Robert Heinlein at 100

How the science fiction master created the template for our looser, hipper, more pluralist world.

Brian Doherty from the August/September 2007 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Heinlein's detractors ignored the fact that military service made up only a small portion of that public service. The novel kept its occasional paeans to authority and discipline strictly within the military context, not meant to apply to all human relations. It also explained that active military men were not permitted to hold public office and were in fact held in low regard by the rest of the culture.

The choice to enter the service and earn the franchise was both voluntary and rare. The society in Troopers was, despite such a restricted democracy, one where "personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits." Still, Heinlein's insistence on the importance and glory of the military, and of often brutal discipline within that context, left him, as Disch wrote, "able to amaze and appall the liberal imagination like almost no other SF writer."

Heinlein the Hippie
The anti-communist, pro-military message of Troopers might seem to suggest that Heinlein stood firmly on the right wing of the larger American individualist tradition. But Troopers appeared as Heinlein was in the middle of writing another novel, one that painted a very different picture.

The interrupted novel became his breakthrough both as a successful "mainstream" writer and as a public influence. It was Stranger in a Strange Land, about a human being raised by Martians who returns to Earth and begins a new religion of free love.

His name is Valentine Michael Smith, and he's brought back to Earth as a total naïf. He falls under the wings of a Heinlein stand-in, a popular fiction writer and curmudgeon named Jubal Harshaw. After many entertaining geopolitical machinations, lots of "everything you know is wrong"-style lectures from Harshaw, and a stint as a carnie, Smith starts a new religion which avers to each and every one of us that "Thou Art God."

Smith has the superhuman ability to, among other things, make both enemies and clothes disappear with just a thought. He teaches that casual sex with your "water brothers" (anyone you choose to share water with--a precious gesture on a desiccated Mars) is in Smith's words "a goodness," not a sin.

Stranger became a slow-burning bestseller, presaging the collapse of traditional sexual and religious mores in the 1960s. It gave the counterculture vocabulary the Martian word grok, that very '60s term meaning really, really understanding something, man, so that you and it were, like, as one. The novel presaged, among other things, the rise of charismatic non-Christian popular cults such as Transcendental Meditation and Scientology. Through Harshaw's lectures and Smith's attempts to teach repressed Earthlings a more loving, open way to live, it opened up the minds of many readers to an observation from George Bernard Shaw that Heinlein adored: that only a barbarian "believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature."

Stranger became a prop in youthful pads across the country. Unlike most such books that marked the owner as hip, this one actually presented a model, long before many American kids would actually try to put it into effect, of communal living. Many would-be "nests" arose, including a neopagan group that explicitly named itself after Smith's Church of All Worlds. Many of these seekers wrote Heinlein letters addressing him as "father" and requesting spiritual guidance. He found this disconcerting.

In 1967 David Crosby wrote a Stranger-inspired song of group love called "Triad" that name-checks "water brothers," and Crosby still enthusiastically considers Heinlein a personal hero. There are echoes of Stranger in the credo of the counterculture bible the Whole Earth Catalog, with its matter-of-fact declaration that "we are as gods and might as well get good at it." ("We all read Robert Heinlein's epic Stranger in a Strange Land as well as his libertarian screed-novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," catalog founder Stewart Brand later wrote. "Hippies and nerds alike reveled in Heinlein's contempt for centralized authority.") With the spirit of Valentine Michael Smith ruling the anti-establishment arenas of the '60s, it was almost inevitable that Ed Sanders, in his book The Family, would declare that Charles Manson modeled his cult on Smith's "nests" of communally living, free-loving, Nietzschean saints.

Heinlein had the claim investigated and found that Manson himself had neither interest in nor knowledge of the book. Still, one of Manson's ladies had named her baby after Smith. A Manson girl also, according to Heinlein's posthumous collection of letters, Grumbles From the Grave, wrote to the Heinleins from jail seeking help. And though Manson was not a fan himself, his vision of antinomian communal living-including the part about killing those you thought needed killing, which Smith was able to do just by willing it-was clearly one way to read Stranger.

In the novel, Smith's new religion angers hidebound humans unwilling to grok the goodness of moving beyond traditional families and even traditional property-an unnecessary expedient among true water brothers, who can successfully and unjealously share. The book ends with Smith becoming a willing martyr, dying to make men both holy and free. That spirit of fighting to the death against a mad culture flowed strong through the upheaval of the '60s, from the peaceful kid sticking a flower in a rifle to the one setting a bomb in a recruitment center.

Heinlein the Libertarian
This one-two punch of curious, powerful novels seems to indicate two opposing strains of thought. But to Heinlein, these dueling visions-a world of sinister alien bugs fought off by powerfully disciplined soldiers, and a beatific Man from Mars teaching humanity how to love freely-had the same message, as he once wrote to his fellow S.F. writer Alfred Bester: "That a man, to be truly human, must be unhesitatingly willing at all times to lay down his life for his fellow man. Both [novels] are based on the twin concepts of love and duty-and how they are related to the survival of our race."

That quote, from a man so proud of his love of freedom he once joked that "Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me," shows yet another side to the Heinlein paradox. As a literary influence on the emerging libertarian movement, Heinlein was second only to Rand.

Yet that statement of self-sacrifice and duty to the species seems as un-Randian as you can get. Heinlein, a human chauvinist, always believed freedom and responsibility were linked. But he would never have thought it proper to impose the duty he saw as the highest human aspiration.

Heinlein once told a visitor, "I'm so much a libertarian that I have no use for the whole libertarian movement." Although never in lockstep with every libertarian attitude, Heinlein's fictions seemed derived from libertarianism before the modern movement even fully existed. Before books like Rand's Fountainhead and F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom sparked the modern libertarian movement in the mid-'40s, Heinlein had published a novelette, "Coventry," about a world whose government was based on a freely entered covenant that said that "no possible act, nor mode of conduct, was forbidden to you, as long as your action did not damage another."