THE ROBERT HEINLEIN INTERVIEW
Conducted by J. Neil Schulman
June 30, 1973
Note for the Pulpless.Comtm edition: This interview appears exactly as it was
edited by Robert A. Heinlein in 1973, with no deletions, additions, or changes. -- JNS, 1996
SCHULMAN: All right. Why don't we start with question number
one?
HEINLEIN: Question number one: "Do you believe time travel is
possible or is it merely a fictional device?"
There is no basis for belief or non-belief in this question,
Neil. We don't have any data from which to work. There is at
present no satisfactory theory of time. We haven't the slightest
idea of how you might get your teeth into the fabric of
time--whatever it is. Time travel, as of now, comes under the
head of fantasy, inasmuch as it requires one to postulate something
about which we know nothing. I do not regard time travel as
either impossible or possible. I have no opinion about its
possibility or impossibility because we have no data on which to
make a judgment. But it makes an excellent device for telling
stories, particularly stories that speculate about the condition of
mankind and his future, and so forth and so on; it's been used
almost entirely for that purpose, including A Connecticut Yankee In
KIng Arthur's Court which is very largely a social and political
pamphlet expressed in story form, to go back to a time-travel story
of the last century and one which doesn't even use a time
machine--it just postulates it. And the same thing is true, of
course, of H.G. Wells' Time Machine and his When The Sleeper
Wakes. In both cases he was using a time-travel device in order to
permit him to speculate about the human condition.
SCHULMAN: If you did manage to find a time machine, would
you go back and try strangling yourself as an infant to see if the
universe would collapse around you?
HEINLEIN: No I wouldn't try it. [laughter] In the first
place, I am not at all unhappy about having lived the life I've
lived. In the second place, if I strangled the infant and the
universe collapsed around me thereby--the solipsist's point of
view--then I would have proved my point by failing to prove my
point. I mean you wind up with a zero--with no observer, follow
me? You wouldn't know if it worked or not. If you're going to
engage in the notion that the universe ceases to exist if you die,
then you're not entitled to an observer outside that to see what
happens. Solipsism has its own logical paradoxes.
SCHULMAN: Okay. We might as well proceed to question number
two, then.
HEINLEIN: "I'd like to know more about your theory that 'no
matter how individualistic you feel, you are really only part of an
evolutionary organism.'"
SCHULMAN: Did I quote you correctly on that?
HEINLEIN: You've placed a little emphasis in there: "really
only a part of." What i believe I said--the book is across the
room and I'm not going to dig it out--was that "you are part of an
evolutionary organism" not "really only a part of." Difference in
emphasis, do you follow me?
SCHULMAN: Yes.
HEINLEIN: Just as you are J. Neil Schulman and you are also
part of the population of an area known as New York City. But it
isn't a case of J. Neil Schulman being "really only a part of" New
York City. You are J. Neil Schulman and you also happen to be one
of that population group called by that name. Now, there is a
matter of emphasis here. You say, "Can you prove this?" Well, I
can't prove that you are "really only a part of" but I observe
that you are only a part of. No emphasis on it, we simply observe
it. You have parents. You have at least the potentiality of
offspring. I assume that you go along more or less at least with
evolutionary theory.
SCHULMAN: To a certain extent.
HEINLEIN: ...Yes. We simply observe that we are part of this
continuing process.
SCHULMAN: Now, I think what I was asking here was the more
philosophical question...in other words, I can see that I have
parents and come from an evolutionary chain.
HEINLEIN: Yes.
SCHULMAN: But the phrase "evolutionary organism" seems to
suggest that you have one being with central control or
something...or at least some central plan.
HEINLEIN: It doesn't... I don't mean to imply that.
Evolutionists differ in their notions as to whether or not there is
any central plan or whether the whole matter is automatic, or what
it may be. All I really meant is that although we feel as if we
were discreet individuals, if you consider it in terms of four
dimensions with time as the fourth dimension, you are part of a
branch...a branching deal, with an actual physical connection going
back into the past and physical connection extending into the future
until such a time as it's chopped off. If you have no children then
it's chopped off at that point. I have no children myself, however
I'm not dead yet, either. I think, however, you are more interested
in a later part here: "if so but we retain free will, why should we
place the welfare of the whole organism above ourselves?" The
question as to whether or not you place the welfare of your
species--your race--above yourself is a matter for you to settle
with yourself and for me to settle with me.
SCHULMAN: On what basis?
HEINLEIN: [Quoting question] "If you say it's something you
can't justify on a purely rational basis, then what other basis is
there to justify it?" That's what you're getting at; you're trying
to make it as either/or here between rational and irrational.
SCHULMAN: Well...rational and nonrational in any case.
HEINLEIN: All right. [Long pause] Uh, I'm trying to phrase
this clearly. And you say this last question leads up to this next
one: "Is there ever any justification to accept something on faith?
How can you prove this since by doing so you are inherently
rejecting reason as final arbiter?" Now, there are a lot of
implications in your question, a lot oh hidden assumptions in your
question.
SCHULMAN: I suppose so.
HEINLEIN: Yes, indeed. All the way through this I can see
that you regard yourself as a rationalist and you regard reason as
the final arbiter on anything.
SCHULMAN: Well, I'm basically starting out with Ayn Rand's
Objectivist epistemology.
HEINLEIN: Well, I'm not going to comment on Miss Rand's
epistemology; I have notions of my own. Have you read anything by
Alfred Korzybski?
SCHULMAN: No, I'm familiar with his work only through your
own; you've mentioned him quite a few times.
HEINLEIN: Only through my own. You haven't read Science and
Sanity, for example?
SCHULMAN: No, I haven't.
HEINLEIN: And you're not familiar with his epistemological
approach?
SCHULMAN: Only what you yourself have mentioned.
HEINLEIN: Uh, huh. [interruption] Uh, I've just been talking
to Mrs. Heinlein; now let me see.
Let me invert these questions a bit. If you've read Stranger
in a Strange Land, you've probably gathered what I think of faith.
I do not regard faith as a basis on which to believe or disbelieve
anything. On the other hand, Neil, there are many
things--practically all of the important questions of
philosophy--are not subject to final answers purely by reason. In
my opinion, they are not subject to final answers simply by
reason. This has been gone into a considerable extent by
philosophers in the past, and there's even a term--a technical
term--for that called "noumena" as opposed to "phenomena."
Phenomena are things that you can grasp through your physical senses
or through measurements made with your physical senses through
instruments and so forth and so in other words, phenomena are things
that we can know about the physical universe. Noumena translates as
the unknowable things. The unknowable things: What is the purpose
of the universe? Why are you here on this earth? What should a man
do with his life? All of those wide open, generalized, unlimited
"whys." There are all noumena, and consequently they are not
subject--consequently by definition--these things are not subject
to final answers simply by reason. My own attitude on that is shown
a bit in several places in this last book [Time Enough For Love] in
which Lazarus Long indicates that he hasn't been able to find any
purpose to the universe any more significant than gametes using
zygotes to create mare gametes. He expresses it that way in one
place, then he turns it over, turns it upside down, and expresses it
another way to the effect that as far as he knows, there's no more
important purpose to the universe than making a baby with the help
of a woman you love. And yet obviously neither of these things are
answers; they are just expressions of what Lazarus Long happens to
like. Now, do you happen to like chocolate malted milks?
SCHULMAN: Uh, yes.
HEINLEIN: Now, do you like them better than strawberry
malted milks?
SCHULMAN: Yeah, I would say so.
HEINLEIN: Can you justify that by reason?
SCHULMAN: No, I would say that it's a purely subjective
judgment.
HEINLEIN: That's right. That is correct. It doesn't involve
faith and it doesn't involve reason.
SCHULMAN: But I'm using internal data; there is data which I
am acting upon.
HEINLEIN: That's right. The internal data tells you that you
like it better...but it doesn't tell you why. This applies also
to a great many things about the universe: it's your own internal,
subjective evaluation of it, not any final answers given by reason
or rationality.
SCHULMAN: This brings up the end of Methuselah's Children in
which Lazarus Long seems to be taking just about the opposite
attitude.
I have a quote here:
"'The last two and a half centuries have just been my
adolescence...men...never had enough time to tackle the important
questions. Lots of capacity and not enough time to use it
properly.'"
And then he's asked: "'How do you propose to tackle the
important questions?'
"'How should I know? Ask me again in about five hundred
years.'
"'You think that will make a difference?'
"'I do. Anyhow it'll give me time to poke around and pick up
some interesting facts...'"
A little later: "'...Maybe there aren't any reasons.'
"'Yes, maybe it's just one colossal big joke with no point to
it.' Lazarus stood up and scratched his ribs. 'But I can tell you
this...here`s one monkey who's going to keep on climbing, and
looking around him to see what he can see, as long as the tree holds
out.'"
HEINLEIN: And that's exactly what he's doing at the end of the
next book.
SCHULMAN: Just holding on.
HEINLEIN: Uh, yes. In the mean time it is postulated that
he's had a couple of thousand years trying this, that, and the other
thing, and he has reached one point. He has reached one
opinion; it's stated flatly in the early part of the book: that you
cannot get final answers about the universe from inside. He said
you'd have to get outside and take a look at it. And the man he's
talking to, Weatheral, says: "Then you believe in immortality?" [In
the book, the word "afterlife" is used.] And Lazarus says, "Wait,
wait, wait, wait, now--hold everything! I didn't say I believed in
immortality; I don't believe in anything. Because belief gets in
the way of facts." He's made certain observations and they've
given him certain limited opinions, and among the limited opinions
he has is the one working hypothesis that there are no final
answers to be obtained from human being inside the universe, that
the position of observation doesn't permit that--to get any final
answers. Follow me?
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: There's nothing inconsistent about the end of
Methuselah's Children and what the man has to say a couple of
thousand years later; it's just that he's had a couple of thousand
years trying this that he said he was going to try and he still
hasn't gotten any final answers.
SCHULMAN: I suppose this leads up to question number fifteen
on page two.
HEINLEIN: Question fifteen on page two: "What would a 2,300
year old man know that we don't?" Neil, I haven't the slightest
idea; I'm not even a hundred, yet! Remember, this thing's a work of
fiction. "Wouldn't it take a 2,300 year old man to write the
memoirs of Lazarus Long?" Of course it would, but do you know any?
This is a work of fiction. If I've managed to make him at all
convincing as an extremely old man--not necessarily twenty-three
centuries but extremely old--then it's successful as a work of art,
as a work of fiction. If it entertains the reader in the course of
doing that then it's a commercially successful work of art. But I
am not twenty-three hundred years old; I'm not even a century, yet.
SCHULMAN: I just wanted to check that out.
HEINLEIN: All right.
HEINLEIN: [Reading next part of question] "How did Shaw's
Back to Methuselah influence this if at all?"
I read Shaw's Back to Methuselah about ten years before I
started writing--oh, sometime in the thirties. I haven't looked at
it since, don't remember it too clearly. I've read most of Shaw's
plays and some of his essays and I suppose I've been influenced by
him, just as I've been influenced by everything I've ever read,
seen, tasted, felt, so forth and so on. But as for specific
influence of one book on the other, they're rather different. As I
recall, in the latter part of Back to Methuselah everyone has
gotten extremely cautious because they`re afraid they might die.
They've got so much to lose. Lazarus Long never suffers from that
although I do indicate that some of the other Methuselahs or Howard
people do have a bit of that trouble. But, I don't remember it too
well; after all, I didn't see the play: I read it once something
over forty years ago--or just about forty years ago--and I've never
reread it since.
SCHULMAN: I think what I was referring to was a specific line
that Richard Friedman, our NLN review editor [when this was
taped], pointed out to me--something along the line that it would
take long life to plan anything, that we simply don't have enough
time to decide what the questions are to ask.
