From Depression into World War II: The Early Fiction
“—during the '30's almost everyone, from truck driver to hatcheck girl, had a scheme for setting the world right in six easy lessons; and a surprising percentage managed to get their schemes published.”
—Robert Heinlein, “The Roads Must Roll,” June 1940
In 1938 the atom was split. That did not seem such big news to many people, for in 1938 the Japanese were extending their invasion of China, the Italian Fascist army was trying to wipe out the stubborn partisan resistance in Ethiopia, Franco's forces opened their decisive offensive against the Loyalist government of Spain, Franco's ally Adolf Hitler invaded Austria, and Czechoslovakia was divided up by Germany, Hungary, and Poland. In early 1939, the Soviet Union crushed an attempted invasion by Japan. In late 1939, Germany successfully invaded Poland. At some point, World War II had begun.
Meanwhile, in April of 1939, the New York World's Fair opened, in futuristic splendor, with visions of “the World of Tomorrow” presented by hundreds of corporations and dozens of states and countries. The Long Island Railroad promised to take you there swiftly from Manhattan: “From the World of Today to the World of Tomorrow in ten minutes for ten cents.” Four months later, in a world plunging from the Great Depression into a global holocaust, Astounding Science-Fiction printed Robert Heinlein's first story.
Heinlein's first three published stories are all celebrations of the individual genius—lonely, misunderstood, but leading humanity forward to new frontiers of time and space. This lone superior individual, alienated but true to his own unprecedented destiny, is to become the central character-type of Heinlein's fiction for the next third of a century.
The hero of “Life-Line” (August 1939), his first story, is Dr. Hugo Pinero, the kind of lonely scientific genius who had haunted the pages of nineteenth-century science fiction from Victor Frankenstein through H. G. Well's Time Traveller. Pinero has invented a marvelous machine that determines with chilling accuracy the time of a person's death. Ridiculed by the scientific establishment, but hailed by the media as “The Miracle Man from Nowhere,” he sets up a lucrative business, “Sands of Time, Inc.,” so successful that it begins to threaten the profits of the giant insurance corporations.
Determined to crush the little upstart, Amalgamated Life Insurance attempts to destroy Dr. Pinero's business with an injunction. But they encounter a judge who delivers a most revealing lecture, obviously expressing the views of Robert Heinlein, whose family's farm-equipment business had been superseded by an emerging monopoly and whose own recent small-business ventures had been unable to compete, in this era of life-and-death struggle between corporate monopoly and small enterprise. This judge denounces the “strange doctrine” that because a “corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest.” He denies the demand of Amalgamated Life Insurance “that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.”
Like many in his social class, Heinlein clung tenaciously to the belief that the main vehicle of progress was free enterprise, a vehicle sometimes willfully sabotaged by the giant corporations. This is an overt theme in several of his stories during this period. In “Life-Line,” Amalgamated Life Insurance shows its true nature after it is frustrated in court: it hires gangsters who carry out their assignment of murdering Dr. Pinero and wrecking his wonderful equipment. Then the leading scientists, earlier labeled by Pinero the “Barbarians! Imbeciles!” who “have blocked the recognition of every great discovery since time began,” fulfill their part on the job by burning all the documentary evidence of Pinero's brilliant results.
Although the corporations and the academic establishment are the main enemy of the lone genius in “Life-Line,” Pinero expresses as much scorn for “the little man in the street” as for “you little men” of the Academy of Science. Yet despite all this exaltation of rugged individualism, there is a detectable countercurrent: a yearning to be part of a collective, a yearning so intense that it threatens to overwhelm individual identity. Pinero's theory and his machine are based on the assumption that each individual life is a continuity in space-time that can be compared to “a long pink worm, continuous through the years.” In explaining his theory, Pinero argues that these pink worms are not, despite all appearance to the contrary, really discrete individuals:
“As a matter of fact there is a physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross-section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.”
This sense of the individual as part of a human collective, organically joined to a death-defying timeless racial identity, is the other side of an unresolved contradiction that branches throughout all of Heinlein's work.
“Misfit,” Heinlein's second story, published in Astounding in November 1939, dramatizes the lone genius as a kind of ugly duckling who, unlike Dr. Pinero, achieves acceptance in the human family. Like “Life-Line,” “Misfit” can also be read as a product of the Depression. In fact, its teenaged hero, Andrew Jackson Libby, is recruited into a twenty-second-century version of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps. This C.C.C. of the future is the Cosmic Construction Corps, employing young misfits to convert asteroids into space stations.
Libby, “a thin, gangling, blond lad,” turns out to be a supergenius. When the ballistic calculator fails at a crucial moment, Libby takes its place, saving the mission. Like the nineteenth-century science-fiction dime novel, “Misfit” allows its readers to identify with a boy genius who wins the admiration and gratitude of the adult world.
The first of Heinlein's stories with a juvenile hero, “Misfit” foreshadows his juvenile novels of 1947-58.1 In fact, Starman Jones (1953) has an extended replay of Libby's superhuman computations in space. The figure of Libby himself continues to haunt Heinlein's imagination and to appeal to his readers. In Methuselah's Children (1941) Libby single-handedly invents and builds the “space drive” that allows trips into deep space, in this and many later tales. In Time Enough for Love (1973) one of the ritual quests performed by the novel's deathless mythic hero is to voyage backward in time to bury the orbiting body of his old friend Andrew Jackson Libby. In The Number of the Beast—(1980) Libby is resurrected as a beautiful woman, Elizabeth Andrew Jackson Libby Long, cloned from his original body and preserving his memory.
“Misfit” also introduces another theme of growing importance in Heinlein's later fiction: love and interchangeability between a human being and a thinking machine. Libby is assigned to the ballistic calculator, “three tons of thinking metal.” The emotional response of this boy who had never felt “needed” is intense: “He loved the big machine. … Libby subconsciously thought of it as a person—his own kind of person.”
The lone genius in Heinlein's third story, “Requiem” (Astounding, January 1940), is Delos D. Harriman, an old man about to die. Bearing the name of the nineteenth-century railroad magnate, Harriman is the crafty, visionary, ruthless, heroic capitalist who has (as we learn in a later story) almost single-handedly built “the Company” that all by itself explored and colonized the moon; he has also created the Harriman Foundation which finances space travel in many later tales. Prohibited by rules laid down by the bureaucracy of “this damn paternalistic government” and his own company from traveling to the moon, Harriman nevertheless roguishly buys his final trip to die on that remote place of his youthful dreams.
In describing these dreams, Harriman eloquently paints a picture of the boys and young men who made pre-World War II science fiction—both those who read it and those who wrote it. This picture is a wonderful self-portrait of Robert Heinlein:
“… I believed—I believed. I read Verne and Wells and Smith, and I believed that we could do it—that we would do it. I set my heart on being one of the men to walk the surface of the Moon, to see her other side, and to look back on the face of the Earth, hanging in the sky.”
“… I just wanted to live a long time and see it all happen. I wasn't unusual; there were lots of boys like me—radio hams, they were, and telescope builders, and airplane amateurs. We had science clubs, and basement laboratories, and science-fiction leagues—the kind of boys that thought there was more romance in one issue of the Electrical Experimenter than in all the books Dumas ever wrote. We didn't want to be one of Horatio Alger's get-rich heroes either; we wanted to build space ships.”
For these technologically oriented boys and men, stimulated by the visions of science fiction, technology tends to be the focus of romance, love, and even sex. Harriman's wife “had not shared his dream and his need.” As he dozes on his voyage to the moon, he imagines her voice calling “Delos! Come in from there! You'll catch your death of cold in that night air.” The ship itself seems more alluring: “He noted with a professional eye that she was a single-jet type with fractional controls around her midriff.” He scans her controls “lovingly”; “Each beloved gadget was in its proper place. He knew them—graven in his heart.” On the voyage he finds himself between two sensual beauties:
The Moon swung majestically past the viewport, twice as wide as he had ever seen it before, all of her familiar features cameo-clear. She gave way to the Earth as the ship continued its slow swing, the Earth itself, as he had envisioned her, appearing like a noble moon, eight times as wide as the Moon appears to the Earthbound, and more luscious, more sensuously beautiful than the silver Moon could be.
Throughout Heinlein's fiction, Earth is beautiful only when viewed from a distance, when people and their civilization cannot be seen.
Despite the vision of “the World of Tomorrow” projected by the 1939 World's Fair, the Depression had shattered the dreams of millions of Americans. Looking back, we can see that this economic catastrophe signaled the collapse of the free-enterprise system, which was rapidly being replaced by monopoly and state capitalism as the dominant form of the American political economy. Robert Heinlein's social and political outlook was shaped within this historical drama. Again and again throughout his writing career, we see him posing the old beliefs in “free trade” and “free enterprise” against the growing monopolies and bureaucracies of the giant corporations and the state controlled by these impersonal forces.
In the pre-World War II stories, the struggle often takes the classic form of the small businessman, the inventor, or the small factory owner fighting directly against the corporate monopolies, which sometimes are seen as already dominating the government. Two striking examples are stories published in 1940, “‘Let There Be Light’” and “The Devil Makes the Law,” the first a hard-core science-fiction tale published in the May issue of Super Science Stories, the second a wild fantasy published in the September Unknown.
