“The Green Hills of Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein is story #19 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Green Hills of Earth” first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, on February 8, 1947.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read “The Green Hills of Earth.” I believe every time before I ignored most of the story, responding and remembering the final part. Heinlein does a great deal of wordy tap dancing before he gets down to a rather simple story. This time I realized that all typewriting soft-shoeing is the real gold in the story, and the final emotional part that I’ve always remembered is pyrite that tricked my eye.

With this reading, I was bowled over by the high concentration of imaginative details in “The Green Hills of Earth.” Heinlein sets up a whole interplanetary space-faring society, alluding to the Harriman’s corporation which is chronicled in later stories. There are politics and laws – the Tri-Planet Treaty and The Space Precautionary Act. There are Venusians and Martians, which aren’t detailed, but I imagined in passing, that is fleshed out in later stories like Red Planet and other juveniles, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Double Star. Heinlein throws in rockets, their makes, and models. And more interestingly, Heinlein alludes to languages that don’t yet exist, and how they relate to our current languages. Plus he talks about pop culture, music, and poetry. He does all this in a faux academic style with hints of satire on how future history and sociology work.

Heinlein also sets up the solar system that’s been explored enough to allow for commercial trade. Heinlein’s spacemen are working-class men who seemed modeled on 1940s commercial shipping and merchant marines and are nothing like NASA’s astronauts. Heinlein had high hopes for the final frontier. Just read through these four paragraphs to see how Heinlein embeds details into his story.

I’d say the first two-thirds of “The Green Hills of Earth” is a kind of prologue that sets up one dramatic scene. Heinlein is experimenting with his writing, going beyond normal pulp fiction. When I think about it, science fiction went through several new waves that caused mutations in SF writing techniques. This story was published in a slick magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, something revolutionary for the genre and Heinlein. The term science fiction wasn’t widely known in 1947. It was just coming into vogue in the general public outside of fandom. Heinlein’s stories for the slicks were breakthroughs, helping the general public move away from thinking of science fiction as Saturday serials “Buck Rogers stuff.”

And we can’t ignore the poetry. This story is full of verse and is about a poet who has become mythic. I’m not big on poetry, so I’ve tended to skim over it in the past. I tried harder this time to read Heinlein’s lines of poetry. I have no idea if Heinlein’s verse is any good, but I did study it enough this reading to realize he put a lot of work into writing it. In “The Green Hills of Earth” Heinlein says about Rhysling, his Blind Singer of the Spaceways, “It mellowed his approach, changed his doggerel to verse, and sometimes to poetry.” I can’t tell verse from poetry, so I don’t know if Heinlein’s verse transcends into poetry.

I did notice Heinlein used some phrasing I thought was bumpy – “calm and couth” – and rhyming dearth with girth. Couth, dearth, and girth seem like archaic words now but might have been fine in the 1940s. Even still, “As they rove around the girth” doesn’t quite seem to work as an image or sound right coupled with “Of our lovely mother planet.” I would have thought, “As we rove around the girth / Of our lovely Earth” would sound better. However, he was saving the word “Earth” for the last line, “Of the cool green hills of Earth.” Of course, this was in a section where Rhysling was working out his song.

Like I said, I’m terrible with poetry, but I like the image Heinlein’s going for here. I’d try to work it as “Let sweet fresh breezes thrill me / As they blow round the Earth / From the planet that calls me / To green hills of my berth.” Can I get away with that pun and double meaning in the end? I know, I’m just as bad as Heinlein. My point here is reading and writing poetry is hard, so I’ve got to give Heinlein a lot of credit for trying.

Heinlein had a habit of killing characters to generate emotion in his readers. In this story, the actual bit of storytelling at the end has Rhysling sacrificing his life to save the ship. That’s rather maudlin and melodramatic, and even cheesy, but I think Heinlein gets away with it because it’s a fitting ending for an old spaceman. Did we want Rhysling to die in a nursing home?

Last year I started a project of reading and reviewing all of Heinlein’s stories in the order they were written. “The Green Hills of Earth” jumps five years ahead of where I left off. I need to get back to that project. But I can say “The Green Hills of Earth” appears to be a quantum leap in Heinlein’s writing skills. I was still writing about his stories written before WWII, and evidently, working for the war effort somehow matured Heinlein’s writing. This story is more sophisticated in its storytelling ambition.

I wish I had the energy and drive to write a comprehensive analysis of “The Green Hills of Earth.” There’s so much going on in this story I could write pages and pages. Looking at the fragment of Rhysling’s poem, “The Grand Canal” makes me wonder if it inspired Roger Zelazny and his story “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” – wasn’t Gallinger writing a madrigal too. Look at Heinlein’s poem. Doesn’t it at least remind you of Ray Bradbury and Planet Stories too?

I could go paragraph by paragraph and find many things to say for each, but that would take too long for a blog post. I imagine each paragraph will remind you of all the science fiction you’ve read too. If you don’t own The Past Through Tomorrow or The Green Hills of Earth, you should be able to find “The Green Hills of Earth” in one of many anthologies.

James Wallace Harris, 6/17/23