Wright, Adrian. Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley. London: A. Deutsch, 1996. A good biography of Hartley for the beginning student, providing a balanced account of
Hartley’s life and information about his novels and other works. Includes a bibliogra-
phy and an index.
York, R. A. “ L. P. Hartley: The Go-Between.” In The Rules of Time: Time and Rhythm in the Twentieth-Century Novel. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. York’s examination of Hartley’s book and novels by other authors focuses on the
rhythm and pace of reading, maintaining that these elements affect readers’perception
of time—a conspicuous presence in all twentieth century fiction.
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ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Born: Butler, Missouri; July 7, 1907
Died: Carmel, California; May 8, 1988
Principal long fiction
Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947
Beyond This Horizon, 1948
Space Cadet, 1948
Red Planet, 1949
Sixth Column, 1949 (also published as The Day After Tomorrow, 1951)
Farmer in the Sky, 1950
Between Planets, 1951
The Puppet Masters, 1951
The Rolling Stones, 1952
Starman Jones, 1953
The Star Beast, 1954
Tunnel in the Sky, 1955
Double Star, 1956
Time for the Stars, 1956
Citizen of the Galaxy, 1957
The Door into Summer, 1957
Have Space Suit—Will Travel, 1958
Methuselah’s Children, 1958
Starship Troopers, 1959
Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961
Glory Road, 1963
Podkayne of Mars: Her Life and Times, 1963
Farnham’s Freehold, 1964
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 1966
I Will Fear No Evil, 1970
Time Enough for Love, 1973
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, 1978
The Number of the Beast, 1980
Friday, 1982
Job: A Comedy of Justice, 1984
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, 1985
To Sail Beyond the Sunset, 1987
For Us, the Living, 2004
Variable Star, 2006 (with Spider Robinson)
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Other literary forms
Robert A. Heinlein (HIN-lin) was a best-selling writer of science-fiction short stories
for ten years before his first novel appeared. Those stories were published in more than one dozen collections, with a great deal of overlap. He cowrote the screenplays for two
films, Destination Moon (1950) and Project Moonbase (1953). He did not publish nonfiction during his lifetime, but his wife, Virginia Heinlein, published his 1946 typescript
“How to Be a Politician” as Take Back Your Government: A Practical Handbook for the
Private Citizen Who Wants Democracy to Work in 1992. His 1953 travelogue Tramp Royale was published in 1992.
Heinlein edited Tomorrow, the Stars (1952), a collection of short stories by other science-fiction writers. In his introduction to the book, he discusses the terms “science fiction” and “speculative fiction,” telling readers that he prefers the term “speculative fiction.” His letters, which were published as Grumbles from the Grave (1989), were selected and edited by his wife.
Achievements
Known since the 1950’s as the dean of science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein was the top-
selling author of the golden age of pulp-magazine science fiction (1930’s-1940’s), the first to sell science fiction to the “slick” magazines (prestigious glossy-paper periodicals such as The Saturday Evening Post), and the first major science-fiction author to write for film.
Heinlein’s science fiction is of the nuts-and-bolts variety, in which space travel and
other future technologies are presented realistically; their engineering is worked out in detail, yet that detail does not intrude on the narrative. Examples of Heinlein’s technologies include the space suit, descriptions of which borrow from his own wartime research at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. In fact, his research led to the development of space suits long after he had described them. (Also, he had envisioned and then detailed the water bed.)
Heinlein received the Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel four times, and Sci-
ence Fiction Writers of America honored him with its first Grand Master award for life-
time achievement. His fiction introduced several words and phrases to the English lan-
guage, including “free fall” for zero gravity, “waldo” for a mechanical arm (named after a Heinlein character), and his acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A
Free Lunch) for a popular phrase, perhaps borrowed from Rudyard Kipling. The acronym
became a byword for libertarians and economists such as Milton Friedman.
Biography
Robert Anson Heinlein was born in Butler, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas City, im-
mersed in what he thought was a Bible Belt culture. His relationship with that culture, as displayed in his fiction, would be partly adversarial.
Heinlein entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, from which he emerged as a
naval officer in 1929. He served on one of the first aircraft carriers, the USS Lexington 117
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(1931), and the Wickes-class destroyer, the USS Roper (1933-1934). He married Eleanor Curry from his Kansas City hometown, but the marriage lasted only one year. In 1932, he
married Leslyn Macdonald. Heinlein’s military career was cut short with a diagnosis of
tuberculosis, leading to a medical discharge. He dabbled in mining and politics, assisting novelist Upton Sinclair’s unsuccessful bid for governor of California in 1934 and running for a seat in the California State assembly in 1938.
