Hippie, fascist, free man - about Robert A. Heinlein

In about two weeks will be the anniversary of the death of the 'Dean of Science Fiction', Robert Heinlein. How did the rugged naval officer become the darling of the weed-loving hippie movement?

Robert Anson Heinlein was, and still is, one of the few science fiction authors who managed to slip beyond the high walls of the genre ghetto. At a time when science fiction stories were published in cheap paper magazines at rock bottom prices, Heinlein's stories were published in the mainstream evening papers. In the days when a plot in MDB literature was sometimes nothing more than a spaghetti western in space, Heinlein's books dealt with mature and provocative topics: politics, sex and social deviations.

Heinlein was born in 1907 in the state of Missouri in the United States, and grew up in the state of Kansas - both in the southern region of the United States. This area is known as the 'Bible Belt', due to the high concentration of devout Christians who live there. A child growing up in such an environment can be expected to absorb the moral norms - not to mention righteous and charitable - that are accepted in it. Heinlein did absorb some of the social values ​​of his environment, but he kicked all the others so hard that they couldn't sit on their metaphorical asses. His books are full of descriptions of 'moral deviations' (in quotation marks) of every possible kind, and he describes them in a very sympathetic way - from casual sex, through homosexuality, to consensual incest.

When he finished high school, he enlisted in the Navy and joined the officers' academy. He completed the course with great success, and served on board several ships as the officer in charge of the communication systems. Heinlein excelled in his role - but fate had other plans. He contracted tuberculosis and was released from the army in 1934, and thus had to find a new way in life. He turned to politics, and ran in the local elections in California as part of the Socialist Party, but failed in his attempt to enter the House of Representatives. This is how Heinlein found himself in 1939, with his only income being a tiny disability allowance from the army, and two short and not so successful careers on his resume.

More about science fiction writers on the science website:

• Odyssey to the stars - about Arthur C. Clark
• Non-fiction - Larry Niven
• Asimov - The Man and the Legend
  

At the same time, an ad in one of the science fiction magazines about a short story writing contest caught his eye. First place, the ad promised, would win fifty dollars.

In his dire financial situation, Heinlein had nothing to lose, and wrote a short story for the competition. But at the last minute he decided not to send it to the magazine that announced the competition, but to Astounding Science Fiction magazine. This decision turned out to be successful in two respects. First, he got seventy dollars instead of fifty for the story. Second, the person who edited Astounding was none other than John W. Campbell Jr., the man who will go down in the annals of literature as being responsible almost single-handedly for the tremendous boom in science fiction literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Campbell had a rare talent for identifying the diamonds in the rough, and turning them into giants like Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey and of course - Robert Heinlein.

Success came to Heinlein at a truly dizzying speed. In just two years he was already considered one of the leading writers of the science fiction world, won awards and was invited to prestigious conferences.
The root of the success was in the nature of Heinlein's writing, which was almost unique in the local science fiction landscape at the time. There was quite a bit of 'science' in Heinlein's science fiction, but at the same time a great emphasis and an almost direct reference to social matters and issues that were burning on the agenda of contemporary American society.

When World War II broke out, Heinlein volunteered to serve in the army as an aeronautical engineer. The army attached to Heinlein a highly capable assistant named Virginia Gerstenfeld. Ginny, as she was often called, was a brilliant chemist who could speak seven languages, a good athlete and an excellent swimmer. In fact, she was also senior to him in rank - even though she was subordinate to him as part of her position. Robert was very impressed by her ginger and lively personality, or as he put it - 'I think Ginny can beat me to the punch, if I don't play dirty.' When the war ended he divorced his current wife, and married Ginny.

The years after World War II were boom years for Heinlein's soaring career, and stories he wrote appeared in respected evening papers such as The Saturday Evening Post that appealed to the general public. During this period, the political tendencies of Heinlein - who was a socialist in the past, as you remember - began to lean more and more towards the right end of the political map. This tendency has him fairly embroiled with many left-wing intellectuals.

