Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907, to Rex Ivar Heinlein (an accountant) and Bam Lyle Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri, and was the third of seven children. He was a sixth-generation German-American in a family that had sent one of their own to fight in every American war, starting with the Revolutionary War.

He grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Naturally, the outlook and values of the time and place (in his own words, "The Bible Belt") had an influence on his fiction, especially in his later works, as he drew upon his childhood in establishing the setting and a cultural atmosphere in works like Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. The 1910 return of Halley's Comet inspired the young Robert Heinlein's life-long interest in astronomy.

In January 1924, sixteen-year-old Heinlein lied about his age in order to enlist in Company C, 110th Engineer Regiment, of the Missouri National Guard, in Kansas City. His family could not afford to send him to college, so he sought an appointment to a military academy. When Heinlein graduated from Kansas City Central High School in 1924, he was initially prevented from attending the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis because his older brother Rex was a student there, and at the time, regulations discouraged multiple family members from attending the academy simultaneously. He instead matriculated at Kansas City Community College and began vigorously petitioning Missouri Senator James A. Reed for an appointment to the Naval Academy. The Naval Academy admitted him in June 1925. Heinlein received his discharge from the Missouri National Guard as a staff sergeant. Reed later told Heinlein that he had received 100 letters of recommendation for nomination to the Naval Academy, 50 for other candidates and 50 for Heinlein.

Navy

Heinlein's experience in the US Navy exerted a strong influence on his character and writing. In 1929, he graduated from the Naval Academy with the equivalent of a bachelor of arts in engineering. (At that time, the Academy did not confer degrees.) He ranked fifth in his class academically but with a class standing of 20th of 243 due to disciplinary demerits. The US Navy commissioned him as an ensign shortly after his graduation. He advanced to lieutenant junior grade in 1931 while serving aboard the new aircraft carrier USS Lexington, where he worked in radio communications—a technology then still in its earlier stages. The captain of this carrier, Ernest J. King, later served as the Chief of Naval Operations and Commander-in-Chief, US Fleet during World War II. Military historians interviewed Heinlein during his later years and asked him about Captain King and his service as the commander of the US Navy's first modern aircraft carrier. Heinlein also served as gunnery officer aboard the destroyer USS Roper in 1933 and 1934, reaching the rank of lieutenant. His brother, Lawrence Heinlein, served in the US Army, the US Air Force, and the Missouri National Guard, reaching the rank of major general in the National Guard.

 

 

After serving five years, Heinlein was compelled to resign from service due to poor health and thus took the opportunity to pursue his graduate studies in physics and mathematics at the University of California in Los Angeles. Except for engineering service during World War II, he was an established professional writer from 1939.

“Life-Line,” was Heinlein’s first short story. It was published in the action-adventure pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He continued to write for that publication—along with other notable science-fiction writers—until 1942, when he he reactivated his commission and worked as a military production engineer.

After WWII, Heinlein returned to writing full-time, with a focus on a more sophisticated audience. His first book, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), was followed by a large number of novels and story collections, including works for children and young adults. After the 1940s, he largely avoided shorter fiction. His popularity grew over the years, probably reaching its peak after the publication of his best-known work, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).

His diverse interests, concern for characterization, and technical details brought him a considerable number of admirers among general-interest readers. Among his more popular books are The Green Hills of Earth (1951), Double Star (1956), The Door into Summer (1957), Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), Methuselah’s Children (1958), Starship Troopers (1959), The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), and Time Enough for Love (1973).

 

 

Heinlein used his fiction to explore provocative social and political ideas and to speculate how progress in science and engineering might shape the future of politics, race, religion, and sex. Within the framework of his science-fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes such as the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the nature of sexual relationships, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices.

Heinlein was influenced by the visionary writers and philosophers of his day. William H. Patterson Jr., writing in Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, states that by 1930, Heinlein was a progressive liberal who had spent time in the open sexuality climate of New York's Jazz Age Greenwich Village. Heinlein believed that some level of socialism was inevitable and was already occurring in America. He absorbed the social concepts of writers such as H. G. Wells and Upton Sinclair. He adopted many of the progressive social beliefs of his day and projected them forward. In later years,he backtracked somewhat and took on more conservative views, believe that a strong world government was the only way to avoid mutual nuclear annihilation.

Also, if you did not already know, Heinlein is the guy who came up with the line, “There ain’t no free lunch.”

I'm In the Dark Here

If you're tangled up, just Tango on...

"We are all broken, that's how the light gets in."

-– Ernest Hemingway

Stranger in a Strange Land

One of the books that influenced me and offered an alternative view to life in general was Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Robert A. Heinlein.

Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel and is on everybody’s list as among the top 10 science fiction novels ever written. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and subsequently raised by Martians. The story explores his interaction with and eventual transformation of Terran culture.

