Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2
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20. While the author was consulting at the UC Santa Cruz library in 2003–6, he frequently experienced small birds stooping to pluck his hair, presumably for nest-building. Perhaps something of the sort was happening to Ginny Heinlein—a local Santa Cruz phenomenon.
21. RAH, letter to Earl Kemp, 01/20/57.
22. Many years later, talking in a general way, critic Fredric Jameson suggested that science fiction achieves a historical consciousness through projections of futures. Fredric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia: or Can We Imagine the Future,” Science Fiction Studies (July 1982).
23. Damon Knight, letter to RAH, 10/06/66.
24. RAH, letter to Willy Ley, 04/05/68.
25. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/04/66.
26. Poul Anderson, letter to RAH, 09/23/66.
27. RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 10/09/66.
28. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/04/66; Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/28/89.
29. Author conversation with Rita (Berner) Bottoms, April 2004.
30. Michael Murphy, letter to RAH, 10/11/66.
31. Rev. David Baar, Bishop of California, letter to Michael Murphy (RAH is cc’d), 12/06/66.
32. Walter Minton, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/01/67.
33. Lurton Blassingame, letter to Walter Minton, 12/22/66.
34. Peter Mayer (Avon), letter to Walter Minton, 02/01/67.
21. Stalled
1. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/23/67.
2. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/23/67.
3. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/23/67.
4. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/18/67.
5. Rita Bottoms, conversation with the author, May 2006, in discussion of her oral history.
6. RAH, letter to Ned Brown, 07/06/67.
7. “Westercon” is the Western Regional Science Fiction Conference/Convention, the largest regional SF convention in the Western United States, held over the Fourth of July weekend each year and alternating between northern and southern regions.
8. Karen Anderson, postcard to the Heinleins, 06/28/66.
9. RAH, letter to Dan Galouye, 10/02/67.
10. RAH, letter to Harlan Ellison, 12/29/67. The dates of the stages in this matter were nowhere recorded in the correspondence, but may have been as late as October 1967.
11. Poul Anderson, memorial in Requiem; Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side A (March 1?, 2000).
12. RAH, letter to Harlan Ellison, 05/24/75.
13. Poul Anderson, letter to RAH, 10/27/67.
14. RAH, letter to Judith Merril, 11/01/67.
15. RAH, letter to A. E. Wilson, 11/19/67.
16. RAH, unsent letter to Judith Merril, 11/01/67.
17. RAH, unsent letter to Judith Merril, 11/01/67.
18. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 12/06/67.
19. RAH, letter to Robert Moore Williams, 04/06/68.
20. RAH, letter to Barbara Herzberger, 12/21/67.
21. RAH, letter to Temple and Nancy Fielding, 04/02/68.
22. The invoice for the flagpole is dated 02/07/68.
23. RAH, letter to John Conlan, 04/06/68.
24. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/22/68.
25. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 5, Side B (February 25? 2000).
26. Mrs. Heinlein said Stranger had appeared briefly on the New York Times bestseller list in 1968, but there were not enough copies available to sustain it there. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 9, Side B (February 28? 2000).
This is not likely, as the New York Times bestseller lists for 1968 show only hardcover issues, and by that time Stranger was available only in paperback. It may be she is thinking of some other bestseller list, such as the B. Dalton List or the Waldenbooks list, which did show paperbacks (as a separate category), but there are too many such lists to check them one by one.
27. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/21/68.
28. Willis McNelly, letter to Alvin Wrobel, Circulation Mgr. at Berkeley, 11/04/68.
29. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 12/24/99.
30. RAH, letter to Pat Gallner, 10/14/68.
31. RAH, letter to “Mrs. Hollingshead” (not otherwise identified), 12/29/68.
32. RAH, letter to Rev. Paul Wilkinnson, Asbury Methodist Church, 12/29/68.
33. RAH, letter to Marie Browne, 12/18/68.
34. Shrive = hear confession, assign penance, grant absolution.
35. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 12/20/99.
36. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/22/68.
37. RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 12/17/68.
38. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/28/68.
39. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/28/68.
40. RAH, letter to David Gerrold, 05/28/68. The Stranger script project thereafter disappeared down a rabbit hole.
41. FOBS = “Fractional Orbiting Bombardment System,” an orbiting missile base specifically forbidden by the Space Treaty of 1967. The Soviet Union launched FOBS 12 in April 1968.
42. Harold Stassen (1907–2001), former governor of Minnesota (1939–1943) and a perennial candidate for president, losing the Republican nomination eight times between 1948 and 1992.
43. Dick Gregory (1932–) Black comedian and social activist, one of the first to perform successfully before both black and white audiences.
44. RAH, letter to John Conlon, 04/06/68.
45. RAH, letter to “Buddy” Col. A. E. Wilson, 11/19/67.
46. RAH, letter to Pat Carroll, 12/17/68.
47. RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 12/17/68.
48. RAH, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, 12/28/68.
49. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 10/20/99.
50. RAH, letter to Jane and Pete Sencenbaugh, 12/28/68.
51. RAH, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, 12/28/68.
22. Picking Up Where He Left Off
1. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Harry and Barbara Stine, 01/07/69.
2. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Harry and Barbara Stine, 01/07/69. The cuts were not allowed in the dunder-free quest house.
3. Fred Pohl, letter to RAH, 02/27/69, forwarding a cable from José Sanz.
4. RAH, letter to Wes Posvar, 03/04/69. The Alliance for Progress was a 1961 program initiated by President John F. Kennedy to counter increased influence of the Soviet Union, by increasing U.S. appropriations for South American economic growth. The goal Kennedy articulated in his proposing speech:
Let us once again transform the American Continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts, a tribute to the power of the creative energies of free men and women, an example to all the world that liberty and progress walk hand in hand. Let us once again awaken our American revolution until it guides the struggles of people everywhere—not with an imperialism of force or fear but the rule of courage and freedom and hope for the future of man.
President Kennedy’s speech, “Preliminary Formulations of the Alliance for Progress, 1961,” was given at a White House diplomatic reception on March 13, 1961 and is archived online at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1961kennedy-afp1.html (accessed 03/04/2014).
5. Dean E. McHenry, Ph.D. (1910–98) was founding chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Chancellor McHenry and Heinlein also had in common that they had both been EPICs in the mid-1930s, Heinlein in Los Angeles, McHenry while working on his doctorate at UC Berkeley.
6. One of Ginny’s endodontists, in San Francisco.
7. Charles Page Smith (1917–95) was an American historian best known for A People’s History of the United States (McGraw-Hill, 1976–1987). He was also an activist for the homeless in Santa Cruz.
8. I have not been able to identify Mr. and Mrs. Joel Schaefer.
9. For years a bizarre rumor has circulated in the community of science-fiction writers that Ginny had a “health crisis” immediately before the Rio trip in 1969�
��by which is meant a recent miscarriage.
The rumor appears to have been the result of a misinterpretation of an unpleasant exchange in the plane between Heinlein and another science-fiction writer/invitee on the way to Rio: Mrs. Heinlein was carrying a large handbag, and one of the other invitees asked what she was carrying, adding “a dead baby?” Heinlein is reported to have told the offending person something like: “If you say anything like that to my wife again, I’ll kill you.”
At that time Mrs. Heinlein was nearly fifty-four years old—and in any case Heinlein was medically sterile. The conclusion that she had had a recent miscarriage was based on no actual information at all—only on a supposed special sensitivity to the subject of dead babies.
10. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Bill and Lucy Corson, 08/03/69.
