All reviews copyright 2003-2010 Evelyn C. Leeper.
CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/05/2005]
While in Los Angeles--or more specifically, in Los Angeles traffic--we listened to Robert A. Heinlein's CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY on audiobook (ISBN 0-786-18479-5, paperback ISBN 1-416-50552-0). It is typical Heinlein, with a lot of lecturing about societal mores, and a juvenile hero amazingly naive and clueless for someone raised as a slave and a street beggar. (Not only he is clueless about girls/women, but at age eighteen or nineteen, he's not even interested in them. And, no, he's not gay.)
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FOR US, THE LIVING by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/16/2004]
I read Robert A. Heinlein's FOR US, THE LIVING, and I can report that my initial comments still hold. To recap, it was apparently written in 1938, at the time of Heinlein's involvement with social reform campaigns in California. And, yes, it is probably only for Heinlein completists. As I commented to one, "If I wanted a course in economics, I'd sign up for one at Brookdale Community College."
The book is written in the tradition of Edward Bellamy and other Utopian writers. As with many of those, the protagonist falls asleep/is overcome by gas/passes through a time warp/has a curse put on him--oh, sorry, I got carried away there. Anyway, the protagonist is in a car crash in 1938 and through some hand-waving ends up in a body in 2086. (The explanation is even less convincing than that of being overcome by gas.) Naturally he gets found by a beautiful woman, who decides to take him in and provide various teachers who explain at great length how the country's economic and political system has evolved since 1938. As with much of Heinlein's work, everything works because he stacks the deck so that it works. For example, everyone is given enough money to live on, but people continue to work because they want to. This is made at least slightly plausible only because he postulates that all the tedious jobs are done by machine. After all, why would someone take a job cleaning bathrooms if they didn't have to? Heinlein also sets up a situation in which the United States can effectively ignore the rest of the world.
One can certainly see the beginnings of many of Heinlein's ideas here, and for followers of Utopian fiction it has its place, but there is nothing compelling enough to warrant reading this if all you are looking for is a good science fiction novel.
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THE PUPPET MASTERS by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/17/2010]
This is particularly timely, because I had just been mentioning THE PUPPET MASTERS by Robert A. Heinlein (ISBN 978-1-439-13376-7) in connection with recent events:
"'Schedule Bare Back' was to be the first phase of 'Operation Parasite.' The idea was that everybody--*everybody*--was to peel to the waist and stay peeled, until all titans were spotted and killed. Oh, women could have halter strings across their backs; a parasite could not hide under a bra string." [Chapter XIII]
"We were complying with Schedule Bare Back; we had not heard of 'Schedule Sun Tan.' Two cops stopped us as we got out. 'Stand Still!' one of them ordered. 'Don't make any sudden moves. ... Now ... off with those pants, buddy.' I did not move quickly enough. He barked, 'Make it snappy! Two have been shot trying to escape already today; you may be the third.'" [Chapter XXIII]
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RED PLANET by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/09/2009]
RED PLANET by Robert A. Heinlein (ISBN-13 978-0-345-49318-7, ISBN-10 0-345-49318-4) was first published in 1949 in a heavily edited form. This edition is a reprint of the 1992 publication of Heinlein's original manuscript (sans typos, etc.) and in the introduction William H. Patterson, Jr., says, "The restored RED PLANET--the one you have in your hands now--is the *real* RED PLANET: the one Heinlein intended." This may be yet another example of why editors are important.
I am not going to go through the whole book, just Chapter 2 ("South Colony, Mars").
Not surprisingly, the first edit in this chapter was in Heinlein's description of Jim's mother: "She was wearing a costume that a terrestrial lady might choose for sunbathing or gardening and was a very pretty sight, although Jim was certainly not aware of it." (Clearly, the Heinlein in which Jim would be aware of it was yet to come.)
The next change is bigger. Jim has left his gun where the baby could get at it, but he manages to grab it in time, just as his father gets home. When Mr. Marlowe asks what the ruckus is, his wife says, "Nothing, darling." In the edited version, that's that. In the original version, he asks again, and apparently gets an answer, because he then comes into Jim's room and gives him a lecture on gun safety, including the following: "You are proud of being a licensed gun wearer, aren't you? ... And I'm proud to have you be one. It means you are a responsible, trusted adult. But when I sponsored you before the Council and stood up with you when you took your oath, I guaranteed that you would obey the regulations and follow the code, wholeheartedly and all the time-- not just most of the time." Heinlein's original had no such speech, and in fact, it does not even make sense. If being a licensed gun wearer means Jim is an adult, how can (or why should) his father guarantee his behavior?
(According to GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE, this explanation of gun licensing was added in response to a specific request by Dalgliesh.)
In Heinlein's version, the gun incident is followed by Jim's younger sister Phyllis asking for a pistol of her own. (If Jim is fifteen, she is about thirteen.) Her father pretty much agrees to take her and see if city hall will license her, which makes Doctor MacRae say he wants to move to another planet: "Sir, it is not the natural limitations of this globe that I object to; it is the pantywiast nincompoops who rule it-- These ridiculous regulations offend me. That a free citizen should have to go before a committee, hat in hand, and pray for permission to bear arms-- fantastic! Arm you daughter, sir, and pay no attention to petty bureaucrats. ... The swarming beehives back on Earth have similar childish rules; the fat clerks that decide these things cannot imagine any other conditions. This is a frontier community; it should be free of such."
