Posted on by jameswharris · 5 Comments

“Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson

Our Facebook group is reading and discussing all the Hugo award winning short stories and novelettes that we’ve haven’t covered in all our previous years. “Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson is a 1983 Hugo winner that I have no memory of even hearing about before. It first appeared in the June 1982 issue of Analog and came in first in the Analog Readers Poll. But then, that’s the fun thing about Group Read 69, we’re discovering stories that should be remembered, or at least consider why they haven’t.

“Melancholy Elephants” is about extending the copyright lifetime. It’s set in the future, and powerful entities want to pass a bill to make copyright perpetual. Dorothy Martin feels this will be a threat to civilization and it’s vital that the bill be stopped. She goes to see a powerful senator she hopes to convince or bribe into killing the proposal.

Most of the story is infodumping about copyright laws. It talks about how there are limits to creativity and if fiction and music are locked down by copyright, it will destroy them. The story even gives examples, including Harlan Ellison and A. E. van Vogt suing movie companies and winning, and George Harrison unconsciously cribbing “He’s So Fine” to write “My Sweet Lord” by the Chiffons. In the future of this story, there will be powerful computer programs that test for previous use and reject copyright violations. Mrs. Martin’s husband committed suicide when he realized his latest and greatest work was inspired by music he heard in childhood.

I don’t see why this story won the Hugo and Analog Readers Award, but then I don’t remember any of the short stories it competed with either. Also, I disagree with Mrs. Martin’s conclusion. I don’t think long copyright terms keeps artists from innovating, but I do think it keeps some works from being remembered. For example, copyright keeps me from linking to a copy of this story for you to read.

What I found fascinating by “Melancholy Elephants” was how much the story felt like a Heinlein story. Spider Robinson was a huge fan and friend of Heinlein, and this story feels like he stole from Heinlein in the same way Harrison appears to have stolen from The Chiffons.

The story starts out with Dorothy Martin killing a mugger. She justifies it because she couldn’t be late with the meeting with the Senator, ruining her only chance of saving the world from a fate worse than death. “Gulf” by Robert A. Heinlein starts with the protagonist causally killing an attacker and justifying it by his righteous cause. And if memory serves me right, the same thing happened in Heinlein’s novel, Friday. Heinlein like to promote the value of his characters beliefs and causes by casually killing people. He equates the end justifies the means with these quick scenes. I always thought they represented massive egos believing their way of thinking puts them above all others.

“Melancholy Elephants” could have been done without the scene of Mrs. Martin killing someone and hiding the body under the car. It gave the story a repulsive beginning. The story really needed to be an essay, but Spider Robinson sells fiction, so he took the idea and fictionalized it much like Robert A. Heinlein would he wanted to promote his beliefs.

Mrs. Martin visits the Senator, who comes across like Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw. The way she makes her case and the way the Senator makes his is exceedingly Heinleinesque At one point Mrs. Martin tries to buy off the Senator and he explains he can’t be bought off because he’s already been bought off and it would be unethical to go against the original deal. Heinlein was big on representing government as being corrupt and things got done by big egos battling it out. Heinlein loved to write scenes where his character persuades others on a particular super-vital issue. However, Heinlein’s scenes often come across as character promoting their righteousness, rather than logic.

In the end the Senator sees Mrs. Martin’s side of things and reverses himself, but the way he does it also reminds me of Heinlein characters when they do give in.

It’s ironic that “Melancholy Elephants” is about protecting a creative person’s rights to borrow from the art that inspired them because this story is obviously inspired too much by Heinlein.

James Wallace Harris, 3/5/24

Posted on by jameswharris · 28 Comments

Has Science Fiction Changed?

I often encounter the opinion that science fiction has changed. Is it true? Over my lifetime novels have gotten longer, trilogies and series have become more common, there are more female authors, and the genre has been heavily influenced by fantasy. Before Star Trek in 1966, the world of science fiction seemed tiny, and that TV show brought in millions of new SF fans. Then Star Wars in 1977 brought in tens of millions of new SF fans. (But I’m not sure how much the population of science fiction readers grew.)

But these are all externals. I’m wondering if the essence of science fiction itself has changed. Yes, the writing has gotten better, and the literary world has become more accepting, but do modern readers get something different out of reading science fiction than what I found in the 1960s? Why do I prefer older science fiction? Is it more than just because I imprinted on it when I was young? I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many aging Baby Boomers say they prefer older science fiction too, but so do some young book reviewers.

Over the last forty days I’ve read five novels by Philip K. Dick written between 1959-1963, plus Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. These aren’t new novels, but newer than what I’m talking about, and they feel different. Over the last year I’ve read such new SFF books as Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill, Babel by R. F. Kuang, and The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I know this is a small sample, but I’ve also read hundreds of science fiction short stories, both old and new, over the last couple of years.

All I can say is science fiction from the first half of my life (1951-1987) feels much different than the second half (1988-2024). The change started around the time of Star Wars in 1977. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg might be the main factors changing the genre. I confess that I’ve long thought that science fiction ran out of original ideas at some point, and the genre has been living on recycling ever since. But women writers, literary standards, and fantasy radically changed the flavor of science fiction since the 1970s too.

But what if the change in science fiction is due to other factors? Yesterday I watched a video by Bookborn, “Do SFF authors think we are stupid now” that offered two innovative ideas. Bookborn suggests that current science fiction lacks subtlety. She also suggests that newer science fiction requires less critical thinking because newer authors tell their readers what to think rather than letting the readers draw their own conclusions. Bookborn also felt authors wrote about topical problems too obviously. Even with books she likes, presenting viewpoints she agrees with, she felt they were too explicit, lacking subtly. She admits this problem is not measurable and highly subjective.

Bookborn then cites an essay, “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes. The essay in long, so I suggest reading Wikipedia’s summary instead, but to give you a quick idea, here’s a quote from the first paragraph at Wikipedia:

"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight.

Bookborn is quite articulate at explaining her position, and her position is more complex than what I’m conveying here, so I recommend clicking on the link above to watch her video. Bookborn goes on to say that current authors hide from their readers because of social media. They fear attacks on what they say so they are overly careful about what they put forth. I had an additional insight. Because modern science fiction is often about elaborate world building, modern authors struggle to be precise so readers will see clearly what they have worked so hard to invent.

In Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, I was disappointed by the blandness of the author’s voice. And I never felt the presence of Griffith or Banks in their stories. Yes, in both cases their world building is beautifully detailed, but both authors left no mysteries about their stories or their personal views for me to ponder. I have theories to explain this too.

Modern writers prefer a close personal third point of view, or first person, to the older omniscient point of view which is better suited for conveying the author’s voice. I also find that the novels I admire most are ones written by authors I love reading about. Maybe what I love about older science fiction is my connection to the author.