The title "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a direct quotation taken from Exodus 2:22. The working title for the book was "A Martian Named Smith," which was also the name of the screenplay started by a character at the end of the novel.

Stranger in a Strange Land won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel and became the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list. In 2012, the Library of Congress named it one of 88 "Books that Shaped America."

Synopsis

Prior to World War III, the crewed spacecraft Envoy is launched toward Mars, but all contact is lost shortly before landing. Twenty-five years later, the spacecraft Champion makes contact with the inhabitants of Mars and finds a single survivor, Valentine Michael Smith. Born on the Envoy, he was raised entirely by the Martians. He is ordered by them to accompany the returning expedition.

Smith is confined at Bethesda Hospital, where, having never seen a human female, he is attended by male staff only. Seeing that restriction as a challenge, Nurse Gillian Boardman eludes the guards and goes in to see Smith. By sharing a glass of water with him, she inadvertently becomes his first "water brother", a profound relationship by Martian standards, as water on Mars is extremely scarce.

Gillian's lover, reporter Ben Caxton, discovers that Smith is extremely wealthy. Ben is seized by the government, and Gillian persuades Smith to leave the hospital with her. Gillian takes Smith to Jubal Harshaw, a famous author, physician and lawyer. Eventually, Harshaw arranges freedom for Smith and recognition that human law, which would have granted ownership of Mars to Smith, has no applicability to a planet that is already inhabited by intelligent life.

Smith becomes a celebrity and is feted by the Earth's elite. He investigates many religions, including the Fosterite Church of the New Revelation, a populist megachurch in which sexuality, gambling, alcohol consumption, and similar activities are allowed and even encouraged and considered "sinning" only when they are not under church auspices. Smith has a brief career as a magician in a carnival, in which he and Gillian befriend the show's tattooed lady.

Smith starts a Martian-influenced "Church of All Worlds", combining elements of the Fosterite cult with Western esotericism. The church is besieged by Fosterites for practicing "blasphemy", and the church building is destroyed, but unknown to the public, Smith's followers teleport to safety.

Smith is arrested by the police, but escapes and returns to his followers, later explaining to Jubal that his gigantic fortune has been bequeathed to the church. With that wealth and their new abilities, church members will be able to reorganize human societies and cultures.

Smith is killed by a mob raised against him by the Fosterites. Jubal and some of the church members return to Jubal's home to regroup and prepare to found new Church of All Worlds congregations. Smith reappears in the afterlife to replace the Fosterites' founder, amid hints that Smith was an incarnation of the Archangel Michael.

Development

Originally titled The Heretic, the book was written in part as a deliberate attempt to challenge social norms. In the course of the story, Heinlein uses Smith's open-mindedness to re-evaluate such institutions as religion, money, monogamy, and the fear of death. Heinlein completed writing it ten years after he had plotted it out in detail. He later wrote, "I had been in no hurry to finish it, as that story could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right."

Heinlein got the idea for the novel when he and his wife Virginia were brainstorming one evening in 1948. She suggested a new version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894), but with a child raised by Martians instead of wolves. He decided to go further with the idea and worked on the story on and off for more than a decade, believing that contemporary society was not yet ready for it.

Heinlein was surprised that some readers thought the book described how he believed society should be organized, explaining: "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."

His editors at Putnam required him to cut its 220,000-word length down to 160,000 words before publication.

Heinlein himself remarked in a letter he wrote to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart in 1972 that he thought his shorter, edited version was better. Heinlein also added some new material to the shorter version. The book was dedicated in part to science fiction author Philip José Farmer, who had explored sexual themes in works such as The Lovers (1952). It was also influenced by the satiric fantasies of James Branch Cabell.

Reception

Heinlein's deliberately provocative book generated considerable controversy. The free love and communal living aspects of the Church of All Worlds led to the book's exclusion from school reading lists. After it was rumored to be associated with Charles Manson, it was removed from school libraries, as well.

Writing in The New York Times, Orville Prescott received the novel caustically, describing it as a "disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire, and cheap eroticism"; he characterized Stranger in a Strange Land as "puerile and ludicrous", saying "when a non-stop orgy is combined with a lot of preposterous chatter, it becomes unendurable, an affront to the patience and intelligence of readers." Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale rated the novel 3.5 stars out of five, saying "the book's shortcomings lie not so much in its emancipation as in the fact that Heinlein has bitten off too large a chewing portion".

Despite such reviews, Stranger in a Strange Land won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel and became the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list. Critics have also suggested that Jubal Harshaw is actually a stand-in for Robert Heinlein himself, based on similarities in career choice and general disposition, though Harshaw is much older than Heinlein was at the time of writing. Literary critic Dan Schneider wrote that Harshaw's belief in his own free will, was one "which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pan-deistic urge, 'Thou art God!'

Writer Sophie Kleeman has taken issue with the roles of female characters within the novel and statements made about women, such as Jill's assertion that "Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault".