Well, clearly Heinlein had some definite opinions on this, and equally clearly his editor at Charles Scribner's Sons, Alice Dalgliesh, did as well, at least in terms of what was suitable for what we now call a young adult novel. I have to say that I can see her point, now even more than in 1949. One can certainly argue that the widespread availability of guns to teenagers has not been as benign as it always seems to be in Heinlein's novels. Heinlein would finally break with Scribner's (or more accurately Scribner's would break with Heinlein) in 1959, when they rejected STARSHIP TROOPERS altogether. (Reading the letters in GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE, one gets the impression that they came very close to rejecting RED PLANET completely, and possibly only Heinlein's insistence on payment for time spent made them willing to accept it with edits.)
Oh, and one parting editorial shot: Doctor MacRae at one point acknowledges that he has "a taste for gossip," then adds, "I like also eavesdropping and window peeping." In the edited version, needless to say, the "window peeping" is gone.
I did not read both versions through the whole book, so I cannot say precisely what else has changed. But it is clear that Heinlein had intended this book--and presumably his other YA novels--to be more polemical than his editor would allow.
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SPACE CADET by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/01/2006]
SPACE CADET by Robert A. Heinlein (ISBN 0-765-31450-9) is very much a mixed bag. Written in 1948, it swings between being perceptive and being way off-base, being liberal and being reactionary. On the one hand, Heinlein seems to have foreseen microwave ovens when he has the cadets heat something with "high- frequency waves." On the other, he seems to think that learning will be done by a combination of injections and hypnosis--which does make it easier to fill his book with more interesting things than having his cadets sitting in class for hours on end. On the one hand, he has an important black character, at a time when the military had just been integrated, and equal treatment of blacks was almost unheard of. (Actually, when he wrote the book, the military was probably still segregated.) On the other hand, all his main characters are male and have either Anglo-Saxon or French names and backgrounds, even when they come from Venus or Ganymede. The lack of women, Asians, or even eastern or southern European cadets seems very obvious today.
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STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/20/2009]
STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert A. Heinlein (ISBN-13 978-0-441-78358-8, ISBN-10 0-441-78358-9) was chosen for the science fiction book-to-movie discussion group this month. The novel is known for its didactic style, but I had forgotten just how awkward they are. For example, on page 6, the sergeant says, "You're supposed to know the plan. But some of you ain't got any minds to hypnotize so I'll sketch it out." And then he does, even though the chances that the military would keep non-hypnotizable people if hypnosis is how they brief you for a mission is, well, zero.
On page 7 (and various times later, Heinlein makes a big deal of how everyone fights--"the chaplain and the cook and the Old Man's writer." That sounds great for morale, but terrible for efficiency. Even if one has civilians doing most of the support work (as seems to be the case later), having specially trained personnel fight as ordinary infantry seems like a waste of the specialized training.
On page 143 is Heinlein's defense of the entire society he has set up. Why is having the franchise given only to discharged veterans the best way to structure a society? Well, the basic claim seems to be "Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage." (Oh, and "our system works quite well. Many complain, but none rebel; personal freedom for all is [the] greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest web." In other words, proof by assertion--or perhaps by intimidation.)
Anyway, after having a few years of an "all-volunteer" army which turns out to be filled based on economic conditions--people enlist when they are poor and see the military as their only option--I would contend that we do not have a lot of evidence to support Heinlein's theory. Yes, his military weeds people out more strongly, and he seems to imply that there is no economic pressure to join, but I definitely would need more evidence before I thought that Heinlein had something. Add to this Rico's thinking, "I wished I were back in the drop room of the 'Rog', with not too many chevrons and an after-chow bull session in full swing. There was a lot to be said for the job of assistant section leader--when you come right to it, it's a lot easier to die than it is to use your head." Given that the majority of discharged veterans will be enlisted personnel, not officers, the electorate will be mostly people trained to follow orders rather than to "use their heads."
On pages 153 through 156, Heinlein recounts events from the June 1813 battle between the Chesapeake and the Shannon: "... there were four officers in the chain of command above [William Sitgreaves Cox]. When the battle started his commanding officer was wounded. The kid picked him up and carried him out of the line of fire. ... But he did it without being ordered to leave his post. The other officers all bought it while he was doing this and he was tried for 'deserting his post of duty as *commanding officer* in the presence of the enemy. Convicted. Cashiered."
The problem with this is it is wrong. When Cox "deserted" his post in this description, he was not the commanding officer. He became the commanding officer during the time he was taking the wounded man out of fire, and during that time he couldn't desert his post because he was never at it. The true description seems to be, however, that the other officers had already been hit *before* he left his post, but that in the tumult of battle, he did not know that.
