(Official transcription of Heinlein’s Congressional testimony, 07/19/79, later cut and revised for “Spinoff.”)
And in any case, the Chase Econometrics study was the best evidence at the time of Heinlein’s Congressional testimony.
19. Art Dula, letter to RAH, 07/06/79.
20. RAH, letter to Ben Bova, 07/27/79.
21. Art Dula, letter to RAH, 07/06/79.
22. RAH, letter to Ben Bova, 07/27/79.
23. RAH, postcard to Eleanor Wood, 09/21/79.
24. RAH, postcard to Eleanor Wood, 09/21/79.
25. This catalogue of the Heinleins’ personal library is published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii, Nonfiction 2.
26. Grosset and Dunlap was then acquired by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1982. In 1996, the Putnam Berkley Group was acquired by Penguin Books.
27. In an interview conducted by David A. Truesdale on April 17, 1980 (Robert Heinlein Day in Butler, Missouri) and published in Science Fiction Review, no. 36 (August 1980), Heinlein called the “interstitial notes” of Expanded Universe “the closest thing to an autobiography I expect to write.” The Truesdale interview is republished in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii, Nonfiction 2.
28. A card from “Shel Dorf” thanking them for the check is dated 09/10/79.
29. Dr. Zimmerman’s self-introducing letter, not on Anderson campaign stationery, dated 09/18/79, has a notation in Heinlein’s handwriting on the accompanying envelope: “(He showed up without appt. We did not let him through the gate.)”
30. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 06/17/02. Mrs. Heinlein was quite definite about Heinlein making a permanent affiliation with the Republican Party specifically because of the Reagan candidacy in 1980. If Heinlein had registered Republican for the Goldwater campaign in 1964, he had since allowed it to lapse, presumably registering as an independent. Possibly Heinlein was disillusioned with the mainstream Republicans he found in Colorado Springs—and somewhat out of touch with local politics after the move to the Santa Cruz area.
31. In her guest of honor speech at Moscon, given on September 29, 1979, Trestrail revealed what John W. Campbell had told her father: Chester Nimitz had acknowledged to him, long after World War II, that Doc Smith’s fictional battlefield information technology devised for his Lensman series had influenced the course of Navy CIC (“Combat Information Center”) systems during World War II—which Heinlein already knew: The arrangements Cal Laning was working on for CIC in the South Pacific in the last year of the war had sounded a lot like the Lensman’s capital ship Directrix …
Cal Laning had told Heinlein that his and other writers’ science-fiction stories were at the root of Laning’s own work organizing an enhancement for Naval CIC in the last years of the war. This material is covered in Learning Curve, chapter 24, 333–4. The Campbell letter is cited in an online biography of Smith at http://www.thefullwiki.org/Edward_Elmer_Smith, in the section titled “Influence on Science and the Military,” and in http://objectswww.academickids.com/encyclopedia/-index.php/E._E._Smith (both sites accessed 03/04/2014). The letter was in Verna Trestrail’s estate, though its current whereabouts are not known. One contributor to the fullwiki talk page tantalizingly said the letter was not from Chester Nimitz. Science historians tend to doubt Campbell’s assertions. For an overview of the reasoning, see Edward Wysocki’s The Great Heinlein Mystery: Science Fiction, Innovation and Naval Technology, 2012. Heinlein included “Larger Than Life” in Expanded Universe.
32. Apota (A Piece of the Action) was a publication of the Star Trek Welcommittee from its founding in 1973 until 1982 under the editorial direction of KathE Donnelly and Karolyn Popovich, after 1976.
33. Apota Guest Editorial, undated but presumably 1979 as the text refers to events that would take place in the summer of 1980.
34. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Michael Cassutt, 10/28/79. In this letter Mrs. Heinlein mentions specifically the good reception among German publishers as well as the domestic United States and English.
35. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Michael Cassutt, 10/28/79.
30. New Beginnings
1. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Giles Welch, 05/11/80.
2. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 1, Side B (October 21, 1988).
3. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 05/10/80.
4. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 05/10/80.