Any science fictional world that’s set far from Earth becomes a fantasy world, and thus far less complex than our reality. Such fictional worlds are far from the infinite complexity of contemporary controversies. Writers can avoid personal philosophy by using allegory. Reading such fantasies means passively consuming what the book describes. Such stories don’t lend themselves to ambiguity and complexity, which makes the reader think. Our reality is infinitely full of shades of gray. Made up fictional worlds tend to be consistently designed because authors want them to be understandable to readers unless you’re Gene Wolfe writing The Book of the New Sun.

The five Philip K. Dick novels were far more compelling and thought provoking than the books by Griffith and Banks. I often try newer science fiction, but they usually come across as merely fun stories. Overall, newer science fiction stories are like going to Disneyland. They dazzle but when the ride is over, are quickly forgotten. I’m still thinking about those Philip K. Dick novels. When nothing else thrills, switching to a Philip K. Dick story will get my mind excited. Why is that? I believe it’s because his Dick’s books are closer to real life, and that makes them ambiguous and mysterious. They offer endless room for speculation. I’m reading another biography of Philip K. Dick, my sixth, I think, because Dick’s novels make me crave understanding.

Dick’s novels were compelling, Ammonite and The Player of Games were not. They aren’t bad, in fact, they’re exceptionally good stories, just not compelling. Dick was obsessed with deciphering reality. He doubted that what we perceive is real. He was horrified by other people, often thinking they were machines, disguised supernatural beings, or illusions of the mind. Paranoia fueled his narratives. Our reality was too complex for Philip K. Dick, and it drove him into insane states of mind trying to figure it out. Every Philip K. Dick novel is another exciting speculative assumption about reality.

Interestingly, Dick doesn’t fit the theory about the author being dead. Yes, his stories are wonderful without knowing anything about Philip K. Dick, but their complexity increases the more you do know about him. I want stories where the authors aren’t dead by Barthes criteria.

By coincidence, both The Player of Games and Time Out of Joint are about game playing. However, the first novel feels contrived. It’s hard to believe. But the second, which is far more fantastic, yet feels very real and believable. Why is that?

I believe the reason I love older science fiction is because it speculates about reality. Whereas newer science fiction is focused on telling a delightful story. Lucas and Spielberg overly inspired newer writers to focus on entertaining the masses.

I loved the Heinlein novels of the 1950s because they speculated about future space travel. That was before NASA showed us what real space travel would be like in the 1960s. Heinlein’s stories honestly tried to speculate about traveling to the Moon or Mars. Space travel in Star Trek, Star Wars, or the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks are really fantasies. Space travel in Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is somewhat speculative.
Most science fiction isn’t very speculative, even the old stuff. However, novels like Flowers for Algernon or Earth Abides feel far closer to reality. And I’m sure many people will point out that stories by Philip K. Dick are extremely fantastic, yet their characters feel like ordinary real people, and that grounds them.

For all his insanity, Philip K. Dick struggled to understand reality. And I think the reason I admire many older science fiction writers is because they were commenting on reality. I do love entertaining stories, but pure storytelling seldom offers much to think about.

I’m not sure I understand “The Death of the Author” in the same way as Bookborn. It seems to me that classics were written by authors whose personality dominated their fiction. Think about Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Conner, Jack Kerouac, or the science Fiction writers like H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Zenna Henderson, Samuel R. Delany, John Brunner, etc. If you want to write a great science fiction novel, I think it must connect with reality. Just think how silly and fantastic Slaughterhouse-Five is, yet Vonnegut points to reality, and that makes it a great novel.

James Wallace Harris, 2/4/24

Posted on by jameswharris · 2 Comments

Heinlein’s Juveniles I Read in the 1960s vs. Philip K. Dick’s 1960s Novels I’m Reading in My 70s

I’ve been gorging on Philip K. Dick books this month. It occurred to me, that I’m consuming vast quantities of PKD in my old age like I did Heinlein books in my youth. Why was Heinlein my #1 science fiction writer in the 1960s when I was a teen? Is it for the same reasons that Philip K. Dick is my #1 sci-fi writer in my seventies in the 2020s?

The short answer is Heinlein’s juveniles were great reads and perfect escapism for a young person growing up in a problem family hoping to find a bright future. While PKD’s books are great escapes for an old guy living through troubled times when the future looks quite bleak. Both offer escapism from troubled times, but their imagined futures were distinctly different. Heinlein’s was best for the young, while Dick might be better for old age.

For some reason I resonate with Heinlein and PKD. I’ve written about that before, read “The Ghosts That Haunt Me.” There are certain writers I can’t stop reading their books, and biographies about them. I’m now curious why Philip K. Dick appeals so much to me late in life.

I discovered Heinlein in the Fall of 1964, just months before the first manned Project Gemini missions in March 1965. This was after Project Mercury was over. I had followed every manned space mission in the 1960s starting with Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in May of 1961. I grew up as a final frontier true believer, and Heinlein’s twelve juvenile novels shaped my hopes for the future. This was before the psychedelic 1960s hit.

I don’t remember when I changed, but like many teenagers growing up in the 1960s, I radicalized. I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. I was still living at home, and I was still going to high school, but I wasn’t in either place.

I can’t say I contracted the weirdness of Philip K. Dick back then, but science fiction was getting weird. My favorite writers shifted from Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov to Samuel R. Delany, Jack Kerouac, and Mark Twain as the 1960s ended. My ideas about the final frontier and the future were changing, especially after reading Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner in 1969.

I didn’t discover Philip K. Dick until 1968 when I checked out Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from the 7-day bookshelf at the Coconut Grove Library in Miami. What a strange ride that was. Before the decade was over, I also read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and a couple of others, but I can only dredge up specific memories of those two titles right now. I didn’t seriously get into PKD until after the Paul Williams article ran about Dick in The Rolling Stone magazine in November of 1975, then I started reading PKD for real. Back in the 1980s I told my friend Mike about Philip K. Dick, and we started collecting his books and both of us became big fans. We’ve been discussing PKD ever since. In 1991 I even went to Ft. Morgan to visit Dick’s grave.

This past month, I’ve been binge reading PKD again. I do that from time to time. And something struck me. I discovered Heinlein when I was twelve, just before I turned thirteen at the end of 1964. I read nearly all of Heinlein’s back catalog in the following two years, ending my Heinlein binge by reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Past Through Tomorrow in 1967 as they came out.

But it was the twelve Heinlein juveniles published from 1947-1958 that made me a science fiction fan. At the end of 1967, with my first paycheck from working at the Kwik Check in Coconut Grove, I ordered all twelve of those books in hardback from Scribners because I loved them so much. I still have them. Those books define my love of science fiction. So, it’s weird that I’m ending up in PKD’s landscape. Heinlein and Dick saw the future vastly different. But then, the future I envisioned for myself in the 1960s is nothing like the future I’m living in the 2020s.

