SOURCE: Slusser, George. “Heinlein's Fallen Futures.” Extrapolation 36, no. 2 (summer 1995): 96-112.

Robert Heinlein's long career has ended. Thus, there is the need, more urgent than ever, to assess the nature and importance of his work. But on what level should this assessment take place? The old-style fan saw Heinlein, both writer and public persona, as the quintessential SF writer and adulated him. Criticism of any sort was not tolerated, as I found out when my mid-seventies monographs were awarded the “galaxative award” by Spider Robinson in a hostile fan press. But SF readership has changed since then, and Heinlein has been placed in broader context—not necessarily to his advantage either, for the persona fans once admired has become an embarrassment to many of today's academic readers, whose ideologies he does not readily serve. All this shows that the Heinlein “problem” is one of the critical context in which we choose to place him. Is his work best studied in terms of genre? As a “literary” phenomenon? A cultural or mythical construct? After years of thinking about Heinlein and following his career, I wish to reinforce my original point of departure: Heinlein is a national writer, one who carries into a new scientific century cultural and ethical patterns first conceived by nineteenth-century American thinkers and writers of “romance.” If Heinlein is the Grandmaster of SF, we cannot say, with Bruce Franklin, that Heinlein has turned America into science fiction, but just the opposite—that SF is America, its natural form of literary expression in the continuity of its culture.

Recently, my earlier writings on a then-living Heinlein were taken to task by British critic Robin Usher. As Usher sees it, I mistakenly sought to limit my explanation of Heinlein's work to “theological” paradigms, in this case to the operation, in his fiction, of a secularized mechanism of Calvinist election: “Heinlein is concerned to promote a vision of an ‘immutable higher order’ but his God does not choose man. Man chooses God, or rather he chooses to be His vehicle. The God which the Heinlein hero serves is a personal inner god: the ‘Self’ of Jungian psychology” (Usher 71). The Jungian interpretation is attractive and no doubt correct. For me, however, it is simply too general. For the Jungian, it seems that all people have a “higher self,” and all are free to choose, or not, to integrate with it. Increasingly, however, it is clear to me that Heinlein's “hero” is not everyman but a uniquely American figure shaped in a very particular cultural matrix.

I do not wish to abandon the Calvinist interpretation, rather I wish to nuance it with an Emersonian reading. Among the few books on the shelves of families in the Bible Belt where Heinlein grew up, Emerson's essays are sure to sit. Emerson is read as secular American scripture, and it is he, not Jung, that glosses Heinlein. Analogies can be made, of course, between Emerson's “oversoul” and Jung's higher self. Nor is election an apparent aspect of Emerson's transcendental materialism. His frequent use of “we” suggests at least that the undulation between soul and oversoul, center and circumference, is a process open to all. The real difference, however, is in the direction and purpose of the process. In Jung, to invest the “higher self” is to grow, expand, move toward a future that must be wiser, thus better. In Emerson, investment takes an opposite path. The heart that abandons itself to the Supreme Mind “will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment, we have come from our remote station on the circumference instantaneously to the center of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect” (“Over-Soul” 1154). Things are topsy-turvy here, with the Jungian “royal road” leading instead from general circumference to a particular center, to an intimate “closet of God” that surely suggests the strait gate of election. What is more, in this closet of God we witness the contraction of future and history (the “slow effect”) to a presentness which is that of the sole self: “For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite” (“Over-Soul” 1158).

Usher speaks of “a positive form of Heinleinian solipsism,” in Jungian terms one with a future, a growth vector. Heinlein's most powerful figures, however, despite their nominal insertion in a “future history,” in fact exist in a present that they strive to render infinite in duration and in size. This is a dynamic, self-sustaining solipsism. Emerson on one hand seems to deny the role of election in bestowing special “grace” on such a self: “Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one” (“Experience” 1170). On the other hand, he describes the mechanism whereby such a self generates its own power and form: “Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either” (“Experience” 1171). The Heinlein hero cultivates “life” not in terms of growth, which is excess, but rather as dynamic undulation measured in the sense of increasing amplitude, where longevity is equated with expanding duration of its present moment. What is experience here is not Jungian individuation but, rather, a material infusion of self into cosmos like that of Emerson's transparent eyeball: “I am nothing, I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me” (“Nature” 1067). The Heinlein hero tells the bird of power it need not alight, for everywhere the bird would put down, the single body is, cosmic currents flowing through its extended circulation system.

Just as Emerson shifts from “we” to “I” in the case of the secularized “election” that is the transparent eyeball, so Heinlein maintains an illusion of democratic possibility, until from the circulating masses a single being is chosen to become the body that in turn subsumes the circulation system. Following Emerson, Heinlein thus occludes traditional Calvinist anxiety over origins. The hero does not worry about whether he was initially chosen; in that “choice” here is made a function of ostensibly material forces such as genetic accident or species drive, the so-called “survival of the fittest.” Successful use of these, however, balancing the power-form ratio in order to expand beyond “we” to “I,” must, in the manner of Puritan society, be read as visible signs of election. The question, then, of Heinlein's “theology” is crucial in the context of an American culture that, as in Emerson, effectively obviates psychological development by transposing religious forms onto secular or material experience.

