That "Robert Heinlein induces very strong reactions" (Franklin 5), is an observation made by virtually every critic of his work. Views of the end of his career (the seven novels from 1970-1988) range from fiercely positive chants of "Rah, Rah, R.A.H" (Robinson) and its scholarly equivalent (eg, Slusser), to fiercely negative dismissals of his last books as "self-indulgence of the worst kind" (Aldiss 386) and its scholarly equivalent (eg, Franklin). I did not realize just how strong such reactions could be until recently. Years ago I collected all his books, reading and re-reading each with pleasure. Then our house was remodeled and my Heinleins went in a box. About a year ago I decided to give that collection one last reading and then sell it. When I came to the last book, a first edition hardcover of To Sail Beyond the Sunset, I found myself shouting at the novel and writing outraged marginal comments in it. Yet the story was still interesting: I finished reading it. Only then did I tear the book into its individual signatures and throw it in the wastebasket.
This essay uses Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather to examine To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I will look at how what Parkin-Speer sees as a "focus solely on unbelievable sexual permutations at unbelievable lengths" (123) is interlinked in the novel with insistent militaristic patriotism and a loud proclamation that those trends usually seen as progress toward greater freedom and justice in this country are in fact causes of America's decay and downfall. Before turning to the novel, I will explain how Imperial Leather offers an approach to studying science fiction, and discuss some of Heinlein's recurring ideological themes and fetishes.
Panshin and Sarti complain that Heinlein's characters are shallow, his settings indistinct, and that he cannot convey emotion or inner conflict. Heinlein's protagonists are generally self-reliant individualists. Plank, among others, argues that juvenile novels aside, in many cases, the self-reliance is so extreme that it seems to be more the stuff of boys' power-fantasies than part of a believable adult character. Slusser, Franklin, and Panshin look at Heinlein stories in which the hero becomes a mentor to his father, literally creates himself through time travel, or becomes a woman by some dodge and impregnates herself with himself. All three argue that such narcissism and "solipsism"(1) are central themes throughout Heinlein's work.
These critics are, in my opinion, missing the point. In a valuable 1975 essay, Joanna Russ writes that science fiction (SF) cannot be judged by the usual literary criteria ("Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction" 3). To talk of narcissism or believable characters is to use critical tools which, Russ notes, "are simply not applicable to a body of work" which "is fundamentally a drastically different form of literary art" from "realistic or naturalistic twentieth- century fiction" (4). Her "Speculations: the Subjunctivity of Science Fiction," (1973) argues that if narrative engages its audience through a suspension of disbelief, SF achieves that suspension in a way fundamentally different from realistic fiction. Quoting an essay by Samuel R. Delaney, she defines the innate relations between a narrative and its believability for different kinds of narrative.
Nonfiction "reportage" asserts that the narrated events "happened" (belief is automatic) while naturalistic fiction asserts that they "could have happened" (we believe because it seems real). Fantasy, on the other hand, asserts that the story "could not have happened," while SF asserts that it "did not happen" (16), creating much more complex and dynamic kinds of reader engagement. This scheme is beautiful, but flawed. Both Russ and Delaney make a mistake of dividing literature into "us versus them." They treat SF as a thing apart from other ghettoized genres, and at the same time leave both nonfiction "reportage" and "naturalistic" fiction unexamined categories.
Before "what happened" can become "reportage," it needs to be made into a narrative. Reality is too complex and formless to grasp. Nonfiction cannot be a transparent account of what "did happen," merely certain happenings, carefully cut, edited, and interpreted to form a meaningful story. Anne McClintock notes that Victorian "nonfiction" portrayed typical bourgeois housewives as living in idleness thanks to the labor of three domestic servants. But the actual cost of such a staff was unaffordable for all but the wealthiest of bourgeois families (160-61). Nonfiction claims to be about what "did happen" but is rather about what the narrator decides "is thought to have happened."
Realistic novels are a recent invention: to emphasize their difference from the upper and lower classes, the emerging bourgeoisie published stories about themselves as they thought they were, and about how they were different. From the beginning of the genre, novelists presented their work as nonfiction, what "did happen." The first edition of Pamela was labeled an autobiography. In making their stories seem "realistic" or "natural," novelists had to use verisimilitude: only things like what was thought to happen in life could appear in the story. The result was a highly conservative kind of storytelling: realistic novels could only describe the world as it was generally seen to be.
