Los Angeles Times: Robert Heinlein's future may be past

[R.A. Hettinga]

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heinlein9dec09,0,1217973,print.story?coll=la-books-headlines>


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 From the Los Angeles Times
Books & authors
Robert Heinlein's future may be past
He was one of the greats of golden-age science fiction, but his  
legacy polarizes today's readers.
By Scott Timberg
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

December 9, 2007

He was a onetime utopian socialist who became an assertive right- 
winger, a libertarian nudist with a military-hardware fetish, a cold  
warrior who penned an Age of Aquarius sensation with a hero who  
preached free love.

He won admiration from Ronald Reagan, who enlisted his ideas in his  
"Star Wars" missile shield, and Charles Manson, who was captured with  
the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" in his backpack. He predicted  
the European Union and invented the water bed.

But Robert A. Heinlein, the California-based science-fiction writer  
who stood over the midcentury decades like a colossus, casts a  
different kind of shadow now, on the 100th anniversary of his birth,  
as his archives, held by UC Santa Cruz, are being placed online,  
making his work even more accessible to scholars and fans. Most of  
his work is in print, but opinions vary wildly about how important a  
writer Heinlein was: He's both a life-changing inspiration and a  
"dinosaur" who exerts less cultural presence than, say, Philip K.  
Dick, the drug-addled oddball who was a footnote during the field's  
golden age.

Heinlein, who in life was a divisive figure, has become, in death, a  
polarizing one and even something of a punch line. "When an emerging  
science-fiction writer's work earns him comparisons to Robert A.  
Heinlein," Dave Itzkoff begins a 2006 New York Times review, "should  
he take them as a compliment?"

As the literary and academic worlds open to science-fiction and genre  
writing, Heinlein lacks the cachet of J.G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin,  
Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson and  
others. Films based on Dick's books, good and bad, keep coming. But  
Heinlein's film adaptations, in the last half century, since 1950's  
"Destination Moon," culminated in 1997's "Starship Troopers," widely  
disliked by his fan base.

Non-SF writer William Burroughs probably has more influence inside  
the genre's literary wing than Heinlein, who won four Hugos (the  
award voted by the fans), sold millions of copies, and was termed the  
field's most significant writer since H.G. Wells.

"His rabid fan base is graying," said Annalee Newitz, who writes  
about science fiction for Wired and Gawker. "To literary readers, the  
books look cheesy, sexist in a hairy-chest, gold-chain kind of way.  
His stuff hasn't stood the test of time," because of characters'  
windy speechifying and their frontier optimism.

"Here at the store I actively resist promoting him, because he was a  
fascist," said Charles Hauther, the science fiction buyer at Skylight  
Books. "People don't seem to talk about him anymore. I haven't had a  
conversation about Heinlein in a long time."

Still, hard-core admirers remain: David Silver, the Venice-based  
president of the 800-member Heinlein Society, discovered the author's  
work as a boy in the '50s and said he rereads about four dozen of  
Heinlein's books every year.

And Heinlein's following shows up in unexpected places: He's the hero  
of numerous astronauts, Silicon Valley types and those seeking to  
privatize space travel. He isn't just their favorite writer; he set  
them on their life's course. He generated public enthusiasm for the  
space race, inspired the genre called "military science fiction." Tom  
Clancy, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and countless libertarians  
are fans. A crater on Mars is named for him.

Tom Disch, author of the respected critical study "The Dreams Our  
Stuff Is Made Of," said Heinlein's early work was often brilliant.  
"His great misfortune is the people who like him: It's often old- 
fashioned, cantankerous, right-wing chest-beaters. He was a better  
writer than that would suggest. He had a gift for startling notions."

'He was the enemy'

THERE are plenty of reasons for the polarized feelings over Heinlein,  
who was born in Missouri, attended the U.S. Naval Academy, left the  
military after a bout of tuberculosis and spent several decades in  
L.A. and Santa Cruz. After campaigning for Upton Sinclair and running  
for the California Assembly, he dominated the pulp magazines, broke  
into the Saturday Evening Post and became the first science  
fictionist to land on the New York Times bestseller list.

Some of the divisiveness around Heinlein comes from a battle that  
redrew the field profoundly over politics and gender.

In the '40s and '50s, science fiction's "golden age," there were  
three faces on the genre's Mt. Rushmore: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac  
Asimov and Heinlein. His books are far more likely than the others'  
to have the word "controversial" in their jacket copy.

"He was the enemy," recalled Disch, who was an emerging novelist in  
the "new wave" of the 1960s.