Heinlein continued publishing up to his death in 1988 (indeed, his voice continued to be heard in 1989, in Grumbles from the Grave). In one sense, however, his opus comes full circle in The Number of the Beast (1980)—or rather, swallows its tale, which from its earliest stories is that of the male monohero himself expanding to absorb all other characters and “plots.” Ostensibly a sprawling space opera, Beast soon reveals, as we sail off with Zeb Carter for dimensions unknown, that it is both fiction about fiction and, specifically, fiction about Heinlein's own fiction. Increasingly in his later novels, Heinlein used fictional persona as alter egos. The author here, however (it is hard to refer to a “narrator,” as Heinlein almost always lets his characters speak in their voice or speaks of them in a voice calqued on their “point of view”), not only resurrects figures from a panoply of early novels but makes them aware that they are fictional creations. Moreover, Heinlein incorporates his reader into the text as well by mingling that reader's world (both as “real” person and as reader of pulp adventures) with those of his fictional characters, thus making that world yet another of the alternative universes he rules over. There is humor here, much of it aimed at critics. Even so, the implication is clear: the author, nowhere and everywhere in his creation, makes himself a transparent eyeball and at the same time, forcing all currents of the Universal Being to flow back through his own pen, declares himself a god in all possible worlds, the reader's world included.

Heinlein announces in this novel an “inter-universal society for eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism.” The joke, however, contains the fundamental paradox of Heinlein's work as a whole. Beast is full of chatty “family” scenes; it is a-whirl with multiple entities. Yet, beyond even the genetic lines of Lazarus Long, this proliferation of kin, fictional or real, collapses as it seems to expand, circumscribing at a single center the isolated “body” of the author. Expansion and contraction are one, systole and diastole, so that as action and pages of prose proliferate, the single author becomes increasingly “visible” not just in but as his creation. We can call the process “dynamic solipsism,” or some such thing. But it seems, too, an act of literary cannibalism, where scores of worlds are “born” only to be fed upon and fictional progeny devoured as the source of energy needed to sustain the single writer. This “god” does not create ex nihilo; rather, he recycles, and because what he recycles is things he creates, he endlessly swallows himself. At the same time, however, this solipsistic creator is central to the material universe that underlies Heinlein's fiction. Operating here is a system of pure transfer of energy that excludes the possibility of future progress. One understands the attraction of grace in such a condition, for Pascal faced a similar dilemma. To Heinlein, however, grace is not a means of transcending orders of reality; instead, it promises access to an alternate world where entropy is replaced by self-sustaining process, where an individual center—here the writer in the closet of God—expands to create its own circumference.

On the narrative level, Heinlein displaces the literary “circumference,” with its diversity of character and plot and pretensions at future history, with the undulating rhythms of personal solipsism. His career as a published writer spanned exactly five decades. His first story, “Life Line,” appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in August 1939. Thereafter his steady output literally evolved along with the publishing industry, embracing formats from the magazine story and serial, the hardback juvenile novel for lending libraries, mass-market paperbacks, and, at the end of his career, increasingly luxurious hardback and trade paper-back publications (an example is the 1980 Fawcett Columbine edition of Number of the Beast with its lavishly embossed wrap-around cover and massively integrated illustrations). The lengths of his fictions range from minimalist short stories, written under austere editorial (and no doubt personal/artistic) constraints, to prolix novels that get longer and longer. By the end of his life Heinlein could demand of his publishers that no word, however unnecessary, be stricken from his texts. As late as 1968, in Stranger in a Strange Land, the work that made him a best-seller, editorial cuts were made; the posthumous appearance of an “uncut version” shows us how precious those lost words have become since.

Despite this great variety of formats, Heinlein's literary purpose has remained remarkably monochromatic in his incessant focus on the single individual and his world. This despite the fact that, as Heinlein's career advanced, he sought to persuade the reader that his stories and novellas were really part of a projected, organically evolving “future history.” Ever since Balzac and the later Asimov, however, we know such histories are post hoc creations. For Heinlein, it seems to have been a matter of drawing clever diagrams and chronologies after the fact. For the 1967 appearance of The Past Through Tomorrow, billed as “Future History Stories: Complete in One Volume,” reveals the arbitrary nature of the grouping and suggests that, as of then, the project was closed.