In opposition to "realistic" narrative is adventure fiction, including SF. Adventure fictions, by definition, are stories of wish-fulfillment and fantasy. The difficulty lies in convincing an audience conditioned by conventions of "realism" to indulge in the pleasures of "could not happen." Russ says fantasy uses framing devices ("Speculations" 20). Horror preys on fears that it could happen, after all. SF uses science (the study of reality) to assert that while the story "did not happen," it is possible.
Instead of telling "could have happened" stories limited to the possibilities of the world as we think it is, adventure fiction tells "could not have happened" stories set in the world as we wish it could be. The result is a highly revolutionary kind of storytelling: by describing what is not, adventure fiction demands change in what is. As stories of wish-fulfillment, adventure fiction can place the author's ideologies, paranoias, drives to power, and fetishes on display in a way that realistic fiction cannot. Which brings me, finally, to McClintock's Imperial Leather, which reads the ideologies of such wish-fulfillment in Victorian culture and adventure novels. Heinlein's wish-fulfillment can be read similarly.
McClintock rejects the usual psychoanalytic definition of the fetish being a penis replacement as too limited. Rather, she argues, fetishes are "the displacement onto an object (or person) of [particularly social] contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level." Social contradictions are "experienced at an intensely personal level," so the fetish inhabits "the threshold of both personal and historical memory." As "the embodiment of an impossible irresolution," marking a "crisis in social meaning," the fetish "recurs with compulsive repetition." By invoking the fetish, "the individual gains symbolic control" over otherwise "terrifying ambiguities" (184-85).
In Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980), H. Bruce Franklin argues that Heinlein's work deals with prototypically American values and ideas. Independent capitalist entrepreneurship, and the liberty and freedom of the individual, are recurrent Heinlein themes, but they embody deep social contradictions. The American ideal of individual freedom and liberty is rooted in assumptions that "all men are created equal." At the same time, the American ideal of the individual who supports his family and who gets ahead in life through honest hard work and thrift is rooted in Calvinist ideas that people are unequal: the few successful entrepreneurs are the elect, while the many failures are the damned. Virtually all of Heinlein's fiction turns and returns to this basic contradiction in American culture.
How Heinlein acquired such a deep commitment to both sides of this social contradiction is difficult to say. A private person, the biographical information available about him is still quite limited.(2) His parents came from Butler, Missouri, a Bible-belt farming community of 3,000 in the southern part of the state. A religious upbringing probably contributed to his conception of the Calvinist work ethic. He was born on 7 July, and probably associated Fourth of July celebrations with his birthday. In the first seven years of his life (1907-1914), his family's finances were rather precarious. His father, Rex, and Rex's relatives worked in Kansas City for companies which failed and tried to start their own company, which also failed. Eventually Rex found steady work as bookkeeper for the monopoly which had forced him and his father and brother out of business. Franklin thinks this family economic history contributed to Heinlein's view of the value of individual entrepreneurship.
Heinlein was one of seven children: the difficulty of feeding and housing so many probably prompted his parents to send him to spend several summers living with his maternal grandfather, Alva Lyle, a physician and early Missouri settler back in Butler. Heinlein once referred to Dr. Lyle as "a horse-and-buggy doctor, who strongly influenced me." Mentoring relationships between the hero and a patriarchal grandfatherly figure recur again and again in Heinlein's fiction. The mentor usually expounds Heinlein's own editorial views in the story.
Heinlein's military service was also strongly influential. He was in high school ROTC, entered the Naval Academy, and served until tuberculosis forced him to retire on permanent disability in 1934. After a few years of depression living he turned to writing in 1939. If the editorial mentor figure in a Heinlein story is not a grandfather type, then he is almost certainly a military boot camp instructor. Military ideologies are deeply contradictory. American soldiers are taught that American equality, freedom and democracy are worth fighting and dying for, but at the same time they become members of a fiercely authoritarian and hierarchical organization in which they must do as they are told and have no say in how even the most petty aspects of their work or personal life is run. Officers are even more deeply indoctrinated in the sanctity of America's system of government, and simultaneously told that because of their intelligence and education, they are suited to lead, while other soldiers must follow.
