Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

by William H. Patterson, Jr.

  4. RAH, letter to Tetsu Yano, 03/19/83.

  5. Denis Paradis, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 03/11/83.

  6. RAH, letter to Jack Williamson, 04/29/83.

  7. RAH, letter to Brad Linaweaver, 03/19/83.

  8. Ronald Reagan’s memoir and daily diaries ignore entirely the matter of input to this decision.

  9. “Dignity committee” is a term of art used in both politics and in the community of charitable organizations—a committee or board of people who lend their names if not often effort to the organization, i.e., to enhance its dignity.

  10. Stan Kent, e-mail to the author, 05/20/06. The Viking Fund actually raised $100,000—one-tenth of the goal from a single effort. However, it became moot when in November 1982 an operator accidentally sent the probe a shut-down command during a software update, and it went permanently off-line.

  11. Art Dula, e-mail to the author, 03/14/06.

  12. Paul Bohannan (1920–2007) was an anthropologist whose principal work was on the Tiv people of Nigeria but also on the anthropology of divorce. How Dr. Bohannan happened to be invited to this dinner was not recorded.

  13. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 08/20/83.

  14. RAH, letter to Clifford D. Simak, 07/04/83.

  15. H. G. Wells, Preface to Seven Famous Novels by H. G. Wells (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1934), 2.

  16. The earliest known representation of the tail-swallowing Ouroboros comes from the Egyptian Book of the Netherworld found in a Tutankhamen shrine—and therefore dating from approximately 1330 BCE.

  17. February 8, 1984.

  18. “Custard-head” was one of Heinlein’s favorite epithets for the foolish; he specifically applied the term to pacifists in the Forrestal Lecture in 1973 and again in a then-recent letter. He attributed resistance to the High Frontier concept to “the Nervous Nellies and Custard Heads who regard even defensive measures as ‘destabilizing’ because it would ‘provoke the Russians into first strike.’ Ah, me!” RAH, letter to Pete and Jane Sencenbaugh, 07/25/73.

  19. Information provided by Timothy B. Kyger, e-mail to the author, 03/18/06. In hindsight, the succession of compromises was not good for the L5 Society. The people who were interested in doing practical projects found other ways of accomplishing their purposes, and within ten years the Society folded up its tents and merged with the National Space Society. Essentially, nobody got what they wanted out of this deal.

  20. RAH, letter to Andre Norton, 06/03/84. Norton’s first published novel, The Prince Commands, was issued in 1934. Her second published novel, Ralestone Luck (1938) was actually the first written, in about 1930.

  21. RAH, letter to Clifford D. Simak, 10/08/78. Heinlein does not seem to have realized that he qualified under his own rule of being a witness to history.

  22. Canadians pronounce Newfoundland with the consonants sharpened and the accent on the third syllable—Newf’nLAND (sometimes NewFOUNDl’nd). The locals say it with a rising pitch, but the rest of Canada can’t manage the same lilt and pronounce it with descending pitch.

  23. Just three days after the Lindblad Explorer departed Beechey Island, a scientific expedition sponsored by the recently created Franklin Forensic Project of the University of Alberta dug up three of the bodies, taking samples of the ice at 10 cm. intervals to determine whether the bodies had lain undisturbed all this time (and found they had). Beattie, O. B. and Geiger, J. Frozen in Time (Saskatoon, Canada: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1987).

  24. Grise Fjord (76.416 N.) is farther north than Resolute (=Qausuittuq at 74.683 N.). In addition, there is the permanent Canadian scientific and military station at Eureka 82.483, far north of that, but Eureka is a scientific station like Little America with rotating staff rather than a permanent habitation.

  Barrow, Alaska, is the northernmost settlement in the United States, but hundreds of miles farther south, even though many maps don’t represent this fact very well.

  25. Mrs. Heinlein pronounced it “Joe Haven,” though other pronunciation guides give it as “ee-yoo-ah.”

  26. Virginia Heinlein, “The Northwest Passage to the Orient” trip report, undated but about October 1984, 6.

  27. New discoveries keep pushing the time frame back, to thirty thousand years ago, and possibly as much as fifty thousand years ago. North America was apparently populated in (at least) two different migrations from Asia, the later one skirting the coast because of glaciation. This second migration populated Central and South America, then North America.