What’s interesting, that I realized this week, is Philip K. Dick’s 1960s science fiction are shaping how I think about science fiction in my old age. And there’s quite a contrast between how Heinlein and Dick wrote science fiction. I just finished five books Dick hammered out in 1963:

Heinlein’s fiction from the 1950s had a consistency to them, with each juvenile novel going step-by-step further from Earth. Heinlein was always adamant that his philosophy was represented in the three novels Starship Troopers (1959), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). But those books represent his third philosophical stage. Heinlein’s first stage was his Future History stories of the 1940s, but what I cared about most was his Space Exploration stage of the 1950s. Both Heinlein and Dick wrote many books that shared a common vision of the future. Heinlein’s vision of tomorrow in his 1950s books are quite consistent. But then, so is Dick’s science fiction from the 1960s.

I’m sensing that Philip K. Dick went through different philosophical stages too. In the 1950s he was cranking out science fiction to make a living, but Dick really wanted to become a respected mainstream writer. Then from The Man in the High Castle (1961) through Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1969) he wrote twenty-one very strange science fiction novels that all have consistent themes and elements. In the 1970s, he shifted to more serious writing, some of which was based on firsthand experiences.

Many readers accused Dick of being a 1960s sci-fi writer on drugs, suffering from mental illness, and producing psychedelic science fiction. I don’t think that’s accurate. I think his 1959 novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist (published 1975) is a key to PKD’s 1960s fiction. Dick learned a lot about writing from producing all those unsold mainstream novels in the 1950s. Yes, he grew up reading science fiction and falling in love with the genre, but he was well acquainted with the real world and real literature. He had to accept that he could only make money selling science fiction, but he compromised by putting reasonable realistic characters into bizarre science fictional fantasies.

When I was growing up and embracing the Heinlein juveniles, I didn’t understand how unrealistic they were. I wanted space travel as Heinlein described it to be possible, but it would be decades before I realized how unrealistic those expectations were. Philip K. Dick was 23 years older than I was, and he obviously knew how crazy science fiction was back in the 1950s. I imagine he told himself, if science fiction sells, I’ll write science fiction but with the weirdness knob turned to eleven.

Dick’s science fiction in the 1960s got very psychedelic before the 1960s got psychedelic. He lived in California, and that helped put him at the forefront of the counterculture. As I grew up with the counterculture, but slightly delayed in Miami, I was still rereading the Heinlein juveniles. They were fantasies that kept me sane, but they were delusional. It’s a shame I didn’t discover PKD sooner, or even first. Dick knew science fiction was delusional. At least, I think he did. I believe with his VALIS experience, he started wondering if the universe wasn’t far stranger than what even science fiction writers imagined. I want to believe that Dick knew he was a crap artist for most of his career before he started believing in the crap. Evidently, you can’t toy with crap ideas all your life and not get infected.

What’s weird on another level was Heinlein turned strange in the 1960s too. It’s my theory that he too realized that 1950s science fiction wasn’t going anywhere, and thus he needed to go in another direction to stay at the top. My guess is he read Atlas Shrugged and decided he wanted to be a writer like Ayn Rand. One whose political ideas were taken seriously. In some ways, Stranger in a Strange Land is just as weird as PKD’s work in the 1960s.

Heinlein’s lost his mojo in the 1970s, and I quit reading him. Over the years, I’ve become disenchanted with Heinlein’s work after 1960 too. Philip K. Dick took a new direction in the 1970s and found a higher calling. Science fiction, as a genre, also cchanged in many ways in the 1970s. Since then, science fiction books have gotten better written, and more creative, but have mostly retreated into itself, into fantastic feats of world building. I still love 1950s science fiction. I think that’s when the genre peaked in terms of exploring science fictional ideas. Movies and novels are better constructed now, but most of the ideas are retreads.

I guess I haven’t progressed much in life. I started in the 1960s with 1950s science fiction, and now in the 2020s I’m focused on 1960s science fiction. Maybe before I die, I’ll get around to digesting 1970s science fiction. But before I do that, I need to use up PKD’s books from the 1960s. I need to figure them out.

I only reread Heinlein juveniles now for nostalgic reasons. I think I’m reading Dick’s 1960s novels for a reason, but I’m not sure what it is. PKD seemed to be writing about something, and I’m trying to figure out what that was. But I could be wrong. He could have just been cranking out a bunch of crazy sci-fi books to pay the bills. However, I’m not the only one trying to figure out PKD. Lots of people are writing monographs and dissertations on him.

In the 1950s and 1960s Heinlein was king of the genre hill. At the time, I thought he would be seen by people in the 21st century as the Charles Dickens of science fiction. That hasn’t happened. Philip K. Dick is the top dog when remembering 20th century science fiction. I would not have predicted that back in the 1960s. Nor would I have imagined that as an old man I would be so hung up on Philip K. Dick.

James Wallace Harris, 1/21/23

Posted on by jameswharris · 15 Comments

How Should We Judge Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land in 2023?

I recently watched a devastating “review” of Stranger in a Strange Land on YouTube. (Watch it below.) The short film summarized the plot of the novel, but in a way that made the story ridiculous. When I first watched it, I didn’t think the sarcasm and satire was unfair. I first read Stranger in 1965 when I was thirteen, and I loved it. I’ve reread it many times over the decades, but with each rereading I became more disappointed with the story. So, the criticisms made by Overly Sarcastic Productions resonated with the memories I have of listening to the audiobook version in 2004, and my last reading in 1991. Even though Robert A. Heinlein is still my favorite science fiction writer; I haven’t liked his books published after 1959 for a long time. However, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t reevaluate that dislike.

Today, I started reading A Martian Named Smith by William H. Patterson, Jr., the man who wrote a two-volume biography of Heinlein and who edited The Heinlein Journal. I wouldn’t call Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century an official biography, but it was written with the support of Virginia Heinlein. Patterson makes a great case that Heinlein was trying something quite different with Stranger, and it shouldn’t be judged like traditional science fiction. Patterson considers Stranger to be a classic satire, and that the satire has a different structural form than the novel.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Stranger in a Strange Land might have been the most famous science fiction novel. It was a cult classic on college campuses and embraced by many in the counterculture. I’m not sure Heinlein liked that. It was also embraced by the growing libertarian political movement. The more Heinlein was embraced by the Right, the more readers on the Left moved away from his works. That put me in a bind. I’m liberal. What eventually happened is I focused on his books published before 1960.