The true nature of Heinlein's “future” is clearly revealed with the 1980 publication of Expanded Universe. Here Heinlein presents a handful of so-called future history stories (the same five stories were also published in a volume called The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein that appeared one year earlier than The Past Through Tomorrow, in 1966). Now, however, the stories serve to present not history but the singular career of the author himself. Presenting “Life Line” lets Heinlein describe his first sale. Other stories mark the chronology of his literary life, giving the occasion for speeches and essays that expose his increasingly obsessive thoughts and “credo.” In his “Foreword” to Expanded Universe. Heinlein talks about making money and gloats uncharitably about outliving all his presumed literary enemies: “time wounds all heels.” The historical mask falls here. And if Heinlein, in his 1980s novels, brings back figures from earlier works to play roles, in a neo-Balzacian attempt to bestow on the whole of his oeuvre a feel of historical continuity, the latter is a facade. The late novels may claim the scope of an intergalactic human comedy. Yet the recurring figures in this family of man prove to be the family of one figure, the most representative of players in his putative “future history,” Lazarus Long. Long's progeny return obsessively in novels from Beast to Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984) and To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987). Long shares with the “commentator” of Expanded Universe, the writer-god of Beast, and even with Heinlein's Job an obsession with preserving his physical being. In Heinlein, all promise of mankind's advancement, its growth across time and space, conflates on a focus that is not even family in the sense of dynasty but the single self. Does it matter if this self is the “real” Heinlein or his fictional alter ego Lazarus Long? Long, whose literary situation permits him to meditate on the wages of prolonged personal destiny (rather than on royalties and enemies), may be most fascinating of the two. It is Long, in fact, who raises the question of kairos in relation to author Heinlein's pretense at chronos or historical axis. For as Lazarus frantically seeks to cleave throughout eternity to his individual body firmly held in the bands of matter, he denies all possibility either of history or of cosmic growth through transcendence, where individuals give way to higher collective entities or “overminds.”

Thus, despite the huge bulk of Heinlein's production and the increasing sprawl of his form into massive romans à tiroirs, the normative form in his canon remains, both in a literal (i.e., structural) and figurative sense, the short, vertically operative allegory. This is an endlessly repeatable tale that, in its working out, ever repeats the same scenario: (1) initial promise of action and strong character development suddenly ruptured along its line of horizontal development; (2) subsequent, and instant, translation of events or protagonists to adulthood and “glory”; (3) conflation of ends and beginnings; finally, (4) physical condensation of all fictional scenarios and human dramas to that fixed point where we discover the preordained duration of a (ultimately the) single physical body.

A frequent narrative mask in earlier Heinlein is the “social evolutionary” setting where, as in Beyond this Horizon (1948), genetically “strong” protagonists dream of some dimorphic evolution that would send their seed “to roam the stars—no limit.” Yet for such “star lines,” genetic advance (and advantage) never leaves the unlikely matrix of the patriarchal family. The perennial grouping, even in tales of promised genetic change, is invariably father, mother, son. The configuration is as static as the psychoanalytical triad. Its particular fixity, however, in Heinlein, comes more from “atavistic” traits, so-called anal and oral formations.

The first, and obvious, thing we notice about Heinlein's narrative is its single-gender nature. If formula plotting requires that there be roles of wife, daughter, even “lover,” Heinlein goes out of his way—more than the conventions of “juvenile” fiction demand—to turn females into tomboys, nags, fuzzy-brained hysterics. Feminists execrate Heinlein, on a visceral level, because he presents women who do domestic duty as irrevocably stupid. For example, the simpering wife of “The Black Pits of Luna” (1948) is so dumb (i.e., ignorant of science) that she calls for bloodhounds on an airless moon to search for a lost son who subsequently proves quite able to take care of himself. The tomboy is a bit more interesting, but only because she is a male travesty. Heinlein lets girls wear the shoes of the traditionally male adolescent of the juvenile bildungsroman. For example, Podkayne of Mars, heroine of a belated juvenile (1963), enters the scene as a tough-as-nails girl with ambitions of breaking into the all-male world of military space flight. In the end, however, biology makes her drop the mask, and voila, the old curse of Eve returns. All she need do is look in a mirror to discover she has broad hips and is fond of babies, and dreams of space conquest bow to destiny with relief. When Heinlein brings back another “tomboy,” in Friday (1982), we are, it seems, promised something quite different: a real female at last, one who (as is proclaimed on the book's jacket) “is all woman … very, very female.” How troubling to learn that this female, who “can think better, fight better and make love better than any of the normal people around her,” is not normal but, rather, is “a super-being … engineered from the finest genes.” The Engineer is still a male authority, and the product, “trained to be a secret courier,” is still his little girl Friday.

Heinlein's “departures” from the male adolescent hero formula are significant because they are not departures. He gives us girl heroines, even concocts potential sexual rivalries and “love affairs” between his youthful protagonists, only to elide them in a way that shows he has no interest whatsoever in gender differences on this level. A female heroine can survive only by being the exact calque of a young male. All daughters are really sons, and it is as sons that they must deal with parental authority. Parents alone in Heinlein have marked gender stances, and what differentiates them has the force of deep creation myth.