  28. Although this condemnation was widely remarked upon at the time, a search for the piece was not successful. It is possible that it was a passing remark in an article about something else.

  29. In 2000, bookseller Alice Massoglia told Robert James, Ph.D., that Heinlein said that he was going to have to take up writing under a pseudonym again, as he had exhausted the potential market of toes he could step on under his own name.

  30. Leon Stover, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 12/03/84.

  31. “War and Peace in the Space Age,” Analog Science Fact, Science Fiction (March 1982).

  32. Clarke, Arthur C., Spring: 1984, A Choice of Futures: Apocalypse May Yet be Cancelled (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984).

  33. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 01/20/00.

  34. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 12/20/99.

  35. Jerry Pournelle, e-mail to the author, 02/13/06, 12:31 P.M. McAleer’s Visionary (2010), at 254, has Clarke’s remark as “Because I learned all I know about orbital mechanics from you, Max.” Max Hunter’s rejoinder: “You didn’t learn enough, Arthur.”

  36. Quoted in Neil McAleer, Visionary (2010), 255.

  37. Jerry Pournelle, e-mail to the author, 02/13/06, 12:31 P.M.

  38. McAleer, Visionary (2010), 255. The language of this confrontation was changed slightly from the earlier Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography (1992), 327. The words in brackets were in 1992 but not in 2010—possibly because the 2010 revision gives an expanded and somewhat more nuanced treatment of Clarke’s position.

  Mr. McAleer kindly sent an expedited copy of the new trade paper edition of Visionary (the original was released in limited edition) when the final revisions of this biographer were being made, collegial generocity greatly appreciated.

  39. McAleer, Visionary (2010), 255.

  40. McAleer, Visionary (2010) treats this material at 255 as:

  At some point Clarke said he had doubts about it as a moral issue. This outraged Heinlein, who then loudly told Clarke that he had no moral right to frame a moral argument about something in which he had no stake. This was a matter of national sovereignty, and Clarke was not a citizen—

  and follows with a comment by Gregory Benford:

  Heinlein was always big on freedom and the balance with responsibility … I mean that’s what Starship Troopers is all about. You don’t get to vote unless you fight. And similarly, you don’t get an opinion unless your skin is personally risked.

  41. McAleer, Visionary (2010), 256.

  42. Arthur C. Clarke, “Robert Heinlein,” Requiem, Yoji Kondo ed., 264.

  Over the next couple of years Heinlein and Clarke did become reconciled, though they never saw each other again. When Leon Stover was on the dais at a London meeting of the H. G. Wells Society, he recalls that Clarke approached him to help effect the reconciliation. Clarke and Heinlein did correspond—which is to say that Clarke sent letters which Ginny answered cordially. There is nothing particularly unusual or telling about this: Ginny answered almost all Robert’s personal correspondence when he was writing or ill, and these two factors accounted for almost all the time he had left. Clarke credits Ginny’s help—but it was Clarke’s change of attitude, more than any personal intervention, that did the trick.

  32. After 1984

  1. Heinlein’s opus card shows that he recommenced work on The Year of the Snake on June 13, 1984, finishing the draft on July 23, 1984.

  2. It is not entirely clear at what point in the pr
ocess of his last five books the World As Myth as an overarching story pattern emerged in Heinlein’s mind, though it seems that it exists by the time of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which contains quite a number of transitional details that would point forward, to the cosmic (and inter-cosmic) war that is made much clearer in To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

  Mrs. Heinlein told David Silver in 2003 that before the writing of Friday began in 1981, she and Heinlein discussed what he might write, so it is probable that The Number of the Beast did not itself suggest the World As Myth story. (David Silver, preliminary material for RAH Reading Group on AIM The “Gulf” (_Starman Jones_?)-_Friday_ Universe. Meeting Dates and Times: Thursday, March 20, 2003, from 8 to 11 P.M., EST.) Sometime after either Friday or Job it appears that the overarching story concept must have occurred to him. Bringing Jubal Harshaw into the story that connects The Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset is a clear marker of the larger structure, which may have evolved out of the unused Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast written in 1977. That suppressed novel was oriented to an interdimensional war in the Cosmic All against the villains of E. E. Smith’s Lensman series.

