Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2
Page 80
He said Fear [I Will Fear No Evil] was more popular than Stranger, selling better and faster, and that Time Enough may sell the best of all. Reason: he’s not writing for an in-group where references have to be explained, but to the general public. There are kinds of stories that can be written today that couldn’t be written before; that’s why he is writing a different kind of book than he was 10 or 15 years ago; there’s a different market.
“To grow old involves a process, if you’re not going to let your mind go into deep freeze, of unlearning things you used to believe.”
He said when his older brother took him out once to see an eclipse and to explain it, that gave him his interest in the heavens. He called his brother Maj. Gen. Lawrence L. Heinlein. He said his kid brother is teaching at the same school as Professor Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, that is. He always used the most formal and elaborate name possible for anyone. After the eclipse “I never from that moment to this lost my feelings of wonder and joy in the heavens.”
He talked about his place at Santa Cruz, without mentioning the exact location, the town, etc. He said they were far enough from neighbors that when they shut the lights out they were in the dark under the stars with “nothing to keep you from getting dizzy with the glory of it.”
Asked about slang, he said the current stuff doesn’t last long enough so he invents neologisms to fill the need to keep characters from sounding like term papers.
He called Asimov one of the few Renaissance characters around today. “If Isaac doesn’t know the answer, don’t go look it up in the Encyclopedia Brittanica because they won’t know the answer either.”
Asked about an apparent dichotomy of worldview in Stranger and Starship Troopers, he said, “They are both descriptions of objects of human love. Loving his fellow men enough to be willing to die for them in one, and the other—well, the whole book is about it.” Which left undefined what he thinks the book is about. Said he wrote Troopers whole in the middle of writing Stranger on either side of it. He keeps a log of his working time and can thus keep track. Stranger was actually written in four different years, but the ideas came about ten years earlier. He spoke with evident satisfaction of the people who said they could spot the break in the book, and so far all such people had been wrong. He said he saw no dichotomy in them because he wrote the two in alternation.
He said he has written engineering articles, engineering reports, “some of them classified,” teenage love stories in the first person singular, adventure stories.… What is the greatest influence on your writing? “Money.”
His books are in about 28 different languages. He sees no dichotomy between the romantic and the realist. “The real world is a romantic and wonderful place. Anyone who doesn’t think so writes fantasy, and dull fantasy at that.” He urged people to “run, do not walk” to their nearest library or bookstore to read Archy and Mehitabel and rehearsed at great length the story of the parrot who knew Will Shakespeare, who wished he had time to be a poet instead of writing pop pap.
He said when he was ill, when he wasn’t in a coma more than half of what he thought he saw didn’t happen—hallucinations.
Will Lazarus and Andy Libby be in a novel set just after Methuselah’s Children? Any chance of that? “All I can say to that is I’m not dead yet.”
46. For example, see Gary Farber’s letter about the incident in The Alien Critic no. 10 (August 1974), with interlineated commentary by Richard E. Geis and Alexei Panshin. Another description, “A Show of Hands,” was published by Guy Lillian, in Transient 34 and in Spiritus Mundi 22, both in 1974, and again in 2007, in his Hugo-nominated fanzine Challenger 26.
47. Harry Hershfield (1885–1974) was an American comic artist, who began publishing newspaper cartoons in 1899 and was a frequent guest on radio and television programs in the 1940s and into the 1950s. Hershfield passed away on December 15, 1974, just a few months after Heinlein met him.
48. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Laura and Bill Haywood, 06/07/74.
