"...many of his opinions may seem like Cold War relics in the present age. As for the Soviets, "I can't understand those who think there's any good in signing treaties with people who have cheated for 40 years." And he believes the Communist Party probably has infiltrated, or at least influenced, campuses, churches and environmental groups; assumes that there are Russian "sleeper" agents soon to awaken; and regards incidents like Three Mile Island as suspicious "pseudo-emergencies." The growing frequency of such "public panics" may serve to keep Americans distraught and confused: "It is possible that the disinformation boys are doing their jobs." And Ginny, a talk-radio fan, says she has "recognized certain terms that are either clearly communist" or the product of callers who are "very well indoctrinated."
Sounds like Heinlein would have felt at home as a Trump supporter or member of the alt-right.
Stranger in a strange land is socially conservative?? (and i don't just mean the pro-poly parts - that book was generally very influential to the hippie movement)
Like there's a lot i disagree with about the views expressed in his novels, but social conservatism is not something i would accuse him of.
I haven’t got around to Stranger in a Strange Land - which is weird because that’s his most populist book.
I’m thinking of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It had group marriages, but the marriage practices were ordained by custom and tradition. Not 20th century custom and tradition, but custom and tradition none the less.
I think the moon is a harsh mistress is also the one that has the scene where the female lead wants to help on the farm, but her boobs are too "distracting" to the men folk, so she goes back to the kitchen instead. (Its been a while, i might be misrepresenting it)
Which stood out to me as first and foremost being shockingly mysogynistic, but also i guess is pretty strongly pro traditional gender roles.
At the same time though, the female lead is a political agitator/rebel, which is quite far removed from what i would consider traditional gender roles.
In any case though, i think when people talk about someone being socially conservative, they mean more in the context of contemporary practise. Like moon is harsh mistress may have practises deemed "traditional" in universe to the characters, but as a work, its setup as a commentary on contemporary norms, so its still arguing for change as a work, even if its not doing so explicitly in the text by the characters.
> I think the moon is a harsh mistress is also the one that has the scene where the female lead wants to help on the farm, but her boobs are too "distracting" to the men folk, so she goes back to the kitchen instead. (Its been a while, i might be misrepresenting it)
There is no such scene in that book.
In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, any man who laid a finger on a woman uninvited would find himself on the wrong side of an airlock without a suit.
> She was gorgeous. When she undulated down a corridor, boys followed in swarms.
> She started to learn farming from Greg but Mum put stop to that. While she was big and smart and willing, our farm is mostly a male operation--and Greg and Hans were not only male members of our family
distracted; she cost more farming man-hours than her industry equaled. So Wyoh went back to housework, then Sidris took her into beauty shop as
helper.
Its not precisely as i remember it, but i think its still strongly suggestive that some things are "woman's work"
> In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, any man who laid a finger on a woman uninvited would find himself on the wrong side of an airlock without a suit.
I didn't mean distracting in the sense she was going to be sexually assualted, but on that score, despite what the characters claim in the book, the society depicted seems to have a very questionable definition of what consent means and ignores issues of coercion.
What makes you think i'm offended by it? Being unconvinced by the sexual politics of the novel's world and being offended are very different things. I read and enjoy many things i'm unconvinced by. Life would be really boring if i agreed with every idea i ever read. And well he's certainly not my favourite author i have enjoyed many of his novels and many of them contain interesting ideas.
> despite your unfamiliarity
You literally just told me a specific scene didn't exist, despite the fact it clearly does as evidenced by me finding it again and quoting it at you. Perhaps i'm not the one who needs to re-read this novel.
I think it would be more accurate to say he believed in traditional gender roles quite strongly, but very little in the societal institutions of the 1950s. Some ideas he promotes in his writing: polyamory, group marriage, distrust of centralized authority.
I don't think so - yes he has this weird trope where most of his female characters after meeting the main male char want to settle down and become a home maker for unclear reasons, but prior to that point in the book typically the female characters are very independent and competent in roles that are not traditional gender roles.
If you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress his views come across as more libertarian and individualist than conservative. Ditto for Job.