But I thought of something today. Stranger in a Strange Land could be considered an early work of New Wave Science Fiction, at least by some of its goals. The New Wave movement wanted science fiction to move away from pulp writing, escape from the old tropes in science fiction, embrace the latest literary standards, experiment in new forms of writing styles, deal with emerging social issues, and be more relevant. Heinlein was obviously doing all that with Stranger in a Strange Land. The New Wave was mostly out of England, and on the left politically. Heinlein made public proclamations that divided the science fiction community between conservative and liberal, so no one considered him New Wave at the time.

Patterson, in A Man Named Smith makes a very intellectually grounded case that Stranger in a Strange Land works on multiple levels, some of which are deep and seldom observed. What if Patterson is right? What if my liberal leanings are prejudicing me from giving the novel a fair chance? To find out I’ll need to reread the book, even both versions, and read Patterson’s book, along with other critical works and studies on the novel. That will be a huge project. That means this blog post will have another ongoing series — and I have too many of those unfinished right now. I’ve been meaning to get back to my Rereading Heinlein project. I expected to reread Stranger in a Strange Land after I read everything Heinlein wrote before it. I’m still stuck in 1940, where I planned to read “The Devil Makes the Law” (renamed “Magic, Inc.”) next.

I also got inspired to reread Stranger in a Strange Land this week when I watched the above video review. Then I read an essay on Book Riot where the writer was proposing to replace eight classic literary novels, four of which are among my favorites. I wrote about this on Auxiliary Memory, where I criticized younger writers for wanting to replace older books they hated, with newer books they loved. I said, if you want to replace a classic, it should be from the same years as the original work and cover the same thematic territory — that classics are how we view the past.

Then I read Joachim Boaz’s review of Davy by Edgar Pangborn. He called it a masterpiece. That led me to finding my copy of Davy and begin reading. It’s quite an impressive novel, but what’s interesting is its overlap with Stranger in a Strange Land. Both are about young males and their education before they become revolutionaries and try to create new social systems. Both these books precede the counterculture of the 1960s by just a few years. At first, I wondered if modern woke readers would accept Davy as a substitute science fiction classic for Stranger in a Strange Land. But if you read my essay linked above, you’ll see that I don’t believe in removing classics from the canon, but adding works that will supplement that.

I believe Stranger in a Strange Land, Davy, and The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis make an interesting trilogy of works that reflect the early 1960s in science fiction. To write that will be another huge writing job that will take a lot of researching, reading, and writing. And I unfortunately have dwindling physical and psychic energy.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s Heinlein was considered the top science fiction author by most readers, even if they didn’t like his books. He was just that successful. He was made the first Grand Master by the SFWA in 1974.

Ever since Stranger in a Strange Land was first published, it was considered controversial, and even polarizing. Since the 1960s, Heinlein’s reputation has been in decline, but that might be relative. So many new writers have had so much success that Heinlein just had much more competition. However, in the 21st century there does seem to be a growing dislike of Heinlein among younger readers.

I love studying how books become popular and how they are slowly forgotten. Is Heinlein and Stranger on their way out? Or is there something to that novel that will keep people reading it for another century? I want to think about that.

Right now, people focus on Heinlein’s flaws. But what about Heinlein’s virtues?

I also want to think about the differences between what makes a literary novel a classic and what makes a science fiction novel a classic. There is an overlap in reasons, but each form has its unique qualities that determine whether they will become a classic novel. I believe literary novels must give significant insight into their story’s physical setting, and both the time in which the story is set, and when it was written.

We judge science fiction stories over their plots and ideas. But what if what makes a classic science fiction novel the same as what makes a classic literary novel? What does Stranger in a Strange Land say about America in 1961, and the decade before when Heinlein was writing it? My guess is it is something like what Pangborn and Tevis were saying. It’s going to take a lot of deep reading for me to find out.

James Wallace Harris, 8/12/23

Posted on by jameswharris · 5 Comments

Which Writers Would Be Included In A Group Biography/History of 1950s Science Fiction?

The World Beyond the Hill by Alexei and Cory Panshin and Astounding Alec Nevala-Lee were two huge histories of science fiction in the 1940s. Both books focused on the magazine Astounding Science-Fiction, where John W. Cambell was a genre-shaping editor. The Panshins concentrated on three writers: Heinlein, Asimov, and van Vogt, while Nevala-Lee dwelt on Heinlein, Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard. The Panshins volumes were more about the stories, with some biographical details. Nevala-Lee spent more words on the biographies of the four men, with less prose about their stories. Combined, the two volumes make a great overview of Astounding Science-Fiction in the 1940s.

What if a similar group biography/history was written about science fiction in the 1950s? I already own a bookcase full of books about science fiction but they aren’t the kind I want. The book I ache to read is a biography/history on the impact of science fiction in the 1950s that’s as impressive as biographies/histories written by Walter Isaacson, Robert A. Caro, or Doris Kerns Goodwin. I want to read a biography/history that would make the subject interesting to the general reader. I just finished Tune In by Mark Lewisohn, a giant history of The Beatles that only covered their career until 1962. That’s the kind of high-quality biography/history of 1950s science fiction I want to read.

Alec Nevela-Lee’s biographies approach that league. He could write the book I want, but I don’t think he would because he probably knows the market for such a volume isn’t very big. And I wonder if science fiction fans would want a history of science fiction in the 1950s by him. His books Astounding and Inventor of the Future were hard on his subjects. I thought them honest appraisals, but he may have done in John W. Campbell’s reputation, and he didn’t help Heinlein’s or Asimov’s. I ended up feeling Buckminister Fuller was brilliant but not very successful, and a bit of a nut or crank after reading Inventor of the Future. However, any honest biography of the influential science fiction writers of the 1950s is going to unearth some worms.

The whole phenomenon of science fiction in the 1950s could be fascinating to the general reader if it was written in the right way. Look how pervasive science fiction has become. Science fiction as a subculture actually had a far more lasting cultural impact than The Beats in the 1950s and The Hippies in the 1960s, yet those movements are more studied and written about. Organized science fiction fandom has since inspired many other forms of organized fandoms. There are connections between science fiction and the space program and computers, both of which also started in the 1950s. And as a pop culture art, science fiction might be bigger than rock. Rock music is fading, while science fiction is still big business.

So, who were the movers, shakers, and creators of 1950s science fiction? I don’t think the major players are as obvious as they were in the 1940s.

As a science fiction fan back in the 1960s I was commonly told that Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke were the Big Three Authors of science fiction. Looking at our CSFquery database, which uses various forms of citations to remember short stories and novels, I’m not sure it backs up that common knowledge. Look at the results. I’ve set the citation level at 3 or more citations. (Short stories are within double quotes, and novels are italicized. Clicking on the number of citations will show you the individual citations.)

