The Thin Red Line

If you are not already a Robert Heinlein fan, Grumbles From The Grave is Not the place to start. A collection of Heinlein’s private correspondence edited by Heinlein’s widow Virginia, Grumbles is an extraordinary glimpse into the life of an exceptional author and a no-holds-barred look at the Business of writing.

Fans of Heinlein’s fiction may not be surprised to learn that the character he most resembled in real life is Jubal Harshaw in Stranger In A Strange Land, the unsentimental writer who makes a very comfortable living giving his editors and readers Exactly what they Want. From his very first efforts writing for Heinlein was first and foremost a business. He quickly developed a canny understanding of what editors want and will pay for and he Always gave them exactly that. He sold a Lot of books and made a Lot of money from writing which is something that is not easy to do. (Much like in the performing arts the huge money superstars like Heinlein are the rare exception to the sad fact that most writers and artists earn very little for their efforts, even when they are good.)

The flower power generation for whom Heinlein’s books and particularly Stranger, which became a kind of bible to them, were a rite of passage must read may be disappointed to learn that all of his writing about sexual liberation and plural marriages was written because it was a story they would buy and not because Heinlein particularly believed in it. By all accounts he had a very conventional and faithful marriage which bore much resemblance to the sort of marriage good boys from Missouri around the turn of the century were expected to make and keep to, rather than any of the muti-amorous arrangements with emotional depth that Heinlein was so noted for in his later works of adult science fiction.

In addition to hard core Heinlein fans this book is Highly Recommended to aspiring writers, those who are interested in earning an income from writing rather than those who write as art. While the publishing scene today is certainly very different than that prevailing when Heinlein wrote this correspondence with his various editors and agents, this inside look at how Heinlein handled the Business of being a writer can provide a number of invaluable lessons to anyone trying to earn money by typing words on a screen.

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Most people know Orson Scott Card as a science fiction writer. And now, I do as well. But my first experience reading Card came about in 1993. I was staying overnight with friends in Baltimore en route to that year’s March On Washington for Gay & Lesbian Civil Rights and my friend Carla, who has since made a name for herself as a science fiction writer and comic artist and whom I’ve sadly lost touch with, told me about a book she had recently read and lent me her copy.

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Robert A. Heinlein

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Usually spoken as the acronym TANSTAAFL (pronounced Tan-staffle) it is the national motto of Luna, the Earth’s moon, which in the 2100’s is thriving as an independent nation-state. Dr. Richard Ames (aka Colonel Colin Campbell) is a resident of Golden Rule, a luxury space habitat orbiting Luna. While dining late one evening at one of the habitat’s classiest and priciest restaurants with Miss Gwen Novak (aka Hazel Stone), a man comes to their table and delivers a cryptic message. The mysterious messenger is immediately killed by a poison dart and is quickly and mysteriously whisked away by extraordinarily well-timed waiters.

So begins The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, my first exposure to the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein. In the following 24 hours Campbell and Stone will fall in love, marry, disarm and kidnap a man sent to assassinate them, are evicted from their apartments on Golden Rule, accused of a murder and barely escape from the habitat, disguised as a Japanese woman and her samurai in a rent-a-wreck Spaceship from Hertz.

What appealed to me most about this book, at a time when I thought that I did not like science fiction, because I neither understood or appreciated the science in most science fiction, was that with Heinlein it never mattered. Heinlein was a master story teller and entertainer and his books were always written such that you neither had to know nor be able to understand the science behind the plot, although he always explained it. And the explanations were always easily understandable even to the non-scientist.

Suffice it to say that the newlywed’s marriage does not get any less zany or frantic in an adventure that will take them to the other end of the galaxy, several thousand years into the future and back and end ambiguously with them in a fight for their lives attempting to save a computer named Adam Selene, a computer said to have “woken up” and become sentient. If you enjoy a fast paced, comic adventure story this one is Highly Recommended.

Equally frenetic and comic in it’s way, Friday is the story of an artificial person or AP, named Marjorie Baldwin who works as a combat courier for a mysterious un-named quasi governmental espionage agency. Created in a laboratory from various genetic materials, artificial persons (”my father was a test tube, my mother was a gene knife”) are designed to be and in fact Are completely, beautifully, fully human. Exceptional intelligence, strength and other abilities enable them to do all sorts of otherwise impossible jobs. Because their unique and amazing abilities are resented, AP’s are often regarded as super-human or less-than-human and are widely reviled in society. Most hide their status and often claim to be orphans when asked about their parents.