As a boy, Heinlein was an avid reader of SF dime novels, including the blatantly racist Tom Swift series. In addition to Verne, Wells, and Twain, he enjoyed Kipling, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. These last authors are suffused with the related ideologies of colonialism and the American frontier, ideologies which recur in Heinlein's novels, especially the myth of the empty frontier and the superiority of the white pioneer who is able to conquer or destroy any native flora or fauna which stands in his way.
Critics of Heinlein's stories have noted that he consistently assumes that a few people are competent, self-reliant, intelligent, and good, and that the rest of humanity are mere yahoos. In line with Heinlein's Bible belt upbringing, his protagonists, members of the superior few, either begin as well off or become so by the end of the story. The Farnhams in Farnham's Freehold make much of how they are ordinary Americans having trouble making ends meet, yet they employ a live-in Black servant. In contrast, the villain of "The Roads Must Roll" is a union organizer, while in I Will Fear No Evil, America is being destroyed by the violent crime of the urban poor.
In line with the racism of Heinlein's beloved dime novels, the competent few are almost always white. Several stories explicitly racialize the bad, incompetent yahoos: in story after story, Asians are a menacing horde of unchecked breeders, threatening to either displace white Americans (Sixth Column) or, more often, to fill and starve the Earth (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Tunnel in the Sky, etc).
In stories, essays, and speeches, Heinlein reiterates the idea that there are "170,000,000 of us against 900,000,000 of them" ("Who are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?" 389), "them" being Chinese communists who are outbreeding "us" (1961 "Guest of Honor Speech" 177). In addition to this threatening horde, the American poor are incompetent: The Cat Who Walks Through Walls ridicules an uneducated welfare parasite who lacks the Protestant work ethic. The yahoos are winning, and democracy is doomed. Starship Troopers places it in explicitly militaristic terms: only veterans deserve the franchise. "Gulf" gives up on democracy completely. A secret organization of geniuses are breeding only with each other in order to produce a new species of smart men. The geniuses manipulate the stupid people who head the world's governments. The story's mentor figure, leader of the geniuses, calls their benevolent interest in the welfare of the stupid people sentimental, and compares it to the way a pet owner feels about his kittens or puppies. The magazine version of "If This Goes On-" (1940) tries to save democracy with totalitarian measures. A religious dictatorship that has ruled America for three generations is overthrown. The revolutionaries agree that most Americans, born under the dictatorship, have no concept of democracy. Until each American was hypnotically reconditioned, "he" would not be fit to be enfranchised "as a free citizen of a democratic state" (synopsis in Franklin 32).
Yet, Heinlein is also convinced that the geniuses and the stupid yahoos are "created equal." A speech, "This I Believe" says "I believe in my fellow citizens. . . . for every criminal there are 10,000 honest, decent, kindly men" (218). A stock plot complication in Heinlein strands the hero in a strange place, without transportation, penniless, hungry, his clothes damaged or missing, and on the run from the antagonists. The hero asks for help from the first person he meets. That person is often poor, backward, uneducated, and/or not white, but is invariably generous, kindhearted, and helpful in saving the hero from his predicament. Job consists of a long series of such encounters. Job is in many ways an anti-elitist novel: a fundamentalist Christian hero is, like Job, being persecuted by God. He goes through the story telling all the kind and decent people who help him that good works don't count: anyone not born again in Jesus before the immanent Rapture will be damned. After the Rapture, the hero discovers that Heaven is a authoritarian, snobbishly elitist society where angels ride in the front of the bus and mortals at the back. Yet in the end, the novel returns to Calvinism: after going to Hell (a rather nice place) and getting help from Lucifer, the hero (who has shown his superiority by surviving all this adversity) is financially and sexually rewarded.
"This I Believe" also asserts that "I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown. In the honesty, durability, and goodness of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet" (219 his italics). The Star Beast and other stories feature nonwhite heroes. Yet like Job's anti-elitism, this anti-racism is only partially sustained: the "minority" heroes are Oreos, white in outlook and culture with dark skins. Only if you know that Heinlein's intent was for the heroine of I Will Fear No Evil to be Black (Heinlein told XXXX this in an interview, XXX) can you spot the buried hints in the novel which mark her as not white . Other stories trade racism for class bias. The narrator of To Sail Beyond The Sunset claims that the feet of Klu Klux Klansmen show "the cheap and worn out shoes of the social bottom layer" who can only "feel superior to somebody" in the anonymity of the Klan (157).