5. McAleer, Visionary (2010), 228.
6. Truesdale, David A., “Robert A. Heinlein” Interview, Science Fiction Review, no. 36 (August 1980): 49.
7. Truesdale, David A., “Robert A. Heinlein” Interview, Science Fiction Review, no. 36 (August 1980): 49. The Truesdale interview actually contains more information about the event than do the local newspaper articles.
By kind permission of Mr. Truesdale (the practice of Science Fiction Review was to reserve copyright to authors), the interview was reprinted in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii, Nonfiction 2. One illuminating remark from the interview may be well worth repeating here: In response to a question from Mr. Truesdale as to whether Heinlein thought the new commercial markets for science fiction “spoils a writer into writing only what the audience wants, instead of being creative?” Heinlein replied:
You have a hidden premise in your question. You assume that writing what the audience wants is not being creative. You have to be extremely creative to write what the audience wants, instead of writing what everybody else is and the audience is tired of. (50)
Later he went on to say “You have to be a born gambler if you want to be a freelance writer” (50).
8. Uncredited and otherwise unidentified newspaper article found among miscellaneous Heinlein Day newspaper clippings in Virginia Heinlein’s files and discussed in Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 5, Side A (late February 2000).
9. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Wes and Millie Posvar, 05/10/80.
10. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Gay and Halsey Cowan, 05/19/80.
11. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 08/17/80.
12. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 08/17/80.
13. New York Times Book Review VII (08/24/80): 26. “Behind the Best Sellers by Edwin McDowell.”
14. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 09/03/80.
15. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 09/03/80.
16. Heinlein’s attitudes changed after the Scribner’s rejection of Starship Troopers, as is documented in chapter 15, supra.
17. Gerald Jonas, “Other Worlds,” New York Times Book Review VII (09/14/80): 12.
18. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 09/03/80.
19. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Jon Crusoe, 04/11/81.
20. Available online through Pournelle.com.
21. U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Stewart Canfield Meyer, Ret. (USMA class of 1943) commanded the Ballistic Missile Defense Systems Command at Huntsville, Alabama, from November 1977 to June 1979, and was in charge of the Homing Overlay project for the Strategic Defense Initiative.
22. Dr. Jerry E. Pournelle, e-mail to the author, 02/13/06.
23. Dr. Jerry E. Pournelle, e-mail to the author, 11/07/03. Dr. Pournelle added:
It would be unfair to say that any one of those efforts was responsible for SDI, although it is almost certainly the case that without the Council reports the United States would not have engaged in the Strategic Defense Initiative.
The Council wrote a draft of the President’s SDI memo. Much of it was incorporated into the President’s speech, including several phrases, the authorship of which is not recorded. Heinlein participated in that effort. Reagan himself added several key phrases. He was a better speech writer than any of those he employed, and he and they all knew it. Reagan was the real author of SDI in that he was open to strategic advice from all of us.
However, in another e-mail to the author, 02/13/06, Dr. Pournelle notes: “One sentence by Jim Baen was copied intact into that speech. Jim was pretty
proud of that, with reason.”
24. Dr. Jerry E. Pournelle, e-mail to the author, 11/07/03.
25. Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to David Silver (AGPlusOne), 07/13/00.
26. This interpretation was first advanced by David Silver in 2003 in an online Heinlein Readers’ Group discussion and then published by Silver in two parts, “Blame It All on H. Bruce Franklin: A Sketch of the Motivation Behind the Final ‘World As Myth’ Novels of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1—Introduction,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 16 (January 2005): 16–20; and “The Lonely Silver Rain: Part II of a Sketch of the Motivations of Robert A. Heinlein’s World As Myth,” The Heinlein Journal, no. 17 (July 2005): 26–36. The rape scene in Friday is thus a direct evocation of Cunegonde’s rape at the invasion of Westphalia in Candide.