Those writers, often liberal or radical, aimed to move away from pulp  
space operas and toward literature, from tales of physics to stories  
about psychology and sexuality and drugs.

There were more female writers, and the men exhibited a feminist  
consciousness that diverged sharply from the golden age, in which  
women were usually sex objects, foils to rugged male heroes or absent  
altogether.

Even "Stranger," with its countercultural following and endless  
debates about alternative sexuality -- it's one of several of his  
books to dramatize group marriages -- enrages feminists these days.  
"It's like the sexist model of hippie life," said Newitz. " 'We're  
all liberated, but the women still get the coffee.' "

Though he became a symbol of all that was backward to the new wavers,  
some cite him as a major influence. "He was the enemy -- yes," said  
Samuel R. Delany, a leader of the '60s insurgence who is also black  
and gay. "But he was the enemy to be bested at his own game. We took  
his rhetorical tricks, his ways of dramatizing an argument, and then  
used them to dramatize arguments he would have hated."

Despite a backlash of masculine, hard-science-driven work in the  
early Reagan era, the new wave effectively won the war when cyberpunk  
and its variations became the dominant strains over the last few  
decades.

"He was certainly temporarily defeated by that generation," said  
Newitz. "But we're really going through a renaissance of space opera"  
in movies and television and books by writers such as Iain M. Banks  
and Ken MacLeod, who lean as far to the left as Heinlein did to the  
right.

"Any form goes through phases, and we're seeing a backlash against  
cyberpunk. We're sick of implants. We want to go to another galaxy.  
This new generation is writing stuff that's more literary and more  
relevant to issues we're grappling with as a culture."

The core of his following

FOR years, the intellectually ambitious novels of the 1960s,  
especially "Stranger in a Strange Land," about a spiritually and  
sexually messianic Martian-born human, and "The Moon Is a Harsh  
Mistress," which concerns a free-market revolt by prisoners on the  
moon, were considered Heinlein's great work.

These books still have followings; "Moon" sits in the International  
Space Station library.

But the bestselling "Stranger," which Kurt Vonnegut Jr. reviewed on  
the cover of the New York Times Book Review in 1990 when it was  
reissued in an expanded edition, now reads like a long-winded relic  
of the '60s, philosophy for junior high kids.

Meanwhile, the books aimed squarely at a youth audience, the  
"juveniles" of the '40s and '50s, such as "Red Planet" and "Orphans  
in the Sky," have seen their stars rise.

"There's always this Heinlein character pontificating," said Junot  
Dmaz, who immersed himself in the books as background for his recent  
novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."

"I never liked that. And he always cut that down in his juveniles. He  
was so much more humane" in those books." "One of my favorites was  
'Have Space Suit Spacesuit -- Will Travel.' I used to have dreams  
about that book."

George Slusser, who's taught science fiction at UC Riverside for 25  
years and sees Heinlein as reflecting many currents of American  
literature, concedes that many of the late books are self-indulgent  
and solipsistic. But his students continue to respond to Heinlein's  
juveniles, especially science students.

"Have Space Suit -- Will Travel," said Slusser, "is like 'Huckleberry  
Finn' redone, even though the title is silly and it involves a kid  
getting a space suit by saving box tops."

L.A. writer M.G. Lord loves the juveniles and credits their strong,  
self-reliant females with making her a feminist. The tendency of  
Heinlein heroines to use initials led young Mary Grace to do the same.

But Heinlein's adult books are not as good, she said, and some  
written during and after the sexual revolution are disturbing,  
including "Friday," in which a heroine falls in love with her rapist.

"The minute he could make his sexual fantasies explicit it was, 'Oh,  
gross!' "

The serious books, especially those he wrote in the two decades  
before his death in 1988, seem culturally out of step. "I don't see  
any of his novels as being especially relevant for my students in the  
21st century," said H. Bruce Franklin, a Rutgers professor and author  
of "Robert Heinlein: America as Science Fiction."

Heinlein's gift was to catch the zeitgeist. "That's what made him so  
successful, but it makes his work seem dated."

As space travel has moved from its Cold War centrality to the  
margins, his work has dated further. In short, Franklin said, the  
future doesn't look as he predicted it would.

Still, even detractors see his shadow. "The idea of combining a space  
opera about the military with a soap opera about sex is a pretty cool  
thing," said Newitz. "Film directors are still wrapping their heads  
around that.

"Maybe there will be a Heinlein renaissance," she offered. "But I  
sure hope not."