11. RAH, letter to Bill and Lucy Corson, 06/10/69.
12. A transcription of the speech was published in Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo.
13. RAH, letter to Bill and Lucy Corson, 06/10/69.
14. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon and Takeko Stover, who were friends of Harrison, 03/13/89:
We were attending a film festival in Rio, as guests of the Brazilian government—HH [Harry Harrison] was there too. An invitation came to us from one of the officials of the U.S. Embassy, a small dinner party at his house. Robert and I were dressed to go, waiting for a taxi, and Robert was carrying a box of flowers for our hostess, when HH came along with several others, and demanded to know where we were going. Robert refused to tell him, and HH tried to grab the box from Robert. It was a rather horrid scene, there on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.
The taxi appeared. We left. And presently, after we’d had some drinks with our hosts and other guests, dinner began. Then, in walked HH and two other people (I can’t even recall their names.) They weren’t expected—it was obvious. Somehow they had found out where we were going and crashed the party.
I was very upset about the matter, and don’t remember it very well, but I was so disgusted with HH that I never wanted to even see him again.… I am sorry that I must relate these seamy matters, but I would just as soon never hear mentioned HH’s name again.
15. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Dr. Roger Lindeman, 07/03/76. The tinnitus was with her for the rest of her life.
16. RAH, letter to Alfred and Rolly Bester, 06/14/69; Virginia Heinlein, letter to Virginia Fowler, 08/17/69.
17. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Virginia Fowler, 08/14/69.
18. Also as “Linguistic Relativity in Old High Martian” (The CEA Critic, XXX[6] [March 1968]: 4, 6). Willis E. McNelly, Ph.D. (1920–2003), English professor at California State University, Fullerton, best known for his 1984 Dune Encyclopedia. In 1971 he assembled, with his colleague Jane Hipolito, an anthology of Marsiana, Mars, We Love You, that contained the “Linguistic Relativity” essay, as well as an extract from Double Star (a practice Heinlein did not encourage but nevertheless sometimes allowed).
19. Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) was a chemical engineer who became interested in linguistics and defined the “Whorf-Sapir” hypothesis of linguistic relativity (Edward Sapir was Whorf’s teacher at Yale University)—that language shapes what can be thought. Heinlein used this idea in Stranger in a Strange Land, and he knew of Whorf because of John Campbell’s enthusiasm for Whorf’s “Languages and Logic” article in 1941 (which came up in their discussions during the creation of Methuselah’s Children—see the April 1941 correspondence of Heinlein and Campbell in the Virginia Edition, Vol. xxxix, Letters 1: Correspondence of John W. Campbell, Jr., and Robert A. Heinlein), but Heinlein first encountered the ideas in his studies of General Semantics with Alfred Korzybski. Comparing Whorf’s ideas and Korzybski’s, he wrote,
… language is a barrier—but not nearly the barrier that culture can be. However, I am not discounting the language barrier where the languages are essentially different in structure, which is (usually, perhaps always) a situation in which the language difference mirrors a basic (and possibly insurmountable) difference in culture … Whorf has pointed out many of these cultural differences imbedded in syntax; Korzybski pointed out that the fashion in which a man thinks is constrained by the unconscious assumptions of the grammar of his native language. (RAH, letter to Howard Cady, 04/09/61.)
20. RAH, letter to Willis McNelly, 05/15/68.
21. A very narrow margin. Shortly after the publication of Starship Troopers, Heinlein set out as his own thought the core observation on which modern individualist anarchism is based. After remarking that he was against conscription and against confinement, he goes on to say:
The only thing common to all forms of government is force. It was rude of me to say so, in an era when euphemisms of all sorts are customary. But there it is—force.… I am not objecting to this. I am simply saying: all government is force. The sole difference between one sort and another is: who exercises that unlimited force?
RAH, letter to George Scithers, 11/23/59.
The modern definition of a state in libertarian theory, following a long debate over the notion of “competing governments” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is an entity or organization which claims to control the exercise of force and violence within a given territory.
22. RAH, letter to Poul and Karen Anderson, 06/22/62.
23. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/04/69.
24. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Willis McNelly, 06/03/69.
25. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 06/04/69.
26. RAH, letter to Lawrence Heinlein, 06/09/69.
27. RAH outline notes for I Will Fear No Evil. RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
28. This sentiment is voiced in several letters, but with particular direction to the juveniles, see RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 03/10/62.