The hero of “‘Let There Be Light’” is Dr. Archie Douglas, a young physicist doing research in a laboratory set up in the factory owned by his father. While awaiting a visit from the illustrious biologist Doctor M. L. Martin, Archie tries to pick up a beautiful blonde with a “dumb pan” and a figure like fandancer Sally Rand's. She turns out to be the famous M. L. Martin (“Mary Lou to her friends”) and Heinlein's first significant female character.
Mary Lou, who has been experimenting with the biology of fireflies, teams up with Archie to invent a device to turn electric power into light with minimum power loss. Then Archie's father explains that he is about to be driven out of business by the utility monopoly, which has “bought” both houses of the legislature “body and soul” in order to keep exploiting “power that actually belongs to the people.” So the two geniuses reverse their process and invent a solar power generator, promising “Free power! Riches for everybody!”
Now they have to struggle against the monopoly, whose political and economic power is explained to naïve Archie by worldly-wise Mary Lou, who cites the preface to George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah2 in describing “the combined power of corporate industry to resist any change that might threaten their dividends.” She tells of the ruthless methods industry uses to suppress inventions, including the super carburetor (an American folk legend that I personally have heard from at least a dozen mechanics in different sections of the country), and of the commitment of American industry to produce commodities “just as bad as the market will stand” so that they will wear out as soon as possible. Using feminine wiles to massage his male ego, she attributes their inventions solely to him and warns that “You threaten the whole industrial set-up.”
Since they cannot safely profit from the inventions, Mary Lou proposes that they release the secret to everybody: “Free power! You'll be the new emancipator.” So finally the theme of the lone Promethean genius is blazoned forth in a newspaper headline: “Genius Grants Gratis Power to Public.” The publicly acclaimed Genius of course is Archie, who now persaudes Mary Lou to marry him “to make an honest man of me.” It is interesting to note that the anti-monopoly if not downright anti-capitalist message of this story is expounded by Mary Lou, who allows her own scientific and practical roles to be concealed from the public, and that the story is the first Heinlein published under a pseudonym (Lyle Monroe), thus concealing his own identity from the public.
“The Devil Makes the Law” is, as its title suggests, an allegory. The setting is a typical American town where, as elsewhere in this fantastic world, all the businessmen routinely use magic in their trades, manufacture, and professions. The protagonist is another Archie, Archibald Fraser, Merchant and Contractor in the construction business. His small business, like all the others in town, is threatened by a ruthless monopoly named Magic, Inc. When the businessmen take their struggle to the statehouse, an old “mass of masonry” which “seemed to represent something tough in the character of the American people, the determination of free men to manage their own affairs,” they are dismayed to discover that Magic, Inc. is already in control of their own state government and those of other states across the country.
Archie and his friends—including a small manufacturer who uses witches to produce the garments made in his factory, an African witch-doctor, and a fiercely independent old witch-lady—are forced to take their fight directly to the source of this infernal monopolistic conspiracy: Hell itself. There, with the help of an FBI agent working for the anti-monopoly division and disguised as a demon, they unmask and defeat the boss of the monopoly, one of Satan's own lieutenants.
Heinlein's loathing of monopoly develops into the most radically “left” story of his career, “Logic of Empire,” published in Astounding in March 1941. Here, as in much of his post-World War II fiction, “the Company” has stretched beyond Earth to become an enormous interplanetary monopoly, tyrannizing over farflung colonies which are moving toward a replay of the 1776 American Revolution.
The story begins with two prosperous gentlemen, lawyer Humphrey Wingate and his wealthy friend Sam Houston Jones, whom Wingate accuses of being a “parlor pink,” drinking and arguing about whether the “labor clients” of the Venus Development Company are actually slaves. Wingate vociferously champions the Company, with its “obligations to its stockholders,” and condemns the lazy workers, “a class of people that feel that the world owes them a living.” The argument ends in a drunken decision to sign a contract for six years of indentured labor on Venus, and they wake up incarcerated in a spaceship.
Heinlein then dramatizes the conditions of labor on Venus as a combination of indentured labor in the eighteenth-century American colonies, Black chattel slavery on nineteenth-century American plantations, and wage slavery and debt peonage in the factories and on the farms of twentieth-century America. Once off the spaceship that resembles a slave ship, the “clients” are sold to “patrons” in a slave auction. As soon as Wingate, our point-of-view character, begins laboring on a plantation, the narrative begins to sound like a future version of nineteenth-century narratives of escaped slaves, such as the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. There are overseers, an addictive drink used to narcotize the slaves, and even threats made against recalcitrant slaves “to sell you South” to more “factory-like plantations.” Technically, the status of the Company's “labor clients” most closely resembles a combination of the conditions of the two main groups of workers in pre-World War II America: the debt peonage characteristic of the majority of Black rural workers and the wage slavery typical of mine and factory labor. Wingate discovers “that while he was free theoretically to quit, it was freedom to starve on Venus, unless he first worked out his bounty and his passage both ways.”
Even more devastating is Wingate's discovery that the conditions of labor are deadening his consciousness; in a passage echoing Frederick Douglass's picture of his own degradation, Wingate realizes that “he was becoming one of the broken men,” whose mind is relaxing into “slave psychology.” And like Douglass, Wingate reawakens the freedom of his mind by resolving upon bold action based on the belief that “No slave is ever freed, save he free himself.” So he and two other slaves attack their owner and escape.
The fugitives discover one of the “runaway slave camps,” where they gain admittance by identifying themselves with the code name “Fellow travelers.” This turns out to be the first of many examples in Heinlein's works of a vigorous frontier cultural outpost, the antithesis of the decadent monopolistic tyrannies of Earth. This “rough frontier culture” gives Wingate still another course in his re-education. He is surprised to find “that fugitive slaves, the scum of Earth,” were able to build a viable society, just as “it had surprised his ancestors that the transported criminals of Botany Bay should develop a high civilization in Australia.”
Wingate, now almost totally awakened to social reality, begins writing “a political pamphlet against the colonial system.” He then encounters a character soon to be familiar to Heinlein readers, a cranky old mouthpiece for the author, in this case a university professor fired for his political views (under a pretext very similar to Stanford University's for firing Thorstein Veblen). “Doc” ridicules Wingate's “devil theory”—although the pamphlet seems tame compared with “The Devil Makes the Law”—explaining that “bankers,” “company officials,” “patrons,” and “the governing classes back on Earth” are not “scoundrels” but products of social necessity and their own class outlook: “Men are constrained by necessity, and then build up rationalizations to account for their acts.” Doc gives Wingate a key lesson in Heinlein's economic theory: “Colonial slavery is nothing new; it is the invariable result of imperial expansion, the automatic result of an antiquated financial structure—.” Later, back on Earth, this message is reiterated by Sam Houston Jones, who has bought himself and Wingate out of slavery:
“I've been wondering how long it would take you to get your eyes opened. … It's nothing new; it happened in the Old South, it happened again in California, in Mexico, in Australia, in South Africa. Why? Because in any expanding free-enterprise economy which does not have a money system designed to fit its requirements the use of mother-country capital to develop the colony inevitably results in subsistence-level wages at home and slave labor in the colonies.”
Finally, Wingate, who has renounced “the empty, sterile bunkum-fed life of the fat and prosperous class he had moved among and served,” realizes his inability to produce another Uncle Tom's Cabin or Grapes of Wrath and seems resigned to Sam's pronouncement that “Things are bound to get a whole lot worse before they can get any better.”
Tacked on to the end of “Logic of Empire” is a note from editor John Campbell, informing readers of Astounding that “all of Robert Heinlein's stories are based on a common proposed future history of the world.” Two months later, in May 1941, Astounding printed Heinlein's chart of this future history. Modeled on the charts of macrohistory included in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), and sharing Stapledon's vision of a spiral of progress moving upward through cyclical rises and falls, Heinlein's chart provided a framework for much of his prewar fiction, an independent display of his historical ideology, and a new pleasure for his growing throng of readers, who could now anticipate the missing pieces of the puzzle. Campbell's introductory essay, “History To Come,” perceptively noted what many subsequent critics have agreed is the most engaging quality of Heinlein's fictions of the future: their sense of being “lived-in,” as opposed to the “stage setting” environments of stories that have to create their future environments from scratch. Heinlein's fans thus had the comfort of entering a somewhat familiar projected history where they could recognize an occasional old friend, while at the same time experiencing the thrill of the unexpected.
Heinlein made minor revisions of this chart of future history until 1967, adding new tales as they were written and occasionally deleting an old one. Most of the stories subsequently included were published before World War II; those eventually added or subtracted made no fundamental change, except to delete references to all years before 1975 and to extend the future from 2140 to 2600. The principal addition was a cluster of nine short stories, published between 1947 and 1950, sketching the early days of space exploration shortly before and after the year 2000. Most of the Future History was published in three volumes: The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950), The Green Hills of Earth (1951), and Revolt in 2100 (1953). In 1967, Heinlein published The Past Through Tomorrow, billed as the “Future History Stories Complete in One Volume,” and including a publisher's note telling how “Heinlein created a gigantic chart—filling an entire wall of his study—to keep track of his future world and the progress of its peoples and civilizations.” The latest revised chart is published in each collection.