In his culturally unassuming medium of the “juvenile” bildungsroman, Heinlein recasts the struggle of child and parent on the primitive and universalist plane of a battle between earth and sky gods. As first glance, the prize seems nothing less than possession of the material universe. In work after work, a young hero(ine), freed of the necessity of seeking Freudian or Jungian individuation, is called to act in a quasi-symbolic drama that (like Everyman moving between the gates of heaven and hell) is bounded by two unchanging, and all-encompassing, forces. On one “end” of the life line, we find the all-separating mother, who bears life only to cast it forth into the stream of material growth and decay. She is a conflation of generative and biological curses—Rhea and Pandora combined. On the other (respondent) end, there is the all-consuming father. In Heinlein's mythology, the latter is postlapsarian. Born of woman's curse, this figure sustains male life only to the degree he harnesses the mother's capacity to generate more life in the form of consumable energy. He is a new Kronos, spawning and raising children in order to devour them. The sole role of Heinlein's younger “generation,” then, is that of allegorical vector between producer of energy and consumer. Such existence is hardly progressive—the young man growing to displace father and mother. It is regressive, where quests for adulthood and adult relationships only mask an inverted (and thoroughly male) drive to reverse the fall by controlling—“farming,” in a literal sense—the maternal force.

The allegorical nature of Heinlein's stories is evident in their ritualistic nature. Female temptation and love, for instance, are rituals. We have seen how the challenge of the female rival is thwarted when plot veers from conflict to revelation of identity. Similar forces intervene to deny the female the self-knowledge necessary to function as lover and, potentially, wife. Wherever couples are formed in a Heinlein novel, the gesture is anticlimactic, an afterthought that denies passion and offers no threat of future conflict. The “lover” is instantly the potential mother, future and dutiful serer of offspring for another young Kronos-in-training.

The rhetorical device here is ellipsis. That its use conceals an obsession with the Pandoran mother as source of originally uncontrolled generation—all-destroying time and love—is clear. In order to contain, and ultimately control, this chthonic force, Heinlein always conflates the figures of wife and mother. His texts (like his heroes) function like machines that would regulate this terrible organic presence by a highly contrived “technology” of substitution. On the simplest level, in a juvenile like Time for the Stars (1956), Heinlein mechanically multiplies female suitors, reducing potential individuals to faceless ciphers. In this novel, Special Relativity is evoked to sanction the elevation to prominence of one identical twin over the other. As befits this allegory of secularized “grace,” female “temptation” must be offered only to be eliminated by making that presence generic in nature. Predestined by their very names, Misses Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Furtney have a destiny only as components in a telepathic net. Unnamed, they cannot be called. Nonentities, they offer no individual menace to the scientifically elect.

The same reduction of female personalities to groupings occurs in the so-called “adult” novels as well. We find them, ironically, in the novel that passed in the late 1960s as a call to self-awareness: Stranger in a Strange Land. The long first section of the novel celebrates the doings of mature “sybarite” Jubal Harshaw. Harshaw offers an iconic template for domination of women that young Michael Valentine Smith will implement in the course of this long book. Playing Pan to the coming hippie rock star, Harshaw always travels with his entourage of beauties. But, physically, they are as faceless as an MTV constellation. They are his “secretaries,” and there is a James Bond uniformity to the standardized modes of sexual experience they offer. There is a Bondlike “danger,” too, in Amazon Jill and temptress-dancer Dawn. But whatever potential threat they pose instantly vanishes when they learn that they are (despite minor physical differences like full-body tatoos for Dawn) in fact mirror twins. We have the impression of reading two novels having different women with the same name. Harshaw's Jill has a mind of her own and is well on her way to becoming a prime mover in the intrigue. With Mike, however, all this vanishes; suddenly she is another faceless unit in his harem—now neither person nor lover, just another breeder of chosen ones.

In the later novels, however, the youthful-feminine appears more tempting, and correspondingly harder to dominate. In I Will Fear No Evil (1970), the male messiah of Stranger (who could only be resurrected on an alternate plane) is replaced by an aged recycler, who takes women's bodies as well as their personalities. The three names here—Johann Sebastian Smith—tell us in emblem fashion that we have a special creative mind trapped in the body of an everyman. An automobile accident and a brain transplant let Johann be recycled in the body of his beautiful secretary. The situation generates three hundred pages of voyeurism and sexual charades, with finally two men and a woman “sharing” the same body. Heinlein, however, is not putting Plato's androgyne back together here. Instead, what we have is a male destiny using a female body to get physically closer to the process of reproduction. Johann had stored his sperm before the operation and now uses it to inseminate himself so that he can control, now from inside the body, the process of gestation that will perpetuate his seed.

Heinlein's young hero has not become old so much as become a conflation of old and young. Smith figures in this sense Heinlein's aged-yet-ageless hero, Lazarus Long. Long's sole activity, in Time Enough For Love (1972), is finding new and intricate ways of fathering himself. In this novel, Long uses a number of gambits from genetic engineering to time travel in order to play sons and lovers, though he has reached the end not only of his biological line but of human time as well. By this playing, he hopes to conquer, retroactively, the female challenges left undone by the normal flow of existence. Cloning allows him to produce the “sisters” he never had. In their production, he reduces biology to empty form by insisting that cloned embryos be carried in host “mothers,” who are two exotic and faceless hetaera of the sort Jubal cultivated. Thanks to longevity, Lazarus can raise these sisters as “daughters” and in turn seduce them as lovers. The creatures even condone his actions: “Coupling with us might be masturbation, but it can't be incest, because we aren't your sisters. … We're you.” In another episode, Lazarus acts as onanistic Pygmalion to bring a computer to life. Where before he has lost “emphemeral” lovers to the stream of time, now he lures a flesh-and-blood woman out of machine-eternity, if into a life of sterile servitude.