HEINLEIN: Oh, yes; I agree with that, and this also makes it
difficult for me to pretend to be a twenty-three century old man
because, as I pointed out to you, I'm not even a century yet. I've
noticed that you've paid quite a bit of attention to Have Space
Suit--Will Travel. Do you recall in there, I think it's the Mother
Thing appealing on behalf of the human race: "But my lord peers,
they are all so very young." She's asking a certain amount of
forbearance for the human race because it's so young. And that's
about the situation we're in: our civilization is very young. None
of us live long enough to cope with too much. About the time we
begin to get our thoughts straightened out we begin to go senile.
Or, in the mean time, we've been knocked over by a taxicab or died
of the plague or something else. We don't live that long.
Shall we finish the rest of that same question?
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: "Do you have any comments on the Wandering Jew
legends which you've made reference to in several of your books?"
I don't recall the other references I've made to it but
throughout my books I refer constantly to mythological matters,
biblical matters, so forth and so on. Call these cultural ties, if
you like. It comes under the head of putting a little flavor in the
stew, that's all. The Wandering Jew legend, I really don't know
anything about it. The Encyclopedia Britannica doesn't have much
to say about it. It's apocryphal; there have been some good
stories from it. General Lew Wallace's The Prince of India--which
isn't nearly as well known as his book Ben Hur from which this
movie was made--was based on the Wandering Jew legend and there have
been several others. It's a nice, romantic legend that has
considerable story value to it. You might say that I grabbed it and
renamed him Lazarus Long and made this book out of it.
SCHULMAN: That's one of the first things I was thinking--that
you might've been intending Lazarus Long to be the Wandering
Jew--until he made reference to having met him.
HEINLEIN: As I recall--I seem to recall writing that
paragraph--I don't think I specifically used it-- Sometime one does
put something like that into a story in order the deny an assumption
of that sort? I don't think I put it in for that purpose; I think
it was just Lazarus Long enjoying one of his whoppers again.
Lying in his teeth! [laughter]
SCHULMAN: Is there anything in the book he believed?
HEINLEIN: Oh, sure. If you examine the fashion in which it is
written, the story of the adopted daughter is written cold sober all
the way through.
SCHULMAN: That was, if I remember, third person?
HEINLEIN: No, it's both third person and first person, because
part of it is narration recounting the events that take place on New
Beginnings and part of it he's talking to the computer, Minerva.
But he's being dead serious all the way through. But when he's
simply engaged in conversation with other people...Mark Twain once
said, "First research the facts. Then distort them to prove your
case." [laughter] This character is sort of a Mark Twain
character. I even have him come from Mark Twain's general part of
the country. The Ozarks are noted for their whoppers.
SCHULMAN: Okay. What about the story of David Lamb?
HEINLEIN: David Lamb? What about him?
SCHULMAN: Well, is it based on anybody you know or material
you drew from your own Annapolis experience or...?
HEINLEIN: You trying to get me sued? [laughter] This is why
author's put disclaimers on the front of books.
SCHULMAN: Which is the biggest lie in any book.
HEINLEIN: Oh, sure. That character is fictional, but it is of
course based on various things I knew, experienced, people I've
known, when I was in the Navy. And obviously in telling the story
Lazarus Long is having fun with it and not necessarily sticking
closely to the truth. In fact, even in a casual reading of it, you
can see big holes in it--where things don't fit, where the
chronology is wrong--where the locations are wrong--all sorts of
things.
SCHULMAN: I've only read it three times; I haven't had a
chance to analyze it yet.
HEINLEIN: Well, for example, just casually on the side he
locates the Naval Academy at West Point.
SCHULMAN: I'd thought that was just a failing of memory.
HEINLEIN: Probably. Possibly. Maybe. In any case, there are
things like that through the story; it's not told at all in the
dead serious way in which "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter" is
told. Entirely different sort of story. It's partially a piece of
satire. This man, no matter what he did, took the easiest way out,
the laziest way out--and it always worked.
SCHULMAN: I can empathize with that.
HEINLEIN: [Laughing] Yes.
SCHULMAN: Would you like to go back to question number four?
HEINLEIN: Sure. Let me turn the pages here; oh, here we are.
[Softly;] There's too much on this desk; there's always too much
on this desk.
"About the space program. I know you are extremely impressed
by the accomplishments of NASA. (Well, so am I.)" The
accomplishment of NASA that I'm most impressed by is how they manage
to take the most romantic subject I know of and by careful
application make in incredibly dull. [Laughter] I am not
disparaging the engineering accomplishments nor the heroic
accomplishments of astronauts in saying that. I'm talking primarily
about their P.R.O.! [Returning to question] "But since it was
financed with tax money"--and your parenthetical remark in there
["(which I believe is the same thing as stolen money)"--JNS]--"isn't
the expenditure of any more money by government on space program
illegitimate?" Now the word "illegitimate" has a technical meaning,
Neil: it means illegal. And the answer to that is that the
expenditure is not illegal; it's perfectly legal--the laws are on
the books. However, you used it in a philosophical sense. I
think you used it equivalent to "immoral."
SCHULMAN: Well, you see, I equate legality with being based on
natural law, and I see that statutory law is a nullification of
that.
HEINLEIN: Well, now natural law--the concept of natural law
--is one that many philosophers have tried to put over, but as far
as I'm concerned natural law are things like the second law of
thermodynamics--that entropy always increases--which could be
defined mathematically. Natural law are the facts that we know
about the physical world.
SCHULMAN: I believe that also in the "Notebooks [of Lazarus
Long]" you have a statement that if you can't talk about it in math,
it's not science, it's just opinion.
HEINLEIN: That is correct; if you can't talk about it
quantitatively it is not science, it is just opinion. And on most
of these matters of natural law, each philosopher that's attempted
to do this has come up with a different set of natural laws from the
one next door. Now, I don't know which philosopher you follow on
this. Do I make myself clear?
SCHULMAN: Yes.
HEINLEIN: I should say at this point that my stories have
consistently shown space travel being undertaken by private
enterprise. That I regard as a matter of taste--my own taste.
Which apparently agrees with yours.
SCHULMAN: Right.
HEINLEIN: [Continuing question] "Shouldn't the entire program
be turned over to private enterprise to try and make a profit?" I
don't like the expression "turned over." Shouldn't the entire
program be "sold" to private enterprise?
SCHULMAN: Well, since from anarchistic point of view I don't
see that government can legitimately own property...
HEINLEIN: All right; how can they legitimately pass on a
title to it by "turning it over" to private enterprise?
SCHULMAN: I guess there's a philosophical contradiction in
there...
HEINLEIN: Yes.
SCHULMAN: But if you accept the presence of government as an
unwanted, already existing thing, you're always backed into corners
like that. [This problem is soluble only by postulating a post-
revolutionary situation in which anarchocapitalist arbitration
agencies are liquidating all government properties and returning
them to those victims with valid claims.]
HEINLEIN: Well, in any case..."For example, my colleague at
New Libertarian Notes, Sam Konkin, says that if he were running
the space program he's simply pay back his investment by running
shiploads of moon rocks back to earth to sell as ornaments and
jewelry." Well, I wonder if Mr. Konkin has considered the economic
law of diminishing returns at that point?
SCHULMAN: I think he did take that into account; he had
several other schemes like that...The point he was trying to make
was that if somebody like him could figure out a way to bring back
profits, sooner of later some sort of trade would be built out of
this.
HEINLEIN: Oh, yes. I am quite certain that space travel is
going to be enormously profitable in the long run. But that
particular stunt...By the way, that is included in this enterprise
of the Hubbards; I suppose you've heard about that?
SCHULMAN: L. Ron Hubbard?
HEINLEIN: No, no no. Colonel Hubbard, and his wife. Let me
see. I'd like to find one of their magazines around here; I don't
see one offhand and haven't time to look. In any case, they are
trying to get together an organization to buy one of the remaining
Apollos--to buy from the government one of the remaining
Apollos--and start in on a commercial venture to get the human
race out into the solar system and on out. They think it could be
done by private enterprise and they're trying to do it. In other
words, they have a point of view that is consonant with yours and
consonant with mine.
SCHULMAN: We might as well bring in question number ten here,
because it's related to number five.
HEINLEIN: All right; let me get to it. Number ten: "This
question is related to number five. Have you heard the claims made
by Dr. Andrew J. Galambos several years before the space program
started that he could put a man on the moon for $100,000? If so, do
you have any comments?" Who is Galambos?
SCHULMAN: Galambos is a Californian; he's at the Free
Enterprise Institute which is in the Los Angeles area.
HEINLEIN: And what is the doctorate in--do you know?
SCHULMAN: I think it's in economics. [I was incorrect:
Galambos's degree is in astrophysics.]
HEINLEIN: How far back did he make this remark?
SCHULMAN: Oh! I can't give anywhere near an exact date; I
think it was as far back as the fifties that he was claiming that he
had a plan to finance it.
HEINLEIN: Yes. Well, the fifties. I have to consider
inflation as to what a hundred thousand dollars meant then and what
a hundred thousand means now. Well, let's put it a few years back
and figure that he'd be talking about a considerably more than a
hundred thousand now; but if it's anything like that recent it
wouldn't have more than doubled--the amount he's talking about--in
buying power.
Now. I happen to be a quite experienced R and D engineer
myself--not in space activities but in aircraft and in high
altitudes work, things like that. Also, I built this house from
which I'm talking to you right now--built it fairly recently. I
spent considerably more than a hundred thousand dollars on it. I
know durn well that I couldn't begin to build a
spaceship--completely shut of all the difficulties of working
through the government or anything like that; I mean if I simply had
the cash and undertook to build it myself--I couldn't begin to build
it for anything like a hundred thousand dollars. I do not think
that Dr. Galambos is an experienced engineer of any sort.
SCHULMAN: I think the point he was trying to make is that if
the government had allowed private research to be pursued in this
instead of every time something was discovered clamping a top
security on it that--
HEINLEIN: The government did not do that. On the contrary,
everything that NASA puts is open.
SCHULMAN: Everything?
HEINLEIN: Everything. And they also put out a thing saying;
now what subjects are you interested in? As a result of that,
having noted several of the subjects that I was interested in, I
have received so many, many pounds--so many millions of words--of
research reports, that I finally had to move them up into my
storehouse because I no longer had library space for them.
Everything that NASA puts out, they do not have anything classified.
Nothing. Now, let me distinguish between anything that the Air
Force might be doing. The two activities are conducted separately:
the Air Force does have classified espionage satellites, for
example. But NASA does not, and they don't work the same places,
they don't work together. Everything that NASA does--from the start
by law--was to be open and unclassified and it has been. This is
one of the things that I have cited--and that Arthur Clarke has
cited--as being a payoff on the space program right now.
Expensively as they've done it, nevertheless all that bread cast on
the waters has already come back severalfold in the way of
unclassified new technology that doesn't even have patents on it.
You can get these things and you can use them all you please. I
know that a lot of people are not aware of this but anyone in
engineering that has any engineering interest is likely to be aware
of it if he has taken the trouble to have himself placed on the
mailing list.
SCHULMAN: Well, I guess that was just a mistake on my part.
[Even more ironic is that Galambos is the father of the theory of
primary property that states that all ideas are private property
and should be copyrighted.]
HEINLEIN: Yes. However, the thing that makes it so expensive
when you do things through government is the enormous amount of
bureaucracy and red tape. This is not alone, however,
characteristic of government; it is characteristic of almost any big
human organization. You get one of those really big corporations
and you have a tremendous bureaucratic structure inside the
corporation itself.
SCHULMAN: However, I've heard that because of competition
demands, if you take the bureaucracy of a private corporation, it's
maybe around ten percent of that which government manages to
generate.
HEINLEIN: Well, I've seen a bit of both and I don't think
the increase in efficiency on the part of free enterprise is that
great. The justification for free enterprise is not that it's more
efficient, but that it's free! Follow me?
SCHULMAN: Yes.
HEINLEIN: This reminds me of a story--oh, it's from a preface
to a book about some civil liberties cases about forty years back; I
wish I could remember the author; he was a prominent civil liberties
lawyer. But he told this anecdote about down South, some time
postbellum, but probably fifty or sixty or seventy years back, in
which this Southern gentleman was attempting to explain to the
Yankee friend that the Negro had actually been better off under
slavery. He says, "I'll prove it to you." He says, "Oh, Tom,
Uncle; come over here." And this old Negro shuffled over. And he
said to him, "Uncle, you were a slave, weren't you?"