27. Heinlein’s working notes, Preliminary Notes folder for Friday, Op. 185, titled “Heinlein-FRIDAY-chronology.”
28. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover (1988), Tape 3, Side B (p. 38 of Transcript in RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz). The specific time of the travel is not recorded, but he began writing in November 1980, so the travel was presumably complete by that time. The Heinleins ceased to keep complete paper files of correspondence after becoming proficient on their computers, and the RAH Archive has not attempted to make the Magic Wand disc contents accessible, so the quantity of correspondence after 1981 that is currently accessible declines precipitously.
29. RAH, letter to Donald T. Clark, 04/02/67.
30. Virginia Heinlein, letter to George Warren, 04/03/81.
31. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 11, Side A (March 2? 2000); Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 08/14/00.
32. Science Fiction Digest, vol. 1, no. 4.
33. RAH, letter to Stephen Goldin, 06/13/81, thanking him for the joint dedication of And Not Make Dreams Your Master.
34. In September 1984, Milt Stevens, an L.A.-based science-fiction fan and convention organizer, was co-chair of the 42nd World Science Fiction Convention at the Anaheim Convention Center.
35. Art Dula, e-mail to the author, 03/16/06.
36. H. Bruce Franklin, “Genius and Supergenius,” New York Times Magazine (July 4, 1982): 32.
37. Darrell Schweitzer’s review for Science Fiction Review, no. 45 (1982), “The Vivisector” Department: “The Old Master’s Return: Part 1—Old Heinlein Collaborates with New Heinlein,” at 33, was particularly articulate on this point:
There are two Robert Heinleins. Heinlein #1, the Old Heinlein, began his career with “Life-Line” in 1939, and rapidly developed into a brilliant talent, arguably the best science fiction writer since the early Wells. He was head and shoulders over everyone else for decades. He was a natural storyteller, and endlessly coming up with new angles and insights …
One is tempted to say that, in the beginning, there was pulp sludge and in the legacy of Gernsback science fiction was void and without form and rather tedious, and darkness was on the face of the deep; and Heinlein divided the waters from the waters, calling one type of SF “the gadget story” and the other “the human interest story,” had [sic] He directed the entire field down the path of the latter. Heinlein #1, the Old Heinlein, was that important.
Heinlein #2, the cancerous growth, became manifest as early as Starship Troopers in 1959. He had none of the virtues of Heinlein #1. He lectured endlessly in cute dialogue, often blathering completely stupid things. We saw more of him in Stranger in a Strange Land, a novel constructed out of an abandoned draft of something written much earlier than the final version. The corpse came out of the author’s trunk covered with fungus or something. It grew.
With The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the Old Heinlein regained temporary control, but by I Will Fear No Evil, the blatherer had taken over completely. It indeed looked like Heinlein #1’s career was over.
I think what happened was Heinlein began to take himself entirely too seriously.…
38. Locus reports, issue 258, vol. 15, no. 7, “Robert A. Heinlein Stars at ABA.”
39. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 06/21/82.
40. General Daniel O. Graham (1925–95) founded High Frontier, Inc., in 1982 as a lobbying organization (with K Street offices) specifically to promote the kinetic-weapons aspect of the overall strategic defense recommendation of the Citizens Advisory Council that became President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Because of his constant presence in Washington, D.C., he is sometimes erroneously regarded as the creator of SDI. In an e-mail to the author, 02/13/06, Dr. Jerry Pournelle recalled:
It was this [first] meeting [of the Citizens Advisory Council] or the second (Robert was at all of the early meetings) that we hammered out the Treaty of Tarzana on strategic defense policy, and came to an agreement that included Hunters’ Gang of Four, Graham, Lowell Wood, and other rivals; that “treaty” gave us a single policy recommendation that became SDI and I am convinced was a key factor in winning the goddam Cold War.…
By 1982 the Treaty of Tarzana had been signed, and Graham was the Washington point man for the strategy the Council had put together. As Reagan used to put it, it’s amazing how much you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit.
41. Record of RAH telephone call with Robert Himber, 06/07/82.
42. RAH, letter to Survive! magazine (September–October 1982): 57.
43. Tor Books, 1982; substantially revised and reissued in 1983 under the same title.
44. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover (1988), Tape 1, Side B.
