Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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reference, made by a character, suddenly reveals that the future world has completely misinterpreted or forgotten some historical fact that is a commonplace of our world, and the fallibility of “history” is pointed out. These are Heinlein’s.
Heinlein’s first published story, “Life-Line,” embeds, Dos Passos– like, a collection of newspaper headlines, telegrams, and court transcripts within its narrative in order to tell its tale. The story’s specifically sciencefictional accomplishment is the image of the branching pink vine with which it effects its major informative exposition. Rhetorical variety was a concern for Heinlein from the beginning. But it was in later works that he was to add to this received rhetoric a whole new battery of his own creation. And every SF writer, when negotiating some particular expository lump, must feel in competition with Heinlein’s purely informative skill—one of his hallmarks from the outset.
The concept that a necessary and socially acceptable violence rises as leisure rises was an idea first presented in science fiction in Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon (1942). This has been a continuing attribute in the presentation of science fiction’s alternative societies ever since. A writer like Joanna Russ uses such an idea both in an unpleasant picture of Earth, in And Chaos Died, and in an idyllic picture of the planet Whileaway, in The Female Man. This is an example of the kind of thinking that separates the science-fictional presentation of alternative societies from the schematic utopian thinking of the nineteenth century and before. I believe it was Damon Knight who first traced out for me, in a 1966 conversation during my first Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference, some of the influences Heinlein’s novella “Gulf” (1949) has exerted on everything from James Bond (“Gulf” is the model for the SForiented espionage tale) to an almost distressing number of things in my own work that I had inadvertently lifted from it! In “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies—” Heinlein singlehandedly almost exhausted the time-paradox story. David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself presents itself as a virtual homage to the Heinlein tales. Any time-tangled narrative has to be compared with them. That such comparisons are usually so invidious is the main reason such tales are now almost extinct.
Heinlein’s novels have inspired a small bibliography of novel-length responses, from Dickson’s Soldier, Ask Not and Anderson’s Trader to the Stars, through Panshin’s Rite of Passage and my own The Fall of the Towers, to Haldeman’s The Forever War. And if Joanna Russ did not read James Blish’s critique of Heinlein’s metaphysical system in Stranger in a Strange Land shortly before beginning And Chaos Died, I’ll bite my gerbil. (That critique is contained in an October 1961 essay by James Blish, collected in The Issue At Hand, as by William Atheling, Jr., Chicago: Advent, 1964.) In all these works, the writers have taken on the social arguments Heinlein has posed in books like Starship Troopers and tried to wrestle with the contradictions as they have seen them. That these novels date from 1960 to 1974 (and include two Nebula/Hugo winners) gives some indication of how relevant Heinlein’s arguments continue to appear—especially to those who disagree with them!
In 1961 Heinlein published what bids fair to be the most popular SF novel ever written: Stranger in a Strange Land. Blish’s discussion (under the William Atheling, Jr., pseudonym and referred to above) remains to my mind the most balanced evaluation of the book.
The novel that followed it, in 1963, Glory Road, has probably received less attention than any other Heinlein work of comparable size and ambition. This is even stranger when one considers that it is one of Heinlein’s most formally satisfactory novels. The long didactic passages that for some readers mar the later novels (e.g., I Will Fear No Evil or Time Enough For Love) had put in only a comparatively brief appearance in the second half of Starship Troopers; they are almost wholly absent here. The ending involves as grandiose a peripeteia as seen in any Heinlein novel since Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and is far more naturally and believably brought off. And there is a psychological veracity in Oscar’s response to his change of fortune that gives the book a character interest well beyond the earlier book, for all of Citizen’s considerable excellence.
To say, however, that Glory Road was simply overshadowed by the success of Stranger in a Strange Land is to indulge a certain disingenuousness. A twenty-one-year-old reader when the novel was first serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under a lush Ed Emsh cover in forest greens gilded with sunlight, I remember the hostility with which the young SF readers among my acquaintances responded to it—the same readers who had had little except praise for Stranger. For a sense of that ire, the reader can check the scant page in which Panshin dismisses the novel in his Heinlein in Dimension (Chicago: Advent, 1968—though written at least five years earlier). Considered work on Heinlein is still rather scarce, which makes Panshin’s book—about as one-dimensional a critique as one can imagine—useful if only by default.1 But Panshin’s truly energetic critique of Heinlein is his own Nebula award-winning novel Rite of Passage, in which real critical passion is sublated by a truly creative mimesis.
It is interesting to note what this ire was not caused by. It did not generate over the opening sociological fantasia on security and pacifism. We read this today simply aware that it misses the feel of the early ’60s about as widely as is possible. But Heinlein’s basic assumption—that those who didn’t want to fight in Vietnam were the same young men who were after suburban security and two cars in the garage—was offered, I think, more as a logical speculation. Like nine out of ten such speculations, it was simply wrong. (Those who questioned the war were, by and large, the same people who were questioning the suburban ideal. Those who accepted that ideal were largely the ones who accepted the war. If there were a few people who fitted Heinlein’s description, they simply were not the significant portion “Oscar” seems to think they were.) But in 1963 Heinlein’s explanation was easier to accept—if only as science fiction.
Nor was the ire caused by the locker-room style descriptions of “liberated” sex—with its downright British fixation on spanking. This tends to strike the contemporary reader as about as close to smuttiness as the “traveling-salesman banter” (James Blish’s all too accurate cut in the above-mentioned article [The Issue at Hand, p. 71]) that Heinlein frequently uses for dialogue can get. To understand the context fully, however, one must remember the absolute printing restrictions of the time, which forbade both four-letter words and any but the coyest references to the actuality of sex. In 1963 the word shit’s one occurrence on the soundtrack of a film (Shirley Clarke’s The Connection) rendered it a cause célèbre that could be seen only at private showings; and the realistic street dialogue of a commercial film like The Brinks Job (1978), at which no one even raises an eyebrow today, would have been unthinkable. Both the pulp tradition and the printing restrictions gave a certain valorization to such attempts at ribaldry; and the audience of 1963 was probably more prepared to take Heinlein’s message of cultural and sexual pluralism on the terms in which it was offered.
No, the ire, as I remember it, was specifically at the novel’s fantasy superstructure. And it is precisely this fantasy superstructure that allows the novel the flexibility to achieve the formal excellence of which I have spoken.
Young Galahad (aka Evelyn Cyril Gordon) is pricking o’er the plaine of life when, on the Isle de Levant, he runs into She Who Must Be Obeyed and her grandson, Alberich-cum-Sancho Panza, all three of whom then journey down the Yellow Brick Road until, after a bit of hedonistic horseplay and a variety of dragon slaying, they are to the Dark Tower come. After a climactic swordfight with Cyrano de Bergerac himself (“I was sorry I hadn’t asked him his name. He seemed to think I should know it.” Glory Road, p. 199), the Egg of the Phoenix is rescued (who was that Russian sorcerer in The Firebird who kept his deathless soul in an egg…?) and returned to its rightful place at Center. Irony subverts archetype; and the message of the book, spelled out in the final eighty pages with surprising didactic restraint, is: A hero is as much a function of his environment as of his own personality.
Science fiction? Every bit of it.
There’s an only somewhat post-Einsteinian explanation for the whole thing, involving 20 parallel universes and a