"Yes, Cap'n."
"Tell me. Do you eat as well now as you did when you were a
slave?"
"Oh, no, Cap'n. Sometimes pickin's might poor."
"Do you work as hard as you did when you were a slave?"
"Oh, no. I works lots harder now."
"Do you live in as good a house?"
"That little shack I'm in now, the rain comes in all the
time."
He says, "Then you were better off when you were a slave,
weren't you?"
And the old Negro didn't agree, he didn't say yes; he
scratched his head and he said slowly, "Boss, there's somethin'
about this heah freedom that I lahkes!"
SCHULMAN: [Laughing] Okay.
HEINLEIN: In other words, you don't have to justify private
enterprise on the basis of its being more efficient than
government--although it usually is. Not always, but usually.
SCHULMAN: Well, at least it keeps the bureaucracies running
against each other so you have a bit of a choice.
HEINLEIN: Yes, and that's even possible inside the
government--I'll tell you about a case in a moment. The
justification for free enterprise is that it's free. "Sort of a
looseness about this heah freedom that I lahkes!" That's all.
SCHULMAN: Okay. I don't need any further justification,
myself, either.
HEINLEIN: It's a matter of taste. It's the way you feel about
it, It's the way I feel about it. You don't have to prove it.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: Oh. Competition. I thought and still think that
one of the mistakes that they made in this government was when they
converted the Army and Navy into the Department of Defense and
created the Air Force Department and simply incorporated it therein.
You know what it did? It removed from a government system one of
the few examples of healthy competition we see in government. The
thing that kept the Navy on its toes was the Army, and the thing
that kept the Army on its toes was the Navy, and the point at which
they had to fight was right over the appropriations. And they
weren't able--either one of them--to judge it for themselves: it was
up to the Congress. And they had to compete. Now, all through
the military service there are attempts to set up competition--oh,
between ships, between companies, between squads, so forth and so
on--because there are a hell of a lot of military officers--most of
them perhaps--who realize that the competition which any socialistic
set-up inherently lacks--and the Army and Navy are socialistic
set-ups--is a shortcoming. It makes it less efficient. So they set
up these artificial competitions just to keep them on their toes.
There are plenty--Perhaps most professional military men are
acutely aware that the Army and the Navy do not have it unless
they deliberately build it up as a sort of a game.
SCHULMAN: I guess I could bring up the point in question
number eleven on page two at this point.
HEINLEIN: All right. "In the 'Notebooks of Lazarus Long'
there is a statement that since anarchists and pacifists refuse to
support a state, they deserve no protection from that state.
Wouldn't you say--at least about anarchists--that this statement is
irrelevant because anarchists don't even want protection 'from'
the state, they want protection against it?" Now. Neil. You
have in there an assumption contrary to fact. And that is that
there is such a thing as anarchists which agree on any one thing.
[Laughter] There are as many sorts of anarchism as there are
anarchists and you sure as hell know it by now!
SCHULMAN: [Laughing] Yes.
HEINLEIN: You've been in it a relatively short time--I mean by
my time scale, not by Lazarus Long's--but you've certainly seen it.
How do anarchists spend their time? Why they spend it fighting with
other anarchists. Isn't that true?
SCHULMAN: [Still laughing] Well, a few of us manage to get
along.
HEINLEIN: Well, you sent me first this New Libertarian Notes
and I noticed that the lead article in there was one panning the
hell out of the magazine called Reason. [Laughter] And blasting
these revisionists, dissidents, and so forth. There are as many
sorts of anarchists as there are anarchists.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: Incidentally, I'm delighted to have both magazines
in the house as I frequently find something in each of them that
disagrees with my own point of view. It does me no good to read
something that agrees with my own point of view. I want to read
something that disagrees with my own point of view, follow me?
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: You can't learn from a man who agrees with you. But
the point I wanted to bring out was that there are one hell of a lot
of anarchists who think that there is pie in the sky and that Santa
Claus sill lives and that somehow, some way, policemen will still be
on the corner no matter if they do away with them. There are an
awful lot of starry-eyed ignoramuses among anarchists, Neil--just as
there are in any other political point of view. And there are
plenty of them who still expect the government to protect them,
and they really don't have imagination enough to visualize a
completely lawless situation.
[Therein lies the value of libertarian science fiction--JNS]
SCHULMAN: In a recent book by Harry Browne called How I Found
Freedom In An Unfree World--I don't know if you're familiar with it
or not...
HEINLEIN: I've seen some reviews. I haven't read it. I've
seen some reviews and things of it.
SCHULMAN: Well one of the things he brings out in there is the
basic anarchocapitalist viewpoint--which he's bringing to the
bestselling reading public for the first time--in which he's saying,
"Well, suppose you didn't have police anymore--what would you do?"
And he says, "Well, you'd probably lock your doors and stay out of
unsafe neighborhoods and keep your children away from unsavory
people--isn't that exactly what you're doing now?"
HEINLEIN: Yes.
SCHULMAN: And then he goes on to state the basic difference
we have with government: that it provides relatively very little
protection at all; if it does anything it simply provides a little
retaliation to act as a deterrent--and it doesn't even do very much
of that.
HEINLEIN: Well, we could get into a long discussion here of
political and anarchist theory; all that I was getting at is that
there are many anarchists who don't really get their teeth into that
notion that there could be anything to be afraid of in an utterly
lawless community. Now it is very much to the point to realize that
the community is already quite lawless, as Harry Browne points out
there. I'm one of those self-help people myself. Cop on the
corner? I said I was fifteen miles out in the country; I'm fifteen
miles from the nearest police service of any sort. It would take
over half an hour for a sheriff's car to get here if he started
right now. I mean if he were available and started right now. In
other words we have no police protection. And, as you may have
heard, Santa Cruz is noted as the murder capital of the world; it's
a small town and we've had nineteen murders so far this year. Just
a second. [pause] I had to shift position; my old bones were
getting tired. Well, I believe in self-help. I'm quite a good
shot. In fact I used to teach it. And my place is surrounded with
a seven-foot-high steel fence topped with barbed wire and controlled
by an electric gate....There are a number of people who can't seem
to realize that things could be mighty rough--even rougher than they
are now--if there wasn't the slightest bit of deterrence. I
believe in deterrence, myself. I know quite well that there are a
number of people walking the streets today alive and well only
because there's a law with a certain implied punishment--even if
it doesn't take place too often--for killing somebody. I'm not
talking about anyone in particular either as the object or as the
subject; I just say that I know that there are many times when
somebody would durn well get killed if somebody else didn't feel
that it was a little bit dangerous to go killing somebody. You
might get arrested; you might get thrown in the hoosegow, and at
least it would cause you dreadful inconvenience even if they didn't
hang you.
SCHULMAN: Well, of course, I can agree with the idea of
deterrence to a great extent, but I disagree with your premise that
you need government to provide the deterrent. Of course my own view
is based on the theories of Murray Rothbard and several other people
here in the movement, about private protection agencies, and private
armies, and settling disputes through private arbitration.
Competing agencies.
HEINLEIN: Yes, I've read a good deal of this. I don't think
that we can manage to settle matters of detail about political
philosophy on the time and toll charges of the Daily News. So
many things have been opened up at this point that you know quite
well that it could go on for days and days and days and many
thousands of words. I'm inclined to evaluate those things about
private protection agencies and how protection could simply be left
to the marketplace about equal to Karl Marx's notion that after the
perfected socialism the state would wither away. You remember that
was one of the predictions, that socialism led to anarchism through
the state withering away. That was the happy condition of the
future under Marx's predictions. Well, Marx turned out to be
mistaken, at least so far as any evidence of the state withering
away is concerned in the numerous countries that call themselves
communist.
SCHULMAN: Well, I certainly don't think you had to run a trial
run on it to find out; I think it was pretty evident from the
inconsistencies in what he was saying.
HEINLEIN: Yes. And, no doubt, you have read a number of
things criticizing this notion of leaving protection entirely to the
marketplace, too. I would be delighted to see a circumstance under
which we needed no laws, no protection, so forth and so on. None of
the philosophers that I have encountered have been able to convince
me that this is practical in the real world, that it could be done.
It is much more likely that if we had, for a short time, a condition
of anarchy, that shortly after there we weld have a condition of
fascism that would grow up from a sort of vigilantism until finally
a man on a horseback was in charge.
SCHULMAN: Well, you see there's where--of course you're right;
we don't have enough time to really get into this.
HEINLEIN: Yes.
SCHULMAN: The only question I'd want to ask is have you read,
for instance, The Market For Liberty by the Tannehills, or
Precondition For Peace And Prosperity: Rational Anarchy by
Richard and Ernestine Perkins, or For A New Liberty by Dr.
Rothbard? All three go into the theories in quite a bit of detail.
HEINLEIN: I have read a number of these things--not
necessarily ones that you've mentioned--but I've been reading on
this subject for considerably more than the past forty years. And
no one of them has convinced me yet. What we do have on this
globe in respect to nations is a condition of anarchy between
nations, despite something that we laughingly call international
law.
SCHULMAN: This is a point Dr. Rothbard makes frequently. He
says we already have international anarchy; why not just
decentralize down to the individual level?
HEINLEIN: Because along comes the bully boys. And if the
bully boys band together then the people who simply want to be left
along have to band together.
SCHULMAN: Fine. I'm not disagreeing with this.
HEINLEIN: Yes.
SCHULMAN: However, to use Franz Oppenheimer's definitions I
would much rather provide my protection through the economic means,
rather than the political means.
HEINLEIN: Well, I think that we had better chop this off.
SCHULMAN: Right.
HEINLEIN: Because it is too long; the Daily News can't
possibly use it in depth. You've got twelve hundred words,
something like that.
SCHULMAN: Fifteen hundred, it turns out.
HEINLEIN: Fifteen hundred. You couldn't possible discuss the
theory of anarchism in that space.
SCHULMAN: Right. Well, hopefully, one of these days we'll be
able to get it settled just between the two of us.
HEINLEIN: Well, I think we'll probably still be discussing it
as long as both of us are alive. It isn't that I wouldn't like to
see a condition of complete freedom; you saw me describe that in
Happy Valley. And you also saw Lazarus Long cope with the bully
boys. But he nevertheless suggested that Happy Valley was pretty
highly selective to start with for several reasons. And that as
long as they had a low population they could get along simply with
the Golden Rule. And they were beginning--he indicates that as
things got a little more complicated--they started having a little
more in the way of rules. But even at that he was sill talking
about an agrarian society with a very low population. But let's
move on to other matters out of fairness to the Daily News.
I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn
Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than
internal police and courts, external armed forces--with the other
matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government
sticks its nose into everything, now.
SCHULMAN: Okay. I think I'm going to have to turn over my
tape right about now. Let's hold on for a second while I do so.
[AFTER THE TAPE IS TURNED]
SCHULMAN: Okay. How about question number five? [A number of
questions relating to the Nixon Administration, impeachment, and
relations with communist countries]
HEINLEIN: Let's leave that one alone.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: The reason I want to leave it alone is because like
it or not the people you mentioned, at the present time, have
tremendous responsibilities and I have no wish to jiggle their arms
or second-guess them or be a Sunday-morning quarterback. It's
very complicated and you don't have to like a man to know he's
Officer of the Deck at the moment.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: Number seven would be next, if you want that one.
SCHULMAN: All right.
HEINLEIN: "Do you consider the revolution in The Moon is a
Harsh Mistress to be a success?" I'm not sure what you mean by
success; I described what happened and you can evaluate it to suit
yourself. What happened in the long run appears in the first
paragraph of the book and then again in the last paragraph. So far
as Manny is concerned, the moon has acquired far too much
government, they've thrown off the dictatorial rule from above and
now they're getting far too much government from democratic means.