Thus Heinlein is able to work in some pretty sophisticated social commentary on prejudice and discrimination without ever mentioning black vs white or any other real life examples of discrimination which might inflame animosities or make it appear that he was taking sides. This novel also provides examples of the types of plot and scenarios that earned Heinlein a reputation as a “sexual libertarian”– group marriages and casual promiscuity are presented in a tone that is clearly proscriptive rather than judgmental. This theme of sexual liberty would appear again in many other Heinlein works including Time Enough For Love and To Sail Beyond The Sunset. Highly Recommended.

Stranger in a Strange Land, widely regarded as a hippie “bible”, and considered by some of the free love generation as a religion or at least a life plan manual, is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised by Martians after his human parents and the rest of their space exploration team perished. A subsequent space ship arrives and spirits the now fully grown off-spring back to earth and things quickly get antic in the classic Heinlein manner.

Due to a peculiarity in Earth’s inheritance laws and the terms of the contract under which the ship carrying his parents was sent to Mars, Mr. V. M. Smith is legally the owner of all mineral, development and other rights for Mars. The fact that Mars actually belongs to the Martians quite escapes the pompous governmental flunkies, business executives, slimy television preachers and reporters of every stripe who are all insistently drawn to the Man From Mars. He quite fails to understand what all of the fuss is about. You see, he thinks in Martian. And that makes quite a difference.

Brought from the returning space ship to a hospital to recover from space sickness and adjust to Earth’s much heavier gravity, Mike displays a number of extraordinary behaviors, such as slipping into a catatonic trance when nervous or excited. Spirited from the hospital by a kind-hearted nurse who sees the dangers implied by the many people desperately trying to sneak in to see her patient the two take refuge with one of Heinlein’s most memorable upper-middle aged male curmudgeons, Dr. Jubal Harshaw (who also appears in several other Heinlein novels).

In an extremely clever maneuver orchestrated by Harshaw, Smith appoints Joseph Douglass, Secretary General of the Federation of Free States, Earth’s de facto planet-wide government, as his agent, thus neutralizing the threat of his many sycophants and shifting it onto Douglass, who in a manner prescient of Ronald Reagan’s government run by Nancy and her astrologer is guided in all things by his wife Alice, the classic power behind the throne.

Thus shielded from the dangers of his exceptional wealth, Mike begins the process of learning human language and culture and does so at an astonishing rate. Mike consumes entire encyclopedias as quickly as most people read dime store novels. After a season of learning, Mike sets off with Jill, the nurse who spirited him from the hospital, and sets out to work as a sideshow magician with a traveling carnival. His Martian-taught ability to move, create and destroy matter by Thought (Martian’s find the exertion expended by humans to do such things physically strange and pitiable) enable him to produce some amazing effects but his lack of showmanship dooms the act to failure.

Learning from his mistakes and inspired by the lead preacher of The Fosterites, a religious sect that might be described as Mormons go Vegas, Mike earns a Divinity degree and starts his own church. He teaches his followers to speak, then read, then think in Martian and his church is a wild success, with rituals and practices that are at once familiar and utterly foreign to readers familiar with modern day Christianity. In a very Christ-like finale Mike marches unafraid into a pack of hostile rowdies who kill him. His followers retrieve his body and take it home to eat, thus closing the circle of life in the Martian way.

Stranger In A Strange Land introduced into the vernacular, “I am only an egg”, an expression of the individual’s insignificance in comparison to the group and of the long road of learning required to become an elder, which for a Martian means watching and learning from the world around him until so much is grokked that the next stage of growth is not just possible, it is inevitable. Which brings us finally to the word grok, Heinlein’s most unusual and enduring contribution to the language. Because I do not speak Martian, I do not yet grok grok. For me, waiting is not yet filled. If after reading the book, you too fail to grok grok, Wikipedia may be of some help. Highly recommended, particularly to anyone who ever was or ever wanted to be a hippie.

(c) 2007 Alan L. Jobe

Grateful thanks to JD whose encyclopedic knowledge of Heinlein and skillful editing allowed this post to be written in one third the time at double the quality.

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Ron and I went out with a couple of friends to a Chinese buffet last night (I pigged out on the king crab legs among other things) and seeing table after table laid out with all kinds of wonderful food brought to mind Hungry Planet, an over-sized pictorial book that documents what thirty families in twenty-four countries eat in a week.