At the end of the 1958s, the Cold War against the Soviet Union was already in full swing, and in the United States there was a stormy public debate about the need to maintain the nuclear deterrent. In XNUMX, Heinlein came across an ad in one of the newspapers on behalf of a left-wing liberal organization that called for the United States to be banned immediately and unilaterally from conducting nuclear weapons tests.
Heinlein's answer to the liberal newspaper ad was, predictably, a book. He even stopped writing another book he was working on to write this one. This book, 'Space Warriors' is its name, will become one of the great and controversial classics of science fiction.

The plot of 'Space Warriors' follows a young soldier named Juan Rico, who serves as a fighter in Earth's armored infantry in the twenty-second century. Rico and his squad mates fight insect-like aliens known simply as 'Bugs'. The book follows Rico's military service from his enlistment, through the battles he participates in until he becomes an officer and commander himself.
The structure of the story - multiple flashbacks to the past and an apprenticeship process in which the protagonists receive lectures on philosophy and morality - gives Heinlein his favorite opportunity to present his worldview. In the universe of the book, only those who served in the army have the democratic right to choose and be chosen. This is a result of the collapse of Western civilizations towards the end of the twentieth century. These fell because their citizens were not ready to fight and die for the right to freedom and liberty, since anyone who was over 18 and had a body temperature of about thirty-seven degrees was eligible to vote. The cockroaches, lacking independent thought and controlled by a centralized queen, are a clear analogy to the communists and the danger they pose.

Literary critics did not like the 'Space Warriors' at all. Many argued that the plot is too flat and simplistic, and that the character of Juan Rico does not develop at all throughout the story: he is in love with 'being a soldier' ​​at the beginning of the plot, and ends it in love with this idea to the same extent.
Readers from the left side of the political map were outraged at Heinlein - no wonder: 'Space Warriors' is a clear hymn to war, and to the sublime value of active defense of the family and homeland. Heinlein himself claimed that he was not trying to glorify the war as an idea, but only the courage and sacrifice of the common soldiers, but claims were heard from all sides that the book tends to fascism. A humorous rule of thumb states that if Heinlein's name is mentioned in a discussion on any internet forum - within three days someone will already mention Hitler or the Nazis (the so-called, 'pull the Nazi card'). Heinlein said that almost all the reaction letters sent to him by readers about the 'space warriors' were negative and angry.

But the book sold well in stores, and even won the Hugo Award in 1960 according to the audience's choice. Many readers identified with the values ​​reflected by Heinlein's characters in the story: courage, loyalty and self-sacrifice. After all, 'Space Warriors' was the epitome of President John F. Kennedy: 'Don't ask what the country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.'
Among the military, these ideas naturally had a particularly strong hold, as Heinlein describes the ideal army: high-tech, moral and composed entirely of determined volunteers.

Another reason for the book's success lies in the futuristic technology that Heinlein chose to incorporate into the story. Rico and his friends fight cockroaches while donning every soldier's wet dream: an exoskeleton. The exoskeleton is humanoid armor that wraps around the soldier and responds to his movements and commands as if it were a direct continuation of his body. The warrior becomes, from a practical point of view, a large and powerful robot, capable of carrying heavy and varied armaments, moving quickly and jumping huge distances using rocket jets. The soldier inside the exoskeleton gets access to sensing means such as night vision and a radar image, as well as access to tactical maps, means of communication and the like.
The exoskeleton that Heinlein describes in 'Space Fighters' is the ultimate fighting machine: the perfect combination between an infantry company and a tank company. The connection between the wisdom of man and the tremendous power of the machine excites the imagination and appears in many fictional works, such as in the comics 'Iron Man', or in the famous final scene of the 'Eighth Passenger'.

As I mentioned before, Heinlein stopped writing another book to write The Space Warriors. The book he stopped writing and continued later was 'Ger in a foreign land'.

In 1948, John Campbell, who was Heinlein's editor as you remember, received a letter to the editor from a particularly creative reader. In the letter, the reader complimented the editor of the magazine on a successful issue, and even specified exactly which of the stories he liked and who were the authors who wrote them. There was only one small problem. The issue in question, according to the letter, was one of the issues of the year 1949 - that is, an issue that was only supposed to be published in another year.
I guess most editors would throw such a letter in the trash, and maybe filter out a few words of hate to the psychic reader who wasted their time. But John Campbell was no ordinary editor: you don't become the most important editor in the history of science fiction if you're 'just another ordinary editor'.