Besides itemizing and dating the stories, the chart draws the “life-lines” of some of the characters, prophesies technical development, and provides sociological summaries of the main events in human history for the next centuries. Other works loosely interconnect with the projected future. Gaps are filled in by a postscript to Revolt in 2100 called “Concerning Stories Never Written” and by the novel Time Enough for Love. From the 1941 chart to the latest revision in 1967, the outline of the Future History remains consistent.
In the immediate future lies the “Collapse of Empire” and “the Crazy Years” of the middle twentieth century: “Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the Interregnum.” Then comes the strike of 1960, the “False Dawn” of 1960-70, with the first rocket reaching the moon in 1978: “The Interregnum was followed by a period of reconstruction in which the Voorhis financial proposals gave a temporary economic stability and a chance for re-orientation. This was ended by the opening of new frontiers and a return to nineteenth-century economy.” This crucial quest in Heinlein's fiction—for “new frontiers” that will lead back to free-enterprise capitalism—is embodied in the Future History conception by Harriman's Lunar Corporation, the foundation of Luna City, and the development of the “Period of Imperial Exploitation, 1970-2020.” But “the short period of interplanetary imperialism” is ended by three revolutions: Antarctica, the United States, and Venus.
Viewed in the context of the Future History, “Logic of Empire” can be read as a study of the conditions that lead to revolution. At the close of “Logic of Empire,” Sam Houston Jones foresees the rise of “a rabble-rousing political preacher like this fellow Nehemiah Scudder” to overthrow the technocratic monopolies. This important event in the Future History is loosely sketched in “Concerning Stories Never Written.” Scudder's revolt leads to a religious dictatorship in the United States, outlined in the Future History chart: “Little research and only minor technical advances during this period. Extreme puritanism. Certain aspects of psychodynamics and psychometrics, mass psychology and social control developed by the priest class.”
Those words describe the scene at the opening of Heinlein's first long fiction, “If This Goes On—” (Astounding, February, March 1940). The former United States is now under a theocratic dictatorship, headed by the latest incarnation of the Prophet, crushed under the weight of a vast military apparatus, and suppressed by omnipresent secret police, religious zealots employing hypnosis, torture, drugs, and the very latest methods of scientific thought control. Here is a perfect setting for Heinlein to explore what has long been one of his central themes: the relation between cultural conditioning and the possibility of human freedom.
If consciousness is determined by being, including the constantly reinforced values of a particular society or social class—and Heinlein sees all this as fairly obvious—then how is it possible for an individual, a social class, or a people to have true freedom, which depends upon the ability to transcend conditioning in order to arrive at true or at least accurate perception? In “Logic of Empire,” Humphrey Wingate was thrown bodily into the social class whose existence he had so radically misunderstood, and he thus came to transcend the false consciousness of his own affluent class. Heinlein chooses as protagonist and narrator of “If This Goes On—” a stolid, loyal, naïve young graduate of West Point, assigned to guard duty near the center of government at New Jerusalem. The story of the revolution is unfolded through the developing revolutionary consciousness of this one young man, John Lyle. But the problem remains, as we shall see, whether such a radical transformation of perception is possible for the people of the nation.
John Lyle falls in love with Judith, a nun-like Virgin about to be despoiled by the lascivious arch-hypocrite Prophet. It is this romantic attachment that literally drags Lyle to his initiation into the underground revolutionary Cabal. He rescues Judith, resists torture because the Cabal had hypnotically prepared him for it, assumes a new identity, escapes arrest, becomes the chief of staff of the commander in chief in the Cabal's enormous underground general headquarters, and takes command of the final victorious assault on New Jerusalem. Then at the end John Lyle decides to become a common citizen in the new system, marrying Judith and becoming a partner in a textile wholesaling firm.
Lyle had learned the truth about the dictatorship through his personal involvement at its evil core and through a long, intensive re-education administered to him by the Cabal. But what of the mass of ordinary citizens, exposed from birth to a profound superscientific conditioning to accept their slave status under the holy and omnipotent state? How are they to become convinced that all they had believed is false?
This problem is posed directly by a member of the technological elite running the revolution, the “chief of psychodynamics,” who argues that “‘We can seize power, but we cannot hold it!’”:
“Remember, my brothers, no people was ever held long in subjugation save through their own consent. The American people have been conditioned from the cradle by the cleverest and most thorough psychotechnicians in the world to believe in and trust the dictatorship which rules them. Since the suppression of our ancient civil liberties during the lifetime of the first Prophet, only the most daring and individual minds have broken loose from the taboos and superstitions that were instilled in their subconscious minds. If you free them without adequate psychological preparation, like horses led from a burning barn, they will return to their accustomed place.”
[March, p. 134]
This is the same problem faced by Hank Morgan in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, when he attempts to establish a capitalist industrial republic amidst the religious darkness of feudal England. It is also one of the central problems of twentieth-century socialist revolution, which attempts to establish a new form of society, often in lands dominated by the most backward beliefs and most pervasive thought control, such as Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959.
In “If This Goes On—” Heinlein presents a solution to this intricate problem, one “concocted” by the technological geniuses in the “psychodynamics” section of the Cabal. This plan “to change the psychological conditioning of the people and make them aware that they really had been saved from a tyranny which had ruled by keeping them in ignorance, their minds chained” provides for “readjusting the people to freedom of thought and freedom of action” under the direction of the men from psychodynamics:
They planned nothing less than mass reorientation under hypnosis. The technique was simple, as simple as works of genius usually are.
[March, p. 141]
All that is involved is placing the masses of people under hypnosis and showing them an extremely sophisticated propaganda film. The technique had already been tested, and found “usually” successful:
Usually it had worked, and the subjects were semantically readjusted to a modern nondogmatic viewpoint, but if the subject was too old mentally, if his thought processes were too thoroughly canalized, it sometimes destroyed one set of evaluations without providing him with a new set. The subject might come out of the hypnosis with an overpowering sense of insecurity which usually degenerated into schizophrenia, involute melancholia, or other psychoses involving loss of cortical control and consequent thalamic and subthalamic anarchy.
So the forces of the Cabal “‘had our work cut out for us!’”:
More than a hundred million persons had to be examined to see if they could stand up under quick re-orientation, then re-examined after treatment to see if they had been sufficiently readjusted. Until a man passed the second examination we could not afford to enfranchise him as a free citizen of a democratic state.
[March, p. 141]
There is not the slightest suggestion of the monstrous possibilities inherent in the technological elite's determining who thinks correctly enough to be allowed to vote, and no hint of irony in Lyle's description of their colossal task: “We had to teach them to think for themselves, reject dogma, be suspicious of authority, tolerate differences of opinion, and make their own decisions—types of mental processes almost unknown in the United States for many generations.”
Thirteen years after the original publication of “If This Goes On—” Heinlein revised it extensively for publication in Revolt in 2100. In the new version a cantankerous old man from Vermont, who looked like “an angry Mark Twain,” arises to denounce the proposed mind-conditioning technique:
“Free men aren't ‘conditioned’! Free men are free because they are ornery and cussed and prefer to arrive at their own prejudices in their own way—not have them spoonfed by a self-appointed mind tinkerer! We haven't fought, our brethren haven't bled and died, just to change bosses, no matter how sweet their motives.”3
He goes on, articulating ideas that in the original version had been presented by the head of psychodynamics in a postscript:
“I tell you, we got into the mess we are in through the efforts of those same mind tinkerers. They've studied for years how to saddle a man and ride him. They started with advertising and propaganda and things like that, and they perfected it to the point where what used to be simple, honest swindling such as any salesman might use became a mathematical science that left the ordinary man helpless.”
When challenged to provide a solution, this new avatar of Mark Twain advocates simply restoring the old civil liberties and the franchise to everybody: “‘If they mess it up again, that's their doing—but we have no right to operate on their minds.’” This position certainly seems less dangerous than the one Heinlein had presented without challenge in the 1940 version. However, it merely evades the central problem of this revolution, which according to the logic of the story itself should not be able to succeed and certainly should not be able to establish a new society capable of resisting the very forces that had originally established the tyranny. Heinlein barely covers the confusion by having the old man dramatically drop dead and the Cabal then immediately accept his position. For he remains stuck on the horns of an awkward dilemma that grows from seeing only two choices: either have the elite indoctrinate the people into correct thinking or just pretend that the problem will solve itself. The last words on the subject come from John Lyle: “I don't know who was right.”4
This basic political and philosophic problem will reappear in many forms throughout Heinlein's works, for he will continue to see essentially just two alternatives: either the elite (the good elite) saves the day, which obviously contradicts democratic principles he sometimes espouses, or society succumbs to the ignorance and folly of the masses of common people. His concept of revolutionary social change imagines something created by an elite for the benefit of the people, usually quite temporarily. He seems incapable of believing that progressive social change could come through the development of the productive forces and consequent action by the exploited classes themselves. Thus Heinlein places himself consistently in direct opposition to the most powerful forces of social change in the twentieth century.
