I see there’s a new edition of Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky. Finding a couple boxes of science-fiction as we unpacked here in the Black Hills, my wife and I just reread Heinlein’s juveniles—the sweet, fun run of books he wrote in the 1950s.
Double Star is still my favorite, but my wife prefers the equally sweet Door Into Summer. Oh, and The Rolling Stones and, really, just about anything he published before 1961.
After that, the sex gets just too weird and, far worse for a novelist, too obsessive. As one commentator on Amazon notes: “Robert Heinlein is a great author. But let’s face it. Sometimes you want to a read a good Heinlein book where characters do *not* spend most of their time having sex with their computers, children, mothers, and female clones of themselves.”
Heinlein’s a libertarian—a hero of libertarians, for that matter—and the early fiction shows a libertarianism that just about any conservative could mostly agree with: a distaste for over-government, a grasp of the centrality of family, an understanding of military cohesion, a hunger to light out for the territory.
The next turn in his fiction mirrored the turn of the age in the 1960s and 1970s. And the sex stuff revealed, as well, the inward impetus that would lead us away from the imagination that space is the true new human frontier.
Forty years on from the moon landing, and we’re still earthbound. As I’ve been arguing for some time now, we need to aim the human imagination outward again.
Let’s go to Mars. And reread Heinlein’s juveniles to see why.
July 19th, 2009 | 1:57 pm
I am happy that science fiction has a voice at First Things. Many years ago I worked a Putnam and my editor acquired THE CAT WHO WALKED THROUGH WALLS. She asked me to write catalogue and jacket copy. Usually there was no problem but after reading it she handed it back to me and said it sounded too much like a eulogy. She was right. I missed the old Heinlein. I continue to recommend those early books from my babyboomer childhood. By the way, Mr. Heinlein was paid six figures for the book. As for Mars — we are not meant to sit on this little ball and nurse our grievances. To Infinity and Beyond!
July 19th, 2009 | 2:16 pm
Absolutely right! The human imagination that was supposed to get bigger and bigger—isn’t that why everyone was reading Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception in the late 1960s?—in fact got smaller and smaller.
Look, the human heart is restless till it rests in God. But that doesn’t mean we should have no temporal goals. In fact, it means that cultures need temporal goals. A culture that has no aim beyond itself is a dying culture. And a dangerous one, as well, for it is easily tempted to follow strange gods.
July 19th, 2009 | 4:17 pm
To Infinity and Beyond! This statement of Graham Combs woke UP a few cells of when I baby sat one of so called saint Anthony’s Cells and he introduced me to Buzz Light Year or some name like that. I was hoping that now that he’s going into grade nine, he would remember and tell me how I hurt his feeling when he put both hands UP and looked at me with tears poring down his eyes and repeated, “Do you want a piece of me?” but he still has no clue to what I’m even talking about.
I’ve asked God in prayer about this priceless moment but all I could get out of HIM was that we are all made in His Image and then tells me that He can’t sanction any of “IT” cause all existing so called gods would be in big trouble if HE did. Go Figure!
Anyway I’ve told Him that I’m just going to hang around from my baptism till my death and keep going around and around until Jesus taps me on the shoulder and says in so many words, Hey Victor, get a hold of sinner vic cause we’ve got an appointment with your good Bishop! :)
God Bless,
Peace
July 20th, 2009 | 4:39 pm
HAVE SPACESUIT – WILL TRAVEL! There’s your “to infinity and beyond” Heinlein classic! That amazing book goes from ice cream soda stand to the moon, then Pluto and beyond, defending the Planet Earth against all the intergalactic rulers, and it never seemed at all illogical to me when I first enjoyed it as a boy.
July 20th, 2009 | 10:16 pm
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a wonderful tale if you can get past the polyandry. And Citizen of the Galaxy, one of the ’50s juveniles, is a great examination of slavery for kids. But Heinlein’s real masterwork is his cycle of “future history” stories and novellas collected in The Past Through Tomorrow. I’m still waiting for the future he imagined, in which it was private entrepreneurs, not the state, that ventured into space.
July 21st, 2009 | 8:58 pm
Last comment from me: WALDO, about a debilitated man for whom space became his natural environment, may have raised the issue of mankind’s destiny and suitability for extra-terrestrial life. Are there people who will fit comfortably in what seems an alien and hostile environment to the rest of us (Asimov’s “spacers”?)? Buzz Aldrin’s post-Tranquility Bay problems may not have had anything to do with an unconscious yearning to return to space — but what if they were? That Christian idea of individual gifts may have its place in that new “great world.” Mr. Bottum is, of course, right about the potential for cultural stagnation and individual demoralization. Are we seeing it already? And a stretch here, maybe, but: isn’t all of this another argument for the culture of life? Unimagined life?
July 26th, 2009 | 5:37 am
My very first Heinlein is still my favorite:
Star Beast – He took me into the future and space without ever leaving the planet until the end of the book. And what a way with words and characters!
Tunnel in the Sky – Humor with deadly reality! I will draw on this if I am ever in a survival situation.
Podcayne of Mars – How sweet to make the girl the main character.
Methusela’s Children – Fascinating!
_________ – The one about the esp twins; it gave me some glimmer of Einstein’s theory.
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