45. The author searched for this letter while going through all of Heinlein’s surviving correspondence, but was unable to locate it, although a number of other letters and cards from Asimov were preserved. Perhaps this letter was moved to a “story notes” desk file and lost over the years.
46. RAH, letter to Isaac Asimov, 08/08/84.
47. The counterintuitive basing of morality in esthetics is a trope drawn (almost uniquely) from F. W. Nietzsche. Although Heinlein had a “low opinion” of Nietzsche (RAH, letter to Robert E. Turner, 07/18/73), having read Also Sprach Zarathustra in the early 1920s (probably as a result of a Wil Durant lecture in Kansas City and probably in the somewhat unfortunate 1909 Thomas Common translation), he was educated at a time when Nietzschean ideas framed the cutting edge of many intellectual fields—the anthropology of Franz Boaz, for example, and his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Nietzsche was arguably the most highly influential philosopher of the twentieth century—and he died in 1900. Much of Heinlein is saturated with Nietzschean ideas. In particular, the pivotal incident of judgment in Job: A Comedy of Justice seems drawn from Cabell’s The High Place (1923), but much of Cabell’s philosophical underpinnings come from Nietzsche by way of Vaihinger and the debates on esthetics that were taking place among the American Pragmatists during the 1920s, particularly the rather acrimonious debate between Dewey and Santayana—Pragmatism itself influenced by Nietzsche.
Heinlein had written a trial-by-esthetic-judgment once before, in the opening month of World War II: “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.”
48. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side A (March 3? 2000).
49. Osamu Tezuka (1928–89), letter to RAH, 08/12/83. Tezuka goes on to add that the exception was the club president, Sakyo Komatsu (1931–2011), who was on location shooting a movie at the time. (Spellings differ slightly in some reference works—e.g., Tesuko for Tezuko—but I have used Tezuka’s spellings in his letter to Heinlein.)
No historical or documentary trace could be found of Tezuka’s “Japan Sci-Fi Writer’s Club” in any reference source, including a three-part survey of Japanese science fiction in Science Fiction Studies (the third installment of Takayuki Tatsumi’s “Generations and Controversies: An Overview of Japanese Science Fiction, 1957–1997. Science Fiction Studies no. 80 [March 2000] contains a brief summary of the preceding two parts). It is possible that the wording Tezuka used is a variant of the “Science Ficti
on and Fantasy Writers of Japan” organization formed in 1963 and of which Komatsu was president from 1980–83. Heinlein’s visit was in the middle of the “Wintry Age” decline of written-form science fiction in Japan, when public attention was shifting over to anime and manga.
50. Virginia Heinlein, untitled first written trip report. Not dated exactly, but about 11/15/82.
51. Virginia Heinlein, untitled first written trip report, not dated exactly, but about 11/15/82. This trip report was included in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii, Nonfiction 2, along with the two other extended trip reports Mrs. Heinlein wrote, for the Northwest Passage and the visit to Antarctica.
52. Virginia Heinlein, untitled first written trip report, not dated exactly, but about 11/15/82.
53. Virginia Heinlein, untitled first trip report, not dated exactly, but about 11/15/82.
54. An outline of the full story of Mark Hubbard’s service, capture, and death, is given in volume 1 of this biography, Learning Curve, in chapter 25, 347–8.
55. RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 09/06/61.
56. RAH, letter to L. Ron Hubbard, 12/16/82.
31. Entotic
1. “Ships of the World: An Historical Encyclopedia—Lindblad Explorer,” web-published at http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/ships/html/sh-055500_lindbladexpl.htm.
2. The incident is detailed in chapter 25 of Learning Curve, 341–2.
3. The penguins were definitely the stars of their Antarctic outings. Mrs. Heinlein commented:
After our association with penguins, we look on them as not being birds, but little people. They manage to endear themselves to anyone who comes into contact with them. Perhaps it is their upright posture, perhaps it’s their clumsy locomotion on their feet—or possibly the “academic processions” going to and from the shore. But everyone seemed to love them.… Penguins are wonderful!
(Virginia Heinlein, “Entotic,” undated but about April 1983, 4.)
Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 Page 82