According to the chart of the Future History, the elite revolution we witness in “If This Goes On—” does succeed in establishing “The First Human Civilization,” a society implicit in the sequel, Coventry (Astounding, July 1940). The new society is based on “the Covenant,” a social “contract” guaranteeing “the maximum possible liberty for every person.” The Covenant forbids “no possible act, nor mode of conduct” as long as the action does not “damage” another individual. Those who violate the Covenant are not punished; they are allowed to choose between undergoing “psychological readjustment” to remove their tendency to injure other people or being sent to Coventry, a bountiful land reserved for those who refuse to accept the Covenant.
Heinlein's story does not show us life in this rational libertarian utopia, although we learn that science has provided an extremely high standard of living, social harmony prevails, while “danger and adventure” are still available: “there is danger still in experimental laboratories; there is hardship in the mountains of the Moon, and death in the jungles of Venus.” Instead Heinlein shows us life in the tooth-and-claw world of Coventry, the land of exile.
The faith in rugged individualism preached in much of Heinlein's post-World War II writing is here the object of scathing attack. The arrogant, conceited protagonist, David MacKinnon, refuses to accept the mutual obligations that constitute society, yet he whines that society should guarantee him some private property in Coventry. The guard at the Barrier to Coventry scorns him and the other such “rugged individualists”: “‘You've turned down our type of social co-operation; why the hell should you expect the safeguards of our organization?’” As he approaches the gate to Coventry, deluding himself with his quest for a “Crusoe-like independence,” MacKinnon fails to realize that even his personal possessions are the end products of “the cumulative effort and intelligent co-operation” of many people, living and dead.
What he finds in Coventry is a lawless social jungle of vicious predators, as well as a conspiracy to overthrow the society of the Covenant. MacKinnon speedily learns his lesson. He absorbs the virtues of self-sacrifice, and “cures himself” by becoming responsible to an old man known as Fader (father?) and to society. Fader turns out to be an undercover agent of the Covenant society, and he and MacKinnon each manage to return there with warnings of the dangerous plot brewing in Coventry.
A similar message appears in “The Roads Must Roll” (Astounding, June 1940), set in 1970, the period of the “False Dawn” in the Future History. Automobiles have now been replaced by high-speed rolling roads with their own restaurants and stores. The skilled workers who man the great underground apparatus powering the roads follow the leadership of a monomaniac who asks “why we technicians don't just take things over.” Heinlein denounces his ideology, developed from “the Bible of the Functionalist movement,” a treatise “published in 1930,” “dressed up with a glib mechanistic pseudopsychology” and proclaiming that those with the most indispensable function in advanced industrial society ought to be its masters. The fallacy, as Heinlein notes, is that in modern society many different functions are indispensable: “The complete interdependence of modern economic life seems to have escaped him entirely.”
The other Future History story set in this period is “Blowups Happen” (Astounding, September 1940), predicting “the most dangerous machine in the world—an atomic power plant.” Here too the main theme is social responsibility. With so much “responsibility for the lives of other people” in their hands, the atomic engineers in the plant must be selected for their “sense of social responsibility” and then they must be ceaselessly observed by the finest psychiatrists. Even so, there emerges the statistical inevitability of a catastrophic—perhaps world-destroying—accident. The only solution, to place the main power plant in orbit, is vigorously fought by the profit-hungry Board of Directors of the Company (who talk just like the management of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant which came close to a meltdown in 1979). But even they are eventually pressured into accepting a socially responsible role, the breeder reactor is on its way into orbit, and the human race is on its way into space, in ships to be powered by nuclear fuel.
“‘—We Also Walk Dogs’” (Astounding, July 1941) was later included in the Future History chart, someplace around the year 2000. It is the tale of General Services, Inc., “the handy-man of the last century, gone speedlined and corporate,” doing anything its customers ask for, though disdaining “the richly idle” who provide most of the business. Yet even the superefficient operators of General Services, who can arrange to have a lone genius invent an anti-gravity shield on order, become lost in adoring contemplation of the timeless beauty of the Flower of Forgetfulness, a Ming bowl they have lifted from the British Museum.
The climax of the Future History comes in Methuselah's Children (Astounding, July, August, September 1941), which begins with the disruption of the Covenant society in the year 2125, traces Heinlein's history back through all the other Future History stories to a key event in 1874, and ends with the “beginning of the first mature culture” in the middle of the twenty-second century.
Back in 1874, a rich old man, fearing death, establishes the Howard Foundation, designed to breed a strain of humans with extreme longevity. The result is the Howard Families, who clandestinely build their own culture in the United States during the next two and a half centuries until they number over a hundred thousand individuals, led by 183-year-old Mary Risling (revised to Mary Sperling in the 1958 edition and the sequel, Time Enough for Love). The Families have decided to reveal their existence to the larger society, resulting in a frenzy of vicious envy that sweeps aside the Covenant and launches a pogrom aimed at extracting the alleged “secret” of longevity by any means, including the Inquisition of the old religious dictatorship.
Although the individuals in the Families are supposedly of superior intelligence, richly enhanced by extraordinarily long and varied experience, we see most of them incapable of confronting this crisis and acting like “bird-brained dopes” (July, p. 42). So on one hand we witness the citizens of the most humane, rational, libertarian, and scientifically advanced society suddenly metamorphose into a ruthless, snarling horde of beasts, merely because some other people have attained longevity; while on the other hand we see a subsociety, allegedly superior to this superior society (not to mention such inferiors as us), behaving like sheep.
Since, according to Heinlein, the majority of people are incapable of determining their own collective action rationally, there can be only one solution: wise leaders must arise to manipulate the masses for their own good. As the crisis begins to unfold, a new leader of the Families suddenly appears: the most characteristic, enduring, and revealing of all Heinlein's heroes, the daring, individualistic, shrewd, tough, brilliant, resourceful swashbuckler born in 1912 as Woodrow Wilson Smith and now calling himself Lazarus Long.
The wise leader on the other side turns out to be the chief Administrator of the Covenant society, Slayton Ford, a genius at organization (as his last name suggests). Lazarus Long concocts a plan, secretly accepted by Slayton Ford, that decides the fate of the Families. Long's plan is to commandeer an enormous interstellar spaceship and transport every single member of the Families—without their consent—to some planet to be discovered beyond our solar system. Before Ford hears this plan, he himself reluctantly comes to the conclusion that there can be no solution to the problem posed by the existence of the Families, either on Earth or on any planet of our sun:
The only matter as yet unsettled in his mind was the question of whether simply to sterilize all members of the Howard Families or to kill them outright. Either solution would do, but which was the more humane?
[July, pp. 41-42]
These are not the thoughts, mind you, of some sinister maniac, but the calm reflections of a man who is later to be chosen for his wisdom and political incisiveness as the administrative leader of the Families themselves. Nor are these thoughts being published in an historical vacuum. This passage appeared in July 1941, while similar speculations about a “final solution” to the problem posed by the people of a subculture were being considered by the leaders of Germany, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, and the other fascist powers. Heinlein himself had already explored, in 1940, the helplessness of the Jews in the concentration camps, as well as the genocidal urges of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, in the short story “Heil!” (Futuria Fantasia, Summer 1940). Zyclon-B, the gas eventually used in the death camps, was already being manufactured by Dow-Badische, the German branch of the Dow Chemical combine.
Ford accepts Long's plan with relief, but a practical question remains: How can all one hundred thousand people of the Families be kept safely in one place until the spaceship is stolen? As the summary in the August 1941 Astounding puts it: “But Long points out that the people of Earth will have to be deceived, or they won't release the Families. The Families must be deceived, or they won't have the necessary swift action and unanimity of movement.” Long comes up with the brilliant solution: Ford is to carry out a “mass arrest” of all the Families and place them in a “concentration camp”! (August, pp. 64, 68).
The spaceship, duly stolen by Lazarus and most aptly named the New Frontiers, is soon off to the stars with all hundred thousand people, powered by a “space drive” single-handedly invented—and built—by Andrew Jackson (“Slipstick”) Libby, the calculating genius of “Misfit.” “The work to be done is too urgent” for elections or other democratic social organization, so “democracy will have to wait on expediency” (August, p. 90). Slayton Ford, with them as a fugitive for his role in the adventure, now becomes their head of internal organization, in charge of a mass “indoctrination campaign” (p. 91), while overall dictatorial authority is invested in the Captain, aptly named Rufus King. Heinlein, with all his love of the first American Revolution, constantly seems drawn back toward the monarchy, at least aboard ship.
Eventually they land on an Earth-like planet inhabited by the Jockaira, a “completely gregarious” race. Everything is fine until they discover that the Jockaira are under the rule of mysterious superhumans they call “the gods,” making them domesticated animals in contrast with the wild beings from Earth. The “gods” literally lift the Families from the planet and send them, using inscrutable forces, thirty-two light years away to a park-like Edenic planet with placid seas, low hills, and calm breezes, inhabited by a race of Little People, apparently gentle, loving telepaths.