It's not to his taste--nor to mine nor to yours. But I simply
described what happened. I might say that there is implied there
my own belief that government is an almost incurable disease of
mankind when you get anything resembling a dense population.
SCHULMAN: And I think you also make a point in Time Enough
For Love--I think Lazarus makes the statement--that any time you
get a large enough population you have absolutely no privacy any
more and it's time to move on.
HEINLEIN: In fact he defines it as when the population reaches
the point where they require I.D.'s. Now, let me comment on that in
my own case.
When I was born the population of the United States was
seventy-five million. Take a look at it now. When I first went in
the service, you didn't even have to have a birth certificate. I
didn't get a birth certificate until I was nearly fifty years old--a
so-called "delayed" birth certificate. We didn't have I,D.'s--I
mean to say a member of the military forces did not carry an I.D. on
his person--back when I started in. He simply didn't; there
weren't any. Very much smaller population, very much smaller
organization, so forth and so on. And now we've reached the point
where every time I turn around somebody asks me for my social
security number; I had it forced on me. Any time a place gets
densely enough populated for things like this to happen, it's time
to move on. I've moved on to what extent I can; I live out in the
country. I've taken a look at all the rest of this globe and I can
say this for the United States; it's the worst possible country on
the globe except for all the others. And as for California,
California has tremendous shortcomings; it simply happens to be
better than the rest for my taste. For my taste. Alaska has a
very small population but it has a horrible climate and I'm tired of
shoveling snow.
SCHULMAN: My friend, Sam Konkin, is a bit of a Canadian
chauvinist and he's always telling me about the glories of Alberta.
HEINLEIN: Oh, yes. He's perfectly right in that--if you're
willing to put up with fifty degrees below zero; I'm not.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: I've done the best I can under the circumstances to
get as much freedom as I can by self-help methods.
SCHULMAN: Okay. There's a second part to that question.
HEINLEIN: Okay.
SCHULMAN: And even a third.
HEINLEIN: Oh, yes. "One of our group of libertarians, David
Friedman, believes that Prof locked out Manny and Wyoh from further
conversation with Mike, then committed suicide to prevent Mike from
using his powers as a dictatorial tyrant." Well, inasmuch as Prof
died right on stage, suicide seems sort of unlikely to me. You
remember how he died? He was speaking at the moment.
SCHULMAN: Right.
HEINLEIN: He's on a platform and speaking.
SCHULMAN: Of course, I could think of several ways it could
be done.
HEINLEIN: Oh, yes, surely. So far as the author of the story
is concerned, I never had any such theory in mind. David Friedman
is mistaken about that. So far as I could, that story--told in the
first person--was told as accurately as Manny could tell it. Of
course his viewpoint is limited.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: "Is that what you intended? If not, what did you
intend?" I intended to tell the story that the words set forth.
SCHULMAN: Okay, that's self explanatory.
HEINLEIN: And as for the revolution being a success, success
is a word--used with respect to a revolution or any attempt of that
sort--that involves a subjective judgment. It's clear from
Manny's standpoint that it is something less than a success.
The final result--the final outcome--is not entirely to his taste.
He's thinking about moving on to where things are looser.
SCHULMAN: Okay. How about question number six, now?
HEINLEIN: "What would Da Capo have been like if you'd
written it right after Methuselah's Children?" [Da Capo was the
original title for Time Enough For Love--listed on the "Future
History" chart--when Heinlein planned it back in the forties--JNS]
Well in the first place I would have written it right after
Methuselah's Children. So I'm reasonably certain that it would
have been somewhat different from what it is, in fact very
different. Look, I've lived more than a generation--in human
terms--between those two books. It would be surprising if I hadn't
changed some, grown some, changed my evaluations a bit in the course
of that time, but in any case I did not write it then. And these
are works of fiction.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: All right. "Do you believe, as some of my friends
have claimed, that you 'copped out' by resolving the matters of the
Jockaira gods only in conversation?" Look, I'm not dead, yet. What
makes your friends think that I won't write that story?
SCHULMAN: They're hoping you will! In fact Sam Konkin--when I
mentioned that I was still hoping you might write such a
story--suggested that you should entitle it Del Segno, which means
"from the sign."
HEINLEIN: Well, I used a musical analog all the way through
this thing; it's Aria Da Capo and that's why the last part is "Da
Capo." Aria Da Capo simply means to go back to the
beginning...which he did.
SCHULMAN: Yes, he certainly did.
I have to say that I disagree with one point that you made in
our last conversation; that pornography is literature written to
create an erection, and that you didn't think that this was the case
with the last part of Time Enough For Love. I can name at least
three friends who read through that last part with an erection.
HEINLEIN: [Laughing] How old were they?
SCHULMAN: Right about my age.
HEINLEIN: Well, look--at the age of which you speak, almost
everything makes you horny. The last part of that is certainly not
pornography such as you can buy on Forty-Second Street. There is
a great difference between realistic treatment of sex and
pornographic treatment, and all I can say about that is that it was
not intended to have that effect but if it did, my congratulations
to you.
SCHULMAN: Okay. How about the next part of number six?
["What really happened at the Families' meeting of 2012?"]
HEINLEIN: The Families' meeting of 2012? Nobody knows what
happened at the Families' meeting of 2012 but Lazarus and he ain't
talkin'! The point is, if you take timing on the thing, this is the
point at which the Families had to make a decision as to how they
were to deal with what they could see was an upcoming dictatorship.
Just consider the date involved on the thing. That ties in with the
story--oh, something "Empire..."
SCHULMAN: "Logic of Empire"?
HEINLEIN: "Logic of Empire" and "If This Goes On--" and so
forth. It was the date of a growing political crisis, and they're
having to decide what they're going to do, and then there are
indications later--in Methuselah's Children and elsewhere--that
what they did do was go underground as thoroughly as they could,
and distribute their wealth here and there under various and sundry
dummies. Quite evidently Lazarus Long thought that their intentions
were too mild--that they should do something far more dramatic--and
2,000 years later he is unwilling to argue the point as to whether
his judgment was better or worse than of men long since dead. I
don't particularly expect to do a story about the Families' meeting
of 2012--all I have are some notes--and I'm not sure that it
constitutes a story. Now. [Quoting from last part of question six]
"I have to admit that my first thought when I started reading Time
Enough For Love was shock and sadness to learn that Andy Libby
had been dead over a thousand years." Well, if I write another story
about Lazarus, it might turn out that Andy Libby isn't dead...at
the time that story takes place.
SCHULMAN: Oooh!
HEINLEIN: You see, my stories jump around in time, they always
have. They are not written in the sequence in which they appear
on the time-chart that John Campbell published a long time ago, not
at all in that sequence.
SCHULMAN: Speaking of the chart, there are two stories on
there which are a bit of a mystery to quite a few of us; "Word
Edgewise" and "Fire Down Below." [Two of the "Future History's"
"unwritten" stories.]
HEINLEIN: I can indicate to you what each was about and
they're--both of them--stories that I don't, at present, have plans
for writing. I might; all I have are notes. But look, Neil--I
probably don't have time to write too many more stories, and I have
lots of other things I want to do besides writing stories. Like it
or not I'm not going to last any twenty-three centuries. "Fire Down
Below" concerned a revolution in Antarctica and "Word Edgewise"
concerned Zebediah Scudder [sic] taking over the United States
through his church.
SCHULMAN: Wasn't that also "The Sound of His Wings"?
HEINLEIN: Well, there are two stories involved in there; both
of them were intended to be novellas when I originally planned them
many years ago. But I doubt if I will get around to writing these.
I'd rather tackle something else. I have well over a hundred
stories--with notes and outlines and so forth--in my files; most of
them will never be written. I mean it's physically impossible
simply for the reason that I acquire more stories each year than I
write. I have more stories on file, unwritten, than I have written
in my entire lifetime, and my backlog gets larger each year. So it
has to be a matter of choosing the story that I happen to want to
write.
SCHULMAN: Uh, huh.
HEINLEIN: And if I have that many stories left unwritten now,
I will have still more stories left unwritten if I manage to last
for a good many years longer, because it gets more so each year.
SCHULMAN: I think I can understand that because I find myself
writing maybe one story for every thirty story-ideas I get.
HEINLEIN: That's right. All right. [Quoting last part of
question six:] "I had expected the book to start telling about his
and Lazarus`s trips exploring for real estate." I had rather
expected that, too, except that I had to pick and choose what I
would put into this story; you can't cover twenty-three centuries in
one book. Libby's and Lazarus Long's real estate adventures are not
of the significance--I mean they're primarily adventures--they're
not of the significance of the stuff that I did write, in my
opinion. That book, despite its enormous bulk, is far more
characterized by what I left out than by what I put in. [Chuckling]
Twenty-three centuries.
SCHULMAN: There's one thing that comes to mind that I didn't
put on my list of questions, and that is I heard there was an entire
section of Stranger in a Strange Land which was never used.
HEINLEIN: Oh, there are big chunks of all my stories that
have never been used because I cut them to the bone as much as
possible.
SCHULMAN: Specifically, I heard it was one telling Valentine
Michael Smith's origins on Mars.
HEINLEIN: Oh, I've forgotten offhand just how much of that I
cut out; I'd have to go back and look at my notes. I suppose
somebody's been reading the archives down in the vaults at
University of California?
SCHULMAN: Uh, or--Is there a library nearby you in Santa Cruz
that has that?
HEINLEIN: University of California is my archivist and its
nearest campus is just below me. They have a completist attitude
and the very roughest of rough notes are saved just as carefully as
the final drafts. Any story I'd finished with--at the time they set
it up--I just turned everything over to them concerning that story.
SCHULMAN: I hope, one of these days, to get down there and
start reading it.
HEINLEIN: Well, I don't think it's too edifying because if I
hadn't thought the stuff I left in was better than the stuff I left
out, I wouldn't have done it that way.
SCHULMAN: Okay, I can buy that.
HEINLEIN: However, people who are interested in such literary
matters--which I'm not, especially--do dig into all these notes and
correspondence and such. Now where are we?
SCHULMAN: Question number eight. ["Of all your stories, which
one did you enjoy writing the most? Who is your favorite
character?"]
HEINLEIN: All right. Oh, those at two very different things.
When I gave the James Forrestal Memorial Lecture down there at the
Naval Academy I answered specifically that first question. I enjoy
writing them all because the thumb-rule that I have about fiction
is whether of not it interests me. If it interests me then I
assume that it probably will interest some other people. If it
bores me I don't write it. Follow me?
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: You know that's an impossible thing for me to
answer? To begin with, all an author's characters are the author
himself speaking in one way or another. He may even be speaking as
the Devil's Advocate at one point, but nevertheless the author does
it all. I could say Lazarus Long but that would simply be because
it's the character that's been on my mind most recently. I could
equally handily say Podkayne Fries, or Rhysling--it doesn't matter.
I can't have a favorite character. It's as ridiculous--If an
author has a favorite character, why he'll behave like a parent with
a favorite child. Each one has to be my favorite when I'm writing
about him.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: Or I don't do myself or the reader justice.
SCHULMAN: All right. Why don't we skip along to number nine,
then? ["New Libertarian Notes Review Editor Richard Friedman
created a fictional list of books that Dr. Samuel Russell (a character
in Have Space Suit Will Travel, for them who don't know) gave to Kip
to supplement his education. It was printed in NLN 5 (Summer
Issue, 1971) and I'm enclosing a Xerox copy for you. Interestingly
enough, one of the books is Eric Temple Bell's Men of Mathematics,
which you recommended to me just yesterday. Do you have any
comments or additions?"]
HEINLEIN: Let's see. I haven't had time to study that list; I
know that about half of them were books I've read and about half
were books I've not read but looked as if they might be appropriate.
I haven't read Have Space Suit Will Travel for quite a long time;
does Dr. Russell give a specific list in there or not?
SCHULMAN: No.
HEINLEIN: He doesn't? Well, I really haven't had time to
study Friedman's list and since I haven't read about half of them I
don't know. It looks as though it were a pretty good list. In any
case, if a man just reads and keeps on reading, whether he reads my
favorites of not he's going to broaden his education. As long as he
reads everything. That's why I was urging you to read Eric Temple
Bell.