Longevity gives Lazarus, after he tires of living multiple lives, the capacity to relive them through the lives of his sons and daughters. Not only are daughters clones of the sons, but both become, through genetic control, simply extensions of the father's body.

Not content with channeling the energies of the female first cause, he strives to encompass it physically, too, by going back in time to make love with his mother. Heinlein titillates us with the possibility of this son becoming his own father. But titillation is all we get, for if the system is to hold, the mother must remain the inviolate first cause. Lazarus cannot touch it, for not only would he cease to be, but the energy that generates the power and form of this being would fail. For the Emersonian materialist, the first cause is awesome. Final causes are, by contrast, menacing but controllable. In relation to birth (the center), final causes promise irreversible events—individuation, future happenings, death—and as such commit energy to linear rather than undulatory movement, drawing it fatally beyond the pull of its source. A “Lord of Life” is needed to forestall the end by controlling the means, holding the center in relation to an ever-expanding circumference. Lazarus is such a “Lord of Life.”

Looking backward from Lazarus, we see these figures dominating Heinlein narratives from the beginning. The only difference is their power and width of circumference. We go from Fader Magee in Coventry (1940) and Kettle Belly Bailey in “Gulf” (1940) to reincarnations of Jubal Harshaw who bridge the gap, in Number of the Beast, between a career of fictional mentors and the author as their stepfather. Finally, there are the many lives and beings of Lazarus Long as they multiply in response to the looming ubiquity of Maureen Johnson in The Cat Who Walks through Walls (1986) and finally To Sail beyond the Sunset (1988). That Heinlein's “Lords of Life” are almost never natural fathers is a strategic device. Witness Lazarus's many “adoptive” masks and roles, which allow him to approach the seat of female power without committing incest or chronoclasm.

The scenario, however, already functions in the juveniles. For example, in Time for the Stars the hero Tom's blood father is “unmanned” through attachment to wife and home. The boy finds a mentor in bachelor Uncle Steve. And happily Steve's advice—go to the stars—proves a way, via relativity, for the son to impede the normal course of bloodlines. Tom returns to find his twin brother the age of his grandfather. He could, therefore, marry a girl the age of his granddaughter. In doing so, he would draw the future, now a circumference to his center, at least a ways back toward the original point of generation.

Uncle Steve is a military man, and his mentor is a titular one: the Captain. Heinlein's army, however, is not a place of blind obedience to a system. Indeed, Time is an exemplary tale of how few, if many are thus named, have the intrinsic qualities to be Captain. Tom is under the command of the inept Captain Urqhardt. The latter, ordering the ship to certain ruin, forces Tom (and with him the now-dead Steve, who remains his tutelary voice) to disobey orders. And through the intervention of a yet higher authority, what Heinlein calls “serendipity,” in the form here of the faster-than-light vessel that suddenly arrives to vindicate the hero's actions, Tom can defy the letter of the law without breaking its spirit. In allegories of this sort, the mentor is ultimately an inner, guiding voice. The action is its vindication, as all institutional hierarchies (as with Emerson, institutions are but lengthened shadows of men) yield to natural ones. In like manner, a natural providence—here the relativity that allows scientists back on earth time to research and build the “miraculous” ship—breaks through the benighted folly of ordinary beings to make manifest the right way. But in Heinlein, “the way” is not a way that goes anywhere in a historical sense. What is revealed is not moments that decide the course of human progress. As with Emerson's representative men, we have revelations of a number of representative moments, different manifestations or forms of a same living power. This is precisely the “geography” of the linked novellas Universe and Common Sense (1941). We do not, here, see all humanity reverted to superstition and self-limitation, only certain people on a typical generation starship lost on its course to Alpha Centauri. The adventure of the stories' “new Galileo,” Hugh Hoyland, leads to no historical breakthrough, no new beginning of civilization, simply to a reprieve. The narrative, revealing a type, only retells Heinlein's single story, that of the winnowing of human chaff and the emergence of the elect.

Heinlein surely would not have liked terms like “providence” or “grace.” The conventional Miltonic God the Father, as we see in Job: A Comedy of Justice (1986), is just another corporate manager, whose dominions are a stifling bureaucracy. But “serendipity” is not a secularized form of grace; it is a localized form. Heinlein's chain of “grace” is not just patriarchal; it is operative on the local, or tribal, level. In his military chain of command, there are never generals. In Starship Troopers (1959), for example, Johnny Rico's exemplary career is guided first by Sergeant Zim, the boot-camp instructor who returns, “providentially,” to lead him in his baptism of fire. Beyond Zim, there is the less tangible Colonel Dubois, the high school “moral philosophy” instructor who first inspires Johnny to enlist. But, if Dubois returns again and again to direct Johnny's path, guidance here is through words not deeds. We have Dubois's timely letters, his lectures, his reported bits of wisdom, but not his physical presence. Colonels, in fact, seem to be numinous figures in Heinlein. Witness P-Colonel Baslim of the Exotic Corps in Citizen of the Galaxy (1957). Once he saves orphan Thorby from slavery in the opening pages of the book, he dies, leaving behind his “aura” or guiding light to future mentors. Captain seems the ideal level of patriarchal authority—the head or chief of a small tribe, of a “few good men.” The social unit of serendipity is never large; in lieu of the blood family, it must form an alternate unit of equal size, as befits the intimacy of Emersonian power and form.