The Little People, who seem to be “simply Mother Nature's children, living in a Garden of Eden” (September, p. 147), see no need for buildings, machines, agriculture. “Why struggle so for that which the good soil gives freely?” they ask, and point to many trees bearing Earth's foods, indicating “to eat therefrom” (pp. 146-47). But in fact they are another kind of superior being, “masters in the manipulation of life forms” (p. 148). Though individually they resemble “morons,” it turns out that “the basic unit of their society was a telepathic rapport group of many parts” and “collectively, each rapport group constituted a genius which threw the best minds the Earthmen had to offer into the shade” (pp. 148, 152). These group minds (derived from Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker), able to produce scientific marvels “with a degree of co-operation quite foreign to men,” are a challenge to the human essence, as conceived by Heinlein. In searching for an apt comparison, Heinlein again reveals the outlook of his own social class, in his own society, during the late Depression years when the doom of small enterprise and perhaps of the entire system of free-enterprise capitalism was daily becoming more clear. Lazarus thus muses as he confronts the obvious superiority of the Little People:
Human beings could not hope to compete with that type of organization any more than a back-room shop can compete with a factory assembly line. Yet to surrender to any such group identity, even if they could, would be, he felt sure, to give up whatever it was that made them men.
[p. 152]
The Families reject and abandon this communal Eden created by collective hyper-science; as Oliver Schmidt puts it, “‘I want to work for my living.’”
A few, however, such as Mary Risling, are seduced into “choosing nirvana—selflessness,” marrying into one of the Little People's groups, “drowning” their “personality in the ego of the many.” And the Little People, using their psychic control of the material world, genetically “improve” a newborn human baby into “a sort of superman,” an hermaphroditic specimen with hoofs, rearranged organs, and many extra fingers, including one ending “in a cluster of pink worms.”
The rest of the humans decide to return to Earth, armed with their newly acquired advanced technology; as Lazarus puts it, “‘We'll be in shape to demand living room; we'll be strong enough to defend ourselves.’” They fly blind, “with nothing but Slipstick Libby's incomprehensible talent to guide them,” and arrive in orbit in the year 2153 prepared to fight for their Lebensraum as a superior race. But there they discover that “Everybody is a Member of the Families now,” for it turned out that biological heredity had very little to do with longevity, the secret being “psychological heredity”: “A man could live a long time just by believing that he was bound to live a long time and thinking accordingly—.” This is as far as the Future History gets, until we meet Lazarus Long again, at the age of 2360, in Time Enough for Love, published thirty-two years later.
An alternative to the flight of the New Frontiers is the voyage of its sister ship, launched several years earlier, described in Universe (Astounding, May 1941). Blindly drifting for centuries in interstellar space after a disastrous mutiny, the Ship has become the Universe of a semifeudal society headed by an autocratic Captain, administered by a class of barely literate priests who call themselves “scientists,” and fed by peasants who work the hydroponic farms around the little villages separated by concentric decks, compartments, and miles of maze-like passageways. “Up” is the direction of lesser weight: toward the interior of this enormous, slowly spinning cylinder. On these relatively weightless levels lurk gangs of cannibalistic mutants, one of whom, the brilliant two-headed Joe-Jim, having read the ancient books and discovered the only viewport, has comprehended the incredible truth: the universe does not end at the lowest level of the Ship, and the Ship itself is moving. In “civilized” society down below, such ideas encountered in the ancient scientific books are dismissed as allegorical romances, and anyone propounding such preposterous heresies is fed, along with mutants, into the Convertor. For, after all: “The Ship can't go anywhere. It already is everywhere.”
Universe is a classic presentation of that critical problem, the impenetrable limits environment places around consciousness, a theme crucial not only for Heinlein and for such science-fiction masterpieces as E. A. Abbott's Flatland, Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and “The Great Dark,” Jorge Luis Borges's “The Library of Babel,” and Christopher Priest's The Inverted World, but for all modern industrial society as technological and social revolutions constantly change the human environment. In the epistemological laboratory presented by Universe, neither the traditional beliefs of the present rulers nor the hard-headed pragmatism of a dissident rationalist bloc who accept only immediate facts can comprehend the stupendous truth of the real universe that lies outside. They are even less capable of breaking out of the prison of the Ship.
The sequel, Common Sense (Astounding, October 1941), is more a minor tale of adventure which concludes with the highly improbable escape of three men, who, along with their chattel wives, manage to land a Ship's “boat” on an Earth-like planetary moon. The story is notable mainly for its political intrigue, the appearance, rare in any Heinlein story, of a Captain who abuses his authority, and the flagrantly derogatory treatment of women, best summed up by the principal hero's injunction, “‘Keep those damned women out of the way.’”
The delusory world of the Ship in Universe is presented as a convincing possibility in a rigorously controlled science fiction in which true science offers the only way out. During this same period, Heinlein was also publishing fantasies of psychological entrapment, paranoia, and solipsism with an emphatic denunciation of science and scientific reasoning. This is not to suggest that he dramatizes one kind of world view in his science fiction, and a contrary one in his fantasy, for, as we shall see, some of his science fiction is just as passionately anti-science. And some of the minor stories of this period show a full range of attitudes toward technology, science, and fantastic imaginings beyond science: “‘—And He Built a Crooked House—’” (Astounding, February 1941), about a four-dimensional house created by an architect and an earthquake; “‘My Object All Sublime’” (Future, February 1942) in which an inventor develops an invisibility device (similar to one in Jack London's “The Shadow and the Flash”) so that he can squirt synthetic skunk juice on offending motorists, which gets him jailed “for everything from malicious mischief to criminal syndicalism”; “Pied Piper” (Astonishing Stories, March 1942) in which a scientific genius stops a war by kidnapping a few hundred thousand children from the enemy nation; “Goldfish Bowl” (Astounding, March 1942), a speculation that there are stratospheric beings to whom we are as goldfish are to us.
The most unrelenting of Heinlein's paranoid fantasies is “They” (Unknown, April 1941), which starkly enacts the dark side of the cult of the lone genius. Most of this story, one crucial to comprehending the meaning and significance of Heinlein's achievement, consists of the anguished musings of a man confined in what seems an insane asylum. He is convinced that the entire material world and all the people in it exist for one purpose only: to deceive him, to keep him from distinguishing their “lies” from the “truth,” which comes to him in dreams. “They,” “the puppet masters,” are merely “swarms of actors”; “they looked like me, but they were not like me.”
Starkly displayed here is the myth of the free individual, so central to Heinlein's fiction and so representative of Western thought since the dawn of the capitalist epoch. The narrator's epistemological predicament, in fact, derives directly from the birth of Cartesian consciousness. He actually reformulates the classical Cogito, ergo sum: “First fact, himself. He knew himself directly. He existed.” Then the evidence of his senses: “Without them he was entirely solitary, shut up in a locker of bone, blind, deaf, cutoff, the only being in the world.” He desperately speculates that the other beings around him might also experience the isolation of the imprisoned ego: “Could it be that each unit in this yeastly swarm around him was the prison of another lonely ego—helpless, blind, and speechless, condemned to an eternity of miserable loneliness?” In Heinlein's later fiction we will see “the agony of his loneliness” re-enacted in many forms.
The other side of this terrifying imprisonment is the narrator's belief in his own transcendent importance: “… I was the center of the arrangements. … I am unique.” He even deduces his own unique god-like immortality: “I am immortal. I transcend this little time axis.” This desire to live beyond and outside one's time will become almost an obsession in the later fiction.
The narrator does vacillate about one person, his wife, who certainly seems to be another human being, one who loves him. But in the end we discover that all his apparently paranoid visions are not delusions at all: New York City and Harvard University are being dismantled as useless props, and “the creature” who pretended to be his human wife requests that the Taj Mahal sequence be arranged as his next deception.
In “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” (Unknown Worlds, October 1942), another paranoid fantasy, our world is merely an immature creation of some aspiring Artist, who has made the mistake of painting us and our environment over an earlier work, “The Sons of the Bird,” evil creatures who now lurk in the world behind mirrors, ready to burst forth into our reality and take possession. Jonathan Hoag is a Critic who has been sent to judge our world to see if it has any aesthetic saving grace or whether it should be obliterated.
Hoag is now in Chicago, which he finds squalid, dismal, and repulsive. Especially distasteful to him are its “coarse and brutal” working-class people. Falling partly under the wicked powers of the Sons of the Bird, Hoag seeks assistance from a married man and woman with their own small business, a detective agency. The husband and wife now find themselves at the center of the evil plot. She is afraid that if they stay on this case they “will find out what it is grown-ups know” and become as unhappy as everybody else. The Sons of the Bird lure the husband into “a small room, every side of which was a mirror—four walls, floor, and ceiling. Endlessly he was repeated in every direction and every image was himself—selves that hated him but from which there was no escape.” This prison of morbid egoism suggests that “the whole world might be just a fraud and an illusion.”
Because of the mutual loyalty of these two devoted small-business people, embodying “the tragedy of human love,” Hoag eventually decides not to destroy our world, merely to correct it by wiping out the Sons of the Bird. He warns the husband and wife to drive away and under no circumstances to open the window of their car. When they momentarily disobey while driving along a crowded Chicago street, they discover that the world they have been perceiving is indeed merely an illusion:
Outside the open window was no sunlight, no cops, no kids—nothing. Nothing but a gray and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life. They could see nothing of the city through it, not because it was too dense but because it was—empty.