SCHULMAN: I've made a note to get my hands on both those books
[Heinlein had also recommended Bell'`s Queen of The Sciences] plus
John J. Pierce made a Xerox copy of part of his Development of
Mathematics dealing with epistemology.
HEINLEIN: Well, that's good. I recommended Eric Temple Bell
because he's so very readable. In that same connection John R.
Pierce--John J. Pierce's father--is one of the best popular
expositors--in addition to being a fine research man; one of the
great physicists of our day--he's one of the best popular
expositors, just as Eric Temple Bell was. Oh, look up stuff by John
R. Pierce with popular titles; he can give you an appreciation of
mathematical physics--or at least certain aspects of it--that you
can't get from ordinary study. Dr. Pierce is a very, very clever
writer. I commend his popular works to your attention--not his
technical works because he works in an extremely technical field.
But his popular exposition of what he does--and what Claude [E.]
Shannon does, for example--the originator of information
theory?--this is good. Dr. Pierce for the applications of
mathematics to physics--are very good sources.
Now, let's see.
SCHULMAN: Well, we already went through ten and eleven.
HEINLEIN: Yes, all right now, twelve. "What is science
fiction" [(I define it as the sort of stuff Robert Heinlein
writes)]" Ah, yes. As you know, everybody takes a whack at that
every now and then. Have you seen a book--just a moment, I'll catch
the name; it's across the room here--[Long pause]--a book called
The Science Fiction Novel, which contains four lectures--one by
me, one by Alfred Bester, one by Cyril Kornbluth, and one by
somebody else; I've forgotten who now--University of Chicago.
SCHULMAN: I've heard it referred to. I haven't seen it.
HEINLEIN: Well, the name of it's The Science Fiction Novel
and it's Advent Press. I discuss the nature of science fiction
quite extensively in the opening part of my lecture, and inasmuch as
it's there and in print and you can unquestionably get it out of the
library, I'll let it go with this one remark here: Science fiction
is to my mind--if you want to separate it from fantasy--science
fiction is based on the real world, speculation that takes
place--usually into the future--about the real world, and which
takes science as a necessary aspect of the story that you`re
writing--meaning if you left the science out the story would fall to
pieces. Fantasy, on the other hand, is a fairy-tale for grown-ups.
It is not based on the real world. This is no criticism of fantasy;
I'm not opposed to it at all. Tolkien's "Ring" trilogy, for
example, is fantasy, laid in an unreal world about unreal things;
that doesn't keep it from having philosophical importances to it
that many students have seen. I write both science fiction and
fantasy and I sometimes mix them up in the same story in a way that
purists do not like. You have read Glory Road?
SCHULMAN: One of my favorites.
HEINLEIN: Well, that's both science fiction and fantasy all
mixed up together.
SCHULMAN: I've been thinking for years that a story, for
instance, like Between Planets--I could see it very easily shifted
into an eighteenth or nineteenth century mode, you know, written by
somebody like Robert Louis Stevenson, and instead of having Don
Harvey being born between planets he could be born on a ship between
countries...
HEINLEIN: Yes, yes. However, it was hard-core science fiction
for its time because at the time I wrote that story it was still
conceivable that Venus could be that sort of planet. That was
written before we knew anything about Venus, or what we knew about
it was the small amount that we could learn from the surface of this
planet. I have written stories that are outright fantasies, such as
"The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag." Now you can't by any
stretch of the imagination call that science fiction; there isn't
any science in it and one simply goes along with the assumptions in
it long enough to read the story. Or a story such as my short
story--it was about city politics and a reporter and it involved a
whirlwind that seemed to be setting it--I've forgotten the name of
the story right now; it's in the same collection with "Jonathan
Hoag"--that's a fantasy. ["Our Fair City" in 6 x H--JNS] In fact,
that entire collection with "Jonathan Hoag" are pretty much
fantasies--"The Man Who Traveled In Elephants"; that's about all
you can call that. All I can say about it is that I try to know
which I'm doing when I'm doing it. There are a lot of people
writing science fiction who don't know anything about science and
they think they're writing science fiction when actually they're
writing nonsense...[Quoting questions;] "Are any of your books
not science fiction by your definition?" Yes, and you can pretty
well pick them out in addition to the ones I've named. Well, "Magic
Incorporated" is an example of one that is definitely fantasy, not
science fiction.
SCHULMAN: But you would say that "Waldo" is science fiction?
HEINLEIN: It's closer to being fantasy but it has some science
fiction aspects. As with Glory Road, I mixed the two elements
into one story, which the purists don't care for, but sometime you
can tell a good story that way. As far as I'm concerned, fiction
is intended to entertain. If I can manage to entertain with it,
that's what the cash customer is paying for. So I don't hesitate to
write straight science fiction, straight fantasy, or a mixture of
the two--or anything else. I've written all sorts of things.
I've written first person, teenage female love stories laid in the
present--not science fiction at all, but the sort of thing that I
sold to girls' magazines, girls' teenage magazines--one magazine was
called Senior Prom.
SCHULMAN: What name did you write under?
HEINLEIN: Now, that's a nasty question.
SCHULMAN: [Laughing] I'm really interested.
HEINLEIN: Look, those stories were written quite some time
ago; their only importance was that they were sufficiently
entertaining to be entertaining to teenage girls. I did it more or
less experimentally because I had a female editor who said it
couldn't be done. Whereupon I did it. Whereupon I finally
thereafter started putting some female, teenage lead characters into
my science fiction: "The Menace From Earth," for example; that's a
piece of hard-core science fiction but the lead character is a
fifteen, sixteen year old girl. Told in the first person, do you
remember that story--"The Menace From Earth"?
SCHULMAN: Very, very well.
HEINLEIN: That was a direct result of having done those
teenage love stories. And, eventually, I did Podkayne of Mars and
there are two or three others kicking around here and there. I
started using realistic female characters thereafter because I found
it fleshed the stories out, it seemed to improve them.
SCHULMAN: Tell me, does the name "Lazabee Green" mean anything
to you?
HEINLEIN: The name what?
SCHULMAN: Lazabee Green.
HEINLEIN: Spell it.
SCHULMAN: L-A-Z-A-B-E-E.
HEINLEIN: Lazadee?
SCHULMAN: Lazabee, with a "b" as in Betty.
HEINLEIN: Yes.
SCHULMAN: Green.
HEINLEIN: Greed
SCHULMAN: G-R-E-E-N.
HEINLEIN: Green. Lazabee Green. I don't believe I've ever
read a story about such a character and I don't think I've known
such person.
SCHULMAN: There was a rumor going around that this was one of
your pen-names.
HEINLEIN: [Laughing] Oh. No, it's not. It doesn't mean
anything to me at all. I can assure that this is not one of my
pen-names.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: [Chuckling] A long time past I was accused of
having the pen-name of L. Ron Hubbard, but that was many, many years
ago.
SCHULMAN: [Laughing] It doesn't seem likely now.
HEINLEIN: Oh, it used to amuse Ron. We'd talk it over from
time to time.
SCHULMAN: Okay. I guess we might as well move on to thirteen.
HEINLEIN: Question thirteen? Oh, but on twelve; "Do you
prefer the term 'speculative' fiction? If so, why?" Yes, I prefer
the term "speculative" fiction because there isn't anything about
that term which ties me down to putting a lot of atomic physics or
such into a story. It's a looser term. More elbow room.
Speculative about the future. But serious speculation.
Now thirteen, ["About your future writing plans. Do you
intend to write another juvenile? How about a story taking place
(perhaps this wishful thinking on my part) in a working anarcho-
capitalist society with competing private police, arbitration, and
armies?"] Future writing plans, we've already discussed that
somewhat. If I continue to live and have a reasonable amount of
health, I'll probably write some stories. I couldn't guess what
they might be. For the past few years I've been ill as much as I've
been well, so I haven't gotten very much done. As of right now I
don't know what my next story will be.
SCHULMAN: Okay. I could tell you right off, though, that
there are a lot of libertarian fans who would be quite happy to see
you write something along the lines I described in number thirteen.
HEINLEIN: Well, I'll write it if it strikes me as a good
story. I won't write it if not. If it's simply going to be a
lecture, no. If I see a really good story in it, I would tackle it.
I don't know; I've got things like that in the file. I did
something like that in Podkayne of Mars when I took them to
Venus. You remember that Venus had no government as such it simply
had capitalists and employees and tourists.
SCHULMAN: Right, but there was only one company which I'm
not sure is what normally would develop.
HEINLEIN: I'm not sure it is, either. But I say I did
something like that once.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: L. Sprague De Camp did something like that with lots
of companies; it was called "The Stolen Dormouse."
SCHULMAN: I'll have to look that up.
HEINLEIN: It's in a book of his--[Away from telephone;] (Yes,
sweetheart.) It's in a--I can't remember what the title of the book
was. I should remember; it was dedicated to me, but a good many
years back. The title--Oh, Divide and Rule was the title of the
volume, but I think it included "The Stolen Dormouse." It was in
Astounding along about 1940, something like that. It described
the United States under circumstances where everything was run by a
bunch of competing corporations. It was quite amusing. Now,
fourteen?
SCHULMAN: Fourteen.
HEINLEIN: "Do you believe that a 'romantic' story necessarily
involves highly motivated characters striving--" Look, that's the
sort of question you ask a professor of English! [Laughter] I'm
not a literary person; I just write stories. They're intended to
amuse people. I'm not sure what the difference is between a
"romantic" story and some other sort of story, I've written stories
that involved "highly motivated characters striving for a single,
overpowering goal beset with obstacles and antagonists until the
climatic resolution"--I have done that, yes. "Is this the story you
like to read? Like to write? Used to like?" Look, I read
everything. I'm a garbage paper reader. I'm the type of a
person who sits on the curbstone and opens up paper wet from garbage
to read the continuation of the jump page! I gave you my only
thumb-rule for a story; if it interests me--if I find it
interesting--I'll write it on the assumption that somebody else will
be interested in it, too, but if it bores me I won't write it. But
all of these other things, these are things that professors of
English talk about in courses on literature and that's simply not
the sort of education I had. If I had started worrying about things
like that when I started writing I probably wouldn't have written
even one story.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: Fifteen, we've had that, haven't we?
SCHULMAN: Right, and I think we've pretty much covered
sixteen, too. [Question seventeen was irrelevant at this point.] I
guess we're up to eighteen then.
HEINLEIN: "Do you see many of your recent story endings as
downbeat? If so/not, why?" Well, I don't see them as downbeat. Do
you? If so, which ones?
SCHULMAN: Well, I found The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress a bit
depressing--from my point of view.
HEINLEIN: [Chuckling] Because the perfect anarchy wasn't set
up as a result of it?
SCHULMAN: Right. [Also for a rather obvious reason which
didn't come to mind; both my favorite characters--Mycroft and
Prof--were dead (or presumed dead) at the end ] Or because you
seemed to feel government was an inevitable "disease."
HEINLEIN: I'm not sure that it's inevitable but I see nothing
in the history of the human race to indicate to me that it is not.
SCHULMAN: You gotta start somewhere.
HEINLEIN: I'm not disagreeing with that, either. Let's see,
the expression "necessary evil" was from Thomas Jefferson, wasn't
it?
SCHULMAN: I don't know, specifically. [I have since learned
that it's from the opening of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense."]
HEINLEIN: I think it was from Thomas Jefferson who was
certainly a libertarian of his period. I never thought of Harsh
Mistress as being downbeat. There are indications quite early in
the story that they're not going to wind up with an anarchy, they
simply aren't; you can see that from the fashion in which the
committee starts to organize. I don't mean the revolutionary
committee, but after they've taken over and they're trying to hold
things together.
SCHULMAN: Several of your stories that have sort of dismissed
the idea of finding a final resolution to philosophical problems on
earth I find a little depressing because--
HEINLEIN: Oh, no! Well, yes, I can make some comment on that.