I never saw much in the way of social conservatism in his writing (the religious right would probably be horrified by some of his work), but he was clearly opposed to collectivism.
Heinlein wrote a book in favor of polyamory ("Stranger in a Strange Land") and was strongly opposed to religion and theology [0]. I doubt he'd be at home with today's evangelical Christians.
For what it's worth, Soviet intelligence did infiltrate large parts of American society during the Cold War [1]. This historical fact is often obscured by accounts of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. While McCarthy was a liar and an alcoholic with little to no knowledge of actual Soviet spy networks, the networks did in fact exist.
Or like most of his later (non-children) books. Dude was really into poly stuff. Although honestly when reading his books, they never really seemed like equal partnerships.
That said, i've only read a few of his more famous novels.
> For what it's worth, Soviet intelligence did infiltrate large parts of American society during the Cold War [1]
Every zealous over-reaction is typically grounded in some small truth. If it was totally separate from reality it would be much easier to fight; the kernel of truth is what makes extremism dangerous.
Heinlein has explicitly said that Stranger in a Strange Land was not an effort to convince people to live in any particular way.
>“I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers... It is an invitation to think -- not to believe.”
'Others have damned him... for inventing female characters fated only for appalling subservience and motherhood. Says the accused chauvinist: "Even that can't be substantiated statistically. I don't know what they want me to do with the females. Do they want 'em not to have babies? I don't think there's much future in a gal who's thoroughly opposed to having babies. And the men in my stories are also thoroughly in favor of it."'
I understand Heinlein is a culturally important figure in Science Fiction, but he should not be one of our heroes.
“Nor do I feel responsible for the generally low state of the Negro — as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved. Having traveled quite a bit in Africa, I know what she means. One thing is clear: Whether one speaks of technology or social institutions, ‘civilization’ was invented by us, not by the Negroes. As races, as cultures, we are five thousand years, about, ahead of them. Except for the culture, both institutions and technology, that they got from us, they would still be in the stone age, along with its slavery, cannibalism, tyranny, and utter lack of the concept we call ‘justice.’”
It's quite uncomfortable to read but that doesn't mean it's not correct. It's like you're more concerned about looking like a mean racist than the fact that millions of people live in hell and blackness is too correlated with misery. Is there a single place in the world today run by black people for black people that isn't a dump on a good day? If they became more like the West wouldn't their lives improve in every single possibly conceivable way? If white people are racist monsters for stating the obvious ask African emigrants to the West what a jerk Heinlein is.
>Nor do I feel responsible for the generally low state of the Negro — as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved
If that Heinlein quote outrages you, this ought to make your head explode:
>Somewhere, sometime, maybe 400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I'll never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants somehow made it up to South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36 years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn't been forced to make that horrific voyage, I would not have been standing there that day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist -- a mere spectator -- watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have instead been one of them -- or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.
>Does that sound shocking? Does it sound almost like a justification for the terrible crime of slavery? Does it sound like this black man has forgotten his African roots? Of course it does, all that and more. And that is precisely why I have tried to keep the emotion buried so deep for so long. But as I sit before the computer screen, trying to sum up my time in Africa, I have decided I cannot lie to you, the reader. After three years traveling around this continent as a reporter for The Washington Post, I've become cynical, jaded. I have covered the famine and civil war in Somalia; I've seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire (hence the trucks dumping the bodies into pits); I've interviewed evil "warlords," I've encountered machete-wielding Hutu mass murderers; I've talked to a guy in a wig and a shower cap, smoking a joint and holding an AK-47, on a bridge just outside Monrovia. I've seen some cities in rubble because they had been bombed, and some cities in rubble because corrupt leaders had let them rot and decay. I've seen monumental greed and corruption, brutality, tyranny and evil.
>But even with all the good I've found here, my perceptions have been hopelessly skewed by the bad. My tour in Africa coincided with two of the world's worst tragedies, Somalia and Rwanda. I've had friends and colleagues killed, beaten to death by mobs, shot and left to bleed to death on a Mogadishu street.