They flee to a remote farm, where they live in a house without mirrors, handcuffing themselves together through the night. Their flight from the overwhelming, threatening, supposedly delusory reality of modern working-class urban America to some simple, primitive, rural world from the mythic past is another archetype reappearing many times in Heinlein's fiction.
“Lost Legion,” published in Super Science Stories in November 1941, the month before the United States formally entered World War II, is set in the contemporary world, when the forces of “pure evil” are poised for a decisive assault: “They've won in Europe; they are in the ascendancy in Asia; they may win here in America …” (Chapter 11. In “Lost Legacy,” the 1953 version of the story, Heinlein switches the words “Europe” and “Asia,” thus switching his identification of “pure evil” from fascism to communism). In the United States these evil forces are embodied in “the antagonists of human liberty—the racketeers, the crooked political figures, the shysters, the dealers in phony religions, the sweat shoppers, the petty authoritarians, all of the key figures among the traffickers in human misery and human oppression” (Ch. 12), who include some members of Congress, judges, governors, university presidents, heads of unions, directors of nineteen major corporations, and local authorities. They are all under the command of an inscrutable “evil thing,” a no-eyed, legless monster in control of almost limitless psychic forces. The situation, in short, resembles that in “The Devil Makes the Law.”
Opposed to these forces are a professor of psychology, his prize female student, and his surgeon friend, who together discover that everybody has almost limitless psychic forces, including telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, etc. Our trio of good guys become “supermen” and then link up with a community of even greater psychic supermen hidden inside Mount Shasta and led by a new avatar of Ambrose Bierce, who seems to be a reincarnation of Mark Twain.
Through their new friends, our heroes take a telepathic voyage to the prehistoric past where they learn the true history of the human race. It seems we were all gods until Loki, speaking for an elitist band of Young Men, argued that “the ancient knowledge should henceforth be the reward of ability rather than common birthright, and second, that the greater should rule the lesser” (Ch. 6). Thus comes “The Twilight of the Gods,” and the emergence of war and empire, specifically “Mu, mightiest of empires and mother of empires.” (Heinlein had co-authored a perfectly silly shaggy-dog parapsychological fantasy set in Mu, entitled “Beyond Doubt,” in Astonishing Stories, April 1941.) The rest of history has been an ever-recurring struggle between the good psychic adepts and the evil forces, who believe in “authoritarianism, nonsense like the leader principle, totalitarianism, all the bonds placed on liberty which treat men as so many economic and political units with no importance as individuals” (Ch. 7).
The good side now is striving to let all the people know that they are capable of these superhuman powers, virtually total direct control of matter by mind. Since the forces of evil already control so many adult American institutions, it is necessary to get several thousand specially picked Boy Scouts to assemble at “Camp Mark Twain” on Mount Shasta, instruct them in parapsychology, and let them loose as teachers for the common people, while our trio and the other good-mind adepts annihilate the evil-mind adepts, literally liquidating the evil leader, leaving him “a gory mess on the rug.” Thus in “Lost Legion” the evil forces trying to take over the world are defeated by the unaided mind.
The belief that mind can at will do almost anything to matter represents the absurdity at the extreme end of the bourgeois definition of freedom and free will. If the will is free to do anything it wishes, the will is free from the apparent laws of the physical universe and also free from the apparent laws of human social development—a thoroughly non-dialectical definition of freedom. Instead of human consciousness being collectively and progressively freed by the advances of science, technology, and social organization, all produced by developing human consciousness, human history is seen as a sinister, imprisoning force that overwhelmed the supposed freedom of nineteenth-century individual enterprise or even, as in this story, some prehistoric, mythic freedom of beings like gods. In the face of the historic forces threatening the destruction of his social class, Heinlein's impulses are characteristically reactionary, that is, longing to reverse the processes of history, and often even thoroughly anti-historic, that is, yearning to see history shattered and swept away.
The paranoid vision clearly relates to these anti-scientific and anti-historic impulses. In early stories such as “Life-Line” and “‘Let There Be Light,’” the sinister powers are often the forces that were then indeed overwhelming free-enterprise capitalism—the forces of monopoly, which actually appear as diabolic in “The Devil Makes the Law.” But the vision of evil forces subverting, controlling, or annihilating our society takes many forms in Heinlein's imagination. They may be power-mad priests (“If This Goes On—”) or satanic elitists (“Lost Legion”) or the Sons of the Bird or simply “They”; in postwar works, they become “the Communists,” either explicitly (“Gulf,” Farnham's Freehold, as well as other fiction and non-fiction) or somewhat refracted into giant communistic slugs (The Puppet Masters) or bugs (Starship Troopers).
In the novel Sixth Column (Astounding, January, February, March 1941), they are the Pan-Asian hordes, who have perfidiously attacked and invaded the United States. Opposed to them is “the most magnificent aggregation of research brains” ever assembled, hidden away in an unmarked spot in the Rocky Mountains, searching for a superweapon to repel these four hundred million cruel Asians, who of course care nothing for individual human life and who are routinely called “monkeys” by all the good staunch American patriots, referred to consistently as “the whites” and “white men.” Finally, when there are only six men left in the secret laboratory, now headed by the aptly named Whitey Ardmore, they figure out “what makes matter tick,” and they launch their counterattack under cover of a phony messianic religion, armed with an assortment of superweapons which kill only those with “Mongolian blood”:
The “basic weapon” was the simplest Ledbetter projector that had been designed. It looked very much like a pistol and was intended to be used in similar fashion. It projected a directional beam of the primary Ledbetter effect in the frequency band fatal to those of Mongolian blood and none other. It could be used by a layman after three minutes' instruction, since all that was required was to point it and press a trigger, but it was practically foolproof—the user literally could not harm a fly with it, much less a white man. But it was sudden death to Asiatics.
[March, p. 133]
The vision of Asians expressed throughout Sixth Column is best summed up in the attitude of Jefferson Thomas, one of the heroic freedom fighters: “‘A good Pan-Asian was a dead Pan-Asian …’” (January, p. 26). This undisguised racism is hardly unique to Robert Heinlein; here, as usual, he is being a fairly representative American. The intense dread of “the Yellow Peril,” those cruel Asians bent on overrunning America, emerged at the very moment that Americans began their campaign of conquest and exploitation of Asia and Asians (just as the dread of the “Indian savages” began with the genocidal conquest of the natives of this continent by the European invaders). Heinlein's fantasy of race war is mild compared with that envisioned by Jack London in his 1910 story “The Unparalleled Invasion,” where the white nations, fearful of being overrun by the Asian hordes, unite to attack China with germ warfare delivered by airplanes, succeed in utterly exterminating the Chinese people, and thus establish a joyous epoch of “splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output.” By 1924 the Congress of the United States had prohibited all further immigration from Japan and outlawed the naturalization of all those who had already immigrated. Heinlein was far less racist than his government, for he calls his one Asian-American character, Frank Roosevelt Matsui, “as American as Will Rogers” (January, p. 27) and shows him loyally and heroically sacrificing his own life. Ironically, in March 1942, a year after the publication of Sixth Column, the American President for whom Frank Roosevelt Matsui was named was to issue his infamous Executive Order 9066, which had all 117,000 Japanese-Americans rounded up and placed in concentration camps, while their land and other property was seized. And although it may seem highly improbable that American scientists could devise a superweapon that would kill only Asians, in less than four years they certainly did invent a superweapon that did kill only Asians.
Throughout this first period, Heinlein seems torn between two quite contradictory conceptions of the relations between mind and matter. On one side he has faith in science and technology—the rational, systematic, developing accumulation of human knowledge which permits a progressive enlargement of human consciousness, of control over the material environment, of potential freedom. On the other side, he rejects science and embraces wishful thinking, the direct, unfettered, immediate control of matter by mind.
Waldo (Astounding, August 1942) embodies this conflict in a single story. In this future scene, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has been done away with and physics has become “an exact science,” the “religion” of men like Dr. Rambeau, head of research for the gigantic power monopoly, North American Power-Air. But this “faith” is being undermined by the mysterious failure of the Company's power receptors.
The Company is forced to seek help from Waldo F. Jones, a marvelous caricature of the lone genius. Waldo orbits above Earth literally in his own small sphere; ostensibly treasuring his “freedom” from the “smooth apes” of Earth below, he calls his solitary home “Freehold.” Waldo, a flabby weakling reduced to almost total physical impotence by the muscular disease myasthenia gravis, has employed his inventive genius to contrive the servomechanisms known in the story, and subsequently in the actual world, as “waldoes.”
Waldo's view of the world in one direction confronts that of Dr. Rambeau:
To Rambeau the universe was an inexorably ordered cosmos, ruled by unvarying law. To Waldo the universe was the enemy, which he strove to force to submit to his will.
Yet Waldo and Dr. Rambeau both share a very mechanical materialism. True knowledge is vested in Gramps Schneider, an old “witch doctor” who initiates Waldo into the mysteries of the “Other World,” an old term for the realm of magic, which Heinlein had set forth in “The Devil Makes the Law” (reprinted as Magic, Inc. in Waldo and Magic, Inc., the 1950 volume that places these two tales into a unified world view). The old seer presents Waldo with an unmitigated split between mind and matter:
“The Other World,” he said presently, “is the world you do not see. It is here and it is there and it is everywhere. But it is especially here.” He touched his forehead. “The mind sits in it and sends its messages through it to the body.”