The three writers with the most citations were Heinlein with eleven, and Bradbury and Asimov with eight each. However, some of those cited stories first appeared in the 1940s. After that, three authors have six titles on the list: Alfred Bester, C. M. Kornbluth, and Fritz Leiber.

Before looking at this data, I would have said Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, John Wyndham, and Walter M. Miller, Jr. were the breakout science fiction authors of the 1950s. Another indication of their popularity is how many photographs I can find of these men, especially ones taken in the 1950s. I’m guessing since photographs are hard to find, then details about their lives will be just as hard to find. That suggests any history of science fiction that focuses on anyone other than Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov will be covering events in the shadows of history.

If we alter the search to allow any work with two or more citations we see other authors standing out, but I’m not sure if it would change the overall apparent rankings. Thirteen women writers are on this list, but none have very many stories listed. I’m afraid the 1950s was still a male-dominated decade for science fiction.

And what about editors? Many histories of science fiction claim that John W. Campbell wasn’t as influential in the 1950s. But who was then? H. L. Gold at Galaxy is often mentioned. Anthony Boucher, and maybe J. Francis McComas at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There were dozens of science fiction magazines published during the 1950s, and I’m not sure if any other editor stood out. But then I haven’t researched it. However, I would say the 1950s were still a magazine-driven era for science fiction.

The Panshins and Nevala-Lee had Astounding Science-Fiction to anchor their history/biographies of the 1940s. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, and Astounding Science Fiction dominated the 1950s, but there were many other magazines that published significant science fiction and influenced the genre. I don’t know if a history of science fiction of the 1950s could be as focused as The World Beyond the Hill and Astounding. The genre just exploded in too many different directions.

The small press or fan press science fiction publishers of the 1950s are legendary, especially to collectors, but I don’t know if any of their editors had that much influence. I would think the editors at Doubleday and the Science Fiction Book Club could be a consideration if I knew who they were. Another consideration is Donald A. Wollheim. His work at Ace Books was both influential and widespread.

If a single volume could be written about science fiction in the 1950s it might need to be divided into twelve chapters, one for each year, or into 120 chapters, based on the months. A linear progression through the decade might be the best way to capture the history of science fiction in the 1950s. And the book would have to be big, maybe a thousand pages.

There is one significant book about science fiction history in the 1950s that I know about, Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines – From 1950 to 1970 by Mike Ashley. I have quite a few other books that cover that era in science fiction, but none are of the scope I’m talking about. I wish Ashley’s books were available in cheap Kindle editions so more people would read them.

And should we also add the impact of the movies and television? Should we consider George Pal and Rod Serling as movers and shakers of 1950s science fiction, for this book I want to read? An Astounding-like biography/history of science fiction in the 1960s would include Gene Roddenberry and one for the 1970s would have to include George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

I wish I had the skill and stamina to write a history of science fiction in the 1950s. I’m in awe of the work done by the Panshins and Nevala-Lee. I would love to read a book about 1950s science fiction like I’ve described, so if you’re a writer looking for a topic, here’s one. I don’t know how many copies it would sell. Sadly, the audience for such a history is getting old and dying. I wrote this essay to gauge interest in such a book, but I’m not finding much so far. However, a good biographer can make any person or topic into a page-turner.

James Wallace Harris, 7/11/23

Posted on by jameswharris · 11 Comments

“The Green Hills of Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein

“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

Posted on by jameswharris · 10 Comments

“Blowups Happen” by Robert A. Heinlein

Only dumbasses, egotists, and the delusional think they can predict the future, although there are a number of professions that try. I do believe Robert A. Heinlein was smart and sane enough to know he couldn’t see beyond the horizon of the moment, but he wrote plenty of stories that tried. “Blowups Happen” is one that stands out. Heinlein’s 1940 novelette imagines the dangers of commercializing atomic energy in peacetime. That was five years before Hiroshima.

I grew up being taught that atomic research during the war was an extremely well-guarded secret. What I didn’t know, and I assume most other people didn’t either, was how much atomic energy was widely discussed before the war. John W. Campbell, Jr. liked to brag about how the FBI came to his offices in 1944 because of Cleve Cartmill’s story “Deadline,” implying the G-men thought it gave away some of the secrets of the atomic bomb. I thought Heinlein’s story felt far more knowledgeable. I now have to assume the well-educated public before WWII knew far more than I ever imagined regarding atomic physics.

“Blowup Happens” is set in the near future from 1940 in the Astounding Science Fiction magazine version, and from 1950 as it was rewritten for the collection, The Man Who Sold The Moon. Those two dates are important because the story is about atomic power, and the magazine version was written before Hiroshima and the book version afterward.

The setup of the story is the United States has come to depend on atomic power even though a breeder reactor in Arizona could theoretically destroy the country or even the planet. The General Superintendent of the plant, King, has to hire one psychiatrist for every three engineers to monitor their work with the reactor because engineers have nervous breakdowns after a short career and must be continually replaced. King brings in Dr. Lentz, one of the country’s top psychiatrists to find ways that allow engineers to handle the stress.

Later in the story, Superintendent King learns that mathematical models that previously showed the reaction in the breeder reactor is probably controlled are wrong. New mathematics prove the reactor could go into a runaway reaction that would destroy the planet. If they bring down the breeder reactor the country would lose a good portion of its industrial power and ruin the economy. King knows the corporation that owns the plant won’t accept the new research because it would be financial ruin for it.

The solution to the problem has been emerging all along in a tangential subplot about two engineers, Erickson and Harper, developing atomic power for rockets.

“Blowups Happen” has a great deal of infodumping where Heinlein tries to educate his readers about the science behind atomic energy. Reading those passages today is tedious unless you are researching early speculation about atomic energy. So, how do we judge “Blowups Happen” as a story in 2022?

We want science fiction that is visionary. We want the future to be exciting. Ultimately, most, if not all science fiction becomes historical curiosities. Time has a way of eroding our genre. I didn’t like “Blowups Happen” when I first read it as a teen back in the 1960s. It was already too dated. Now that I’m rereading it in my seventies in 2022 I have to admire Heinlein’s speculation. “Blowups Happen” is an ambitious story. I’m starting to think science fiction writers are at their most ambitious when they are working closest to the present.

In “Blowups Happen” Heinlein explores the impact of atomic energy before the world is startled by the reality of Hiroshima. Sure, the idea of atomic power had been around since Einstein’s most famous equation. The reason why the science fiction of the 1950s had been so exciting is it just preceded NASA of the 1960s. And the reason why cyberpunk was so exciting in the 1980s is that it just preceded the World Wide Web in the 1990s. Science fiction writers get the details wrong, but they still anticipate the wonder and the chaos. This thought makes me rethink Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land anticipation of the 1960s.

