Robert Heinlein

Robert Heinlein was one of my favorite authors growing up, and like Asimov, I never knew him as a person.

I knew him entirely through his books, and those books did a lot to shape the reader I became. My feelings about his work have grown complicated over the decades. That’s its own kind of honesty. Some authors you love uncritically forever.

Heinlein is one I loved deeply as a kid and have wrestled with as an adult, and I think that tension is worth being honest about in a tribute. He deserved the love, and he deserved the wrestling too.

The book that found me

The first Heinlein book I ever read was Stranger in a Strange Land, and the way it came to me was almost as memorable as the book itself. A great aunt of mine died, and the family received a box of her things. Among them was a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land, and I got to keep it. I was only about twelve years old at the time.

It was an unusual find for a kid who already loved to read but had never really been exposed to science fiction before. That one book cemented all of it for me.

Stranger in a Strange Land is, fittingly, a strange book. It’s certainly not a book for children, and at twelve I was almost certainly too young for a lot of it. But the concepts grabbed me anyway. Life outside the body, alien ways of perceiving the world, the idea of a human raised by Martians coming back to look at humanity from the outside. I found all of it interesting, even the parts I didn’t fully understand yet. It opened a door, and I went straight through it.

Down the Heinlein shelf

Once I’d finished Stranger, I went hunting for everything else Heinlein had written. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Podkayne of Mars. Title after title, whatever I could track down, I read it.

He was a fantastic writer, and his books had a particular flavor that set them apart. They were more technical than most, grounded in real engineering and hard detail, and they were plot-driven instead of character-driven, much like Asimov in that respect.

But Heinlein wasn’t Asimov. He had a military bent that Asimov never had, a fascination with service, discipline, and the machinery of war and command that ran through a lot of his work. He also had nowhere near Asimov’s breadth. Asimov wrote about everything under the sun, while Heinlein stayed closer to his own territory. What he did, though, he did well, and his stories were simply interesting to read. For a stretch of years, I read just about everything of his I could find.

The seam in the middle

Over the years, I’ve found that I can’t reread most of his books, or don’t want to.

They’re well written, but they’re no longer to my taste. Part of that is Heinlein himself. Based on his books, he struck me as something of a militarist and, in his politics, leaning toward something harder than I’m comfortable with. As a kid I didn’t notice any of that. As an adult, it’s hard to miss, and it colors the rereading.

And then there’s the seam. Heinlein was very, very good right up through the first half of Stranger in a Strange Land. You can almost see the exact point in that book where his career splits in two. Stranger starts off strange but recognizable, fairly typical science fiction with a little fantasy and telekinesis worked in. Then, around the midpoint, it turns into a cult story, and it gets very strange in a way I’ve never quite been able to make sense of.

The books he wrote after that point felt to me like he’d turned bizarre, or at least his writing had. A lot of it I simply couldn’t stand. It went somewhere I couldn’t follow.

There’s an edition of Stranger out now that restores all the cuts the original editor made, the uncut version published after Heinlein died. I’ve read it, and my real verdict is that the editor was right. That material needed to be cut.

The restored edition is a tough read. I think I’ve been through Stranger four or five times over my life, and it gets harder each time. That’s a strange thing to say about a book that once meant so much to me, but it’s the truth.

The one that holds up: Mike and the Moon

If Stranger is the complicated one, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is the one I love without reservation. I really, really like that book. It’s a little more character-oriented than Heinlein usually was, and that’s why it works for me. You get invested in the people, especially Mike, the artificial intelligence that runs the Moon and gradually wakes up into something like a person.

The story of the lunar colony’s fight for freedom, the war that follows, the whole struggle for independence, fascinated me when I first read it as a kid in the seventies and it fascinates me still.

I’ve probably read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress a dozen times. Mike is the heart of it. There’s something about an AI learning to understand humor, friendship, and loyalty that’s stayed with me my whole life, and Heinlein wrote it before most people had any real concept of what a computer could be. Even with all my reservations about his other work, that book has a permanent place on my shelf.

What he gave me

Robert Heinlein died on May 8, 1988. He left behind a huge body of work, four Hugo Awards for best novel, and a permanent mark on science fiction. He’s still one of my favorite authors, even with the complications, even knowing his work doesn’t hold up well for me on rereads the way some other writers do. I always felt good reading his stuff. There was a pull to it, a confidence and momentum in his storytelling that made you want to keep turning pages, and that counts for a great deal.

I owe him a real debt. A box of a dead relative’s belongings handed me Stranger in a Strange Land at twelve, and that single book, strange as it is, helped turn me into a lifelong science fiction reader. Whatever I came to think of his politics or his later work, that gift was real and it lasted. Rest in peace, Mr. Heinlein. Thank you for Mike, for the Moon, and for the door you opened for a twelve-year-old who didn’t yet know how much he loved to read.

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