The second monolithic volume in William Patterson ’s fannish life story of Hellenic science fabrication author Robert Heinleinhas just come out , and it explores — in part — the writer ’s foreign political transformation . It all embark on , and stop , with free love .
Heer points out that Heinlein contend to capture audiences on both ends of the political spectrum , partly because he did slew around on it so much himself :
Heinlein ’s most renowned novel , Stranger in a Strange Land ( 1961 ) , was a parry - culture Bible , its message of costless love inspiring not just secular heteroicous communes but also theChurch of All Worlds , a still - flourishing New Age sect incorporate in 1968 . Heinlein was equally beloved in military dress circle , specially for his book Starship Troopers ( 1959 ) , a gung - ho shout - out for organized aggressiveness as the paint to human survival . A good authoritarian book , it included an ode to flogging ( a practice the American Navy banned in 1861 ) and the execution of mentally trouble criminals , yet Heinlein became a hero to libertarian : Milton Friedman praise Heinlein ’s 1966 novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress , which chronicled an anti - statist insurrection on a lunar colony , as a “ wonderful ” book and commend Heinlein for popularizing the sloganTANSTAAFL(“There ai n’t no such matter as a free tiffin ” ) .
Despite Heinlein and his biographer ’s protestations that Heinlein ’s politics were unwaveringly “ extremist progressive ” and “ democratic , ” Heer is able-bodied to piece together a story of Heinlein ’s political playground slide from left to right wing .
Heer write :
by and by in life , as a libertarian , he would rail against “ loafers ” and the wellbeing Department of State but in his leftist days he knew how much he count on the government . As he acknowledged in a 1941 varsity letter , “ This nation has been very good to me , and the taxpayers have keep going me for many years . ” The popularizer of TANSTAAFL ate more than his share of subsidised meals .
In discovering his midlife vocation as a science - fiction writer , Heinlein was aided infinitely by his second wife Leslyn , who he get hitched with in 1932 ( an earlier marriage in 1929 fizzled after a year ) . Both were socialists and sexual radicals — it was an open wedlock with each get many lovers — and in the 1930s both were leading figures in the grassroots movement End Poverty in California ( EPIC ) , make for to force the popular party to the left hand . When Heinlein set forth selling skill fiction in 1939 , Leslyn serve as his un - credited collaborator and storey - editor program …
Heinlein ’s leftwing political relation got him blacklist from the Navy , which did n’t desire his services even during World War II when the military machine was so desperate for trained military recruit that they observe office jobs for disabled soldiers . or else he mold as a civilian engineer in Philadelphia , helping to design the high - altitude pressure level suit of clothes , a precursor to the astronaut suit . In 1944 , Heinlein met Lieutenant Virginia Gerstenfeld , and after the war judge to bring her into his business firm as part of a ménage à trios . Gerstenfeld accepted but her stay with the Heinlein ’s was abbreviated and stormy . This was n’t the first love Triangulum in the Heinlein mansion house ( they had earlier been in a consensual threesome with L. Ron Hubbard ) , but Leslyn find Virginia threatening so the marriage collapsed in 1947 . Heinlein and Gerstenfeld we d the following yr , a matrimony that would also be open .
Whereas Leslyn was a liberal Democrat , Virginia was a button-down Republican . Some of Heinlein ’s friend speculated that his shift in politics was connected to his divorcement and remarriage . That ’s too simplistic an account , but Heinlein acknowledged that Virginia helped “ re - educate ” him on economics .
In truth , Heinlein ’s displacement to the rightfulness took place over a decade , from 1948 to 1957 . In the early 1950s , the Heinleins travelled around the world . The writer was already a Malthusian and a eugenicist , but the misstep greatly exacerbated his demographic desperation and xenophobia . “ The real trouble of the Far East is not that so many of them are communists , but but that there are so many of them , ” he compose in a 1954 travel book ( posthumously published in 1992 ) . Even outer space travel , Heinlein conclude , would n’t be able to open up enough room to get disembarrass of “ them . ” Heinlein handle overpopulation as a personal insult .
Heinlein had caught a bad sheath of the Cold War jitters in the belated 1940s . He accused handsome popular protagonist , notably the director Fritz Lang , of being Stalinist stooges . With Heinlein ’s heavy talent for extrapolation , every East - West standoff seemed like the ending of the world . “ I do not suppose we have better than an even chance of living , as a commonwealth , through the next five twelvemonth , ” he indite an editor program in 1957 . The USSR ’s Sputnik launch in 1957 and Eisenhower ’s moves toward a atomic trial ban the following year both unhinged Heinlein , who called Ike a “ slimy faker . ” By 1961 Heinlein concluded that even though it was a “ fascistic formation , ” the John Birch Society was preferable to liberal and moderate conservatives .
The turn compass point come in 1957 . After that twelvemonth , Heinlein ’s books were no longer reformist explorations of the future tense but hectoring diatribe lamenting the decadence of modernity …
Only on the issue of sex did Heinlein remain faithful to the radicalism of his young , with some of his late book of account portray a time to come where bisexuality is the norm . Yet even on sex , late - period Heinlein is an untrustworthy guidebook . Many reader have been disturbed by the pro - incest disputation found in such books as Farnham ’s Freehold , Time Enough For Love ( 1973 ) , and To Sail Beyond the Sunset ( 1987 ) . Perhaps the best that can be said on Heinlein ’s behalf is that incest served as an documentary correlative to his libertarianism and solipsism .
You must learn the whole articleover at The New Republic
BooksPoliticsRobert Heinlein
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