>Now, after three years, I'm beaten down and tired. And I'm no longer even going to pretend to block that feeling from my mind. I empathize with Africa's pain. I recoil in horror at the mindless waste of human life, and human potential. I salute the gallantry and dignity and sheer perseverance of the Africans. But most of all, I feel secretly glad that my ancestor made it out -- because, now, I am not one of them.
> I understand Heinlein is a culturally important figure in Science Fiction, but he should not be one of our heroes.
The man was born in 1907. That is so long ago that he was discharged from the Navy because he caught Tuberculosis in the days before antibiotics were developed.
Of course people raised that long ago were taught things that we find ridiculous today.
Casting off those sorts of cultural prejudices and thinking for yourself became a theme in his later works.
That's not in his work, though. That's in the insecurities of people who set out to be offended.
The closest he gets is the characterization that's it's natural to women to have babies because their bodies are capable of it, and most women do or at least want to. That shouldn't even be controversial because it's borne out by all of human history.
No, its pretty directly in his interview response, not his work: “I don't think there's much future in a gal who's thoroughly opposed to having babies.”
I remember reading an article claiming that The Number Of The Beast was the start of his "later, post-talented phase".
This part of the article _striongly_ reminded me of that:
In 1978, he suffered a near stroke from a blocked carotid artery that temporarily paralyzed one side of his body and left him to choose between the Damocles sword of massive seizure or the scalpel of a risky operation. He took the surgery, beat the odds, and immediately wrote "The Number of the Beast" (1980) -- four lubricious characters on a romp through various universes -- "to see if my brain would work." (Many critics said No.)
As a kid, I loved Have Spacesuit Will Travel. But even as a 14-15 year old I understood Number Of The Beast was not the same...
Is anyone doubting that Heinlein writes highly competent female characters? Like he's pretty famous for that part. That's not the part people tend to object to.
>As a kid, I loved Have Spacesuit Will Travel. But even as a 14-15 year old I understood Number Of The Beast was not the same...
One is a Scribner's juvenile, and the other is a novel written for adults.
Anyway, Friday is a post-carotid artery novel and is fantastic. Job, the novel the article discusses, is also great. They're just different from his earlier works.
You do realize that those female characters are largely modeled after his wife Virginia? And they are portrayed as extremely competent and capable because their rolemodel, Dr Virginia Heinlein, was a lieutenant during WW II, and a working biochemist while married to Robert.
You may be offended at the stereotype. And he'd be dead wrong to say that this is what most women either are like or would want to be. But it is an archetype that describes what some women really are like, and really do want. That's reality, and there is no sense in being offended at it.
For the record, I was argued into this position by my wife. At first I had rejected Heinlein because of how he treated his female characters. But she (engineering degree from CalTech, working software developer for 20 years) made that point that she should have the right to decide what she wants. And what she wants happens to match what Heinlein's women try to be an archetype of.
Nobody should be pushed to fit that or any other stereotype. But they should be free to choose it. And anyone who wants to read a fictionalized version of it, should be free to do that as well.
For some reason this criticism reminded me of one of my favorite Heinlein quotes. I set out to google it so that I could reproduce it correctly. I searched for "Heinlein a man should be able to" and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the quote actually begins "a human being should be able to":
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects
When you measure a figure of history using today's moral yardstick, you're obviously going to find a lot of things that are now-taboo. What will your grandchildren's generation write about the things you say, using the (yet unknown) cultural rules of the year 2061?
Pretty sure he was even more taboo at the time (pre-matrial sex! The horrors).
If anything, parts of his novels dont work well today because what was radical at the time isn't today. A long winded argument on why pre-marital sex should be acceptable, just isn't interesting anymore.
Of course he wrote plenty of stuff still taboo (and rightfully so, imo) e.g. all the incest.
I'd argue that the problem is more that incest is commonly abusive to the point where i'm not sure its possible to separate the theoretical non-abusive case out.
In any case, i'm a believer in free speech, i don't object to him writing on such a topic, im just unconvinced.