Each family is photographed with their weeks’ worth of groceries. It is a study in contrasts. From the family in a refugee camp in Chad shown sitting on a blanket with a few small bags of grain that are their ration from a relief organization to the North Carolina family who’s weekly haul includes two large pizzas and lots of fast food containers or the Greenland family who hunt the walrus, duck and polar bear featured prominently on their table. Each family is profiled and you get a real sense of who these people are and why they eat as they do. Interspersed with the family stories are essays by a number of other authors on such topics as “diabeasity” (a newly coined term for the closely related issues of diabetes and obesity that are becoming endemic throughout much of the world) and “nutrition conversion”, a term which refers to people whose health was previously threatened by not having enough to eat who now face the “diabeasity” problem from eating too much of the wrong things. The writing and photography are both excellent and this one is well worth picking up next time you are at the library.

It is only a coincidence that I happened to read Hungry Planet at the same time as Beggars And Choosers, but the themes mesh in an interesting way. A somewhat high brow science fiction novel set in the 2100’s, Beggars And Choosers portrays a United States radically transformed by genetic engineering. Physically striking and remarkably intelligent people, who are called “donkeys” live in high security enclaves where they pursue intellectually challenging occupations and pay heavy taxes, while the un-modified, who are called “Livers” are no longer expected to work at all– they are fed at cafes and obtain clothing and other necessities from warehouses, all of which are operated by robots and provided free of charge by politicians in return for votes. Then a small group of super-enhanced people, called “the sleepless” (they have been modified such that they no longer need to sleep, have very long life-spans and are so highly intelligent they make the donkeys look like livers) concoct an injectable substance that makes humans completely impervious to disease and able to transform sunlight and exposure to soil into glucose, such that they no longer need to eat (although they still can). The political fall out from this extraordinary development is quite surprising. Recommended.

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My intention to post about a different book every day has come to seem hopelessly optimistic. I have been temping at the libraries more or less full time and just have not found much time to read or blog lately. Next week I am working 6 days and have two interviews scheduled and am hoping the following week I will begin as a regular, benefited type.

Meanwhile I did get around to finishing Leaping To The Stars, and I liked it. The main characters did seem to continue to grow and develop and the adventure continued unabated, with another kidnapping, another secret plot and lots more surprises. I was much slower than Charles to trust Jmee again (she being the girl who had betrayed him and his family back in book one) and there were again times when the middle aged author rather than the juvenile character seemed to be speaking the long soliloquies, but overall the book works and it’s fun. And sometimes, that’s enough.

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So I finished the sequel to Jumping Off The Planet. And I liked it. If anything, the Heinlein influence is even stronger in this installment, particularly the concept of a computer "waking up" and becoming "sentient", which Heinlein examined at some length in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. But much as I would love to castigate Gerrold for "stealing the main ideas" or for being derivative, I honestly can’t. To some degree all literature builds on the body of work that has come before it and in this instance Gerrold quite appropriately uses some ideas that Heinlein played with as a jumping off point for a strikingly original tale.

The pace of this novel is much faster and I found myself really turning the pages to see what would happen next. Unfortunately, there were very few of the "inside" jokes this go round. He did manage to slip in the lovely phrase "that Sykes woman", but she is only briefly alluded to and makes no actual appearance in this book. Likewise the Georgia and Olivia characters are mentioned a few times but only in passing.

I did find myself thinking several times that much of the reflection and dialog attributed to the thirteen year old narrator was far beyond what could reasonably be believed of even the most precocious young teenager. At times even the older brother seemed to be speaking the words and thoughts of the sixty year old author, rather than what would seem reasonable for the seventeen year old character. In fairness, these flaws detract little from the story. Upon finishing the book, I promptly logged into the library catalog to request the final volume of the trilogy (which is not available at my branch). This is perhaps the strongest indication that I really liked it, much as I didn’t want to.

On a personal note, all fingers crossed today, please. I have an interview at 1pm for a position at the Dupont library branch and am hoping that this may be when I finally land the fully benefited regular position I have been aiming for.

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Happy Birthday to me. Forty-three today, egad. Working a longish shift at Eatonville library, blogging on my breaks, and contemplating growing older and growing up as I push my cart through the stacks. Wondering if perhaps maturity means learning to accept that human are confoundingly compex creatures and learning to celebrate what is good about each person even when what is bad is so glaring it knocks you over the head. This is not a strictly rhetorical excercise. I actually have a problem. Last night I finished reading David Gerrold’s Jumping Off The Planet. And I liked it.

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