49. Robert Heinlein, letter to Edgar D. Mitchell, 06/11/74.
26. Mr. Science
1. Richard Pope, letter to RAH, 03/31/75; see also RAH PS to form letter to Denis Paradis, 07/20/74.
2. RAH, PS to form letter to Denis Paradis, 07/20/74.
3. RAH, letter to Dr. Harry Wallerstein, 12/03/75.
4. RAH, letter to Richard Pope, 07/30/74.
5. RAH, letter to William Rotsler, 08/23/74.
6. RAH, letter to Mrs. Paul Dirac, 08/20/74.
7. RAH, letter to Richard Pope and Charles Cegielski, 09/18/74.
8. RAH, letter to Philip K. Dick, 08/22/74.
9. Heinlein apparently had the typewriter sent directly from the seller; there is no correspondence dating the purchase and gift; however, it is mentioned by both Theodore Sturgeon and by Spider Robinson [291] in their appreciations of Heinlein collected in Requiem, Yoji Kondo, ed. Dick himself mentioned the loan and the gift of the typewriter in his introduction to his short story collection The Golden Man (1980).
10. RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74.
11. Heinlein’s relationship with then-Captain King is detailed in the first volume of this biography, Learning Curve, in chapter 11, 126–43.
12. RAH, letter to Richard Pope and Carol Timmons (marked “never sent”), 07/12/75.
13. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 04/19/00. Mrs. Heinlein, whose screen name was “Astyanax12,” remarked: “SFWA would have vanished if Robert hadn’t paid their bills and no one except Joan Hunter Holly knows about it. Knew about it—I think she’s dead now too.… Actually he swore her to silence. But I knew about it. He must have sent her a lot of money—from our joint account!” Joan Carol Holly (1932–82) wrote science fiction under the pseudonym “J. Hunter Holly” from 1959 to 1977. Ms. Holly’s papers are archived at the University of Kansas, Lawrence.
14. RAH, letter to Jerry Pournelle, 07/14/73.
15. RAH, letter to Philip José Farmer, 11/21/73.
16. Transcription by the author of Jerry Pournelle’s presentation at the October 8, 1988 NASA Distinguished Public Service Awards Ceremony—from videotape provided by Virginia Heinlein.
17. In Joe Haldeman’s remembrance in Requiem, 274.
18. The times of the two ovations were given by Joe Haldeman in Requiem, 274.
19. Confusingly, even though The Forever War was published both in serial and hardcover formats in 1974—and so ought to have been eligible for a Nebula at the 1975 ceremony in New York—it was instead voted best for the year 1975, so Haldeman received the Nebula at the 1976 ceremony in Los Angeles—the same year the book received the Hugo and Locus awards.
20. Spider Robinson, “Robert,” Requiem, Yoji Kondo, ed. (New York: Tor, 1992), 315.
21. In an e-mail to the author dated 06/18/08, Herb Gilliland (English Dept., USNA) mentioned speaking with Haldeman about Heinlein’s opinion.
I asked Haldeman Saturday in Kansas City [at the Heinlein Centennial, in 2007]. He said, yes, there had been a slight followon. Some time after the first encounter, he and Heinlein were at an autograph table at some convention (with, he said, Heinlein’s throng stretching off toward the horizon while Haldeman had two or three people), and Heinlein said something like, “I read your book again, and I like it even better.”
Haldeman is probably referring to MidAmeriCon (1976), though it might have taken place at a blood drive at SunCon in 1977.
22. RAH, handwritten note on Thomas Clareson’s invitation letter dated 04/26/75. Heinlein referred to this work by Samuelson as “a thesis on me (for his master’s degree, I think) in which he picked up Blish’s theory about 1st-person stories” (RAH, letter to Lloyd Biggle, 08/30/76). This seems to rule out Samuelson’s best known Heinlein essay, published as “Frontiers of the Future: Heinlein’s Future History Stories” in Voices for the Future, Thomas Clareson, ed. (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976), and as “Major Frontier Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein: The Future and Fantasy” in Robert A. Heinlein, Joseph Oland
er and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1978).
23. Dr. Ruth Sanger was married to Dr. R. R. Race.
24. RAH, letter to Editors Compton Yearbook (marked “never sent”), 08/31/75. The reference to pornography may be obscure: Before pornography was legalized, some libraries kept locked reference collections of pornographic and other “unacceptable” literature.