  Curiously, Heinlein’s late invention of a master story that incorporates previously written material echoes James Branch Cabell’s late (1915) invention of the Biography of the Life of Manuel, which incorporates all the material Cabell had written since 1904.

  Since The Cat Who Walks Through Walls clearly incorporates material from “All You Zombies—” and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, there is some suggestion that Heinlein intended to incorporate other material from his own corpus into the World as Myth—and therefore that both Friday, with its incorporation of materials from “Gulf,” and Job, which incorporates material from “They” (and possibly also from “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”), might have been intended to become parts of the World As Myth superstory.

  3. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 02/28/85.

  4. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 1, Side B (1988).

  5. The date of the visit mentioned by Virginia Heinlein in taped interview with the author, Tape 10, Side B, is not recorded, but the transmittal letter of the manuscript which Jayne Sturgeon sent to Heinlein was dated August 21, 1985.

  6. Both Jane Gallion, citing Harriet Emerson (www.wussu.com/writings/jane_gallion.html, accessed 09/16/11), and Norman Spinrad (Science Fiction in the Real World, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990) independently mentioned that Sturgeon originally wrote Godbody for Brian Kirby at Essex House, a Los Angeles-based publisher of literary pornography, but never finalized the manuscript because the advance offered by Essex House was too low—either $1,000 or $1,500 compared to the then-usual rate of $5,000 for major publishers. Neither Gallion nor Spinrad fixed the date of the writing, though Essex House had failed by 1972 (http://www.wordservices.com/hobbit, accessed 09/16/11). The manuscript for Godbody was, therefore, not less than about fifteen years old when Sturgeon died in 1985.

  7. In a postscript to a card Jayne Sturgeon sent to Heinlein on 01/30/86 she indicated that her talk with Heinlein about editing the manuscript made her realize she had gone “editorially soft” since Sturgeon’s death.

  8. The manuscript is in Ms. Box 147 of the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz.

  9. Jayne Sturgeon, postscript to postcard to RAH, 01/30/86.

  10. Remy de Gourmont, A Night in The Luxembourg, 1919.

  11. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 08/18/00.

  12. Robert Silverberg, letter to RAH, 09/04/85.

  13. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with Leon Stover, Tape 2, Side A (1988).

  14. Judy-Lynn del Rey died in February 1986.

  15. Heinlein voiced this sentiment a number of times over the years, often in passing remarks. Virginia Heinlein explained their position to Margot Fisher (Lurton Blassingame’s assistant) on 02/11/81:

  … we left Putnam as of Robert’s recent book, TNOTB, for various reasons … Since Walter [Minton] was no longer at Putnam, we departed. [See Virginia Heinlein to George Warren, 03/15/79.] Our real loyalty was to him, rather than to the publishing house.…

  There were other reasons, of course. But that was the primary one. MCA was running it for the balance sheet.

  16. During the editing of this volume in 2010 and 2011, editor David Hartwell added that the Heinleins’ friend Walter Minton had gone to law school since selling his ownership of Putnam’s to MCA in 1975 and leaving the presidency of Putnam’s in 1977 or 1978 (he took the bar examination in 1982). Minton offered to represent Heinlein, and Hartwell himself testified on their behalf, noting that Signet had been reissuing the paperbacks Hartwell had repackaged for them in the early 1970s for nearly fifteen years by that time.

  17. A transcription of Heinlein’s “Message to the Berkeley Sales Staff Concerning The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” is published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xxxviii, Nonfiction 2.

  18. Spider Robinson, untitled review in Analog dated “mid-December” 1985, 184.

  19. David Bradley, “Superlunarian Follies,” New York Times Book Review, VII, 6. There is no particular significance to the specific placement on p. 6, but over the previous fifteen years or so, reviews of science-fiction books in The Times had been migrating from the back toward the front of the magazine.

