Robert A Heinlein was a science-fiction writer, one of the 3 or 4 most acclaimed of the golden age. Some of his tales deal heavily in social philosophy – political, sexual, inter-personal. As he left the pulps and slicks magazine markets behind and wrote more novels for hardback publication (and as he gained in prestige and fame and grew more comfortable financially), Heinlein’s tales began to change. Large sections of the novels consisted of little more than a character lecturing other characters about love and sex, taxes, political freedoms and duties, and other social mores.
Since we’ve been reading some Heinlein lately, let’s look at the three tales and see how they work. The three are:
- Stranger in a Strange Land (the original 220,000-word manuscript submission)
- Double Star
- Glory Road
Stranger in a Strange Land
This is maybe Heinlein’s most famous tale. It has been credited with helping launch the hippie movement and the sexual revolution in the USA. It gestated long in Heinlein’s mind, over a decade passing between the time when his wife Virginia first suggested the idea of ‘an Earthman raised by aliens’ until he submitted the manuscript to his publishers.
The basic story tells of Michael Valentine Smith, born on Mars but soon orphaned, the sole survivor of the first human expedition to the planet. He is raised by Martians. No one on Earth knows about this until some 20 years later when the second Martian expedition reaches the planet.
Mike is brought back to Earth, and some unique circumstances make him a very rich and powerful personage legally. As a side note, let’s look at those circumstances – they teach us something about talesmanship.
Mike is the only offspring of a human married couple. Both his mother and her husband were brilliant, she invented what would later turn out to be the essential power source for interplanetary travel.
This alone would grant Mike immense wealth. But Heinlein is not yet satisfied.
Mike’s natural father was not his mother’s husband but the captain of the ship, and the captain had no heirs, so Mike inherits both his legal parents’ estates, and his natural fathers. More: the entire crew entered into a legal relationship stipulating that all their estates would accrue to the last survivor, should some accident happen on Mars. These estates have been handled over the past 20 years by a foundation, which is now very wealthy indeed. (This gimmick echoes H G Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes.) Mike owns a big chunk of the Moon as a result (actually he owns about a fifth of the corporation that owns the Moon). That should ensure that Mike is the richest and one of the most powerful humans on Earth. But Heinlein is still not satisfied.
A complicated chain of legal decisions (elaborated at length in the tale) sets the precedent that Mike also ‘owns’ Mars. This means, legally speaking, all natural resources on Mars, and all landing rights, visiting rights, tourist rights, etc., belong solely to one Michael Valentine Smith. This guarantees Mike not only the promise of immense future wealth, but also political power (depending on what minerals and other resources are found on Mars).
In terms of the tale, and what later develops, all that’s important is that Mike should be fabulously wealthy, enough so that he can found his church later in the story. But Heinlein has become interested in legal ramifications of discovery, explorers’ pacts, and the like. Page after page is devoted to the maneuverings this complex of inheritance brings to Mike, only to end, about half way through, with a neat and very sudden solution – the whole matter is dropped after that, like some toy Heinlein tired of (or maybe he realized that it was getting too cumbersome and he extricated his tale from it at the earliest moment he could).
And one of these would have sufficed; Heinlein gives us all three. This not only complicates things needlessly in the opening third of the tale, it leads into a too-neat, too-easy solution when Heinlein decides to drop it. These speculations do however interest sf fans in and of themselves, for we enjoy speculating on ‘what ifs’ of a grand historical as well as scientific and cultural scale. In no other genre, perhaps, would Heinlein have gotten away with it. Indeed, he might not have gotten away with it in sf, had he been only a novice and not one of the big poobahs of the industry, whose name was enough to guarantee a certain number of sales. (No novice, maybe, could have sold a tale in 1961 that was about group sex and marriage, either!)
Heinlein’s interest in plausible speculations interferes with the talesmanship from page one, which opens with a fairly long discourse on the criteria best suited to choosing a crew to operate a space ship for several months on end. This leads to a crew of 4 married couples, which then sets up Mike’s parentage; the affair between Mike’s mother and natural father prefigures the group sex-marriages Mike will create in his church (but too little is made of this).
But once Mike is back on Earth, in the huge naval hospital outside Washington DC, and in danger, threatened by forces interested in controlling his wealth and potential political power, the tale gets going. This is the only part of the tale that works all-out as a tale. The events follow logically in sequence, cause gives rise to effect, interesting characters come on scene, with witty dialogue that is nicely balanced to the descriptive and action paragraphs. Suspense holds and mounts, and along with suspense, sf fans can delight in the appreciation of Mike’s very-Martian, unhuman way of looking at life and society, and the gradual revelation of his superhuman powers, something like a yogi’s mastery of himself raised to the last degree.
Mike’s powers fall into two classes. First there is his control over his own body. He can enter sleep so profound it looks more like death; slow down or speed up his sense of time; heal his wounds, cure illness in himself, grow muscles, change the shape of his bones and facial features, age or grow younger. Second he has control over external objects as well: he can make things move with his mind, he can read other people’s minds and communicate mentally with some, and he can push people and objects into nonexistence by willing it.
