Dread of Heinleinism

Anent nothing: over on his other blog, noted SF critic James Nicoll asked, "I wonder if there's an essay on why discovering a writer of a certain age is setting out to write a Heinlein-style book fills me with dread."

What follows is my attempt at answering his question. If you're unfamiliar with (or uninterested in) the bizarre hold the literary legacy of Robert A. Heinlein holds on the imagination of more recent SF writers, you can safely skip this blog entry.

RAH was, for better or worse, one of the dominant figures of American SF between roughly 1945 and 1990 (he died in 1988 but the publishing pipeline drips very slowly). During his extended career (he first began publishing short fiction in the mid-1930s) he moved through a number of distinct phases. One that's particularly notable is the period from 1946 onwards when, with Scribners, he began publishing what today would be categorized as middle-grade SF novels (but were then more specifically boys adventure stories or childrens fiction): books such as Rocket Ship Galileo, Space Cadet, Red Planet, and Have Space Suit, Will Travel. There were in all roughly a dozen of these books published from 1947 to 1958, and as critic John Clute notes, they included some of the very best juvenile SF ever written (certainly at that point), and were free of many of the flaws that affected Heinlein's later works—they maintained a strong narrative drive, were relatively free from his tendency to lecture the reader (which could become overwhelming in his later adult novels), and were well-strutured as stories.

But most importantly, these were the go-to reading matter for the baby boom generation, kids born from 1945 onwards. It used to be said, somewhat snidely, that "the golden age of SF is 12"; if you were an American boy (or girl) born in 1945 you'd have turned 12 in 1957, just in time to read Time for the Stars or Citizen of the Galaxy. And you might well have begun publishing your own SF novels in the mid-1970s—if your name was Spider Robinson, or John Varley, or Gregory Benford, for example.

Then a disturbing pattern begins to show up.

The pattern: a white male author, born in the Boomer generation (1945-1964), with some or all of the P7 traits (Pale Patriarchal Protestant Plutocratic Penis-People of Power) returns to the reading of their childhood and decides that what the Youth of Today need is more of the same. Only Famous Dead Guy is Dead and no longer around to write more of the good stuff. Whereupon they endeavour to copy Famous Dead Guy's methods but pay rather less attention to Famous Dead Guy's twisty mind-set. The result (and the cause of James's sinking feeling) is frequently an unironic pastiche that propagandizes an inherently conservative perception of Heinlein's value-set.

Sometimes this is a side-effect of the process. Spider Robinson, for example (born 1948) wrote Variable Star (published 2006) on the basis of an 8-page outline found in Heinlein's papers. (The result is a dutifully executed late-1940s Heinlein juvenile, designed to captivate 1940s boy scouts, published just in time for the Nintendo generation.) Sometimes it's deliberate: Greg Benford's Jupiter Project or John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless are tales about teen-agers growing up in space colonies. And sometimes there's a sneaky dialog at work with Heinlein's own work—as many critics have noted (in particular Jo Walton) the state of contemporary SF exists in furious dialog with (and commentary upon) its own antecedents, and one prime example might be John Varley's Steel Beach (shortlisted for the Hugo, Locus, and Prometheus awards in 1993). (While the setting of Steel Beach is utterly non-Heinleinian, there's a very specifically Heinleinian sensibility to the meta-narrative, to the way the author's viewpoint illuminates the events of the story—and there's a specific hat-tip to Heinlein buried in the second half of the book that makes it explicit.) (Mind you, Steel Beach is anything but a Heinlein juvenile, as becomes clear from the very first line: "In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.)

But here's the thing: as often as not, when you pick up a Heinlein tribute novel by a male boomer author, you're getting a classic example of the second artist effect.

Heinlein, when he wasn't cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren't talked about in Polite Society. Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars. Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham's Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), "Starship Troopers" with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).

In contrast, Heinlein's boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein's version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).

There are exceptions. Post-boomer cultural appropriation of Heinleinian tropes sometimes results in different outcomes. 1969-vintage John Scalzi is still a straight white male American, but at least he grew up after Martin Luther King, after Stonewall, after Vietnam. His Heinlein tributes aren't challenging, but neither are they reactionary: rather, they're positioned as gateway drugs intended to make reading fun for teenagers. And you can see some of the barest hints of the Heinleinian SF story skeleton in the most unexpected places, once you look for it: Nnedi Okorafor's Binti, winner of the 2016 Hugo and Nebula awards for best novella, is structurally absolutely of a kind with Heinlein's 1950s juveniles and pushes many of the same buttons, even though the society depicted in it would have been beyond Heinlein's wildest imagining (being about as far from white Calfornian male reality as you can get while still writing in the same language).

As for me, I will plead guilty to having committed Heinlein tribute-ism ... but with malice aforethought. I'm of mid-1960s vintage, on the cusp of Generation X: while Heinlein's juveniles were on the library shelves while I was growing up, so were Dangerous Visions, and his scouts-in-space sensibility felt curiously stale and airless to me. Which is why I wrote Saturn's Children as a late period Heinlein tribute, a story in dialogue with Friday. I ended up making it made it all about a diseased society and an abuse victim, and not remotely school library safe. Because the only way to win some games is not to play.