Newspaper Article

Books: The Stars Our Destination

Sandlin, Lee

2014

Overview

The first book, \"Rocket Ship Galileo\" (1947), is a feeble, Tom Swiftian wheeze about two boys who build a spacecraft in their backyard (the working title was \"The Young Atom Engineers and the Conquest of Space\"). But [Robert A. Heinlein] gained his stride with the second book, \"Space Cadet\" (1948), and the titles alone of some of the books that followed show how confidently he was reaching out into the unknown: \"Red Planet\" (1949), \"Between Planets\" (1951), \"Time for the Stars\" (1956). The expanding scale hit a crescendo in 1957 with the 11th book, a grand Kiplingesque adventure in the far future, about the struggle between freedom and slavery set against the backdrop of an interstellar civilization: Its title is \"Citizen of the Galaxy.\" Taken as a whole, the juveniles offer a radiantly hopeful vision of human prospects: The message is that we will move outward into the universe, by a historical process as natural and inevitable as the passage from adolescence to adulthood. Heinlein grew to be just as ambivalent about his other masterworks. \"The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress\" is a visionary epic of a lunar colony breaking free from earth's government and establishing an anarchist-libertarian utopia. But even as it was being enshrined by the libertarian movement as a foundational text (it was endorsed by Milton Friedman), Heinlein turned cagey and evasive about whether he was advocating its revolutionary agenda. Once again, it was as though his own persuasiveness was making him uncomfortable. This discomfort escalated exponentially into nightmare with \"Stranger in a Strange Land.\" Heinlein always insisted that he meant it as nothing more than a satirical and ironic fantasy a la \"Candide\" (the working title was \"The Man From Mars\"); he was both amused and appalled when the hippies took it up, enchanted by his luxuriantly sybaritic portrait of a Martian free-love commune. ([William H. Patterson Jr.] reprints a whimsical fan letter that Heinlein wrote to Jefferson Airplane granting the band permission to quote lines from his novels in lyrics.) But he was horrified to discover that the novel was the bible of the Manson cult. I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that the catastrophic fall-off in Heinlein's work began after the 1969 Manson murders. The novels he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s wholly lack his old persuasiveness. Nothing in them is real, nothing is at stake and nobody takes anything seriously. Characters travel not to other planets but to the familiar and harmless settings of childhood fantasy: Oz or Barsoom. There are interminable scenes of adolescent ribaldry and reams of metafictional banter, for which Heinlein has approximately zero gift (though it is funny when a character in \"The Number of the Beast\" dismisses \"Stranger in a Strange Land\" with: \"My God, the things some writers will do for money\"). The overall effect is so low-energy and stupefying that it's hard to believe it isn't somehow deliberate -- as though Heinlein is out to repudiate his greatest talent and make sure no reader is inspired to take any action whatever.

• Publisher: Dow Jones & Company Inc
• Subject: Biographies / Moon / Novels / Writers