When we judge an old science fiction story for its visionary qualities I think it’s important to look at the story’s original publication. “Blowups Happen” was first published in September 1940. It was first reprinted in The Best of Science Fiction edited by Groff Conklin in 1946, and then in 1950, it was rewritten for The Man Who Sold the Moon. However, for that edition, Heinlein rewrote the story to include the knowledge of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. By 1950 the public and science readers knew much more about atomic energy. I’m guessing “Blowups Happen” was already outdated even in 1950.

Ten years makes a lot of difference in a science fiction story, although I doubt anyone in 1940 could have imagined what the next five years would bring, much less ten. Science fiction writers do not and cannot predict the future, but we do have to admire Heinlein for imagining the political implications of a country having atomic energy in 1940, and what the dangers might be for developing peacetime uses of atomic power. He gets the details wrong, but what he gets right is the essence of great science fiction. By the way, in the 1940 version, the power plant is called a bomb, but in 1950 the label was changed to pile. I’m guessing Heinlein imagined the power plant as being a controlled explosion.

Within the 1940 version, Heinlein described a nuclear explosion as “forty million times as explosive as TNT. The figure was meaningless that way. He thought of it, instead, as a hundred million tons of high explosive, two hundred million aircraft bombs as big as the biggest ever used.” To give his readers a better picture, Heinlein has his character say to himself about ordinary big bombs, “He had once seen such a bomb dropped when he had been serving as a temperament analyst for army aircraft pilots. The bomb had left a hole big enough to hide an apartment house. He could not imagine the explosion of a thousand such bombs, much, much less a hundred million of them.”

Then in the 1950 version, the same character thinks of it as “a hundred million tons of high explosive, or as a thousand Hiroshimas.” Heinlein didn’t need to write anything more. By then, readers had seen films about atomic explosions. They knew exactly what that meant, but in 1940 I doubt readers could imagine anything close to reality.

Psychiatry and psychology are so commonly talked about today that we also forget that it was new at one time. I’m an old movie fan, and psychiatry became a hot subject matter for films after WWII and into the 1950s. I’m guessing Heinlein was doing just as much speculation about the future impact of psychiatry as he was doing for atomic energy in “Blowups Happen.” But how sophisticated his Heinlein’s expectations about the field? Heinlein loved popular scientific speculations published in popular books of the 1930s. But he also was a fan of many pseudo-scientific works too, stuff we’d consider New Age today. In his Future History stories, Heinlein seemed just as interested in the soft sciences as the hard sciences.

Heinlein describes Dr. Lentz, the top psychiatrist of the day this way:

Notwithstanding King’s confidence, Lentz did not show up until the next day. The superintendent was subconsciously a little surprised at his visitor’s appearance. He had pictured a master psychologist as wearing flowing hair, an imperial, and having piercing black eyes. But this man was not overly tall, was heavy in his framework, and fat—almost gross. He might have been a butcher. Little, piggy, faded-blue eyes peered merrily out from beneath shaggy blond brows. There was no hair anywhere else on the enormous skull, and the apelike jaw was smooth and pink. He was dressed in mussed pajamas of unbleached linen. A long cigarette holder jutted permanently from one corner of a wide mouth, widened still more by a smile which suggested non-malicious amusement at the worst that life, or men, could do. He had gusto.

Heinlein, Robert. The Man Who Sold the Moon and Orphans of the Sky (p. 131). Baen Books. Kindle Edition.

Is Heinlein serious about giving us a shrink that goes around in public in his pajamas? Is Heinlein just imagining a colorful future with odd fashions? Or is this satire? Would 1940 science fiction readers believe the fashions we see on TV today? Heinlein had his sociological speculations too. There is another scene at a bar where the atomic energy scientists go to unwind, that features a B-girl who is also a prostitute. Such women were common in the 1930s, but it was a lower-class thing. I got the feeling that Heinlein expected society would change its attitudes toward these women in the future.

But, we’re back to my original question. Is “Blowups Happen” a fun science fiction story to read in 2022? I don’t think so. Scientific lectures can slow a story, or even ruin it, but scientific lectures about out-of-date science are even harder to endure. Would “Blowups Happen” read better today if he had left out all the lectures? They weren’t needed for the story. Lester del Rey’s “Nerves” is another story about atomic energy from the 1940s that’s outdated, but it still works dramatically. It has problems with length, and some plotting, but overall, I remember it being a better story. I don’t know if Heinlein wanted to be educational, show off his knowledge, or provide evidence for his speculation, but I don’t think the story needed those infodumps.

“Blowups Happen” does offer one lesson for would-be science fiction writers. Speculating about the near future will have the greatest impact on current readers, but you risk writing a story with a limited shelf life. Most stories never become classics anyway, so I think Heinlein boosted his career significantly in 1940 by writing “Blowups Happen.” And there is a downside to writing far-future science fiction that’s pure storytelling. I find science fiction that feels like fantasy fiction far less appealing. Although “Blowups Happen” is now just a historical curiosity I still admire it for Heinlein’s ambition. I seldom find science fiction stories with that kind of ambition being written today.

Near-future SF stories with serious speculation do show up but are rare. I am impressed with The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, and even though it just came out, I’ve already heard good things about it from several readers. There’s something exciting about science fiction that speculates about the near future with ideas that could come true.

James Wallace Harris, 12/12/22

Posted on by jameswharris · 3 Comments

“Coventry” by Robert A. Heinlein

“Coventry” by Robert A. Heinlein first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in July of 1940 and marks the end of his first year of publishing science fiction with eight stories. “Coventry” is also part of his Future History series and was first published in book form in Heinlein’s collection Revolt in 2100, which is still in print, including audio and ebook.

Heinlein’s legacy suggests he was hardcore libertarian, and that might have been true at times, but not always. “Coventry” shows a streak of liberalism or even utopianism. The “Coventry” of the title refers to land set aside for those citizens who do not want to abide by the Covenant, a future constitution of what the United States became after the Crazy Years. Under the Covenant, all citizens are guaranteed the freedom to pursue their happiness so long as they don’t commit violence against another citizen.

The story begins with the trial of David MacKinnon who is convicted of damaging another citizen’s freedom. David freely admits he punched out a guy but rationalizes he committed no offense because the guy had insulted him. The judge tells him that’s no excuse. I thought this was rather amusing because, in later Heinlein novels, Heinlein’s characters often claim that rudeness should be a capital offense, and sometimes his characters do kill people for being offensive.

David is given a choice: go to Coventry, or submit to psychological reeducation. David has a big ego, and he’s quite self-righteous about his actions, so he accepts being sent to Coventry. However, he has the illusion that it’s a wide-open frontier and he can go there and live in peace like a pioneer of old. He is allowed to take anything he wants into Coventry and converts his savings into fancy camping equipment.

