying to tell you for years that Doubleday scamps the trade edition, then milks the subsidiary rights, all to the disadvantage of the author…” In this contract, the extent to which Doubleday proposed to “negotiate” terms with its own subsidiaries and present them as fiats to the author scandalized Heinlein:
At the moment I am so vexed at their unreasonable demands—the fashion in which that contract has been rigged throughout to clip the Author without ever quite telling him how he is being clipped—that I am strongly disposed to reject it in toto and withdraw the properties. Therefore I shall let it sit a few days until I have cooled down on the subject.…
Here are a few of the many things I object to:
In several places it says that the publisher can negotiate with himself (i.e., with a subsidiary division or affiliate of Doubleday) and decide how much profit to show on some right or permission—then I have to accept 50% of that rigged profit as my compensation. Lurton, this is as ridiculous as it would be for Ginny and myself to negotiate between ourselves as to what the return would be, then announce it to Doubleday—and Doubleday would have to pay me whatever we decided.
I will not accept any such blind provision, whether it be for the Science Fiction Book Club, the Dollar Book Club, or any other of the various front names for Doubleday. Either each such contract must be negotiated with me later, on terms agreeable to me—or the exact nature and terms of the sub-contract must be incorporated into the main contract now. I will not give blind permission for Doubleday to negotiate with Doubleday, and thereby bind me—at my expense.
Doubleday puts in a paragraph under which Doubleday may at any time (even immediately after publication) cease publication of the trade edition, remainder any stock—below cost and at no royalty to me, if they so choose—and again “negotiating” such sale with a subsidiary part of themselves!—and nevertheless retain forever all subsidiary rights!
I won’t hold still for any part of this! I will not permit remaindering in less than two years after publication; any less time than that means they haven’t tried. Nor will I agree that they can remainder by selling to themselves “below cost”—and thereby cut me out. But in particular I will not permit them to retain any rights whatsoever if they choose to let the trade edition go out of print.
And so on. Editor David Hartwell commented (in a marginal note to this manuscript, ca. mid-2012) that he knew of Doubleday’s practices as of 1967, a few years later: “Doubleday would print, fill all advance orders and then pulp anything left upon sale to the book club—in all the genres where they ha[d] a library subscription program.”
53. RAH, letter to Willy Ley, 07/23/64.
54. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 07/29/64.
55. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 08/10/64.
56. RAH, letter to Peter Israel, 06/15/64.
57. RAH, letter to Sandy Fulton, 09/24/65.
58. RAH, letter to Don and Andy Panda, 06/11/64.
18. Gold for Goldwater
1. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/15/64—possibly misdated from August or September 1963.
2. RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 09/29/64.
3. These quotations from RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 09/29/64.
4. Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) was an early French theorist of socialism. Saint-Simon fought in the American Revolution, taking part in the siege of Yorktown under General Washington.
Saint-Simon returned to France and devoted himself to developing a class-collaboration brand of socialism distinct from Babeuf’s class-warfare socialism of the French Revolution. Saint-Simon’s theory called for society to be organized into an integrated industrial machine, directed by scientists. His ideas influenced his secretary, Auguste Comte (who invented the word “socialism”) and after him Marx. His ideas formed part of the intellectual underpinnings of science fiction through H. G. Wells.
5. François Marie Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was one of the leading socialist theorists contemporary with Saint-Simon, though not, apparently, much influenced by Saint-Simon. In Kent Bromley’s preface to Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, Fourier was designated the founder of the libertarian branch of Socialist thought. Fourier worked out the ideal infrastructure of what are now called “utopian” communities (his “phalanxes”) based on notions of “passional attraction.” That is, society could be self-organizing because different people are attracted to different professional and social functions. Fourier was influential enough in European politics to be condemned by Frederick Engels in the Anti-Dühring (1878).
Fourier’s first book, The Theory of the Four Movements, was published in 1808 and became the basis for wave after wave of socialist experimental communities in America through the nineteenth century. He also wrote up a fictional utopia ca
lled “Harmony” which might well be a source for Heinlein’s Howard Families, since they remained sexually active into advanced old age. Fourier also coined the term “feminism.”
6. François-Noël Babeuf (1760–97) was a French agitator and journalist (using the pseudonym “Gracchus”) during the French Revolution. He originated class-warfare socialism with the idea that the aristocracy must be liquidated before the revolution could succeed. A partisan of the Terror, after Robespierre’s death he organized an unsuccessful counterrevolution and was guillotined. His ideas were later developed by Karl Marx.
7. Rexford Guy Tugwell (1891–1979) was an agricultural economist who became part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” developing the policies that would become Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” Tugwell served as assistant secretary (and then undersecretary) of the Department of Agriculture and was instrumental in creating the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (“AAA”), the Soil Conservation Service, and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Tugwell resigned from the Roosevelt adminsitration in 1936, accused of being a Communist.
8. This is a position articulated prominently in a book that deals specifically with late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century sex radicalism: Hal Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence, Kan.: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977). The discussion in this book was highly illuminative of Heinlein’s attitudes toward both sex and politics.
9. A few years later, it was quite startling to many historically-aware people within the nascent libertarian movement when the New York Times Magazine profiled libertarianism as a “new right” ideology (“The New Right Credo—Libertarianism,” by Stan Lehr and Louis Rossetto, Jr., 01/10/71, 24–25). Libertarianism is a radical liberal position, with a strong emphasis on individualism. It is only the historical accident of a pervasive adoption of collectivist ideas on the left that later made a working political alliance of libertarians with American conservatives politically possible—and necessary. But a small Movement of the Libertarian Left continues to exist within libertarianism.
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 75