In 1939, Heinlein’s short story “Life Line” was published in Astounding Science Fic-
tion, marking his first publication. A flurry of similar stories in the following years determined his career. In fact, he was so prolific that he began competing with himself: Fan
polls in Astounding Science Fiction rated him number one, followed by Anson MacDonald—one of his many pseudonyms.
The year 1947 was portentous for Heinlein. First, he broke into the upper echelon of
the magazine fiction market with “The Green Hills of Earth” in the February issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Second, he began his lucrative and influential series of juvenile novels for Scribner’s with Rocket Ship Galileo. Third, he divorced his second wife and, the following year, married fellow engineer and naval officer Virginia Gerstenfeld, whom he had met at the Naval Air Experimentation Station in Philadelphia during World War II.
fiction.
Heinlein’s contract with Scribner’s guaranteed him one novel a year, timed for a
Christmas release. Scribner’s, however, broke the contract in 1959 by rejecting “Starship Troopers.” Heinlein sold the manuscript to G. P. Putnam’s Sons, which published the book the same year. His next novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, created controversy with its frank sexual and religious themes, but it proved that science fiction could be a medium of social criticism. His later novels continued exploring similar controversial themes, while mixing the hard, nuts-and-bolts science fiction with pure fantasy, in a type of magical realism in which the most fantastic events are given scientific plausibility.
Heinlein was a guest commentator for CBS television’s coverage of the first U.S.
spaceflight to the Moon, and his works were discussed on the Moon by Apollo 15 astro-
nauts in 1971. He almost died from peritonitis in the early 197
0’s and was ill through most of the decade and unable to write much. In his last decade, however, he wrote five well-regarded novels. He died in his sleep on May 8, 1988, from emphysema and congestive
heart failure.
Analysis
The science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein became, by the second half of the twentieth
century, the gold standard by which the genre was measured. Along with his friend Isaac
Asimov and British author Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein became one of the “big three” writ-
ers of English-language science fiction in the twentieth century.
Heinlein’s specialty was twofold: the well-engineered, scientifically plausible exposi-
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tion of future technologies, and his success at weaving those technologies into his fiction unobtrusively. He also was recognized as one of the pioneers in the integration of the social sciences into science fiction, and many of the major themes of his fiction concern social issues: individual liberty, the nature of authority and civil disobedience, nonconformity, sexual and religious morality, and the role of the military in society. Critics
sometimes overstate the importance of sexual, religious, and military themes in Heinlein’s fiction, but his conviction was that all three would be impacted by space travel and that speculative fiction—the term Heinlein preferred for the genre in which he wrote—would
not give a complete picture of possible futures if it did not take these themes into account.
The Puppet Masters
One of the marks of this novel’s success is that its plot (human bodies being invaded by aliens who control their minds) has become a cliché, particularly in film. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978; based on the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), and The Brain Eaters (1958) are all similar in plot, but Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters preceded them all. In fact, The Brain Eaters so clearly “borrowed” from his 1951 novel that Heinlein sued for plagiarism and won an out-of-court settlement. Readers who can get beyond the echoes of later imitators will find a novel of surprising psychological depth that forces its characters to reevaluate the nature of human relationships.
Like most of its imitators, The Puppet Masters gains much of its energy from the instinctive horror at the thought of another creature controlling a person completely. That horror is not mitigated by knowing that the alien creatures controlling the humans remove any trace of negative feeling about the experience. The first-person narrator of the novel, Elihu Nivens, is a government agent known by his codename Sam, and he is humanity’s
last best hope for saving the world from the creatures that attach themselves to the human spinal cord. In the process, Sam’s disgust at the prospect (and at one point the reality) of being controlled by another creature forces him to confront the ways in which the human
spirit can be dominated without alien interference—through such cultural bulwarks as filial piety (the head of the secret service agency Sam works for turns out to be Sam’s father), marriage (Sam’s emotional connection with his wife, Mary, also an agent, is used to manipulate him into taking an alien parasite on his back), and religion (Sam wonders if Mary had been a member of a cult known as the Whitmanites).
The book ends with the eradication of the alien puppet masters that are immanent, but
more important, the story ends with Sam coming to terms with the imitations of the puppet masters in his social, vocational, and emotional relationships.
Double Star
Heinlein’s first Hugo Award winner, Double Star, is a science fiction version of Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda (1894), in which a look-alike is groomed to stand in for a 119
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kidnapped monarch. In Double Star, the captured leader, John Joseph Bonforte, is not a monarch (though the solar system is presented in the book as a constitutional monarchy,
with an emperor), but the leader of an expansionist coalition. Bonforte’s party wants the human government of the solar system to form an alliance with the nonhuman Martians,
but there is a great deal of race prejudice against the Martians among Earth’s humans
(Bonforte’s opponents are known as the Humanity Party).