Clear back in a thing called Sixth Column--which is a story that I
wrote to a plot of John Campbell's and didn't particularly want to
write, except that I needed the money--I added a lot of things into
it that John Campbell didn't have in his plot including the idea
that there were no final solutions. And Neil, there aren't.
SCHULMAN: Well, that won't prevent me from looking for them.
HEINLEIN: Yes, but don't be too discouraged when you don't
find them. My wife--who is only a little younger than I am--still
looks for these final answers, and is still hopeful. I got over
looking for final solutions a good, long time ago because once you
get this point shored up, something breaks out somewhere else. The
human race gets along by the skin of its teeth, and it's been doing
so for some hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Human
solutions are never final solutions--at least so far as the
history of the race up to now indicates. When I was a kid we had
the "War to End All Wars"--going to make the world "safe for
democracy." Now look at the damn thing. In fact, all you needed to
do was take a little over ten years after that war as over and
things were already in bad shape. We thought we had all the
problems of our economy solved except the problems of
distribution--I'm talking about the race as a whole, I'm not talking
about my books--and now we suddenly discover that we're in a closed
spaceship, a goldfish bowl, and if we don't get a balanced aquarium
we're going to poison ourselves with our own poisons. It is the
common human condition all through history that every time you solve
a problem you discover that you've also created a new problem. I
did a story based on this called Beyond This Horizon--
SCHULMAN: Which I'm just rereading, now.
HEINLEIN: All right. I started out with the assumption that
all present-day problems had been solved at that point. I
describe a utopia--largely anarchistic; there isn't enough
government there to matter--and what do we do? We've got a hero who
says: "Nevertheless, it ain't worth the trouble! What's it all
about?" He's unhappy in this utopia simply because he doesn't
have those answers to noumena--that I defined earlier?--the problems
of philosophy known as noumena. And he finally accepts--agrees to
accept--a partial answer: that a serious research effort will be
undertaken--not to solve all those problems but simply to find out
whether or not there is life after death, because that
would--whether the answer is yes or whether the answer is no--it
would affect the final answers on other things.
SCHULMAN: Do you have any opinions on that question?
HEINLEIN: I usually do not express them in newspapers.
SCHULMAN: Off the record?
HEINLEIN: I have little or no objective data. So far as
subjective data is concerned, I incline to the notion that when
we die, we don't die all over. That we do not die all over. That
there is something that persists. But even that--because that
opens up all of the questions of philosophy and religion--I avoid
discussing in fiction endlessly, both in this last book and in
Stranger in a Strange Land and Beyond This Horizon and lots of
others.
SCHULMAN: I'll repeat the comment that I made in my letter;
that I think religion and politics--or "philosophy" and
politics--are the only subjects worth arguing about.
HEINLEIN: Well, yes. There are four major subjects as
mentioned by Lazarus Long: war, money, politics, and love--and
matters of philosophy affect all four of those. Those are four
principal interests of the human animal. Sex, economic motivation,
war, and politics. Politics in its broadest sense, which would
include anarchy.
SCHULMAN: Right. Without meaning to get back on the subject
of libertarianism again--because we can't go very far on that--I
just wanted to make the comment that Podkayne of Mars there's a
whole speech by Uncle Tom about not putting down politics because
it's the way men get along without fighting.
HEINLEIN: Yes.
SCHULMAN: Well, we're in agreement about the idea of getting
along without fighting, it's just that I--again using Franz
Oppenheimer's definition--would call that the economic method,
rather than the political method.
HEINLEIN: Well, politics simply names a field, that's all.
Politics is the whole field of human interrelations. It is so
difficult to separate the economic and the political factors that
the subjects are often lumped in together as political economy--one
title.
Now, let's see.
SCHULMAN: I guess we're up to nineteen or twenty; both are
basically the same question. [Question nineteen, asking for an
expansion of Heinlein's views on Ayn Rand, was dispensed with as
having too low a priority for the Sunday News.]
HEINLEIN: Twenty: "What philosophers or artists--past or
present--attract you, and why?"
SCHULMAN: That's a big question.
HEINLEIN: Well, yes it is...I studied philosophy under Will
Durant many, many years ago--this was before he was well-known,
long before he was well-known; this was back in the early
twenties--and he first introduced me to a wide range of
philosophers; and I read 'em all; I gobbled 'em all. I suppose I've
learned something from all of them, but not necessarily what they
wanted to impart. It took me quite a while, for example, to realize
that what Plato was preaching was the direct opposite of what I
liked and believed in--[Laughter]--because it was so well-told, so
well-expressed. Artists?--are you speaking of pictorial art, or
what?
SCHULMAN: I'm using art in the very general categories of
music, painting, literature...
HEINLEIN: My tastes in art are pretty eclectic. I refer you
to some remarks by Dr. Jubal Harshaw in Stranger In a Strange Land
in which he discuses art and in which he indicates that most of the
artists he likes are pre-World War One--and why. Now, this is not
entirely true of myself--there are a lot of good artists around--but
I'm reminded of something a Norwegian artist told me in Oslo a good
many years ago. I asked him what he thought of American
artists--did we have any good artists at the present time? and he
said, "Oh, yes, yes--you've got lots of them. But they're all in
commercial art. [Laughter] This is a period when a great many of
the so-called fine artists are apparently painting with old brooms,
and would be horrified at the idea that a picture actually had to
look like something? Or say anything to the viewer? I'm an old
square on that; I want to be able to understand a picture that I
look at.
SCHULMAN: My father still has a color slide of three huge,
white canvasses at the Museum of Modern Art with absolutely
nothing on them.
HEINLEIN: Yes. Did your father like that?
SCHULMAN: He thought it was a big joke.
HEINLEIN: Yes, I think so, too. Like that pianist here some
years back at one of these far out things who gave a concert that
consisted of going to the piano and sitting there holding perfectly
still for twelve minutes. Never touched the keys.
SCHULMAN: Yes, this was just done in Boston within the past
two years.
HEINLEIN: Yes. That's carrying a joke a bit far; however, if
they can get away with it, it's all right with me; I simply won't
subscribe to it.
SCHULMAN: Well, you might pay for it once just for the
gimmick, but I doubt that you'll ask for the recording.
HEINLEIN: Have you read Huckleberry Finn?
SCHULMAN: Not for a long time.
HEINLEIN: Well, do you remember that the Duke and the Dauphin
arranged a show down in Arkansas that was a phony, a fake? And they
put on three performances; the first, the people were dismayed; the
second one, they had everybody else in town because the first people
attending wouldn't admit they'd been swindled; and the third night,
everybody showed up and they were carrying rotten eggs and dead cats
and so forth. The Duke and the Dauphin snuck out the back door with
the receipts and were half way to the river before Huck realized
that they were about to go off without him! [Laughter] Mark Twain
defined in there how many times you can get away with a swindle, and
in that particular case three times--as long as you risk being
lynched.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: Now. let's see. [Reading question twenty-one] "One
of your main themes has constantly stressed that man is the most
dangerous, deadly, and resourceful beast in the universe. Do you
believe this? [If so, since we have no basis of comparison as yet,
why?]"
Look, we aren't off this planet yet, really. I don't know
whether he is or he isn't. Actually, what I'm saying at that point
is he's the most dangerous, deadly, and resourceful beast on this
planet, because that is all the universe we know so far. He
certainly is on this planet--of course we've only been dominant for
a relatively short time; the returns from upstate are not in
yet--[Laughter]--but as of right ow, we are just that. I kept
emphasizing that because there are so many people going around
talking sweetness and light, acting as if the human animal--all you
needed to do was make sure that you petted him enough when he's a
small child and then he would never bite. I don't believe it. We
got this way--we got where we are--over the course of a long stretch
of evolution, by being survivor types in a very tough jungle. And
from all I've seen of the human race so far, they're still that
mean, tough, and nasty. I do not mean that as a derogatory remark,
either; I think that's what it takes to survive. That doesn't mean
you have to be mean, tough, and nasty in your daily behavior. In
other words, I am not a pacifist, and I do not think the human
animal is put together so he can be a pacifist and still survive.
Pacifists stay alive at the present time because others who are not
pacifists have put up with them and protect them in spite of
themselves. There are some indications of that in Time Enough For
Love, too. My ideal on that would be Dora in "The Tale of the
Adopted Daughter" who's shown as utterly sweet and gentle all the
way through except the one time when she was called upon to shoot
and she shot. Did it right, and didn't hesitate.
SCHULMAN: I think I'm going to have to transfer cassettes at
this point. One second.
HEINLEIN: All right.
[AFTER NEW CASSETTE IS PUT IN]
SCHULMAN: Okay, I guess we're up to number twenty-two, now.
HEINLEIN: All right. Hold it just a second. On twenty-one;
One of the reasons I have emphasized that is because there have been
lots of other writers who have always talked as if just as soon as
we got in touch with really intelligent, highly advanced races, we
will find them to be peaceful vegetarians. Well, I don't think that
is necessarily true at all. There's no data on which to base that;
it is simply wishful thinking on the part of the writers who write
that way. The universe might turn out to be a hell of a sight
nastier and tougher place than we have any reason to guess at this
point. That first contact just might wipe out the human race,
because we would encounter somebody who was meaner and tougher, and
not at all inclined to be bothered by genocide. Be no more bothered
by genocide than I am when I put out ant poison in the kitchen when
the ants start swarming in.
SCHULMAN: Do you think any of the U.F.O's have been actual
contacts?
HEINLEIN: I don't know. I simply don't have data.
SCHULMAN: What about Air Force Project Bluebook?
HEINLEIN: I don't have data. There have been some ooh-foh
sightings that are extremely hard to explain. I'm reminded of
something Willy Ley said to me, oh, twenty, twenty-five years ago.
He said: "Vun. Dere is something dere. Two. I do not know vat it
iss." I'm just about where Willy Ley put it then; there is
something there and I do not know what it is.
SCHULMAN: Okay. [Question number twenty-two; "Alexei Panshin
in Heinlein In Dimension claims that Clark Fries is 'thoroughly
sick.' Since Clark happens to be one of my favorite characters, I
believe Panshin is wrong, and that whatever Clark's problems, his
natural intelligence will finally resolve them. What do you
think?"]
HEINLEIN: Number twenty-two; I have not read Heinlein in
Dimension; I've never seen it.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: Clark Fries--his uncle indicates in the very end
of the story that he thinks the boy is sadly in need of treatment,
yes. That's the uncle's opinion. And he also thinks the boy got
into the shape that he's in through being neglected by his parents.
That is the opinion of the uncle, however, I can see how Mr. Panshin
would reach that opinion. You say that he happens to be one of your
favorite characters. Well, he's one of my favorite characters,
too. He was quite a lot of fun to write. Instead of writing the
sweet, little Boy Scouts that I've done so many times, I wrote a
character who was strictly self-centered. "And his natural
intelligence will finally resolve"--yes, the last paragraph of the
book indicates that Clark Fries had decided to join the human race.
Yes, I would agree with you on that. He's quite young, you know,
he's what?--twelve years old, something like that? And to expect
much in the way of social integration out of a twelve-year-old is to
be sadly disappointed.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: He's growing up, though. Yes. And he's quite
intelligent.
[Number twenty-three:] "Are you familiar with the
psychological theories of Dr. Thomas Szasz?" I have in my study one
of his books which I've read. Let me see the name of it here, if I
can read it from across the room. The general idea was that he's
opposed to psychiatry--although he's a professor or psychiatry--he's
opposed to psychiatry as it's organized now. The Myth of Mental
Illness, that's it.
SCHULMAN: The main point I was referring to here is his basic
idea that you have to define mental illness--You just can't say that
because someone commits an abhorrent act that he's "sick"; he says
that the medical analogy just doesn't hold up.
HEINLEIN: That's right.
SCHULMAN: And you seemed to be making a similar point with the
"sound semantic orientation" in "Coventry."
HEINLEIN: Yes, somewhat. Not the identical point, but a
somewhat similar point. As far as I'm concerned the defense in
court of "Not Guilty By Reason Of Insanity" should not be considered
a defense at all. But, I'm not a psychiatrist.