Gramps uses his occult power to fix one of the power receptors, and Dr. Rambeau becomes a convert from science to magic, deliriously proclaiming: “‘Nothing is certain. Nothing, nothing, Nothing is certain!’” “‘Chaos is King, and Magic is loose in the world!’”
Waldo learns to repair the broken power receptors by merely willing them to work, and he constructs an improved receptor that draws its power directly from the Other World. So now, as in “‘Let There Be Light,’” there is “free and unlimited power,” but Waldo is able to trick the Company into paying him royally even though he blandly tells the Chairman of the Board, “‘you will not be in the business of selling power much longer.’”
Now Waldo attempts to build a scientific explanation of the Other World, for it is “contrary to the whole materialistic philosophy in which he had grown up” to believe “that thought and thought alone should be able to influence physical phenomena.” But he finds himself plunged into pure Berkeleian idealism, wondering if “the order we thought we detected” is “a mere phantasm of the imagination,” “Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos—by Mind!” He begins to believe that “the world varied according to the way one looked at it,” that the physical universe would operate by magical principles for a culture that believed in magic, by scientific laws for a culture that believed in science. This notion, that a society's culture determines the physical universe it inhabits, is precisely the opposite of the view, stated earlier in the story, and certainly truer to human history, that it is the physical universe, including the current level of technology, that determines the character of a society's culture:
It may plausibly be urged that the shape of a culture—its mores, evaluations, family organization, eating habits, living patterns, pedagogical methods, institutions, forms of government, and so forth—arise [sic] from the economic necessities of its technology.
Heinlein seems unable to choose between a mechanical materialism, together with an inflexible determinism, on one hand, and unmitigated idealism, together with a capricious voluntarism, on the other. Any dialectical interplay between mind and matter, between what is determined and what can be freely changed, lies outside the rigid bipolar framework for the philosophical speculation in Waldo.
In Waldo himself, however, we do see such a dialectic. Gramps Schneider had told him that he could reach into the Other World to cure his pathological muscular weakness:
Gramps Schneider had told him he need not be weak!
That he could be strong—
Strong!
STRONG!
Waldo has something in common with many of the readers of Astounding, as we find out if we turn to the last page of this August 1942 issue:
Let me make YOU a SUPERMAN!
When you stand before your mirror, stripped to the skin, what do you see? A body you can be really proud of? A build that others admire or talk about? OR—are you fat and flabby? …
If you're honest enough with yourself to admit that physically you're only half a man now—then I want to prove I can make you a SUPERMAN in double-quick time! …
… I'll show you exactly how to get a handsome, husky pair of shoulders—a deep, he-man chest—arms & leg muscles hard as rocks yet limber as a whip … every inch of you all man, he-man, SUPERMAN.
Charles Atlas's “Dynamic Tension” method of body-building here advertised is almost precisely what Waldo employs. He does not overcome his weakness by the instantaneous and magical wishful thinking he used to fix the power receptors, but by a determination of will that forces him to condition the muscles of his body systematically and rigorously. Gradually building up his muscles, he becomes even stronger than the average man, and leaves his lonely exile in “Freehold” to rejoin the human race, becoming an acrobatic dancer, admired by all for his strength and agility. The lone genius, it turns out, really just wished “to be liked, to be wanted.”
Heinlein's first published attempt at a time-travel story, “Elsewhere” (Astounding, September 1941), projects a bizarre maze of alternative time tracks which individuals may choose at will. Here the desire to be free from the present, to be released by wishing for an escape, is explicit: the central character, a professor of speculative metaphysics, escapes from imprisonment by wishing himself into a future that combines idealized features of both ancient Rome and an advanced space age. The professor explains to his four choice students that “‘the mind creates its own world,’” that “‘Berkeleian idealism’” creates just as “real” a world as “materialism.” (In the revised version, published in 1953 in Assignment in Eternity, Heinlein goes so far as to add a fifth student, a religious fundamentalist, who manages to transform herself directly into an angel!) There is scorn for “‘you engineers,’” who all “‘believe in a mechanistic, deterministic universe.’” Yet a young engineering student saves a whole planet from an invasion of alien forces by flitting from one time track to another so that the good guys can build a blaster gun, a “little gadget” that “‘unquestionably will win the war for us.’” The whimsical jumble of fantastic time tracks contrasts sharply with the novel from which this story derives, Jack London's The Star Rover (1915), in which a political prisoner in San Quentin escapes from incessant torture by achieving different identities in the class struggle that has constituted actual human history.
“Elsewhere” also contrasts sharply with “By His Bootstraps” (Astounding, October 1941), Heinlein's second time-travel story, and one of his masterpieces. Rigorous in its logic, this tale penetrates deeply into the implications of the myth of the free individual.
Bob Wilson, the protagonist, moves from being an ordinary doctoral student (working on a thesis disproving time travel) to becoming the lone active will and consciousness thirty thousand years in the future, ruling alone as lord and master over an Earth filled with his slaves. We see the events from the different points of view of Wilson as he becomes different selves by moving back and forth through time.
When we first meet Wilson, he is being accosted by two mysterious strangers who pop out of a “Time Gate” into his apartment. Later we perceive the same scene from the point of view of each of these men, who turn out to be later selves of Bob Wilson, sent from the future back into the present. The first Wilson goes through the Time Gate and meets the mysterious all-powerful Diktor, who sends him back into his own time, from which still another Wilson eventually emerges into that remote future ten years before the encounter between Diktor and Wilson. In all these adventures, Wilson can never recognize any of his future selves. He does not even realize that he himself has become Diktor until the moment of the first encounter between this future self and the first Wilson from the past. On one level, the story is an ingenious exploration of the problems of identity in time, and the associated questions of the relations between determinism and free will. Diktor has created himself out of Bob Wilson, but without conscious choice until after it has already happened.
“By His Bootstraps” is also a dramatic display of the trapped ego, creating a world out of images of itself. It is thus the first fully developed manifestation of the solipsism which will become one of Heinlein's main themes. This solipsism is the ultimate expression of the bourgeois myth of the free individual, who supposedly is able to lift himself from rags to riches by his own bootstraps. As Diktor puts it to the Bob Wilson who emerges into this future of dictatorial power and abject slavery, “‘One twentieth-century go-getter can accomplish just about anything he wants to accomplish around here—.’”
Diktor is a grandiose enlargement of Robinson Crusoe, with the entire planet his island. In fact, the first man Wilson meets in the future throws himself on his knees and arises as “his Man Friday.” All the people of this world, who have been enslaved by some mysterious “High Ones” for 20,000 years, are now “docile friendly children,” “slaves by nature.” What they lack is “the competitive spirit,” “the will-to-power”: “Wilson had a monopoly on that.”
But this “monopoly” is also a state of supreme loneliness, as well as boredom. Diktor wistfully compares these people, mere extensions of his own will, with “the brawling, vulgar, lusty, dynamic swarms who had once called themselves the People of the United States,” the very society he had earlier rejected and abandoned as “a crummy world full of crummy people.” His choice—if that is what he ever had—lies between the life of normal futility he left and the one of sublime futility he has acquired. The choice is embodied in his sexual alternatives: in the future are myriads of beautiful mindless slave women literally kneeling to his will; in his old life there is the “shrewish,” conniving Genevieve, whose approaching footsteps on his stairs had been the deciding factor in driving him out of his humdrum world into the Time Gate. Wilson's sexuality in both worlds is barren. He can only reproduce himself, as he, a self-created being, suggests in his final words, promising himself, his only kind of son, a great future: “‘There is a great future in store for you and me, my boy—a great future!’”
On still another level, “By His Bootstraps” displays this world-embracing egoism as the center of political imperialism. When Diktor asks the first Bob Wilson to return briefly to his own time, his purpose is to acquire some tools to be used in colonizing this undeveloped land:
“I want you to return to the twentieth century and obtain certain things for us, things that can't be obtained on this side but which will be very useful to us in, ah, developing—yes, that is the word—developing this country.”
The prime thing he needs is certain books: Machiavelli's The Prince, Behind the Ballots by political machine boss James Farley, How To Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
The utopian novel Beyond This Horizon (Astounding, April, May 1942) is Heinlein's only attempt in this early fiction to describe what he conceives to be a good society. Here he tries to combine a high level of social organization and cooperation with the maximum possible individual freedom. Though this society somewhat resembles the one implied in Coventry, it is no gentle, peaceful land where any damage to another person means “readjustment” or exile. It is a society made up of people “descended from ‘wolves,’ not ‘sheep’” (April, p. 21), one in which all self-respecting men and even some women are expert gunfighters ready to cut each other down at the drop of an insult. The main product of human history through “the Continuous War of 1910-1970” and beyond can be summed up in one italicized sentence: “The fighters survived” (April, p. 21). Now, several centuries of systematic genetic engineering have created a race of human beings superior in health, longevity, physique, and intelligence.