Campbell embraced the idea. He turned to the writers whose names were mentioned in the letter, and asked them to write the stories mentioned by the creative reader. Heinlein agreed to the idea, and proceeded to write the story that the letter stated would be called Gulf ('gap'). The reader did not specify the content of the story, so Heinlein at least had creative freedom in this area.

Ginny, Heinlein's talented wife, was not just a pretty face who could converse in seven languages. As she did from time to time, Ginny threw in an idea for the new story - an interesting variation on the famous 'Jungle Book'. Instead of a boy raised by forest animals, she suggested Heinlein write about a human boy raised among aliens. This idea struck deep roots in Heinlein's mind, but he did not agree to write the short story about it: he knew that to develop this intriguing subject in its entirety, he needed a suitable space - meaning, a full-length book.

The book was published in '61, and it describes the return to Earth of Valentine Michael Smith, a human boy raised by the Martians. His parents, a couple of space explorers, die on the Red Planet, and Smith learns and absorbs the alien Madian culture into which he has been assimilated. When he returns to Earth as a young man, he finds that he lacks the most basic tools to deal with the alien and strange human culture. To complicate matters, it turns out that Smith is (according to some legal interpretation) the rightful owner of Mars, and the heir to a vast fortune thanks to patents registered by his parents before their deaths.

Its special situation results in the fact that everyone who has an economic and political interest in the Earth's authorities tries to make cynical use of it and exploit it for their own purposes. Smith rebels, and decides to introduce the cultural enlightenment of the Martians to the people of Earth. He establishes the 'Church of All Worlds' based on the ancient ideas of brotherhood, pacifism, prevention of hunger and disease, etc. The members of the Church of All Worlds sleep together in communes, have group sex and basically do everything that the conservative American right sees as hacking and desecration of Christian moral principles.

'Ger Eretz Nochria' was published in the early sixties, and more or less at the same time, the beatnik movement also broke into the public consciousness: the hippies, Aruchi Habulorit and the joint. 'Living in a foreign land', for its multitude of liberal and radical ideas, became the bible of this movement. One of the phrases Heinlein coined in the book, 'to dig' - which generally means 'to understand something through empathy and love', entered the accepted lexicon of the movement. Heinlein had to put up a fence in his house to keep out those confused new fans who believed he was about to declare himself the guru of the Party of Love.

So who, exactly, is Robert A. Heinlein? Is he a right-wing conservative? After all, he supported Senator McCarthy's witch hunt, and loathed communism. Or maybe he is a left-wing liberal? In almost all of his books he demonstrates an anti-establishment and anti-religious stance.

It is possible that the answer to this question can be found in the book 'Tyranny is White', also one of Heinlein's most successful and finest books.

The moon, according to the book, is a penal colony where everyone the authorities on Earth want to get rid of is sent, a bit like the early days of the continent of Australia. The living conditions in the lunar colony are strict and uncompromising: those who do not get along with their neighbors, who disturb the few women who live in the colony or who have trouble finding work - are thrown out of the airlock without a spacesuit.

The plot of the book follows a rebellion that breaks out on the moon and the attempts of its inhabitants to establish an independent state for themselves. Their chances of standing against the full power of the earth are slim, but to their credit are long years of forging and natural selection in the difficult conditions that the tyranny, the white, puts before them.

The values ​​that emerge from the book are the essence of Heinlein's values ​​- libertine values, from the word 'liberty', freedom. Personal freedom, the freedom of man to do as he wishes without the restraint and yoke of government, are the important motif of his books.

Libertarianism is a strange hybrid: it is neither liberal nor conservative, or both liberal and conservative. The freedom of man to do what he wants to do in his bedroom without interruption - is liberal. The uncompromising struggle for a free state against enemies who wish to stifle this freedom - communism, in Heinlein's opinion - is distinctly conservative. In short, it is impossible to place Heinlein on the accepted scale of right and left, liberals and conservatives: he is something else. He is both. Perhaps this is the secret of the magic of his books.