  20. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 12/22/85.

  21. Hensen’s discussions with Heinlein are mentioned in Edward Regis, Jr., Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge (Addison-Wesley, 1990).

  22. Spider Robinson, “Robert,” Requiem, Yoji Kondo, ed.

  23. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 04/17/89.

  24. Leon Stover, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 04/22/89.

  25. Rita Bottoms recalled in personal conversation with the author that Heinlein told her quite early that Stover was to be his designated biographer—before, in fact, he told Stover. Although Mrs. Bottoms was unable to date this communication specifically, it was in 1986 that Heinlein began communicating biographically useful facts to Stover—see especially RAH, letter to Leon Stover, 06/08/86, which is published in the Virginia Edition, vol. xli, Letters 3 [1960–87]. Heinlein must have discussed the matter explicitly with Stover some time before the end of 1987, as Stover signs himself “… I remain your loving friend and loving biographer, Leon” in a letter to Heinlein dated 01/08/88—exactly five months before Heinlein’s death.

  26. RAH, letter to Leon Stover, 06/08/86.

  27. From Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), “Ulysses” (1842). Quoted as epigraph to To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

  28. This incident of the hemorrhage from Heinlein’s nose, including the detail following, is related in Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Third Series, Tape A, Side A (March 27, 2001).

  29. The incident is described in a circular letter dated 08/09/86; Denis Paradis’s copy is preserved in the RAH Archive.

  30. Virginia Heinlein, IM with the author, 04/22/00.

  31. The copy sent to Denis Paradis is dated August 9, 1986.

  32. This information comes from the August 18, 1986, continuation of the circular letter Mrs. Heinlein wrote for friends.

  33. August 18, 1986, continuation of Mrs. Heinlein’s circular letter about Heinlein’s medical state.

  34. Virginia Heinlein, letters to Denis Paradis, 08/26/86, 10/14/86, and 11/07/86.

  35. Missouri does not actually have a state fruit.

  36. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 09/26/86.

  37. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 11/07/86.

  38. “Three Men in a Starship,” The Economist (11/15/86).

  39. Probably the purest statement of Heinlein’s view of the difference between mass market science fiction and genre-audience science fiction is contained in his 1950 correspondence with Forrest J. Ackerman, 02/19/49, which is quoted in chapter 1 of this volume.

&nbs
p; 40. Daniel Dickinson, “What Is One to Make of Robert Heinlein?” Modern Fiction Studies, XXII: 1 (Spring 1986): 127–32.

  41. Leon Stover, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 01/14/87.

  42. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 01/25/87.

  43. Leon Stover, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 02/25/86.

  44. Leon Stover, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 03/08/87.

  45. Jim Eason, e-mail to “David Silver and the Heinlein Society,” 07/17/07.

  46. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 07/30/87.

  47. Notes of phone conversation with Rita Bottoms by the author, 01/18/03.

  48. Leon Stover, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 07/21/87.

  49. Leon Stover, letter to Robert Heinlein, 07/18/87. “At that time [the June 9, 1984, interview with Heinlein] I got a bigger vision, and wrote back [to Unger] saying, RAH really is a significant American author, not just another genre writer.” Stover goes on to say that for this reason the book deal with Unger collapsed: They only wanted a treatment as a science-fiction figure.

  50. Gerald Jonas, New York Times Book Review, VII: 36:2 (10/18/87).

  51. Leon Stover, letter to RAH, 09/22/87. In (unmemorialized) conversation with the author in 1999, Stover indicated that the inscription identified the Uncle Podger character with Heinlein himself and that Heinlein told him that anyone who wanted to understand him needed to understand this book.

  52. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Tape 7, Side A; Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 06/04/99.

  53. There was at least one copy of the manuscript not in Heinlein’s files, a copy he had given to Cal Laning many years earlier. A copy of a copy of a copy of that manuscript eventually was tracked down by Dr. Robert James in 2003 and was published after Mrs. Heinlein’s demise as For Us, the Living: a Comedy of Customs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

  54. Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 03/12/00.

  55. Virginia Heinlein, letter to Leon Stover, 03/29/89.