The underlying assumption of Beyond This Horizon, as Philip E. Smith II has put it in his superb essay on Heinlein's social Darwinism, is that “biology explains behavior” and “biology also explains politics,” with an “underlying fantasy-wish … derived from a social Darwinistic interpretation of evolution.”5 We witness this dynamic utopian society passing through a series of crises to advance to what Heinlein often projects as the next stage of human evolution, the development of telepathic powers.
The economic structure itself, supposedly a perfected, fully rational capitalism that has evolved from the “pseudo-capitalism” of previous centuries, is seen as relatively unimportant, so long as there is a rational system of finance. Here everybody gets “dividends,” the social distribution of surplus capital, through centralized accounting. To the question “… wouldn't it be simpler to set up a collective system and be done with it?” comes this response:
“Finance structure is a general theory and applies equally to any type of state. A complete socialism would have as much need for structural appropriateness in its cost accounting as would a free entrepreneur. The degree of public ownership as compared with the degree of free enterprise is a cultural matter. For example, food is, of course, free, but—.”
[April, p. 11]
Technology also has relatively little to do with the greatness of this society, except insofar as it allows the necessary improvements in genetic engineering. We are assured that the goal of their eugenics is to improve the gene pool of the whole race, not to develop a separate line of supermen.
The hero of Beyond This Horizon is Hamilton Felix, the fastest gun in town, packing an antique Colt.45. A “star line” genetic type, Hamilton is supposed to contribute his superior genes to the race by breeding with his pre-selected genetic counterpart, Phyllis, a beautiful gunslinger. But he is weighed down by ennui and frustration, because he lacks some of the qualifications of the leading geniuses, the philosophers in charge of centralized planning: “‘When it was finally pounded into my head that I couldn't take first prize, I wasn't interested in second prize’” (April, p. 24).
However, Hamilton discovers and helps defeat a conspiracy of “the Survivors Club,” an elitist cabal planning to seize power, set up “the New Order,” and redirect genetic engineering to create classes of superbrainy leaders and superbrawny workers. In heroically combating these protofascists and amorously dallying with Phyllis, Hamilton begins to reawaken his interest in life and the possibility of procreation.
Yet he still fails to see any purpose in human existence. His own profession symbolizes his dilemma: he invents sophisticated games and superpinball machines for amusement centers. An extraordinary revelation comes to him as his consciousness swims out from a dose of gas he gets in a shootout:
No fun in the game if you knew the outcome. He had designed a game like that once, and called it “Futility”—no matter how you played, you had to win. … It was always a little hard to remember which position himself had played, forgetting that he had played all of the parts. Well, that was the game; it was the only game in town, and there was nothing else to do. Could he help it if the game was crooked? Even if he had made it up and played all the parts.
[May, p. 66]
Hamilton here is perilously close to Diktor, the sole player in the rigged time-travel game of “By His Bootstraps.”
But Hamilton makes a deal with the geniuses who administer this society. He will agree to reproduce if they will commit massive funds to investigate the meaning of life, including research into the question of an afterlife. They accede, Phyllis assumes her proper role of wife and mother, and their star line children soon exhibit telepathy and living proof of reincarnation.
As the May 1942 synopsis explained, Beyond This Horizon “is, itself, almost a synopsis.” There are subplots that go nowhere (including a delightful sequence about a Babbitt-like ex-football player and fraternity man, rabid anti-Communist, boosterish Republican businessman who turns up from 1926 and soon dispels some romantic notions that have developed about the twentieth century), pages of scientific and pseudo-scientific theory, and more philosophizing and action than the narrative can comfortably handle. This myriad of fragments kaleidoscopically displays the contradictory components of Heinlein's late Depression outlook, a world view that will later determine his responses to the earth-shaking events of the period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s.
I have saved for the final story to be explored in this [essay] the only one that directly confronts the actual international situation emerging in these early years of World War II, “Solution Unsatisfactory” (Astounding, May 1941). This story, like most of the fiction we have looked at so far, should not be read as merely prewar. As Heinlein puts it in “Solution Unsatisfactory”: “We were not at war, legally, yet we had been in the war up to our necks with our weight on the side of democracy since 1940.”
In December 1938 Otto Hahn in Berlin had discovered the splitting of the uranium atom under a bombardment of neutrons. Earlier that year, Hahn's Jewish wife, the great physicist Lise Meitner, had fled Germany to avoid the pogroms; in early 1939, Dr. Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch formulated an explanation of Hahn's process, which they named nuclear fission. Heinlein begins his tale with the ominous implications of these critical modern events. He loosely fictionalizes Lise Meitner as Estelle Karst, a Jewish assistant of Dr. Hahn, who comes to the United States and discovers, as a by-product of her medical research, the ultimate and irresistible weapon, radioactive dust.
The story is told by “an ordinary sort of man” who suddenly finds himself thrust into the center of history. The main character and hero is “liberal” but “tough-minded” Clyde C. Manning, congressman, colonel in the United States Army, and apparently the only possible savior of the world.
America now has the weapon which amounts to “a loaded gun held at the head of every man, woman, and child on the globe!” The narrator expresses some misgivings about America having this power:
I had the usual American subconscious conviction that our country would never use power in sheer aggression. Later, I thought about the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War and some of the things we did in Central America, and I was not so sure—
Nevertheless, for Heinlein there can be only one conclusion, inescapable and inevitable:
The United States was having power thrust on it, willy-nilly. We had to accept it and enforce a world-wide peace, ruthlessly and drastically, or it would be seized by some other nation.
So first America intervenes in the war. But before actually using the atomic weapon, “we were morally obligated” to give every possible warning, first to the German government, then to the people of Berlin, the targeted city. This passage rings with shocking irony in the echo of the American sneak attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Next comes the worldwide “Pax Americana.” The United States demands that every nation in the world immediately disarm, a threat Heinlein quaintly expresses in frontier lingo: “‘Throw down your guns, boys; we've got the drop on you!’” This choice is forced on us by such “facts” as these:
Four hundred million Chinese with no more concept of voting and citizen responsibility than a flea. Three hundred million Hindus who aren't much better indoctrinated. God knows how many in the Eurasian Union who believe in God knows what. The entire continent of Africa only semicivilized. Eighty million Japanese who really believe that they are Heaven-ordained to rule.
So the Pax Americana inescapably must be “a military dictatorship imposed by force on the whole world.”
Sure enough, there is another nation so uncivilized, unreasonable, and dastardly as to dispute the American global hegemony, the “Eurasian Union,” now under the control of the “Fifth Internationalists,” who have paralleled our atomic research. In 1945, unlike the actual history of that year, the sneak atomic attack is delivered not by the United States but upon it. We retaliate by wiping out Vladivostok, Irkutsk, and Moscow, and sending an invasion force, “the American Pacification Expedition.” The United States now has the job of “policing the world.”
The President of the United States at this time is a good man, so he and Colonel Manning wish to prevent the atomic weapon being used “to turn the globe into an empire, our empire” for “imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed.” They decide that the power “must not be used to protect American investments abroad, to coerce trade agreements, for any purpose but the simple abolition of mass killing.” In characteristic American and Heinlein style, “Manning and the President played by ear,” establishing treaties “to commit future governments of the United States to an irrevocable benevolent policy.”
Colonel Manning then becomes Commissioner of World Safety, which forms the international Peace Patrol, whose pilots, armed with the atomic weapon, are never to be assigned to their own country. The Peace Patrol is welded together by “esprit de corps,” and the main check on their new recruits is “the President's feeling for character.”
Then the good President is killed in a plane crash, and the presidency is assumed by the isolationist Vice President, allied with a senator who had tried to use the Peace Patrol to recover expropriated holdings in South America and Rhodesia. They attempt to arrest Manning, but the pilots of the Peace Patrol intervene, arrest the bad President, and make Manning “the undisputed military dictator of the world.”
Nobody, not even Manning, likes this solution. But, though unsatisfactory, it apparently seemed the best to Robert A. Heinlein in 1941.
Notes
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As pointed out by Sam Moskowitz in Seekers of Tomorrow (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1966), p. 194.
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Actually the reference as pointed out by J. R. Christopher in “Methuselah, Out of Heinlein by Shaw,” Shaw Review, 16 (1973), pp. 79-88, is to Shaw's The Apple Cart. This article documents quite an extensive influence by Shaw on Heinlein. And Samuel R. Delany has argued that “the didactic methods of Robert Heinlein owe a great deal to Shaw's comedies of ideas, far more than to Wells and Verne” (in “Critical Methods: Speculative Fiction,” Many Futures, Many Worlds, ed. Thomas Clareson (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977), p. 281).
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“If This Goes On—,” Revolt in 2100 (New York: New American Library, 1955, 1959), pp. 118-19. This is the text of the 1953 Shasta Publishers' edition.
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Ibid., p. 119.
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Philip E. Smith II, “The Evolution of Politics and the Politics of Evolution in Heinlein's Fiction,” in Robert A. Heinlein, eds. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Taplinger, 1978), p. 141.
Unless otherwise noted, all references are to the original publication, as identified in the text. Page references will not be given for short stories. For longer works published in serial form, page references will be given parenthetically and will include month and page number; where it will be more convenient for the readers, and where no ambiguity will be thus created, references will be made by chapter number.
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Major Political and Social Elements in Heinlein's Fiction
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