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The 1960s were when Heinlein produced some of his most famous works. And they started to bring him fame outside the Science Fiction community, which was most unusual.
Heinlein in the 1960s
Heinlein had interests that he tended to keep hidden in the early years while he was establishing himself as a writer, particularly as he was feeding the lucrative Juvenile market. These included things like sex, nudism, and unusual political and religious views. But when Scribners rejected Starship Troopers he not only abandoned writing Juveniles, but decided he could be a lot more open about his views. And this resulted in his most famous novel. This is the one novel that people who are not science fiction fans are likely to have read, particularly in the 1960s.
This novel won just about every award possible: Hugo, Locus, Prometheus. It was the first science fiction novel to crack the New York Times Best Seller list. And the Library of Congress named it as one of 88 “books that shaped America”. And it even introduced a new word to the English language: grok.
The stranger in the title is Valentine Michael Smith, an infant born to one of the astronauts, and then raised by Martians. He is brought back to Earth by a later mission, and his adventures in this strange land are what the book is mostly about. But in so doing, Heinlein writes a satire on religion and also espouses very different approach to love and sexuality than was considered proper at the time. And this attracted the hippies of the 1960s, for whom it became a Bible, much to the annoyance of Heinlein who did not appreciate them knocking on his door. The book had the original title of “The Heretic”, and was intended to challenge social norms about religion and monogamy. Heinlein’s own take on the reaction to the novel was that he 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.”
The book also exemplifies the characters that Heinlein managed to put into most of his stories. Michael is the naive young man who needs to learn better, and Jubal Harshaw is the wise old man who becomes his mentor.
The heroine of this book, Podkayne, is a teenage girl who is invited along with her younger brother on a luxury cruise with their uncle Tom from their home on Mars to go to Earth. We learn along the way that Mars was once a prison colony (echoing Australia), and that Podkayne’s family are of Maori ancestry. In the United States, at least, this would count as “colored”, and reflects Heinlein’s subversion of racist ideas in his works. Much of the travelogue on the luxury liner reflects Heinlein’s own experiences as depicted in his non-fiction book Tramp Royale which covers his own world cruise. But old uncle Tom is actually a diplomat using the kids as cover, and they get kidnapped by people who want him to take a certain position at talks to held at Luna. Podkayne’s brother Clarke is portrayed as a genius but lacking certain qualities of empathy, and in the end he manages to get her killed. The publisher rejected this ending an insisted on one where she lived. Later Heinlein published a version with both endings and invited people to vote on which one they preferred, and the one where she died won. Heinlein’s own objection was that it was like changing the ending to Romeo and Juliet into one where they both lived happily ever after. Since then the book has been published with Heinlein’s preferred ending.
This is basically a couple of novellas from 1941put together as a complete novel. The first novella, Universe, was recognized by the Science Fiction Writers of America by including it in their volume The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two. This is a story about a generation ship, i.e. a ship that will take generations to arrive due the speed of light limit. In this case, the people who understood what this was all about are long dead, and we learn that at one point there was a mutiny and the the ship’s officers were killed. In Universe, the descendants of the remaining people think the ship is all there is, it is the Universe to them. In the second novella, Common Sense, a few people find some of the old records and work out what the situation is. Then, seeing a star growing larger ahead of them, they take a life boat and land on a habitable moon of a giant planet.
This is part of the Future History, as Rhysling and his “Green Hills of Earth” are brought up, and it is also referred to in Time Enough For Love, where it is revealed that this ship is the sister ship to the one the Howard Families stole in Methusaleh’s Children. But being that this is from 1941 it does not show the polish and mastery of Heinlein’s other work of the 1960s.
Some stories make you wonder if they are Fantasy or if they are Science Fiction, and this is one of them. Of course, Heinlein would just call it Speculative Fiction and not worry about it. A former soldier has just been discharged from a war in Southeast Asia. The country is not mentioned, but this is 1963 and Vietnam was just bubbling up into people’s consciousness. With nothing to do, he meets up with a gorgeous woman who invites him on a quest. This takes them to other worlds and involves a certain amount of swordplay, culminating in a sword fight against Cyrano de Bergerac. The woman turns out to be the Empress of many worlds, and the quest was to retrieve the Egg of the Phoenix, a cybernetic device containing the memories and personalities of most of her predecessors, and now she has to absorb all of this, which is fine for her but leaves or hero pretty useless. Finally he goes looking for another quest.
This is a really good novel, and was nominated for the Hugo, but it lost out to Clifford Simak’s Way Station. We should probably discuss Simak at some point, he was an important writer with a distinct style.
This novel attempts to be satire on race relations, but is in my view a failure. A nuclear war happens, and a group of people in a fallout shelter find that they have been transported into the future (or is it an alternative universe?). The war pretty much destroyed the societies of the northern hemisphere, leaving things open for the Africans and other southerners to become dominant. And of course the blacks enslave the whites and re-enact the worst excesses of the ante-bellum American South. When I am in the mood to go back and re-read some Heinlein, this is not one I pick.
This is one of Heinlein’s best novels, set on a lunar colony. The moon has been used as a penal colony, but of course most of the people there now are descendants of the people originally exiled there. The Warden runs things, but as long as the grain shipments are on schedule he doesn’t bother much with the affairs of the “Loonies”. The background here is fascinating, describing a nearly anarchic society. Men out number women two to one, leading to some interesting marriage customs, including something called “line marriage” which is a type of group marriage. The wise old man role is played by Professor Bernardo de la Paz (Prof), while the young man he mentors is Manuel O’Kelly-Davis (Mannie). Mannie is computer technician who discovers the big mainframe computer that runs everything has become sentient. And since the computer has the acronym HOLMES, he names it Mycroft Holmes (Mike), for Sherlock’s smarter brother. They all become involved in a revolution against the Earth government, which in theory is led by Prof, but in fact is led by Mike. Since he is a computer, and keeps his sentience a secret, he creates a persona of Adam Selene to be the figurehead
I said that the background of this lunar colony is fascinating in itself, but the book is also a discourse on the nature of government, libertarianism, and what it means to be free. That was something Heinlein was prone to do, and it did not always work well. In some of his last works he tended to pontificate in a way that left the story behind, but in this novel the story is interesting all the way through. This the novel that popularized the acronym TANSTAAFL, which means There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, and which is the motto of the Loonies. Hazel Stone, of The Rolling Stones, appears here as a 12-year-old girl involved in the revolution, and both she and Mike also appear in later works of Heinlein. I recommend this book highly.
This novel won the Hugo award (by the fans), was nominated for the Nebula Award (by the writers), was named one of the Top 10 novels in the Locus poll, and won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.
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