Gender is another site of contradiction for Heinlein. Heinlein's competent heroes embody American exceptionalism, even when they are natives of Mars or the Moon. Free frontiersmen at heart if not in fact, they have the pioneering spirit and the know-how, independence and can-do stubbornness to go with it. Only a few Heinlein stories feature significant heroines. According to democratic ideals, these women are smart, competent, and so on, even more so than the heroes. On this basis, Parkin-Speer argues that Heinlein is "Almost a Feminist." But Heinlein's democratic ideals of gender equality are contradicted by his patriarchal ideals of male supremacy. In To Sail Beyond The Sunset, the heroine narrator writes of her honeymoon that "I knew that all my life had just been preparation for this moment" of having sex with, and being impregnated by, her husband (92). The heroine's superior competence is part of being helpmate to her man: in The Puppet Masters, the knowledge that he is married to someone "tougher and stronger" than he is (235), but who obeys him in all things, serves to restore the hero's self-confidence.
All humans are basically decent and good. Humans are unequal, with a few being smart and good and the rest being stupid and bad. Women are superior to men. Women should be subordinate to men. Democracy and freedom are worth fighting and dying for. Democracy and freedom are doomed because of all the yahoos. These are Heinlein's fetishes, themes he reinvoked and remanipulated over and over again, taking one stance, then another, but never able to resolve the basic social contradictions.
When Heinlein republished his prewar magazine stories (1939 to 1942) in book form, he revised them. I suspect many of these revisions had less to do with improving poorly written material than with returning to and reworking an earlier invocation of a fetish theme. The book version of "If This Goes On-" (1953) retains the magazine idea of indoctrinating the poor ignorant masses to be able to handle freedom, but recasts it. The revised story introduces a mouthpiece character who looks like "an angry Mark Twain." This character denounces the indoctrination scheme (which was accepted without question in the first version of the story) declaiming that "free men are free because they are ornery and cussed" and "the American people are not children" (460-61). He then melodramatically drops dead, and the revolutionaries agree that they will not attempt to reindoctrinate the population. But how democracy will be restored when most Americans still support the religious dictatorship is left an unanswered question.
Heinlein also returned to "Gulf," this time by writing a sequel, Friday. The heroine's boss is the same mentor character as the leader of the geniuses in the earlier story. The organization of benevolently Machiavellian, reproductively isolated geniuses, however, is completely gone. Instead there is a reference to the colony planet where "those self-styled supermen went," the one planet Friday's boss forbids her to go to when she emigrates from Earth. Again, however, Heinlein does not complete his refutation of the earlier story. Democracy has failed: America has broken into several independent authoritarian states. The yahoos have won and Earth is being run by greedy multinational corporations whose selfish unconcern for people's welfare creates a global outbreak of Black Death. The only hope lies in those who are smart enough to abandon Earth, emigrating and colonizing new planets.
Having swung back from Job's anti-elitism to elitism again, Heinlein's last novel is another refutation. But instead of refuting himself, he wrote a refutation of the world. To Sail uses the SF device of parallel universes and alternative histories to provide a detailed look at American history, as imagined and rewritten by Heinlein. Long-lived Maureen Johnson wakes up on a strange planet with no idea of where she is or how she got there. This frame encloses Maureen's autobiography, from her birth in 1882 to her leaving Earth in 1982. The story is somewhat autobiographical: Maureen's father, Ira, is clearly based on Alva Lyle, and Maureen on Heinlein's mother. On the other hand, I doubt Heinlein's mother was as obsessed with having sex as is Maureen.(3)
Maureen explains that she is writing an account of her life in an attempt to determine "where I went wrong" and "how to straighten out the mess and go right" (64). As character motivation it is rather thin, but adventure fiction is not concerned with motivation. Russ argues that SF tends to be didactic ("Towards an Aesthetic" 5), and this is especially true of Heinlein's work. Maureen's story is not for her, but us: it shows us how we Americans went wrong. The Spanish-American war begins on the next page, and Heinlein begins the first of several refutations in the novel with a rewriting of Mark Twain's "The War Prayer."