Heinlein's patriarchal dramas, then, are to be read not in an Oedipal sense but as rituals that free the young hero from the strictures of family and blood, from the possibility of social individuation and, beyond this, of historical dynasty. But free them to what purpose? In Citizen of the Galaxy, step-father Baslim acts, beyond death, to activate a series of surrogate mentors whose task is to free Thorby from any resurgence of blood ties: first Captain Krausa, who frees Thorby from the toils of a Trader “family” so complex in organization an anthropologist is needed to decipher it; then Lawyer Garsch, who extricates the hero from the intrigues of his own blood family. As we have seen, blood fathers, like the bureaucratic structures they represent, hinder the young hero. They do not, however, hinder “growth” in a Freudian sense. We never see, in Heinlein, Freud's displacement of the father as creating a balanced personality. Heinlein's mentors, instead, redirect the young man to a non-Oedipal line, where blood father is displaced by a symbolic figure: bachelor uncle, teacher, captain. In Starship Troopers, for example, the possibility of Oedipal conflict is raised only to be elided when an alternate military chain of command subsumes the authority of blood ties. Johnny's blood father is unsuccessful in exercising his paternal right to prevent his son from enlisting. Defeated, he returns in the end in an inverted role: now as the sergeant who serves directly under Lieutenant Rico. Johnny has displaced the father, but not through psychological growth; rather, by instant identification with the symbolic patriarchy that rules his universe. This is the universe of Kronos, a world before and outside the laws of personal and historical development, where fathers and sons, by necessity, remain indistinguishable. The symbolic figure associated with a Kronos who absorbs his progeny is that of elision. “Son” Johnny is simply an immanent patriarch. By eliding normal processes of biology and psychology, he merely invests the form of the symbolic “father.”

It is difficult to isolate a “key” text for any aspect of Heinlein's rich work. The narrative, however, that best defines the crux between immanence and history in Heinlein, where the promise of future generations encounters the self-perpetuating dynamic of Kronos, the interchangeable father and son as Emerson's center and circumference, is The Puppet Masters (1959). This novel, on the surface, seems to restore Freud and bloodlines to the family portrait. For in the story we learn that the “Old Man,” the military boss, is in fact the protagonist's own flesh-and-blood father. The purpose of this narrative, it appears, is not to lead Sam, in guise of some secular grace, to take possession of the father role. It is rather to have him earn the right to become the father, as the individual who rids the Old Man of his parasitical “slug,” restoring him to the bloodline and overthrowing his authority at the same time. The Kronos function, the immanent possession that conflates son and father to interchangeable roles, seems transferred to the vampiric, personality-stealing slugs who in the end are defeated. But on what terms is a family reunited here? Were I wont to give Heinlein such intentions, I would say that in The Puppet Masters he restores the Freudian temptation, but only to “subvert” it. On the eve of figures like Michael Valentine Smith and Lazarus Long, who are openly hermaphroditic compounds of father and son, he seems to wish to lay the ghost of individuation to rest.

Indicating the vertical nature of family development in the novel is the perfect allegorical “readibility” of the cover illustration from the 1951 Galaxy, where the earlier serial-form appeared. The cover, depicting the final scene, shows us a son who is now Boss, looming tall and strong over a much smaller female figure. In now familiar manner, man's potential partner and sexual rival is neutralized by size and symbolic position. The seductive attributes of Eve—in this case full breasts—are regulated by the strait-jacketing “space” costume and thus reduced to mere signs of the breeding function the female must serve on the subsequent twenty-year flight to Titan to destroy the slug's home world. This is an accurate depiction of the narrative's reductive nature. Initially, Mary is an agent as tough and resourceful as Sam. In the course of things, however, she does not develop but is merely translated from an active to a symbolic role. In the end, she may be the one who saves mankind; but she does so only because she is capable of being a passive vessel. Because she has survived the rare Venusian fever that kills the slugs, she becomes the repository of crucial information that allows men to exterminate them. Indeed, it is only through controlled male probing of her hidden life sources in memory, an act of permissive rape by proxy, that the identity of the disease is finally retrieved.