Coventry is behind a giant force-field, and well guarded. David is told he can ask to leave at any time if he’s willing to undergo psychological reeducation. He swears that will never happen, and they open a portal in the barrier just large enough for David to drive his all-terrain vehicle through it. At first, Coventry seems like open free land, but soon David arrives at a guard station where he’s told he must pay customs duty. This enrages him and he refuses. The guards, which he thinks of as thugs, take all his possessions and start dividing them up. Once again, David goes before a court. He soon discovers that there are governments and laws within Coventry, three of them, each with their own approach to how things should be run. David is outraged that Coventry isn’t the unspoiled frontier he imagined. Again, he refuses to cooperate with the local laws and gets himself imprisoned. Eventually, David realizes he was wrong and wants to leave Coventry, but it’s not that easy.

It seems to me, Heinlein uses Coventry to model America in 1940, and the country of the Covenant to model how he imagines life should be in the United States. Heinlein also imagines another near utopia in his early novel Beyond This Horizon (Astounding, April and May 1942). Heinlein’s unpublished novel, For Us the Living written in 1938-1939 is also near utopian. Much of it was recycled for his early stories and Beyond This Horizon.

But after WWII, I’m not sure Heinlein ever imagined a positive big government again. Many of his stories, maybe even most, had characters trying to escape a big government by becoming a space pioneer, or by overthrowing a government. So it’s quite interesting to see Heinlein imagining a large well-run government. Wait — I’ve thought of one exception, Starship Troopers. If you can recall another, leave a comment.

And when I said Heinlein was being near utopian, I don’t mean he was advocating a perfect society, but one that was very well designed and had few problems. Heinlein obviously thought we could do much better than we were in 1940.

One of my friends regularly tells me she wishes the states could be divided up between conservatives and liberals so we didn’t have to live with each other. “Coventry” is Heinlein imagining this wish in a way. Most people accept the big government of the Covenant, while the anti-government folks are sent to a reservation where anything goes. What Heinlein does in the story is say anything goes leads to power structures run by strong men and gives three examples. One is a theocracy made of renegades from his earlier short novel, “If This Goes On—.”

Heinlein’s collection Revolt in 2100 includes “If This Goes On—,” “Coventry,” and “Misfit.” But you really need to read all the other early Future History stories, and to get them you need to track down a used copy of The Past Through Tomorrow. See my “Heinlein’s Super Collections” about which short stories collections to buy used.

Of course, what I’m calling a near utopia Heinlein might call a libertarian society. However, it is a big government running things so everyone is given the maximum freedom to pursue their happiness. I’m not sure theories about small government existed back then, not in the way some conservatives think about it now.

For those Heinlein fans who really want to get into Heinlein’s politics and philosophy, I highly recommend reading “Chapter 5: Heinlein and Civic Society” and “Chapter 6: Heinlein and the Civic Revolution” in Farah Mendlesohn’s The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein. I was at first somewhat disappointed with her book because she didn’t go story by story and write about each in depth. But as I write these reviews, I can see of the value of her writing about them theme by theme, referencing the stories by how each fit into Heinlein’s beliefs. It makes it hard to quote her about any particular story, but if you read each of her chapters as a whole, it has an overall cumulative summation of all of Heinlein’s stories.

“Coventry” came in first in the Analytical Laboratory but there were not any devoted letters about it in the letter column. I’ve been a little disappointed with the letter column because Campbell doesn’t give that much space to the discussion of stories. And quite often fans wrote about the artwork instead. At this time, Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard was still getting most of the story discussion comments. I need to read that novel. (“Brass Tacks” was divided into two sections. The first part was story comments, and the second section was devoted to science discussion. I think Campbell preferred spending space on this section more.)

James Wallace Harris, 12/3/22

Posted on by jameswharris · 7 Comments

“The Roads Must Roll” by Robert A. Heinlein

“The Roads Must Roll” is one of Heinlein’s most famous shorter works, yet I’ve never been very fond of it. Science fiction writers love to be inventors. They often imagine a gadget and then write a story around their imaginary invention. Secretly, I think they want to think up things before anyone else, and then get credit for them in the future after real inventors get around to building their fictional machines.

In “The Roads Must Roll” Heinlein envisions giant moving walkways, called Roadways or Roadcities, that carry people over vast distances at high speed. Just picture an airport slideway scaled up to take people throughout cities, between cities, and even across the country. To me, it’s always been one of the dumbest ideas Heinlein ever had.

Just contemplate a moving roadway that carries a million passengers a day. If one thing goes wrong, a million people are stranded. It’s much saner to have one car break down and allow 999,999 people to keep on schedule. And what about freight shipping? How do you push boxes or freight containers onto the roadways? Heinlein has passengers getting onto these moving roadways by stepping onto a slow-moving 5-mile-per-hour belt and gradually moving across a series of faster belts until they reach a wide 100-mile-per-hour belt where people can sit, shop, or eat while they travel.

The energy expenditure for such a system would be far greater than having individual cars and trucks. However, Heinlein did imagine these roadways being powered by solar panels. And it’s interesting that Heinlein, who was such an individualist, promoted mass transit for the future.

Once again Heinlein begins his story with a public discussion, a union meeting with an agitator. Heinlein loved public discussions because they give the illusion of drama and action. The plot involves Shorty van Kleeck, the Chief Deputy Engineer, convincing union members they are more important than any other worker in America, so they should be the leaders of America making the important decisions. Van Kleeck proposes a “New Order” in which he plans to be the leader. Concurrent with this action, Larry Gaines, the Chief Engineer of the Diego-Reno Road Town, has to entertain the Minister of Transport for Australia, Mr. Blekinsop, who wants to learn about the rolling roads technology. This allows Heinlein to do a lot of infodumping and describe how the roadcities work. While taking Blekinsop on a trip on a roadway, there is a catastrophic failure, and Gaines leaps into action. Eventually, Gaines meets up with van Kleeck and learns the failure was intentional, a demonstration of power by van Kleeck and his revolutionaries.

Most of the action sequences involve Heinlein showing Gaines’s importance. He’s able to snub the mayor and governor because his experience and knowledge trump everything. This is an annoying trick Heinlein often uses. Heinlein likes to set up superman-like characters who answer to no one. I can’t help but feel that’s how Heinlein felt about himself. It’s rather ironic that Heinlein worshipped the military and often used its structure in his stories, but personality-wise, he was a go-your-own-way kind of guy.

Heinlein was involved in California politics in the 1930s, and he saw a lot of violence, especially union and political violence. I assumed that experience inspired this story. Plus Heinlein was also obsessed with the American Revolution and revolutionaries. My hunch has always been that Heinlein wanted to design a better society. Heinlein pictured the roadway system being managed by the United States Academy of Transport, with workers having ranks.