As far as thinking for oneself, not on the incest subject, but i agree about the author generally. starship troopers is a novel where i heartily disagree with what is espoused. However reading it forced me to really think about why i disagree and what i really believe instead and why. It really helped me examine my own beliefs, which made it a very positive reading experience.
That is an excellent way to phrase it. The only other piece of writing that I know of that has the same "reconsider your unconscious beliefs" effect is the now-dead blog "The Last Psychiatrist".
And he managed to at other times. He just didn't in that particular instance.
I'm also unsure that was fully his goal. If so wouldn't other books or even other characters on the same book have opposing or different (yet still radical) views on the topic, instead of most of his characters all having really similar views?
Everyone's entitled to an opinion, I suppose. But something tells me that keeping company with Heinlein, Asimov, and the other greats now deemed problematic would be far better than with these "others".
I Highly recommend the book The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein to understand him in context of his time. Here's a pretty good review[0].
Quoting from the review:
When it comes to more difficult issues, Mendlesohn neatly avoids the simplifications that frequently appear on both sides: “With Heinlein it’s always a case of being a little bit more complicated than it initially seems.”
Mendlesohn compares his vocal opposition to bigotry with the limitations of his nonwhite characters – whose racial identities are often reduced to “Easter eggs” in the text – and his lack of sensitivity toward institutional oppression: “Heinlein understands and opposes enslavement and colour prejudice, but he does not really see that racism has a wider infrastructure. He does not understand what we now frame as systemic racism.”
Elsewhere, Mendlesohn points out that Heinlein’s most famous aphorism on guns – “An armed society is a polite society” – falls apart in context, while their discussion of Heinlein’s “intensely personal” fascination with gender may inspire many readers to see his portrayal of women in a new light. Writing of his “yearning to get a real feeling for what women think, feel and want,” Mendlesohn concludes: “Heinlein made a conscious effort to think about what women were like, and how they thought about themselves. He tried to create for them a voice that was embodied and aware of being female in a male world. In these stories he also tried to make an argument about the possibilities for shifting that sense of self.”
This willingness to view a writer through the lens of the critic’s own time is just what we ought to expect from a serious evaluation of a figure in the main line of American literature, which is precisely how Heinlein is regarded by his fans. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein pays him the compliment of holding him to his own high standards.
The typical Heinlein heroine might seem a bit, i don't even know- let's go with, uncomfortable by modern standards, but i could see how it could be considered a step up from some of the zero-dimensional female characters in older science fiction.
Thanks for the profile; it's one I hadn't read before. I thought the wording of the discussion of Heinlein's previous marriage was hinting at his actual first marriage, which no one knew about until after long after his death, but it doesn't.
I grew up reading Heinlein. I've read it all; the short stories, the juveniles, the late-period novels, the early and late nonfiction essays, the recently published "lost" works. I consider him and Asimov among my formative influences. I disagree with the critics the article cites about the quality of his post-surgery work; Friday is fantastic and Job, the book the profile is putatively about, is also great. They're just different from the Scribner's juveniles. In turn I like the juveniles, but they don't stick with me as much as his short stories, or his late novels like Friday (which did cyberpunk two years earlier and better than Neuromancer did), Job, or (as weird as they are) The Cat Who Walks Through Walls/To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
I very much think, however, that Stranger in a Strange Land can only be read with vicarious embarrassment.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadSounds like Heinlein would have felt at home as a Trump supporter or member of the alt-right.
He’s very much a produce a very different time, and that’s what makes him so interestin.
Like there's a lot i disagree with about the views expressed in his novels, but social conservatism is not something i would accuse him of.
I’m thinking of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It had group marriages, but the marriage practices were ordained by custom and tradition. Not 20th century custom and tradition, but custom and tradition none the less.
Which stood out to me as first and foremost being shockingly mysogynistic, but also i guess is pretty strongly pro traditional gender roles.
At the same time though, the female lead is a political agitator/rebel, which is quite far removed from what i would consider traditional gender roles.