Heinlein also said, "This boy's family tried for a century and a half to get his conviction reversed. No luck, of course." This really is wrong. They *did* get his conviction reversed--in 1952, less than a century and a half later, and before Heinlein wrote STARSHIP TROOPERS. Clearly Heinlein heard this story back in the Naval Academy in the 1920s and it made quite an impression on him, but he did not do any follow-up research before including it in the novel in 1959.
And once again, I will note, this just emphasizes that what one learns in the military is blind obedience to orders, and regulations enforced to the letter--which may be fine for the military, but don't strike me as what you want in your electorate.
For that matter, the recruiting sergeant in STARSHIP TROOPERS says, "But if you *want* to serve and I can't talk you out of it, then we have to take you, because that's your constitutional right. It says that everybody, male or female, shall have his born right to pay his service and assume full citizenship--but the facts are that we are getting hard pushed to find things for all the volunteers to do that aren't just glorified K.P." Given that, there are probably lots of people who would sign up, knowing that they would never qualify for anything risky.
"If you came in here in a wheel chair and blind in both eyes and were silly enough to insist on enrolling, they would find something silly enough to match." But why silly? Heinlein seems to have decided that really only able-bodied people should be allowed to vote, and for disable people to want to is just silly.
And speaking of the right to vote, I've been reading the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers recently, and ran across this where James Madison recommends not "confining the right of suffrage to freeholders, and to such as hold an equivalent property, convertible of course into freeholds. The objection to this regulation is obvious. It violates the vital principle of Government that those who are to be bound by laws, ought to have a voice in making them." [Madison's note number 2, 1820s]
Unless it was Madison's intention that women (or slaves) were not to be bound by laws, this seems amazingly obtuse.
Having nit-picked the book STARSHIP TROOPERS, I will now proceed to the movie. First, they dumbed down the lectures. Where the book gives Carthage as an example where violence settled something, the movie uses Hiroshima. But Carthage was completely destroyed (and sown with salt to keep it that way), while Hiroshima was only partially destroyed, and rather quickly rebuilt.
The screenwriter doesn't seem to know the difference between arachnids and insects, using the terms interchangeably. I would let him get away with "bugs" for both, but not the two other terms as being the same.
In the movie, the recruits are constantly saying "Sir" to their sergeants. One does not say "Sir" to a sergeant--if one does, one is immediately told, "Don't call me sir--I work for a living!" One says "Sir" only to officers.
Carmen does not shave her head in the movie. Then again, the ships she is flying appear to have artificial gravity.
And can you really set off a nuclear bomb a few hundred feet away and not suffer any ill effects?
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STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/21/2003]
I'm re-reading Robert A. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND for our library's science fiction book discussion group. At the time (for me, 1969 or so), it seemed great. Now, I must admit, it seems awful. All of the things about Heinlein's writing that grate on one's nerves are there, as well as his (apparent) ignorance of genetics and planetology. For example, on page 177 (of the 1961 Avon edition), Jubal Harshaw (a fairly obvious autobiographical character) says, "Most do-gooding reminds me of treating hemophilia--the only real cure for hemophilia is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death...before they breed more hemophiliacs." But hemophilia is a recessive trait, so unless you kill off the hemophiliacs siblings (and first cousins, etc.) as well, you haven't decreased the quantity of the trait in the gene pool. (You have kept it from increasing, I suppose.) And on page 89, he describes the solar system as having four planets of any noticeable size, but then goes on the describe Earth and Mars as if they are two of these four. Maybe that's just bad writing, but I note that the "original uncut version" recently published says it's *three* of the planets, not four, which is even more wrong. (This is on page 118 of the Ace edition; the previous item is page 231 of the new edition.) As far as the longer version, I think I'd rather see a shorter version, with Harshaw eliminated entirely. (Mark observes, correctly I think, that when Heinlein wrote this, he no doubt intended that Harshaw be the focus, not Smith. However, his readers had other ideas.) Since I'm only half done, I may have further comments next week.
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TUNNEL IN THE SKY by Robert A. Heinlein:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/06/2005]
Our science fiction discussion group discussed Robert A. Heinlein's TUNNEL IN THE SKY (ISBN 0-345-35373-0) this month. It was compared and contrasted to such works as ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe, SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON by Johann Wyss, THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND by Jules Verne, and LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding. It is worth noting that the only books listed in the "Customers who bought this book also bought" section of amazon.com were five other Heinlein juveniles and Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, and their "Better together" recommendation is one of the Heinlein juveniles. While there is certainly validity in those choices, TUNNEL IN THE SKY is far more closely connected to the works listed above. The science fictional content is minimal, merely a device to strand this groups of teenagers on an uninhabited world. In fact, the main character is convinced for a while that he is actually still on Earth, possibly in Africa somewhere. One thing we agreed on, though, was that Heinlein included a lot more politics than the other "survival" novels. (One on-line reviewer said, "TUNNEL IN THE SKY has variations of the themes covered in LORD OF THE FLIES." He may not have realized that TUNNEL IN THE SKY predates LORD OF THE FLIES by four years. It is even remotely possible that Golding was writing in response to Heinlein.)
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