The initial intrigues over who will control Mike (or will they murder him?) end when Mike finds a guardian and teacher, Jubal. What follows is a series of discussions of Martian versus human philosophies, and the tale falters.
Mike then takes about a third of the book off in wandering around, trying different occupations, trying to figure out what makes humans really tick. When he finds out, he feels it is his duty to teach us Martian ways, and the tool he chooses is his church (but ‘It’s not a religion,’ he insists.) This dovetails into what is most controversial about the tale: not only is Heinlein advocating free love, nudism, and group marriage, but he does so as part of religious services. He also concocts a new fundamentalist Christian church, the Church of the New Revelation, inspired by Mormonism and the evangelical movements that swept the Southwestern United States in the 1920s and 1930s.
Stranger in a Strange Land ends up looking and feeling a lot like Candide and there is a strong feeling of social satire and Enlightenment-iconoclastic moral philosophy to the tale. If we could extract the first third (minus the 20 pages or so leading up to Mike in Walter Reed Hospital) we would have a terrific tale with all the elements for a good pulp page-turner. The rest, mixing carnival tents, tattooed ladies, church crusades and sex, fails as tale and holds our interest mainly because of the erotic appeal, the humor, the wittiness of the dialogue (even down to a section of art criticism several pages long), and curiosity in the lifestyle Mike advocates (‘Would it work? Could it work?’)
Double Star
Double Star tells the tale of out of work actor Larry Smith (billed as ‘the great Lorenzo’) who impersonates a kidnapped politician who heads a major political party in the solar system. In essence the tale reworks Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. As with Stranger the beginning scenes are filled with suspense and action, each scene is handled in concrete terms and flows logically and immediately into the following scene.
There is a small diversion when Smith learns just who it is he is to impersonate – a discussion of interplanetary politics intrudes, and we explore hypnosis and what later thinkers would call ‘anchoring’ – and there is no action at all, other than discussions, on the long flight to Mars. Heinlein doesn’t take Smith around on the ship, and nothing much happens, and the passages drag.
The Martian sequences pick up the action, but at the crucial scenes of climax – when Smith is adopted by a Martian clan, and then must handle press conferences and meetings as the politician – Heinlein seems hardly interested; the scenes are not detailed, and no snags offer us any hint of suspense or danger. The mores of the Martians are raised to make a crucial plot point – then they are dropped entirely. The tale seems to be heading into a story of Smith on Mars; he then leaves Mars and the tale shifts entirely.
What closes out the book is a summary, rather abstract and handled mostly in narrative summary, of the political campaign that will seat the next Imperial Parliament. The only scenes worthy of the name consider Smith’s personal and private meeting with the Emperor Willem IV, the only one who sees through the disguise. The Emperor thus seems to rise as a major character, but he’s dropped as soon as he approves of the impersonation.
The second half of Double Star seems confused, as though Heinlein had lost his train of the tale, and wasn’t sure any longer just what kind of tale he was undertaking. Maybe he changed his mind. When compared to The Prisoner of Zenda, the second half of Double Star is woefully weak, and hardly worth reading. (And since so much of what’s good about the opening of Double Star never pays off in the end, we can say the whole story is not worth reading as a tale proper.)
Glory Road
Glory Road tells of E C Gordon, a young man who fights in Vietnam in 1962, is wounded, discharged, and ends up on a nude beach in France, where he meets a lovely blonde who takes him on an interdimensional quest of great danger and different cultures. He survives the quest and wins the object of it, whereupon he learns the blonde is in fact the Empress (or ‘Wisdom’) of Twenty Universes.
The second half is where the tale drops into summary narrative and cultural speculation mode. Unhappy as the Empress’ Consort, Gordon returns to Earth, where he is equally unhappy with ‘normal life’ as a draftsman in Los Angeles or student at Caltech. In the end he seeks another adventurous quest. Today, we could read this as a treatise on the appeal, and potential danger, of immersive videogames; in 1963 Heinlein had in mind the newly-revived books of Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as those of Robert E Howard, Anthony Hope, and all the pulp tales of adventure.
As with Stranger, the second half of Glory Road interests not as a tale, but rather as sociological and sexual speculation. But the sex is not so potent; Gordon passes up almost every proposition the beauties of several universes offer him. An entire novel could have been told around Gordon’s dissatisfaction (or ‘acculturation’ as he calls it) with life back on Earth, and it might have been moving to a Romantic talesman. Heinlein however is a satirist and humorist more than romantic, bringing to mind Walpole’s dictum that ‘the world is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think.’
Conclusions
The sum is: an extended discussion of philosophy, sociology, and the like, ought to conform to the rules of talesmanship just like any other element: it ought to advance the story itself. But we readers don’t insist on that for discussions or any other elements, so long as they entertain us sufficiently. In that case, they are a weakness we are more than willing to suffer.
The question then arises, whether a grand opening to a tale that lets us down in the second half, is worthy of our attention. It doesn’t conclude properly speaking. It doesn’t pay off what it plants. Plot threads are woven in, then the stitches dropped, the threads abandoned. But for those moments when we are engaged in the opening scenes, we are entertained.
— asotir
(Composed 12 May 2010 on keyboard)