One of the novel’s racist humans is the first-person narrator, the egotistical actor
Lorenzo Smythe, billed as the Great Lorenzo. Because of his resemblance to Bonforte and
because of his acting ability, Smythe is tapped to stand in for Bonforte at a Martian cere-mony. Smythe, however, cares little for politics. By projecting the psychology of racism in 1950’s America as future prejudice against an alien other, Heinlein took science fiction beyond its literary ghetto and showed that it could engage contemporary social issues—
though in this novel the connection was not overt, and certainly not allegorical. The triumph of this novel, however, lies not in any implicit critique of racism but in the
development of the character of Smythe.
lates” to something nobler. He had expected to play Bonforte only for a single event, but when Bonforte dies in the hands of his captors, Smythe is faced with the prospect of either continuing the charade for the rest of his life or allowing an entire government to collapse.
This most selfish of men is poised to sacrifice his entire career for a cause that was not his.
This unlikely outcome is possible because of the metamorphosis of Smythe’s character
from a cad to a hero so likeable that Bonforte’s secretary, who hated Smythe from the start, falls in love with him. Fellow science-fiction writer James Blish called Lorenzo Smythe
Heinlein’s most successful first-person narrator.
Starship Troopers
Reminiscent of the boot-camp films of World War II, this study of the nature of the mil-
itary mind in an interplanetary future scandalized many readers who considered the novel militaristic and even fascist. Heinlein’s editor at Scribner’s refused to publish the work, but Putnam’s jumped at the chance to publish anything from the popular novelist. The
novel led to Heinlein’s second Hugo Award.
Starship Troopers posits of a future society in which government service (including, but not limited to, military service) is a prerequisite for citizenship. Some readers chafed at the book’s supposed didacticism. It is certainly more discursive than most Heinlein novels: Each difficulty in narrator Juan “Johnny” Rico’s training results in a flashback to a lecture in Johnny’s high school civics class (a required course designed to prepare students for their government service). The novel’s real protagonist might well be the power suit that is the all-purpose soldier’s weapon. Heinlein describes the armored suit with the same detail he uses to describe the regular space suit in Have Space Suit—Will Travel.
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Stranger in a Strange Land
Heinlein’s third Hugo-winning novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, is probably his best-known and most influential work. The basic premise of the “Martian-eye view” of Earth
society had long been a natural narrative device for writers of science fiction. Because the novel’s protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, is biologically human but had been raised
by Martians, he arrives as a cultural outsider on Earth. This plot line allows Heinlein to critique his own culture indirectly. While doing so, Heinlein also delves into the science of linguistics by applying the hypotheses of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf.
Indeed, Heinlein’s use of linguistic theory in his novels had a major effect on science
fiction. The hypothesis is simple: Grammatical categories of a language determine how a
speaker of that language
views the world. In the novel, Smith has a number of unique abilities, which no other human has. He tries to teach his Earth friends these abilities (telekine-sis, voluntary control of autonomic bodily functions, and others) but cannot do so until they learn the Martian language. In the process, Smith creates precedents in international (and interplanetary) law, starts a new religion, and invents unconventional family arrangements, which became actual models for many communes of the 1960’s.
John R. Holmes
Other major works
short fiction: The Man Who Sold the Moon, 1950; Waldo and Magic, Inc. , 1950; The Green Hills of Earth, 1951; Universe, 1951 (as Orphans of the Sky, 1963); Assignment in Eternity, 1953; Revolt in 2100, 1953; The Menace from Earth, 1959; The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, 1959 (as 6 × H, 1962); The Worlds of Robert A.
Heinlein, 1966; The Past Through Tomorrow, 1967; Destination Moon, 1979; Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein, 1980; Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master, 1992; The Fantasies of Robert A.
Heinlein, 1999; Off the Main Sequence, 2005.
screenplays: Destination Moon, 1950 (with James O’Hanlon and Rip Van Ronkel);
Project Moonbase, 1953 (with Jack Seaman).
nonfiction: Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science-Fiction Writing, 1947 (with others); The Science Fiction Novel, 1959 (with others); Grumbles from the Grave, 1989
(Virginia Heinlein, editor); Take Back Your Government: A Practical Handbook for the Private Citizen Who Wants Democracy to Work, 1992; Tramp Royale, 1992 (wr. 1953).
edited text: Tomorrow, the Stars, 1952.
miscellaneous: The Best of Robert A. Heinlein, 1939-1959, 1973.
Bibliography
Franklin, H. Bruce. Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. A study of Heinlein’s entire corpus, biased in its Marxist readings. Franklin, unaware of Heinlein’s socialist activities in the early 1930’s, paints him as a knee-jerk conservative capitalist.
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Gifford, James. Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion. Sacramento, Calif.: Nitrosyncretic Press, 2000. Commentary on all known Heinlein works, including each of his