Heinlein also likes to read books about social theory, and quite often used such theories in his stories. In “The Roads Must Roll” Heinlein even mentions a book by name, Concerning Function: A Treatise on the Natural Order in Society by Paul Decker, published in 1930. In this case, Heinlein is using “The Roads Must Roll” to attack the book.

I can’t find this book on ABEbooks or Wikipedia, nor in a quick search on Google. Google’s top returns deal with “The Roads Must Road.” So I don’t know if this was a real book or not. If anyone knows, leave a comment.

Overall, “The Roads Must Roll” flows along, full of action, and good world-building, with 1940s slang, and wit. Heinlein is a good storyteller, even when I disagree with his speculation. “The Roads Must Roll” was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, where science fiction writers voted for their favorite science fiction stories that were published between 1929 and 1964. “The Roads Must Roll” actually came in 7th in the overall voting after “Nightfall,” “A Martian Odyssey,” “Flowers for Algernon,” “Microcosmic God,” “First Contact,” and “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” and tieing with “”Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” “Coming Attraction,” and “The Cold Equations.” Obviously, “The Roads Must Roll” is a well-loved story by the first generations of science fiction writers.

[I sure would love to know which stories from 1929-1964 science fiction writers working in 2022 would vote for today.]

“The Roads Must Roll” came in second in the Analytical Laboratory (August 1940). But then serials usually come in first, and it was a big one, Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard. However, a letter writer praised the seriousness of Final Blackout, If This Goes On, and “The Roads Must Roll’ as proof that science fiction wasn’t just escapism. Another reader focused just on Heinlein:

It’s interesting, that on the cover of the June 1940 Astounding, which illustrates “The Roads Must Roll” we see individual vehicles shown in action. I assume they are the support vehicles the maintenance crews use below the rolling roads, and even then, they are not like how I pictured them in the story. The interior illustration got attacked in the letter column as being just a smear. It’s a shame that neither illustration pictures the roadway like Heinlein did in the story.

James Wallace Harris, 11/26/22

Posted on by jameswharris · 1 Comment

“Let There Be Light” by Robert A. Heinlein

In 1939 Heinlein wrote several stories that were rejected by John W. Campbell. Heinlein wanted to save his name for stories appearing in Astounding and invented pen names for “lesser” publications. I think that was a bad idea. He sold “Let There Be Light” to Frederik Pohl for Super Science Stories and it was run under the Lyle Monroe byline. But if you look at the table of contents below, you’ll see that L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller weren’t protecting their Astounding reputations.

Heinlein should have used his own name for all of his stories. It would have helped out the smaller markets. Frederik Pohl practically begged Heinlein to let him publish it under his real name. Heinlein evidently felt anything Campbell rejected wasn’t first-class and he didn’t want his name associated with such stories. Heinlein obviously wanted to shape his public persona. Doesn’t that reveal a kind of egotism that disassociates flaws from their self-identity? Heinlein is perfect. Who knows who those other guys are?

Even when Campbell published two stories by Heinlein in a single issue he should have put Heinlein’s own name on them. Heinlein would have been an even greater phenomenon than he was, even with his flawed stories. Using all those names split up his reputation and momentum. And Heinlein shouldn’t have assumed Campbell was the arbiter of quality in science fiction.

“Let There Be Light” opens with Dr. Archibald Douglas getting a telegram from Dr. M. L. Martin. Martin informs Douglas “ARRIVING CITY LATE TODAY STOP DESIRE CONFERENCE COLD LIGHT YOUR LABORATORY TEN PM.” Douglas is affronted at the presumption that an unknown character could barge into his lab. Douglas consults Who’s Who in Science, and discovers Martin has a string of degrees and many prestige appointments and papers but is a biologist. Douglas figured a biologist cannot possibly connect to his work in physics.

When Douglas finally meets Martin, M. L. turns out to be Mary Lou, and she’s a beautiful young blonde. This is rather amusing since Heinlein makes all beautiful women redheads after he marries his third wife Virginia. In the 1940 magazine version, Mary Lou is compared to Sally Rand, who Heinlein and his wife Leslyn knew. In the 1950 book version, she’s compared to Marilyn Monroe. I’m surprised he didn’t switch it to a famous redhead. And Mary Lou can’t believe Archie is Dr. Douglas because he looks like a gangster. In the 1940 version, he’s compared to George Raft, but in the book version, no person is mentioned.

Heinlein did some other minor tweaking to the story when it was reprinted in book form. Strangely, the magazine version used the word hell frequently, and I think a damn was in there too, and Heinlein removed them. He also took out some of the gooiest of the sweet talk.

“Let There Be Light” turns into an invention story, but instead of featuring a mad scientist, Heinlein gives us two movie star lookalikes whose dialog sounds like it was written for a 1930s Warner Brothers picture. There’s a fair amount of scientific infodumping which lets the couple invent lighting that sounds like the LED overhead panel in my kitchen, and then solar panels. Of course, this isn’t much of a plot, so Heinlein throws in the conflict of evil corporations keeping innovative inventions off the market to protect the economics of older technology. That’s still not much of a plot.

Heinlein had spent years involved with California politics and was still griping about corruption. Even in the 1960s, I used to hear stories, often from my uncles, about how inventions were kept off the market, such as car engines that could get 200 miles to the gallon. There have always been conspiracy stories. Heinlein expresses other leftist ideas in the story too.

According to William Patterson, “Let There Be Light” was originally titled “Prometheus ‘Carries the Torch'” and it was also rejected by Thrilling Wonder Stories.

“Let There Be Light” isn’t a particularly good story. Its pluses, at least for us today, is it features a positive role for a female character. And it predicts solar power. So why did Campbell reject it? Patterson quotes Campbell’s rejection letter to Heinlein:

So Campbell is afraid of brainy women? That could explain a lot about Astounding/Analog. Heinlein loved brainy women, Leslyn and Virginia proved it. It’s just a shame he couldn’t write better dialogue when it came to men and women. It often seemed like poor dialogue cribbed from B-movie screwball comedies, and in his later novels, flirty dialogue sounded like a twelve-year-old girl trying to write a grownup romance after studying porn films.

Still, I enjoyed the story. It has no lasting value. We can stick a star on it for having a smart woman character, and another for predicting the solar energy industry. But that’s hardly enough to make it a good story for modern readers. Heinlein should have published it with his own name. He should have owned up to it. No one expects a writer to hit one out of the park every time they’re up to bat. And isn’t it odd that he wouldn’t put his name on it in 1940 for a magazine that few people would read, but would admit paternity when it came to a hardback publication in 1950?

Heinlein wasn’t the only contributor showing powerful women, the cover artist paints a fully-clothed woman shooting a BEM.

James Wallace Harris, 10/22/22