In any case though, i think when people talk about someone being socially conservative, they mean more in the context of contemporary practise. Like moon is harsh mistress may have practises deemed "traditional" in universe to the characters, but as a work, its setup as a commentary on contemporary norms, so its still arguing for change as a work, even if its not doing so explicitly in the text by the characters.
There is no such scene in that book.
In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, any man who laid a finger on a woman uninvited would find himself on the wrong side of an airlock without a suit.
> She was gorgeous. When she undulated down a corridor, boys followed in swarms.
> She started to learn farming from Greg but Mum put stop to that. While she was big and smart and willing, our farm is mostly a male operation--and Greg and Hans were not only male members of our family distracted; she cost more farming man-hours than her industry equaled. So Wyoh went back to housework, then Sidris took her into beauty shop as helper.
Its not precisely as i remember it, but i think its still strongly suggestive that some things are "woman's work"
> In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, any man who laid a finger on a woman uninvited would find himself on the wrong side of an airlock without a suit.
I didn't mean distracting in the sense she was going to be sexually assualted, but on that score, despite what the characters claim in the book, the society depicted seems to have a very questionable definition of what consent means and ignores issues of coercion.
Sorry, but you seem to have very little notion of Heinlein's works, except for a burning desire to be offended by them, despite your unfamiliarity.
> despite your unfamiliarity
You literally just told me a specific scene didn't exist, despite the fact it clearly does as evidenced by me finding it again and quoting it at you. Perhaps i'm not the one who needs to re-read this novel.
Not in any stereotypical sense. Pigeonholes—whether of the 1950s or today—don’t capture him well.
I don't think so - yes he has this weird trope where most of his female characters after meeting the main male char want to settle down and become a home maker for unclear reasons, but prior to that point in the book typically the female characters are very independent and competent in roles that are not traditional gender roles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Marxism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies
I never saw much in the way of social conservatism in his writing (the religious right would probably be horrified by some of his work), but he was clearly opposed to collectivism.
You can drop the probably.
Stranger in a Strange Land explicitly points out things like the Christian ritual of communion being ritualized cannibalism, for example.
For what it's worth, Soviet intelligence did infiltrate large parts of American society during the Cold War [1]. This historical fact is often obscured by accounts of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. While McCarthy was a liar and an alcoholic with little to no knowledge of actual Soviet spy networks, the networks did in fact exist.
[0] https://www.azquotes.com/author/6509-Robert_A_Heinlein/tag/r...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United...
See also: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
That said, i've only read a few of his more famous novels.
Every zealous over-reaction is typically grounded in some small truth. If it was totally separate from reality it would be much easier to fight; the kernel of truth is what makes extremism dangerous.
Heinlein has explicitly said that Stranger in a Strange Land was not an effort to convince people to live in any particular way.
>“I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers... It is an invitation to think -- not to believe.”
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/l...
Advocating that people should be willing to reconsider their deeply held cultural beliefs was a major theme in Heinlein's later works.
I understand Heinlein is a culturally important figure in Science Fiction, but he should not be one of our heroes.
“Nor do I feel responsible for the generally low state of the Negro — as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved. Having traveled quite a bit in Africa, I know what she means. One thing is clear: Whether one speaks of technology or social institutions, ‘civilization’ was invented by us, not by the Negroes. As races, as cultures, we are five thousand years, about, ahead of them. Except for the culture, both institutions and technology, that they got from us, they would still be in the stone age, along with its slavery, cannibalism, tyranny, and utter lack of the concept we call ‘justice.’”
More in the same vein here:
https://worldsf.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/heinlein-and-racism...
Includes such evergreen classics as “neurological differences”, “white people are the ones actually discriminated against”, etc.
This is something a KKK member would say. And in fact, KKK members do say exactly this, 19:22 in this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN6Sb4SrK4c&t=547s#t=19m22s
(By the way, Soft White Underbelly is a compelling YouTube channel, describing itself as: "interviews and portraits of the human condition")
>Nor do I feel responsible for the generally low state of the Negro — as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved
If that Heinlein quote outrages you, this ought to make your head explode:
>Somewhere, sometime, maybe 400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I'll never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants somehow made it up to South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36 years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn't been forced to make that horrific voyage, I would not have been standing there that day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist -- a mere spectator -- watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have instead been one of them -- or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.