SCHULMAN: I guess what I'm referring to next is the question:
"If a person understands the consequences of 'damaging'
another...[(namely, Rothbardian theory, full restitution to the
victim plus cost of apprehension and interest for the time lost; or
in the case of murder the murderer becomes the slave of the victim's
heirs), isn't his psychological state irrelevant?"]
HEINLEIN: Look, that's a very complex question, particularly
in that you want me to take a high order abstraction and follow that
abstraction by somebody else's intensional definition, rather than
an extensional definition.
SCHULMAN: I looked those up, and I'd like to be sure I
understand them.
HEINLEIN: Extensional is where you define the word "chair" by
pointing to a half a dozen or a dozen or twenty different chairs,
and add; "and many others." That's an extensional definition. An
extensional definition of human beings would be to go down and point
to any busload and add; "and many others." Now an intensional
definition is a definition you'll find in words in a dictionary. An
intensional definition is where you define one symbol by means of
other symbols. An extensional definition is where you define a
symbol by its referrents. The referrent of the symbol. Korzybski,
in lecturing, used to do away with any discussion of religion right
at that point by inviting anyone in the audience to define the word
"God"--G-o-d--and insisting that they define it extensionally, not
define it in terms of other symbols. Try pointing at God.
SCHULMAN: Yes. Well, I remember when I was five years old--I
was going home with my mother after we'd been out shopping, or
something like that--and I asked her; "Where is God?" And since she
was unable to tell me, from that point on I said, "Well gee. If she
doesn't know where it is then how does she know there is one?"
HEINLEIN: Yes. Well, Korzybski's point was that since you
can't point to the referrent for this symbol, we are not prepared to
engage in any further discussion of it.
SCHULMAN: Was Korzybski trying to make the point that there
was very little use for intensional definitions?
HEINLEIN: Well, there's a thing called the "Semantic Rosary"
that he used to use--levels of abstraction. If you read this book
Science and Sanity--or better yet, much easier to read is Dr. S.I.
Hayakawa's Language In Action; the revised edition has slightly
different wording but if you look that up you'd find the revised
edition, too--This Hayakawa that I'm speaking of is the one that
settled the riots at San Francisco State [College, not Prison].
SCHULMAN: I remember that.
HEINLEIN: He's quite a boy; mind you, this is a man older than
I am who faced sown those rioters with his bare hands--and stopped
the riots. He's not much older than I am, but he is a bit. I knew
him first oh forty, yes forty, years ago.
SCHULMAN: I see reference to him in your 1941 Worldcon speech
[Heinlein's Guest of Honor speech, "The Discovery of the Future"].
HEINLEIN: I referred to Hayakawa?
SCHULMAN: Mm, hmm.
HEINLEIN: Well, that's good, so that--He's been around for a
while. He's no chicken. And his stuff is much easier to read than
Korzybski's; Korzybski was a Pole, and I've never seen a Pole yet
writing in English who didn't manage to get pretty turgid.
Korzybski was a wonderful lecturer but his writing is rather
difficult to follow, even though he is a s[S]emanticist. [Laughter]
You can almost see him translating in his head. Hayakawa--despite
his Japanese name--speaks English as a native language; he learned
it as a baby in Canada, so that Hayakawa handles English much more
easily than Korzybski ever did. I commend it your attention.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
HEINLEIN: But don't miss Korzybski before you're through.
Korzybski is the fountainhead; Hayakawa is the follower.
SCHULMAN: In other words, Hayakawa brought Korzybski down to
earth?
HEINLEIN: Somewhat like that. Certainly Hayakawa handles
English in such a fashion that the layman can read it, whereas
Korzybski is heavy going--quite technical.
Now where are we on this: Dr. Szasz..."damaging"..."isn't his
psychological state irrelevant?" As I say, that involves so much in
the way of high abstraction that I wouldn't attempt to answer it on
my feet. [Quoting the last part of twenty-three:] "Isn't
"Coventry" still an attempt by the state (albeit a relatively benign
one) to interfere with the natural market processes and not let the
victim have his restitution?" Well, "Coventry" was an attempt on
the part of a writer to make a few hundred dollars to pay off a
mortgage. [Laughter] I got an idea for a quite different way of
treating violations of law from the method of either hanging them or
throwing them into jail. Simply divorce them, that's all. Expel
them from society. And I still think it has its points although all
I tried to make out of it was a novelette, and certainly there are
lots of other things that can be said about it.
SCHULMAN: I specifically, however, remember "Coventry" as the
first time which I pointed to a story and said, "Yeah, this is
pretty much what I've been trying to say about the type of society I
wanted to live in; and that's the story that--even though I didn't
know the term at that point--I became a libertarian on.
HEINLEIN: Mm,hmmm. Number twenty-four next?
SCHULMAN: I guess so.
HEINLEIN: "Madalyn Murray O'Hair once told me that she's read
everything you've ever written. [Any comments?]" I don't have any
comment on that; I don't know the lady; I have never met her. I
think I read an article--an interview--about her in the Saturday
Evening Post about twenty years ago, and that's all. I really
don't know very much about her. I'm pleased to hear she's read
everything I've ever written; the more of those we have around, the
more money I make.
SCHULMAN: I tend to think there are quite a few. I know at
least twenty who can make that claim.
HEINLEIN: Well, inasmuch as I started in this business to make
money and my purpose was to entertain, why this pleases me. I don't
know Mrs. O'Hair--or "Ms." O'Hair, or whatever she calls herself--I
really know nothing at all about her except that every now and then
she takes part in a class action case and it always seems to be
libertarian.
SCHULMAN: Okay.
I've managed to whip up a few more questions that aren't on
the pages I've given you ; let's see if I can get a couple of them
out of the way. John J. Pierce gave me a few questions which he
wanted to know [and which I asked because I also was interested in
them]...He wants me to ask you if you're aware that many who admire
your work up to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or so are turned off
by I Will Fear No Evil and Time Enough For Love and he's
wondering if you think you've changed that much.
HEINLEIN: No, I do not. I knew that he was turned off by both
of those books; he let me know...Probably John Jeremy would be
considerably disappointed to know that I Will Fear No Evil was
listed as a bestseller last year in a publishers' publication
comparing the sales of the whole market; I think it would distress
him. I got some bad reviews primarily inside science fiction
itself; I got good reviews from outside science fiction and the book
has been extremely successful with the public, whether it's popular
with John Jeremy or not.
SCHULMAN: I think what he's trying to say --and I've gotten
similar things from several other of my friends--is that they seem
to feel that it's not as quite "hard core" science fiction.
HEINLEIN: Yes, yes. I have departed from the "true religion."
[Laughter] Yes, I know. I remember a letter I received--oh, it
must have been around 1947 for it was shortly after I had my first
story published in the Saturday Evening Post; the story was "The
Green Hills of Earth"--and it was from someone, a reader of
Astounding chewing me out for departing from hard-core science
fiction and also casting me into the outer darkness for going over
into the slicks instead of staying with Astounding. I didn't even
bother to answer the letter. The Saturday Evening Post was paying
me something like ten times the word-rate that Astounding did; I
couldn't afford to write for Astounding on that basis..I am
happy to say that the public liked the book that he [J.J. Pierce]
disliked so much, and I am also happy to say that I,m getting
excellent reviews on this new book.
SCHULMAN: Did you read my review, yet?
HEINLEIN: I glanced through it rather hastily.
SCHULMAN: Was there anything you strongly disagreed with of
anything I said?
HEINLEIN: No. No, I didn't. It seemed to me the review was
quite fair. You did mention the difference in pacing--that's true.
When you're writing an adventure story you do pace it differently
from this sort of story, however there are adventure sequences in
Time Enough For Love that are paced pretty fast--here and
there--but it is not primarily an adventure story. In fact it's a
whole bunch of stories, that's true. But how are you going to cope
with twenty-three centuries in one book?
SCHULMAN: With great difficulty?
HEINLEIN: [Laughing] Yes...Over the course of some thirty-four
years of writing, every now and then I receive things from people
condemning me for not having written a story just like my last one.
I never pay any attention to this, Neil, because it has been my
intention--my purpose--to make every story I've written different
from every other story I've ever written--never to write a story
just like my last one...I'm going to write what it suits me to write
and if I write another story that's like any other story I've ever
written, I'll be slipping.
SCHULMAN: I have a note up on my wall which I look at whenever
I start getting down because somebody doesn't like a story I've
written and it says something along the line of: "I'll write what I
want to write, how I want to write, and for whatever reason I want
to write it, and if anybody doesn't like it, he can go 'censored'
for all I care."
HEINLEIN: Well, inasmuch as I have always written with the
reader in mind, I agree with all of that but add onto it that I
write for publication things that I think people will enjoy
reading...and this book I Will Fear No Evil has been extremely
successful with the general public, whether or not it appeals to a
small group of science fictions fans...I'm trying to write to please
not even as few as forty thousand people in the hardcover, but a
million and up on the softcover. If an author let these self-
appointed mentors decide for him what he's going to write and how
he's going to write it, he'd never get anywhere...
SCHULMAN: It has been suggested to me that since I'm writing
for a paper like the Sunday News I should do a sort of "movie-
star"-type interview and ask you questions like "What are your
hobbies? Do you have a garden?" That sort of thing.
HEINLEIN; Well, if you want to know things of that sort.
I used to alternate writing books with stonemasonry when I was
in good health; I'm no longer physically up to that. But I've done
a lot of stonemasonry and general mechanic work. I can do almost
any of the construction trades. Of course I'm an engineer by
training, but t I'm pretty handy with almost any tools. I can wire
a house or set a toilet or almost anything of that sort--the sort of
work with his hands that I described Lazarus Long as doing, these
were things I know how to do. My wife is very much of a gardener,
but I don't garden myself. At the present time what with frequent
illnesses it's about all I can do to manage to keep up with the
nonfiction that I have to keep up with to know what's going on. In
consequence, I don't read very much fiction now--not because I don't
want to but because I don't have time to. Reading science fiction
back before I started writing it was my favorite way of spending
leisure. But, Lordy, I don't have time to do it now. I do read a
little of it, but not much. There are some very good writers around
loose now whose work I have accumulated and hope to get to some
time. Larry Niven, for example, is an example of a very good
science fiction writer but I haven't read too much of his--I've
simply got it accumulated in my room--just lack of time for I find
Larry Niven very entertaining. Do you read him?
SCHULMAN: I haven't read anything of his, yet.
HEINLEIN: Well, I commend him to your attention. He's a very
creative writer and very clever. He writes a good yarn.
My wife and I for many years have traveled as much as we
could; this has been somewhat held down by illness in the past four
or five years. I've been to South America a couple of times in the
last four years but that's about as far away as I've been. But for
a number of years I'd write a story while she prepared another trip
and then we'd take the trip and I'd write a story while she prepared
another trip and then we'd take the trip and I'd come back and write
another story. I've never written more than about three months out
of the year the whole time I've been writing. Part of that is
because I never rewrite. I cut, but I don't rewrite.
SCHULMAN: I envy that. I rewrite [then, not now] everything I
put my pen to at least ten times--not through desire, it's just
through dissatisfaction.
HEINLEIN: Well, I never learned to do it that way. Far, far
better to take it a little slower and write it the way you intend it
to be and then I find I still have to take a brush-pen--and cut out
unnecessary verbiage. Oh, I cut thirty or forty thousand words out
of this last one, an I cut twenty-five, thirty thousand words out of
what I thought was the final version of Stranger in a Strange
Land. I mean I'd already cut it before that and then I cut out
another twenty-five thousand words out of it to get it down to a
manageable size.
SCHULMAN; One thing I was wondering about; were those
"omitted's" in Time Enough For Love places where you actually cut,
or was it just an insert at that point?
HEINLEIN: In some cases they were actual cuts; in other cases
they're simply abrupt transitions to make it faster. An example of
the abrupt transition is once when I decided that the reader had had
plenty of the hardships of getting that covered wagon through the
pass, and I just cut out the next several weeks. That's simply an
abrupt transition, in other cases I cut it out because--after having
written it--I cut it out because it wasn't absolutely necessary and
the book was too damn big already.