25. RAH, letter (marked “never sent”) to editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 08/31/75.
26. No further mention is made of a copy obtained in New York; it may well be that the language of Heinlein’s memorandum of the Levin dinner and subsequent book hunt with Tanner is unclear and what Tanner was actually communicating was that when Levin’s team located a copy it would be available at the Times-Mirror office. But the Heinleins left New York within a few days.
27. RAH, letter to Dr. Harvey Wallerstein, 12/03/75.
28. This “Francis X. Riverside” pseudonym is unique; it is possible that it invokes Francis X. Bushman (a silent-era cowboy movie star) and the “John Riverside” name under which “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” had originally been published in Unknown in 1942.
29. Three-by-five index card in RAH’s hand clipped to 1,990-word version of manuscript, 07/03/75.
30. RAH, memo to Richard Pope and Christine Timmons, 07/06/75.
31. RAH, letter to Tessa Dick, 08/03/75.
32. RAH, letter to Tessa Dick, 08/03/75.
33. Dr. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, letter to RAH, 08/13/75.
34. Dr. Eloise R. Giblett, letter to RAH, 09/26/75.
35. Alan E. Nourse, letter to RAH, 09/19/75.
36. Charles Huggins, M.D., letter to RAH, 09/24/75.
37. Isaac Asimov, letter to RAH, 09/26/75.
38. RAH, application for AABB membership, 12/11/75.
39. RAH, memo to Richard Pope and Christine Timmons (marked “never sent”) 08/31/75.
40. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
27. “I Vant Your Blood”
1. RAH, letter to William S. Kyler, Executive Director of CCBC, 11/13/75.
2. RAH, letter to William S. Kyler, 11/13/75.
3. RAH, letter to Dr. Harvey Wallerstein, 12/03/75.
4. RAH, open letter to “Dear Friends,” written 11/26/75, in the MidAmeriCon Progress Report for Winter 1975.
5. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 3, Tape B, Side B (March 27, 2001).
6. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 1, Side 1 (10/21?/88).
7. In an e-mail discussion with the author on August 19, 2011, Dr. Pournelle commented on this liaison:
At some point I told the [MidAmeriCon] Committee “Do you think I am a bit old fashioned and fuddy duddy and hard to deal with?” They all grinned (well this was by phone so I infer the grins). “He graduated from the Naval Academy before I was born,” I pointed out. Robert was very old fashioned in some of his beliefs about proper etiquette, and pretty damned rigid in his expectations.
It all worked out but it cost me more time than I think either Robert or Ginny realized. I sure took pains to see they didn’t know.
8. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 3, Tape B, Side B (March 27, 2001).
9. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 3, Tape B, Side B (March 27, 2001).
10. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 3, Tape B, Side B (March 27, 2001).
11. RAH, letter to Jack Williamson, 03/20/76. This letter in its entirety is published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii, Nonfiction 2.
12. Heinlein’s meetings with Tony Damico are told in Learning Curve, the first volume of this biography, at 316 and 344.
13. Transcription of Jerry Pournelle’s presentation at the October 8, 1988, NASA Distinguished Public Service Awards Ceremony—from videotape provided by Ginny Heinlein. A somewhat shortened version of these remarks were included in Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo.
14. RAH, letter to Garth Danielson, 08/25/76.
15. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Morning Glory Zell, 09/14/76.
16. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 1, Side A (October 21? 1988).
17. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Series 3, Tape B, Side B (March 2001).
18. The videotapes made for the MidAmeriCon closed-circuit cablecast represent the longest video of Heinlein that exists, as every television appearance the author has been able to check was destroyed over the years. Even the original tapes of the appearance with Walter Cronkite and Arthur C. Clarke for the Moon landing in 1969 have been recycled. A screen capture of the public broadcast portion of the interview and commentary was preserved on a videotape presented to Virginia Heinlein, which is now in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz. Digital copies of the somewhat age-degraded videotape were made for Mrs. Heinlein by the author in 2001 and 2002, and by special permission the Heinlein Society shows the CBS tape at some science-fiction conventions. The MidAmeriCon videos, also somewhat time-degraded, were given to the Heinlein Centennial by MidAmeriCon chairman Ken Keller for exhibition and have also been digitized.