29. “The Rare Ones: How They Save Lives,” Parade magazine (06/23/68).
30. RAH, letter to William S. Kyler, CCBC, 11/13/75.
31. Heinlein’s outline “Notes for a 2-part serial intended for PLAYBOY” 18 June 1969 in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz, first paragraph.
32. Heinlein’s composition record, kept on his “opus” file card. The card file is still in use by the Heinlein Prize Trust in managing Heinlein’s literary properties.
33. RAH taped interview with Frank M. Robinson, 08/09/69 (raw transcript). The unpublished Playboy submission format of the interview is published in the Virginia Edition, Vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1.
34. These sentiments Heinlein expressed in the Frank Robinson interview. The words specifically applied to the atmosphere in the Downey studio a few days later, but they were the ripened essence of the spiritual experience that began four days earlier, at the launch.
35. Frank Robinson, Playboy Interview file, UCSC Special Collections. Heinlein does not identify the person he made the bet with. Heinlein’s closest friend in 1919 would have been Isidore Horoshem.
36. RAH, taped interview with Frank M. Robinson, 08/09/69 (raw transcript). The order of the remarks has been slightly rearranged for effect, as the questions and answers in the raw transcript were not in strict sequential order and were rearranged (in a different way) for Robinson’s submission manuscript, which is published in the Virginia Edition, Vol. xxxvii, Nonfiction 1.
37. “N.O. Scientists React: ‘A Step Into Manhood’ or ‘A Waste of Money’?” New Orleans States-Item (07/21/69), 10.
38. RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74.
39. R. N. S. Clark, letter to RAH, 07/26/69.
40. It was not generally remembered, even within the science-fiction community, that a televised Moon landing had in fact been predicted in a comic book at about the time Destination Moon was being written. Jay Rudin pointed out in the alt.fan.heinlein newsgroup on September 6, 2007, that it appeared in Real Facts Comic no. 15 (July/August 1948).
41. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 06/14/99.
42. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Stevie and Ken Stone, 08/03/69.
43. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Lucy and Bill Corson,
08/03/69.
44. The index cards of Heinlein’s notes for the lunar landing broadcast are preserved in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.
45. The time is recorded in a photo essay (screen captures) section of 10:56:20 P.M. 7/20/69: The Historic Conquest of the Moon as Reported to the American People by CBS News over the CBS Television Network (New York: CBS, 1970), n.p. Much more video was taped than was used.
46. CBS News, 10:56:20 P.M. 7/20/69: The Historic Conquest of the Moon as Reported to the American People by CBS News over the CBS Television Network (New York: CBS, 1970), 107.
47. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Stevie and Ken Stone, 08/03/69. Mrs. Heinlein believed the cheers and applause in the studio were for Heinlein’s performance in discomfiting Cronkite (and that may well have been a factor), but it is just as likely the applause was for Heinlein’s message—and for Heinlein himself.
48. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 01/10/86. This exchange was not on the preserved portion of the interview tape; nor was it included in the CBS commemorative book. Stover’s “outtake” in his book Robert Heinlein for the Twayne U.S. Author Series (at 122, fn. 2) is an almost word-for-word transcription of Virginia Heinlein’s memory, as follows:
The exchange which I recall so vividly between Robert and Walter Cronkite went something like this:
R. About one third of the weight of this Apollo ship could have been saved by having an all-female crew.
C. Women in space!! Never (words to this effect).
R. Eventually whole families will go into space. But in this particular instance, if we’d sent someone—say Peggy Fleming—on this mission, the entire project could have saved a great deal of money, etc. Because women weigh less than men, and the engineering on the Saturn rocket would have been simpler and cheaper. An athlete like Peggy Fleming could have learned all the things she needed to know, and done what was necessary.
C[ronkite] continued to splutter at the idea of women in space, and these days he would find himself a candidate for lynching if he said some of the things he said then.