The book significantly influenced modern culture in a variety of ways.

Church of All Worlds

A central element of the second half of the novel is the religious movement founded by Smith, the "Church of All Worlds," an initiatory mystery religion blending elements of paganism and revivalism, with psychic training and instruction in the Martian language. In 1968, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (then Tim Zell) founded the Church of All Worlds, a Neo-pagan religious organization modeled in many ways after the fictional organization in the novel. The spiritual path included several ideas from the book, including polyamory, non-mainstream family structures, social libertarianism, water-sharing rituals, an acceptance of all religious paths by a single tradition, and the use of several terms such as "grok", "Thou art God", and "Never Thirst".

Heinlein objected to Zell's lumping him with other writers such as Ayn Rand and Robert Rimmer; Heinlein felt that those writers used their art for propaganda purposes, while he simply asked questions of the reader, expecting each reader to answer for him- or herself. He wrote to Zell in a letter: "... each reader gets something different out of the book because he himself supplies the answers. If I managed to shake him loose from some prejudice, preconception or unexamined assumption, that was all I intended to do."

Though Heinlein was neither a member nor a promoter of the Church, it was formed including frequent correspondence between Zell and Heinlein, and Heinlein was a paid subscriber to the Church's magazine Green Egg. This Church still exists as a 501(c)(3) recognized religious organization incorporated in California, with membership worldwide, and it remains an active part of the neopagan community.

Grok

The word "grok", coined in the novel, made its way into the English language. In Heinlein's invented Martian language, "grok" literally means "to drink" and figuratively means "to comprehend", "to love", and "to be one with". The word rapidly became common parlance among science fiction fans, hippies, and later computer programmers and hackers, and has since entered the Oxford English Dictionary. In November 2023, xAI, an artificial-intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, launched Grok, a large language model chatbot named after the novel’s neologism; the system is integrated into the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter).

Watership Down

A few years back, I sent a paperback copy of Watership Down to a female pen pal serving a life sentence. I don’t think she read it, although she said she did, but as I inevitably learned, she lied about pretty much everything. But what do you expect from an habitual criminal, right? There I go again, thinking I can save the world. Anyway, it was an enlightening disappointment when she requested true crime stories instead. 

On the other hand, Watership Down is a heart-warming and absorbing adventure story. That is, if you pay attention. Watership Down is a novel by English author Richard Adams, published in 1972. The setting is in Hampshire in southern England and features a small group of anthropomorphised rabbits. Through the magic of Adams’ prose, the reader is introduced to their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. It’s really great fun and quite entertaining. 

Evoking epic themes, the storyline follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home (the hill of Watership Down), encountering perils and temptations along the way. Watership Down was Richard Adams's first novel. It was rejected by several publishers before Rex Collings accepted the manuscript; the published book then won the annual Carnegie Medal (UK), annual Guardian Prize (UK), and several other book awards. Adams completed a sequel almost 25 years later, in 1996, Tales from Watership Down, constructed as a collection of 19 short stories about El-ahrairah and the rabbits of the Watership Down warren.

Origin and publication history

"To Juliet and Rosamund, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon"

-- Dedication, Watership Down.

 

"Master Rabbit I saw"

-- Walter de la Mare — Line quoted in Watership Down.

The story began as tales that Richard Adams told his young daughters Juliet and Rosamund during long car journeys. He recounted in 2007 that he "began telling the story of the rabbits ... improvised off the top of [his] head, as [they] were driving along". The daughters insisted he write it down —"they were very, very persistent". After some delay, Adams began writing the novel in the evenings; he completed it 18 months later. The book is dedicated to the two girls.

Adams's descriptions of wild rabbit behavior were based on The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964), by British naturalist Ronald Lockley. The two later became friends, embarking on an Antarctic tour that became the subject of a co-authored book, Voyage Through the Antarctic (A. Lane, 1982).

In his autobiography, The Day Gone By, Adams wrote that he based Watership Down and the stories in it on his experiences during Operation Market Garden, the Battle of Arnhem, in 1944. The character of Hazel, the leader of the group of rabbits, was modeled on Adams's commanding officer, Major John Gifford. He gave the warrior Bigwig the personality of Captain Desmond Kavanagh, who is buried at the Airborne Cemetery in Oosterbeek, The Netherlands.

Watership Down was rejected seven times before it was accepted by Rex Collings. The one-man London publisher Collings wrote to an associate, "I've just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I'm mad?" The associate called it "a mad risk" in her obituary of Collings, to accept "a book as bizarre by an unknown writer which had been turned down by the major London publishers; but," she continued, "it was also dazzlingly brave and intuitive." Collings had little capital and could not pay an advance but "he got a review copy onto every desk in London that mattered." Adams wrote that it was Collings who gave Watership Down its title. A second edition was released in 1973.

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