19. Spider Robinson, “Robert,” Requiem, Yoji Kondo, ed., 316–17.
20. RAH, letter to Andrew Porter, 01/15/77.
21. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
22. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
23. RAH, letter to Vikki Gold, 01/17/77.
24. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
25. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
26. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
27. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
28. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
29. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
30. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
31. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
32. RAH, letter to R. Faraday Nelson, 02/07/77.
33. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Sondra and Myrna Marshak, 02/14/77.
34. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Sondra and Myrna Marshak, 02/14/77.
35. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Jeannie and Alex Campbell, 04/12/77.
36. For the installation as Grand Master in April 1977; Published in NESFA chapbook of Creator in 1984 and again in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii, Nonfiction 2.
37. RAH, letter to Judith Merril (marked “never sent”), 11/01/67—but note, this is more than a decade after he gave up his Democratic Party membership, and four years after working for Barry Goldwater’s election. Heinlein is clearly a small-d democrat as well as a small-l libertarian.
38. RAH, letter to Prof. David Friedman, 08/05?/78.
39. RAH, letter to Joseph Martino, 04/15/85.
40. RAH, letter to Prof. David Friedman, 08/05?/78. Heinlein’s relationship to libertarianism is quite complex and nuanced. Although he does not seem to fit comfortably within any of the common and named libertarian traditions, he seems to come closest to the radical individualism (“Egoism”) typified by Max Stirner—a position that sets both Marxists and orthodoctrinaire libertarians on edge, as it acknowledges neither “natural law” nor the pseudoscientific Marxist “laws of history.”
41. Tucson television news reporter Forrest Carr researched the KGUN9 Archives at the Arizona Historical Society in 2011 but was unable to find any record of this interview. Like most of Heinlein’s television appearances, it appears not to have been preserved.
42. RAH, “Some Applications of Space Technology for the Elderly and the Handicapped,” Congressional Testimony given on 7/19/79.
43. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Greg Hagglund, 06/12/77.
44. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Robert Forward, 07/24/77.
45. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Dr. and Mrs. Passovoy, 08/01/77.
46. The Gregg Press science-fiction line was founded in 1973 by Editor Thomas T. Beeler, to be run by Hartwell, who was his fellow grad stude
nt and friend in the English department of Columbia University. David Hartwell, e-mail to the author, 08/08/11. Hartwell goes on to add that he had also been an editor at Putnam’s from 1973 to 1978, and as such was in direct contact with the Heinleins and their agent, Lurton Blassingame, about book projects and for that reason was also a part of the Heinleins’ social and business circles and was invited to the Heinleins’ “at-homes” at the Tuscany when they were in New York.
47. Hartwell indicated in an e-mail to the author, 08/08/11, that the advance for all the Gregg Press books was $100.
48. Altogether, Gregg Press published eight Heinlein books, five in 1979 and the last in 1981. Gregg Press ceased publishing in 1985, having issued 252 books.
The Destination Moon compilation edited by Hartwell was part of the Gregg Science Fiction and Film series and published in 1979. It contains Heinlein’s novelization of the original movie script, an article Heinlein wrote for Astounding in 1950 about the film, and a selection of publicity material, including the contents of the press package designed by Heinlein’s friend Ben Babb.
The remaining seven issues are as follows:
1978: Double Star (1956)
Intro: Joe Haldeman
1978: I Will Fear No Evil (1969)
Intro: Paul Williams
1979: The Door into Summer (1956)
Intro: David Hartwell
1979: Glory Road (1963)
Intro: Samuel R. Delany
1979: The Puppet Masters (1951)
Intro: James E. Gunn
1979: Waldo & Magic, Inc. (1950)
Intro: Charles N. Brown
1981: Beyond This Horizon (1942, 48)
Intro: Norman Spinrad
49. Program dated 09/23/77 in Denis Paradis binder of documents, RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.