The background of the cover is a huge spaceship, the largest element in the picture and symbol of the primacy of the mission. Beckoning the couple to enter is the Old Man. His distant smallness suggests the role of tutelary spirit. He bears, in fact, no family resemblance to the tall young man. Instead we have Heinlein's typical mentor, bald and paunchy, the physique common to such diverse figures as Kettle Belly Bailey and Hugh Farnham. In the narrative, the Old Man all but perishes in a final plane crash only to be resurrected by physical fusion with his young acolyte. Much as Jubal Harshaw's suicide, in Stranger in a Strange Land, is reversed when Mike “inhabits” his body, here Sam's lying “face to face … almost cheek to cheek” with his dying father restores the vitality we see on the Galaxy cover. On that cover, the father continues to draw on filial energy, inviting the son into a situation—space travel—where he must take the form of an old man. Sam's voyage to adulthood will be an elided one. Like Rip van Winkle, the tall son will emerge from this mental chrysalis twenty years later on a distant planet as a bald and paunchy figure. Yet, within the allegorical space of this cover, Sam, potentially the father yet still the tall youth, improves on Rip. Rip must pay for the instant translation from inexperience to wisdom with loss of youth, while Sam retains both. Applying the Einsteinian gambit of Time for the Stars, twenty years of Sam's time at near-light speeds translates into centuries of earth time. If Sam ages on his biological line, even more he is a hopeless anachronism to the “new” world many intervening generations have created. Yet, by the logic of paradox, he still returns “younger” that his great-great-grandfather. This cover freezes, in static eternity, the elements of that dynamic of self-perpetuation which is Heinlein's master narrative throughout his career. It is a narrative in which, in this instance, the fantasy of election and the physics of space travel concur to make Sam a youth in age's mantle.

Looking across the span of Heinlein's work, then, we see families and generations and future history conflate into what is an endless reconfiguring of a single lifeline—that of the aging authority figure, from Hugo Pinero in the first published story “Life Line” (1939) to Lazarus Long—into a dynamic figure that resembles Emerson's undulation between center and circumference. If Emerson defines his poles as individual being on one hand and universe on the other, he does not see the latter as a purely personal construct but as the universe itself. We cannot, thus, limit Heinlein's hero, in light of his relation to the “continuity” of an American experience, to those patterns of psychoanalysis and bildung his own fictional vision rejects. The Oedipal and individuation myths assume the primacy of Zeus and the Socratic dictum of “know thyself.” But Heinlein, following a cultural current that can be traced back to Ben Franklin, openly formulates the human condition in terms of a pre-Socratic emphasis on material atoms and intelligence on one hand and, on the other, of preindividuated, “archaic” human formations—the oral Kronos who devours generations and futures in order to preserve his material present. In Heinlein's monohero—in whom Emersonian self-reliance and Thoreau's call to “simplify” is carried to monstrous proportions—we have, rather than a case of arrested development or “phobia” of growing old, a concerted act of personal philosophy.¹

Heinlein's care is for the physical perpetuation of the body—the sole body he (in the manner of the empirical tradition of the American founders) really knows: his own. But if psychological categories are tangential, even antithetical, to his vision, moral categories are not. The word “ethos” refers to a being's character, its “normal state” of being. C. Hugh Holman states that Calvinism “may almost be considered the ethical mode in America” (226). As such, Calvinism may be said to haunt Emerson's transcendental vision as its ethical “soul,” the basic condition of the humanity on which that vision would operate. Heinlein, then, though neither a professed nor practicing Calvinist, is unable, in his narratives of male self-perpetuation, to do away with the female first cause. Here, it seems, we have a thing of awe and terror, the place of generation that is at once a place of total depravity and source of the Fall and a wellspring of “grace,” the force (however disguised as genetic or evolutionary trajectories) that sustains Lazarus's “unconditional” election beyond any ability he may have to perform deeds. It is for this reason that Lazarus, claiming the circumference in the very late novels, increasingly comes under the pull of Mother Maureen's center. Her presence in these novels acts to restore, in light of the secular temptation of control by unaided reason, Calvinism's ultimate doctrine of limits. Maureen's rise signals the limited possibility for atonement or action in the face of the mystery of grace, which no one, even Lazarus, deserves in light of the enormity of the Fall.

Heinlein's Americanism is usually confused with the genre formulas he adopts. Samuel R. Delany outlines the following pulp formulas as “genre conventions” in SF: “(1) that a single man, unaided, can change the course of history; (2) that the universe is basically a hospitable place; (3) that intelligence is a perfectly linear human attribute” (226). Heinlein is constantly telling us that such is his credo. But let us measure his fiction by these categories. First, in spite of constant praise (through fictional mouthpieces or in authorial asides) of the lone hero, rarely if ever is that single man “unaided” in Heinlein. Lazarus's name, we are told, means “God has helped.” For such heroes, self-reliant toughness is doubled by a secular form of “grace,” an inscrutable destiny that elevates a figure who bears no marks of greatness. Second, if certain men are chosen, how “hospitable” is the destiny that elects them? Heinlein forever asserts, in the name of “serendipity,” that the universe is a friendly place for his elect. For example, when Hugh Hoyland's band in Common Sense casts off in space, it appears to land in a new Eden. Yet no new world begins here: instead we have a localized event, a huddling place for a few lucky survivors, nothing more. In the broader scope of the Fall, human triumphs and “conquests” are diminutions when measured against what was and is no more, the lost first cause, or, in its secular mask, the peak of energy from which all else is a downward slope. Heinlein's “Eden,” in fact, returns human beings to the crudest oral existence: “From now on, Alan, always Good Eating” (128). On an even vaster intergalactic stage, Kip, in Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1959), successfully argues the human cause before a cosmic bar of justice. But the outcome of his serendipitous efforts (his “grace”) is pure Calvinist anticlimax, for mankind is not granted a pardon, only a reprieve. The sole triumph is again on the level of anality and food. For only back at the local soda fountain after his adventure can Kip exercise free will, and this only to fling a pie in the face of the local bully.