America gained a colonial empire in the Philippines as a result of the Spanish-American war. Filipinos resented America's refusal to grant them independence, and rebelled. America's colonial occupation force killed a million people (about a tenth the population of the Philippines) putting down the revolt. "The War Prayer" was one of many short pieces Twain wrote in opposition to America's imperialist policies. In it, war is declared, and people gather in church, organ music blaring the battle hymn of the republic. "An aged stranger" enters the church and walks up the aisle to the front as the pastor delivers a "'long' prayer" in "moving and beautiful language" asking God to watch over and keep safe the soldiers who are about to go to war, and to grant them victory. The stranger interrupts the pastor and tells the congregation that the unuttered half of the prayer asks God to "help us tear [the enemy] soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells" (Twain 156-160).
Heinlein puts Maureen and her family in church: the minister is delivering his sermon when "someone started ringing the big bell in the county courthouse" (65). An aged patriarch, Ira, leaves, then reenters the church, walks up to the front, and interrupts the pastor to tell him that war has been declared. The pastor delivers "about twenty minutes" of prayer, asking
the Lord God Jehovah to lead us in this time of peril. . . . He asked the Lord's help for all our brave men on land and sea who must now fight for the preservation of this sacred, God-given land. He asked . . . help in drying the tears of widows and orphans and of the fathers and mothers of our young heroes destined to die in battle. He asked that right prevail for a speedy end to this conflict (66).
Maureen tells us that she is agnostic, and contemptuous of the pastor, but "found myself saying 'Amen!' to his every word, while tears streamed down my cheeks" (67). The parallels are clear, especially since Maureen has already established that she and Ira are avid fans of Twain who "read everything by Mr. Clemens he [and she] could lay hands on" (24).
Heinlein could easily have depoliticized Twain, portraying him as America's humorist and storyteller without reference to his political activism. Instead, in a scene where Maureen and Ira meet with Twain, Heinlein has Twain voice Heinlein's own opinions. "A democracy works well only when the common man is an aristocrat," Twain is made to say. But instead the common man is common. "Fur on a frog" is as likely as a common man who understands "personal responsibility for the welfare of the State" (79). While Twain may have written something like this, it would almost certainly have been part of a statement about the corrosive effects of money, nepotism, and the spoils system on politics during the Gilded Age. Heinlein makes it a blanket statement, then has Maureen quote it in the course of expounding on patriotism. Only a few journalists or congressmen need be "murderous fools indifferent to the deaths of heroes for that minority to destroy lives, lose battles, turn the course of a war" (79). In reality, Twain repeatedly said that if opposition to an unjust war was unpatriotic, then he was a traitor ("Patriots and Traitors" 67-69). Thus Heinlein's Twain is being used to attack the views of the real Twain.
The novel's meeting between Twain and Maureen supposedly happened in Kansas City, in January of 1898, a few months before the Spanish-American war. The real Twain was in Europe for most of the 1890's, and did not return until 1900. But the real, expatriate Twain does not sit well in Heinlein's version of the world: Twain's long absence from America suggests a lack of the flag-waving patriotism that Heinlein is advocating.
After describing the pastor's prayer, Heinlein has Maureen announce that "I must drag out my soap box." She attacks "something called 'revisionist history'" which "became popular among 'intellectuals'" in 20th century America. She sets up revisionist historians as straw men, knocks them down, and adds that "somehow" they have "turned the War of 1898 into a case of imperialistic aggression by the United States. How an imperialist war could result in the freeing of Cuba and the Philippines is never made clear" (67). Heinlein is also refuting his own 1941 story, "Solution Unsatisfactory," which matter-of-factly treats the Spanish-American war as a case of American aggression.
Once war is declared, Maureen's fiancee, brother, father, and former boyfriend all join the army. Anne McClintock argues that ideologies of gender play a key role in nationalism. She notes that fetish displays of patriotic paraphernalia (bands, flags, and of course armies) often include women in the symbolic position of "wife and mother" (371). "Women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation, but are denied any direct relation to national agency" (354). Heinlein includes such a display, with Maureen and her mother in Sunday best, seeing off their men while a brass band plays (76). But Maureen's symbolic bearing of the nation happens separately. The former boyfriend was the first man Maureen had sex with, and she has classed him as an inept partner (38). But she has sex with him again after he joins the Army to show him that "I was proud of him," and is surprised by "fireworks, big ones! I got all blurry and . . . found I was making loud noises" (75). The boyfriend dies in the war.