>Does that sound shocking? Does it sound almost like a justification for the terrible crime of slavery? Does it sound like this black man has forgotten his African roots? Of course it does, all that and more. And that is precisely why I have tried to keep the emotion buried so deep for so long. But as I sit before the computer screen, trying to sum up my time in Africa, I have decided I cannot lie to you, the reader. After three years traveling around this continent as a reporter for The Washington Post, I've become cynical, jaded. I have covered the famine and civil war in Somalia; I've seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire (hence the trucks dumping the bodies into pits); I've interviewed evil "warlords," I've encountered machete-wielding Hutu mass murderers; I've talked to a guy in a wig and a shower cap, smoking a joint and holding an AK-47, on a bridge just outside Monrovia. I've seen some cities in rubble because they had been bombed, and some cities in rubble because corrupt leaders had let them rot and decay. I've seen monumental greed and corruption, brutality, tyranny and evil.
>But even with all the good I've found here, my perceptions have been hopelessly skewed by the bad. My tour in Africa coincided with two of the world's worst tragedies, Somalia and Rwanda. I've had friends and colleagues killed, beaten to death by mobs, shot and left to bleed to death on a Mogadishu street.
>Now, after three years, I'm beaten down and tired. And I'm no longer even going to pretend to block that feeling from my mind. I empathize with Africa's pain. I recoil in horror at the mindless waste of human life, and human potential. I salute the gallantry and dignity and sheer perseverance of the Africans. But most of all, I feel secretly glad that my ancestor made it out -- because, now, I am not one of them.
—Keith B. Richburg (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Richburg>) of The Washington Post, 1995 (<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/richburg...>)
The man was born in 1907. That is so long ago that he was discharged from the Navy because he caught Tuberculosis in the days before antibiotics were developed.
Of course people raised that long ago were taught things that we find ridiculous today.
Casting off those sorts of cultural prejudices and thinking for yourself became a theme in his later works.
Apparently he didn't take his own themes to heart, then
That some people do want to be parents?
Someone else mentioned The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, a detective story Heinlein wrote in 1942.
The detective's wife is called out in the story as being the brains of the outfit, a very progressive notion in 1942.
Exceptionally competent women have been a staple in Heinlein stories forever.
I think what people would most likely object to is the implication that every woman should want that.
The closest he gets is the characterization that's it's natural to women to have babies because their bodies are capable of it, and most women do or at least want to. That shouldn't even be controversial because it's borne out by all of human history.
No, its pretty directly in his interview response, not his work: “I don't think there's much future in a gal who's thoroughly opposed to having babies.”
This part of the article _striongly_ reminded me of that:
In 1978, he suffered a near stroke from a blocked carotid artery that temporarily paralyzed one side of his body and left him to choose between the Damocles sword of massive seizure or the scalpel of a risky operation. He took the surgery, beat the odds, and immediately wrote "The Number of the Beast" (1980) -- four lubricious characters on a romp through various universes -- "to see if my brain would work." (Many critics said No.)
As a kid, I loved Have Spacesuit Will Travel. But even as a 14-15 year old I understood Number Of The Beast was not the same...
It was definitely different than what came before it, though.
One is a Scribner's juvenile, and the other is a novel written for adults.
Anyway, Friday is a post-carotid artery novel and is fantastic. Job, the novel the article discusses, is also great. They're just different from his earlier works.
You may be offended at the stereotype. And he'd be dead wrong to say that this is what most women either are like or would want to be. But it is an archetype that describes what some women really are like, and really do want. That's reality, and there is no sense in being offended at it.
For the record, I was argued into this position by my wife. At first I had rejected Heinlein because of how he treated his female characters. But she (engineering degree from CalTech, working software developer for 20 years) made that point that she should have the right to decide what she wants. And what she wants happens to match what Heinlein's women try to be an archetype of.
