I\u2019m a Heinlein fan.\u00a0 That\u2019s not to say I like everything he wrote.\u00a0 I believe \u201cI Will Fear No Evil\u201d is remarkably bad.\u00a0 I know of several other of his books that I don\u2019t think very highly of.\u00a0 But a lot of what he wrote, especially during his heyday was very good.\u00a0 And comparing him to those writing at the time when he came on the scene it is striking how much better he was.<\/p>\n
So why was that?\u00a0 What made him so good?\u00a0 First of all, I think Heinlein happened to be a very intelligent man.\u00a0 Secondly, he was well educated and this included the fact that he had an upper middle-class upbringing that included good literature.\u00a0 Thirdly, he had a decent work ethic.\u00a0 Between these things he probably brought much more to the table than most of his peers.\u00a0 And finally, I think he modelled his stories not on other science fiction authors but rather on successful authors in the wider literary world.\u00a0 And I think this has been recognized for a long time.\u00a0 Many years ago, I read some literary criticism that posited that Heinlein had taken Kipling\u2019s British Raj and mapped it onto the Solar System or some such thing.\u00a0 Another critic said that Heinlein created America as Science Fiction.\u00a0 While I don\u2019t think either of these premises are completely true I think they hint at the fact that Heinlein wanted to take science fiction out of its ghetto and make it interesting to the grown-ups.<\/p>\n
And to a great extent, he succeeded.\u00a0 Especially in his early future history stories, the feel is very much of a mid-twentieth-century American dynamism.\u00a0 It combines wit, enthusiasm and confidence.\u00a0 It belongs with such other products of the time as John Houston\u2019s motion pictures The Maltese Falcon and Treasure of the Sierra Madre.\u00a0 He has turned the American Century into the source for his characters and their ethos.\u00a0 And in some of his stories like Citizen of the Galaxy and Double Star, Heinlein did borrow some of the flavor of Kipling\u2019s British Empire.<\/p>\n
But really all this shows is that Heinlein wanted his stories to belong to the Anglo-American tradition of storytelling.\u00a0 He recognized good work and he incorporated the spirit of the best works from his time and of the literary past that he enjoyed and projected them on the future.<\/p>\n
Some might say that he thereby lacked originality.\u00a0 This may be somewhat true.\u00a0 But it is also universal.\u00a0 Even James Joyce when he wrote his stream of consciousness in Ulysses is using Homer for his plot basis.\u00a0 And to the extent that Ulysses is original it is also a failure as literature.\u00a0 Every writer borrows from the past.\u00a0 He has to.\u00a0 As Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun.\u00a0 The trick is making it new and making it your own.\u00a0 I think Heinlein was well within fair usage.<\/p>\n
Coming back to the question of what Heinlein was, I believe he was the right man at the right time.\u00a0 He was an intelligent, literate American at just the moment in the American Century when science fiction was becoming mainstream and relevant to the culture.\u00a0 Atomic bombs and space craft were crossing over from science fiction to front page headlines.\u00a0 Science fiction readers were seeing their stories become respectable and even literary.\u00a0 Legitimate periodicals included some of the more refined writers between the glossy covers.<\/p>\n
Will we see his like again?\u00a0 I would have to say no.\u00a0 Not so much because he was some towering genius, but because the times have changed.\u00a0 No one would mistake our present culture for 1930s America.\u00a0 Even in the depths of the Great Depression there was an optimism and solidarity that just doesn\u2019t exist anymore.\u00a0 Authors today reflect that despair.\u00a0 And maybe that is interesting to some, a sort of decline of the Roman Empire sensibility, but I don\u2019t think it lends itself to good storytelling.\u00a0 Even in the most realistic story I think you need something beyond fatalism and ennui.\u00a0 Otherwise it feels like the story is not even worth your time to read.<\/p>\n
But, of course, maybe a change is just around the corner and an American renaissance is on the horizon.\u00a0 Well, if that\u2019s the case, I better reread Green Hills of Earth.\u00a0 Delilah and the Space Riggers?\u00a0 Sure why not?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m a Heinlein fan.\u00a0 That\u2019s not to say I like everything he wrote.\u00a0 I believe \u201cI Will Fear No Evil\u201d is remarkably bad.\u00a0 I know<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,237,4,242],"tags":[26,68,92,711,44,265],"class_list":["post-2731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-american-exceptionalism","tag-book-review","tag-heinlein","tag-robert-a-heinlein","tag-sci-fi","tag-science-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n