In 1917, Heinlein repeats the scenario. Maureen's father tries to join but is turned down as too old. Her husband joins. Theodore, a friend of Ira's who Maureen lusts after, delays, then joins. Maureen is relieved that Theodore is not "a coward who would refuse to defend his country," and adds that "I had not really believed that there were such subhuman creatures. I had never known one" (186). Maureen kisses Theodore goodbye: "my tongue met his and I promised him wordlessly that whatever I had was his" (187). Later she has sex with him before he leaves for France, where he ends up missing in action.
The formula gets rather monotonous. When Maureen's fiancee comes home from the Spanish-American war, she has sex with him, and "anyone within a quarter mile must have heard me. I fainted" (86). Male patriotism ignites female desire, allowing the man's patriotism to be validated and rewarded by the woman's sexual favors.
The Spanish-American war happened before Heinlein was born, and World War I ended when he was only 11. He was not personally involved in, and had little or no experience of, either one. Thus nothing keeps him from making each into a formulaic demonstration of his views on patriotism. During World War II, however, Heinlein was an adult. After Pearl Harbor, he wrote to his editor that "my feelings toward the Japs could be described as a cold fury. . . . I want them to be smashed . . . [and] punished at least a hundredfold, their cities burned . . . their sovereignty taken away from them" (Grumbles From the Grave 26-27). So instead of a third repetition of the formula, we get a rewriting of history that allows Heinlein to be vengeful.
The Japanese attack San Francisco instead of Pearl Harbor. Once again all the adult male characters sign up for military service, but in a rather perfunctory way, and this time there is no man Maureen has sex with. Heinlein has other things on his agenda. "More than sixty thousand Japanese-Americans were lynched or shot or (in some cases) burned alive" in the days following Japan's attack (244). The war ends with the atom bombing of two Japanese cities, and the emperor and his ministers "shocked us all by ritually disemboweling themselves." Maureen concludes that "we will never understand the Japanese" (246). Heinlein's thirst for vengeance is not satisfied, however. Twenty pages later we learn that Japan has become an American colony, "the Far Eastern Possessions." American treatment of the colony is severe: a rebellion against American occupation elicits a policy of "ten of their number for one of ours," and when that does not work, "one Shintoist shrine [is] destroyed and defiled" for each American killed (268).
One would expect at this point that Heinlein would go on to give his versions of Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War. To the contrary, they are not mentioned at all. Heinlein's project is to show where America went wrong. Thus far he has shown what he claims is America gone right. He has fiercely asserted, contrary to Mark Twain and other critics, that the Spanish-American war was a righteous war. He portrays Kansas City, from 1900 to 1940, as peaceful, crime-free, prosperous, and generally utopian. He uses the world wars to emphasize the importance of patriotism in his value system. The rest of the novel is devoted to showing how America is supposed to have deviated from these ideals in the second half of the century.
Heinlein defines the deviation in frontier terms. "The American people had . . . started losing the hard common sense that had won them a continent" (371). The novel features two different explanations for this loss. The first appears in a story-stopping lecture Heinlein could have typed in his sleep: the yahoos are taking over. "Peer group promotion [in schools] insured that the franchise would be exercised by ignorant incompetents." Repeal of "the pauper's oath" insured that "habitual failures, incompetents of every sort, people who can't support themselves and people who won't" would each "have the same voice in ruling the country" as people like "Thomas Edison or Thomas Jefferson" (371).
The second explanation is integrated into the story. Maureen divorces her husband in 1946. In 1952, two years before Blackboard Jungle was published in the real world, two of her children who stayed with the husband show up at her doorstep (280). Maureen rapidly becomes appalled: she has no objection to sex, but is upset that one of her daughters would be so careless as to catch "syphilis and clap" (329). Worse yet, the daughter is using marijuana and cocaine. The son is not in as much trouble, but both refuse to obey her orders and have the shocking idea that they should have an equal say in household affairs. When they left her care, after being raised to the tune of a peach switch (18, ???), they were "well behaved," "polite, [and] obedient" (344). After six years in the care of her ex-husband's new wife, who did not beat them (319), they are "incorrigible, uncivilized, totally out of hand" (344).