Nobody should be pushed to fit that or any other stereotype. But they should be free to choose it. And anyone who wants to read a fictionalized version of it, should be free to do that as well.
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects
Oh?
Hazel Meade Stone / Gwen Novak
Wyoming Knott
Podkayne Fries
Even Grace Cormet isn't subservient, although she fakes it on duty.
If anything, parts of his novels dont work well today because what was radical at the time isn't today. A long winded argument on why pre-marital sex should be acceptable, just isn't interesting anymore.
Of course he wrote plenty of stuff still taboo (and rightfully so, imo) e.g. all the incest.
The entire point of the incest taboo is to avoid those genetic consequences.
Do we still need an incest taboo in that case?
That's just the sort of deeply held cultural value that Heinlein wanted people to be willing to think about for themself.
Heinlein didn't advocate for incest or for polygamy.
He wanted to convince people to think for themselves, even when the thing you are thinking about is an "unquestionable" cultural belief.
In any case, i'm a believer in free speech, i don't object to him writing on such a topic, im just unconvinced.
As far as thinking for oneself, not on the incest subject, but i agree about the author generally. starship troopers is a novel where i heartily disagree with what is espoused. However reading it forced me to really think about why i disagree and what i really believe instead and why. It really helped me examine my own beliefs, which made it a very positive reading experience.
He wasn't trying to convince you to do anything except to reconsider the views you absorbed from your culture without conscious thought
I'm also unsure that was fully his goal. If so wouldn't other books or even other characters on the same book have opposing or different (yet still radical) views on the topic, instead of most of his characters all having really similar views?
Motherhood sometimes, but “appalling subservience” is pretty far from my recollection of any of Heinlein’s major female characters.
Everyone's entitled to an opinion, I suppose. But something tells me that keeping company with Heinlein, Asimov, and the other greats now deemed problematic would be far better than with these "others".
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Quoting from the review:
When it comes to more difficult issues, Mendlesohn neatly avoids the simplifications that frequently appear on both sides: “With Heinlein it’s always a case of being a little bit more complicated than it initially seems.”
Mendlesohn compares his vocal opposition to bigotry with the limitations of his nonwhite characters – whose racial identities are often reduced to “Easter eggs” in the text – and his lack of sensitivity toward institutional oppression: “Heinlein understands and opposes enslavement and colour prejudice, but he does not really see that racism has a wider infrastructure. He does not understand what we now frame as systemic racism.”
Elsewhere, Mendlesohn points out that Heinlein’s most famous aphorism on guns – “An armed society is a polite society” – falls apart in context, while their discussion of Heinlein’s “intensely personal” fascination with gender may inspire many readers to see his portrayal of women in a new light. Writing of his “yearning to get a real feeling for what women think, feel and want,” Mendlesohn concludes: “Heinlein made a conscious effort to think about what women were like, and how they thought about themselves. He tried to create for them a voice that was embodied and aware of being female in a male world. In these stories he also tried to make an argument about the possibilities for shifting that sense of self.”
This willingness to view a writer through the lens of the critic’s own time is just what we ought to expect from a serious evaluation of a figure in the main line of American literature, which is precisely how Heinlein is regarded by his fans. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein pays him the compliment of holding him to his own high standards.
[0]: https://locusmag.com/2019/05/alec-nevala-lee-reviews-the-ple...
I grew up reading Heinlein. I've read it all; the short stories, the juveniles, the late-period novels, the early and late nonfiction essays, the recently published "lost" works. I consider him and Asimov among my formative influences. I disagree with the critics the article cites about the quality of his post-surgery work; Friday is fantastic and Job, the book the profile is putatively about, is also great. They're just different from the Scribner's juveniles. In turn I like the juveniles, but they don't stick with me as much as his short stories, or his late novels like Friday (which did cyberpunk two years earlier and better than Neuromancer did), Job, or (as weird as they are) The Cat Who Walks Through Walls/To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
I very much think, however, that Stranger in a Strange Land can only be read with vicarious embarrassment.