Calvinism makes a perfect fit with the thermodynamic vision that Heinlein derives simultaneously from his Emersonian heritage and from his interest in the physical sciences. The undulatory pattern between center and circumference, which shapes family relations and conflict around the self-sustaining patriarch, may offer conservation of matter. But this itself is a localized case on the irreversible slope of entropy. However centrifugal the claim for an expanding circumference, as with Lazarus's universe-spanning body, expansion is matched by an opposite and unequal centripetal pull toward an ever-diminishing center. Nor is intelligence, the motor of physical mastery, ever (in Delany's sense) linear in Heinlein's SF formulas; rather, it is curved or sloped. For example, the apparently linear pursuit of life extension leads ultimately to physical contraction. Such is Kettle Belly Bailey's search to acquire “speedtalk” in “Gulf” (1941), for this is a skill that damns those that master it to “an effective lifetime of at least sixteen hundred years, reckoned in flow of ideas,” thus placing an intolerable compression on a still-short lifeline. Even escape into alternative universes proves a compression, not expansion, of heroic possibility. In Glory Road (1963), “Scar” Gordon trades Vietnam for a realm of sword and sorcery only to find its paths of glory (worse even than those of its analogue) meandering and hopelessly regressive. “Decisive” battles lead nowhere, and the world he finally liberates (aptly called “Center”) turns out to be simply a mirror of Scar's anarchic being, a world without government, where “even the positive edicts of the Imperium were usually negative in form.” Finally, intellectual mastery of time inscribes nothing more than endless loopings around a single, and endlessly diminishing, instant or episode in the lifespan of a single self. Bob Wilson, in “By His Bootstraps” (1941), appears to achieve physical eternity—and a much better life in the magic kingdom of Norsaal—by orchestrating a dynamic circumference of temporal manifestations of himself around a single, endlessly repeated spacetime event. Yet perpetual motion proves here to be a “fur farm,” where with each turn something dies, a little energy is lost. Bob, for example, passes through the circles to become the mentor Diktor because he is Diktor. Yet the notebook Diktor first showed him is lost in the process, and he must (re)write it. The “Bob” who will replace him in turn must rewrite another, and so on. What happens, however, to these notebooks? And where does each Diktor that is displaced go?

In the end, Bob Wilson is perhaps the emblematic Heinlein hero. He, by an act of grace (the appearance of the “time gate”), does not have to finish his thesis and go get a dull teaching job in the adult world. He runs temporal rings around his fiance Genevieve, dominating her while never having to marry her. He invests the role of his mentor by both being and becoming him, thanks to the providential paradox of sequency/simultaneity. He is master of a segment of time, with the reward of being able to live in an imaginary kingdom, the master of many beautiful women. Even entropy, provided he sees it operating on the notebooks and Diktors, must take a million years to wear him down. And yet we readers find him ultimately dull and empty. He has neither personality nor future nor the possibility of spiritual adventure. He is Heinlein's fallen man, who is chosen only to illustrate the ubiquity of damnation. The stigma, in Heinlein, that cleaves universal promise to material process is a denial not only of the future but of all possibility of transcendence. In the paradox of election in a world without the possibility of God as spirit, we face the vision, less of Emerson than his nightside Poe, whose materialist fantasies are circumscribed by a brooding sense of the universe as irrevocably depraved and fallen. On one hand, history and future must lie in the tomb of matter, where existence undulates between fear of premature burial and the lure of material “resurrection,” and its amplitude in the end is but the span of a corpse, so that Lazarus and Johann Smith make no advance over Ligeia. On the other, hope of transcendence is ultimately the same life-in-death suspension of biological process we find in the symbiosis between Usher and his house. In like manner, Heinlein's life-defying patriarchs draw parasitically on their maternal past. The “universes” they build, to cite Ray Bradbury in “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” are “wormed with man and gravity” (250), equally crumbling. Heinlein has taken the formulas of SF and lengthened their shadows, infusing them with the central problematic of his culture, for which the paradox of the fallen future remains a driving force, and fatal obsession.

Notes

1. One can trace Heinlein's preoccupation with endlessly extending the material line of a single existence from his first published story “Life Line.” We find fascinating variants on this ongoing investigation in the “middle period,” in works like Double Star, where a protagonist called in to impersonate a political figure in danger in the end actually becomes that figure. The older man has been physically replaced (rejuvenated) by the younger one, and, in infinite series, one could imagine a yet younger one, when the time comes, replacing this impersonator. Time Enough for Love carries this search to obsessive and monstrous extremes, and the last novels only build on this.

Works Cited

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