Juvenile delinquency due to lack of proper corporal punishment is just the beginning, however. Within a few years, "the whole country was losing its buttons" (369). Maureen moves to Albuquerque, a place that is "fighting back," in 1972 (369). Albuquerque's university was "blessed with a chancellor who had not given in to the nonsense of the sixties." Students who rioted were expelled. Remedial English was abolished, and students who needed it were not admitted. Students were required to take mandatory drug tests, and were expelled and prosecuted if they failed them (368-69). The legislature reinstituted "public hangings" for drug dealers. As a result, the city was "a good place to live the ten years I was there" (369).
In short, juvenile delinquency led to the 1960's counterculture and left-wing student activism, and these evils are the root of America's ills. This message is reinforced in various ways. The novel contains no mention whatsoever of the civil rights movement. However, while dealing with her delinquent children, Maureen says that she doesn't think any government should "coddle hunger strikers," or "people who chain themselves to fences or lie down in front of vehicles." She dismisses such acts as "grown-up tantrums" (319). Elsewhere, in the midst of attacking feminists who do not appreciate men's helping them out of cars and similar "gallantries," Maureen notes that by 1970, "manly men . . . the sort who do not wait to be drafted, were growing scarce" (277). She mourns the destruction of "the best culture up to that time in all known histories" (371).
Finally, Maureen contemptuously notes that "as usual, the ACLU had a fit over" Albuquerque's approach to students and drug dealers. "Several ACLU lawyers" were jailed "for contempt of court, not in the new jail, but in the drunk tank" with "the drunks, the hopheads, the wetbacks, and the quasi-male prostitutes" (369). This returns us, in a different form, to the yahoo thesis. Any people who argue that American society is less than perfect, whether student activists, hippies ("hopheads"), or civil rights lawyers, are no better than the lower classes ("drunks") or the inferior races ("wetbacks"). All are degenerate yahoos, lacking in essential American values, their race, sexuality, and gender identity suspect.
Science fiction critics have classified Heinlein as a conservative libertarian with outspoken elitist, racist, and sexist views, all of which is clearly true. His stories present his opinions not as opinions but as inarguable facts, an attitude not likely to gain a sympathetic audience. But Heinlein is to be pitied rather than condemned. Underneath the certainty of his convictions is a tragic insecurity: Heinlein firmly believed in the truths which are "self-evident," of equality, liberty, and happiness. They are American ideals and he was an American. At the same time, he believed in a superior few and an inferior many. That also is an American ideal, although one seldom explicitly formulated, and he was an American. Unable to give up either ideal, unwilling to consider questioning his allegiance to either, he was forced to endlessly return to the same themes and questions, never getting a satisfactory answer.
Note: Stories by Robert Heinlein not cited below were described from memory.
Heinlein, Robert A. Expanded Universe. New York: Ace, 1982.
-----. Farnham's Freehold. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1964.
-----. Friday. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982.
-----. Grumbles From The Grave. Virginia Heinlein, ed. New York: Ballantine, 1989.
-----. "Guest of Honor Speech at the XIXth World Science Fiction Convention, Seattle, 1961." in Yoji Kondo, Requiem. 168-197.
-----. "If This Goes On-" in Heinlein, The Past Through Tomorrow. 361-470.
-----. The Past Through Tomorrow. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967.
-----. The Puppet Masters. New York: Ballantine, 1990.
-----. "Solution Unsatisfactory." in Heinlein, Expanded Universe. 96-144.
-----. "This I Believe." in Yoji Kondo, Requiem. 218-219.
-----. Time Enough For Love. New York: Berkeley Books, 1974.
-----. To Sail Beyond the Sunset. New York: Ace, 1987.
-----. "Who are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?" in Heinlein, Expanded Universe. 386-395.
Kondo, Yoji, ed. Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A Heinlein and Tributes to the Grandmaster. New York: Tor, 1992.
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Jim Zwick, editor. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992.
Aldiss, Brian W. and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. New York: Atheneuem, 1986. p383-406.
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1. The philosophical position that nothing exists beyond the self: the outside world is a mere creation of the self. Back
2. Biographical data in the following is from Franklin, 3-16, with my own commentary and interpretation. Back
3. To avoid endless explanations, I ignore the novel's role as the third book in a trilogy, and its time-travel frame. The following discussion therefore contains some inaccuracies of omission. Back