For years and years we've traveled, oh, around the world three
times, and I don't know how many times to Europe, over the North
Pole, four or five times to South America. We've covered just about
all the globe that we could reach, in view of the fact that you
couldn't get a visa for Red China, and I did avoid the Congo after
things got tough in there--just plain too difficult to travel. And
usually Mrs. Heinlein has learned to speak at least one of the local
languages and in some cases, I have, too. She can speak eight
languages--I can get along in four--but she's not a professional
linguist, she's a biochemist specializing in tropical and
subtropical plants, genetics of them. But she happens to have an
ear for languages and she studies very hard, so there's at least
three languages that she can think in and some eight languages that
she can get along it. But when she finished NYU a good many years
ago she had only three languages; she simply kept adding them on.
We're both very fond of dancing; we haven't done much of it
lately. We used to do a lot of dancing on ice. We belonged to a
couple of figure skating clubs that regularly had ice
dancing--social dancing on ice. I don't know whether you've ever
seen it but all of the usual dances that are done on boards can be
done on skates. And we belonged to a square dancing club and a
cotillion and one thing or another, but we're always set up for
dancing here in the house. But you get older...so we just don't
dance as much as we used to.
SCHULMAN: Does your house resemble at all the description of
Jubal Harshaw's place.
HEINLEIN: Well, of course I wrote that book when I was in
Colorado--but not too much. Jubal Harshaw's house was tailored to
Jubal; this house is tailored to us. It's an eccentric house in
that it's as carefully tailored to use as a custom-made girdle.
it's circular because Mrs. Heinlein wanted a circular house. I did
the design work on it, but I did very largely what she wanted to
accomplish. Got a big atrium in the middle of it--twelve feet
across to the sky, open to the sky--which has a tree in it, and
flowers. And it has all sorts of things that I put in to make
housekeeping easier, for example everything is either built in or on
wheels. One or the other. It's either built solid with the house
or it's on wheels so it will roll, with the single exception of her
baby grand. Putting a baby grand on wheels isn't too practical.
Oh, and very complex wiring, and it's a forced-air factory system
for ventilation and heating and so forth.
SCHULMAN: Are you a high-fidelity buff at all?
HEINLEIN: Not particularly. We do have a hi-fi system but I'm
not the sort of a hi-fi buff who's continually worrying about
components and, "Look at this curve" and , "now let's turn the gain
up high and see what you can get there" and, you know, where their
interest is in reproduction. Our interest is in the music. And we
have an excellent sound system which a hi-fi buff would probably be
playing with all the time and changing around. We simply got an
expert to put the thing in an then we use it to play music. We have
speakers distributed all around the house and outdoors--I don't
know, fifteen, sixteen speakers--with switches and pads to let us
get any combination we want. And the swimming pool is arranged the
same way--I mean automated. Automatic cleaning, automatic
chlorinization, and so forth.
SCHULMAN: I remember that--you just mentioned Beyond This
Horizon a short time ago--in Beyond This Horizon is the first
description I've ever seen of a waterbed. Do you have one of those?
HEINLEIN: I've got one but it's in the storehouse; I don't
have any place to set it up. The first man to manufacture 'em sent
us one as a compliment; he'd picked it up, not from Beyond This
Horizon, but where I described it much more clearly in Stranger in
a Strange Land. I designed the waterbed back in the thirties and
couldn't afford to build the things. I wanted it then because I was
an invalid. But I couldn't afford to build it and then finally used
it in fiction, and a number of people picked it up from there and
now everybody's building waterbeds. And some of them are built
quite precisely to my specifications. I mean they really worked.
Some of them are not so well-built. But I don't have space to set
up a waterbed in this house without tearing something else out. And
we do have some tailor made and quite comfortable beds.
The house has all sorts of things to make housekeeping simple
because neither one of us cares too much for servants, and yet we've
got a big enough place--and we're getting old enough--that we
otherwise would need help. She has electronic cooking and, oh,
little things. There are twelve or thirteen telephone jacks
throughout the house, and eight or ten instruments so that no matter
where we happen to be we can answer the phone there. And each of
the bathrooms has a door to the outside so you can go directly from
the bathroom to the pool without tracking wet and muddy feet through
the house. A lot of things like that. It's an eccentric house, all
right, but it's simply tailored to what we need to do.
SCHULMAN: I remember in The Door Into Summer you went
through quite a bit about the drudgery of housework and one of the
premises of the story had to do with all sorts of devices to make it
easier. Have you come up with any of those things?
HEINLEIN: Most of the things I described in there are so far
out that they would be extremely expensive to develop. That
electronic equipment and so forth. It can be done, sure, but it
would not be easy. I haven't attempted to put anything of that sort
into this house because you can't buy it off the shelf and I'm not
equipped to do--nor do I have any inclination to do--the tremendous
amount of R and D work that would be involved.
SCHULMAN: Were Thorsen memory tubes purely a fictional
creation?
HEINLEIN: Yes, however they've got things that are the
equivalent to it right now, but I invented that notion back before
they did have, when the state of computer art was much more
primitive than it is now. I'm really surprised to see the extent to
which they've managed to compress the memories in--oh,
microminaturization in computers today is incredible to a person
who's seen it grow up. I was first training in computers--in
ballistics computers--back in 1930, when all the sequences had to be
mechanical. When I see how far machine computation has gone since
that time, I find it the most impressive development--more
impressive than the atom bomb, more impressive than space travel--in
its final consequences.
SCHULMAN: How far away do you think we are before somebody
like Mike will be around?
HEINLEIN: You mean a human being who is raised by other
beings?
SCHULMAN: No, I mean Mike in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
HEINLEIN: Oh!
SCHULMAN: Or is it the same character, as some people have
claimed?
HEINLEIN: Uh, no. Simple coincidence. the names derive
differently. One is from Mycroft and the other is from Michael.
Combined with the fact that I have habitually used rather
commonplace names for my lead characters on purpose.
SCHULMAN: I noticed at least four characters with the name
"Smith"--or "Smythe" if you include--
HEINLEIN: Yes. Uh, huh. That's on purpose. If you don't use
commonplace names then you invest a character with something unusual
by his name. Now, Dr. Jubal Harshaw is an unusual name and there's
a reason for it...there are overtones to the thing. Jonathan Hoag
is an unusual name, and I spent a lot of time picking out that name.
But ordinarily I use very commonplace names because I want the
reader to identify, this is an everyman character.
SCHULMAN: But anyway, getting back to Mike in The Moon is a
Harsh Mistress...
HEINLEIN: Now, that has an assumption in it that we don't know
to be true and the assumption is discussed still farther in Time
Enough For Love. The assumption is that once a computer get
sufficiently complex--on the order of complexity of the human
brain--that awareness can take place, self awareness. Now, that's
purely an assumption--I don't know whether it's true or not--but
then nobody knows how human consciousness works, either. Herman
Kahn was a guest of ours at the time I was writing The Moon is a
Harsh Mistress. Do you know who I mean? The Hudson Institute?
SCHULMAN: Uh, no I don't.
HEINLEIN: On Thermonuclear Warfare? Thinking About the
Unthinkable? On Escalation? Never heard of Herman Kahn?
SCHULMAN: I'm afraid I'm abysmally ignorant.
HEINLEIN: Well, he was with the Rand corporation, then he set
up his own think-tank up the Hudson called the Hudson Institute. He
is widely regarded as one of the top brains in the country. He was
a physicist before he became an interdisciplinary man. I told him
about this assumption and Herman thought about it and said, "Yes,
that appears plausible." He made no further comment, because it's a
matter on which no one can have a finished opinion until we see.
This matter of artificial intelligence isn't very far along,
yet--even the stuff they're doing at M.I.T.
SCHULMAN: Marvin Minsky and Seymour Pappert?
HEINLEIN: Yes, Marvin--you saw the article about Marvin in the
Wall Street Journal about two weeks ago?
SCHULMAN: No, I didn't. The whole thing was pointed out to me
by J.J. Pierce. [See "An interview With John J. Pierce," NLN 21,
May, 1973 for this reference.]
HEINLEIN: Uh, huh. Marvin doesn't make any more claim than
that himself. We were shipmate's here a short time ago--he and his
daughter and my wife and myself--and we had a little discussion.
There are some of us who think that machine intelligence is
possible--machine self awareness--and some who do not, but the
matter is wide open at the present time--nobody knows. Certainly
Dr. Minsky has done pretty well in the line of teaching machines to
do things. His machines do appear to reason. Remember and
reason, but on a fairly primitive scale.
Let's see. This came about as the result of someone saying
that you ought to do a movie star-type interview.
SCHULMAN: We seem to get back to the weighty stuff.
HEINLEIN: Well, let's see. I suppose that you have the usual
biographical stuff on me that's been carried in several books
several times?
SCHULMAN: I have all sorts of stuff. Alexei Panshin gives a
brief account, there's a brief account in the The Past Through
Tomorrow, I have a sheet which I Xerox[-copied] from a library book
[Contemporary American Authors]...Yeah I have several things.
HEINLEIN: I don't know what Panshin had to say because I've
never read anything by Panshin. Panshin doesn't know very much
about me, that's certain, I've never met him.
SCHULMAN: I don't know. I really think you may have missed
something by not reading Heinlein in Dimension; I really found it
a fascinating book.
HEINLEIN: Look, I don't ordinarily read reviews; my publisher
does--he keeps track of them. I would read such a book if it were
about Isaac Asimov, but although I know Isaac very well--close
friend from a long time back--in reading about Isaac I would be
reading about another person. Why the devil should I read about
myself--what for?
SCHULMAN: Well, much of the material in the book is not
specifically about you, it's about other concepts in science fiction
and relating it to where he feels your contributions have been.
HEINLEIN: Well, okay. But still, why would I read it? I
wrote it! [Laughter] I'm certainly not the market he aimed it
at.
SCHULMAN: No, I guess not.
HEINLEIN: Yes.
SCHULMAN: One thing which I have a note on here -- which
doesn't relate to the movie-star interview part -- is that there's
a notion in several of your books -- I'm specifically thinking of
Podkayne -- about Man's limitations in his own environment. You
know, about how he can be sunstruck very easily, and needs arch-
supports, and all sorts of things like that.
HEINLEIN: I didn't hear that latter part.
SCHULMAN: That he needs arch-supports for his feet.
HEINLEIN: Oh, yes.
SCHULMAN: Yes. And one of the notions that came to mind when
you related to this how you thought that perhaps this wasn't man's
natural environment was Desmond Morris's theory that the missing
link in Man's evolution was a stage as an aquatic animal. I was
wondering what you thought about that?
HEINLEIN: Well, it doesn't seem very likely to me, but it's
not a matter to which I've given any deep thought. I haven't read
what he has to say; it seems to me unlikely but I haven't read it.
That's simply a very horseback opinion. It reminded me of something
else...Have you read a book called The Naked Ape?
SCHULMAN: Yes, that's the one I was referring to. That's by
Morris.
HEINLEIN: Oh! And that's the book you were referring to?
SCHULMAN: Yes. Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape and also The
Human Zoo.
HEINLEIN: I had forgotten that portion in there about the
possibility that he was aquatic--the Missing Link. The thing that
impressed me about that book was his emphasis on pair-linking as an
evolutionary necessity for the human animal. I was thinking about
this matter...that all this discussion of sex and so forth is not
appropriate to science fiction? Well, to my mind, sex is so central
an element in every human being and in the development of the human
race that to have left it out of science fiction--as it was for many
years--was a major fault in science fiction, and I'm very pleased
that it's now possible to write about it. I'm reminded of an
elderly maiden aunt of a person of my generation--this was quite a
while back--who remarked with respect to Romeo and Juliet that it
was an excellent play, but why did he have to get all that sex stuff
into it? Human sexuality is so major a factor in the human race
that any attempt to deal with the human race or with people
realistically which omits this factor cannot really be a mature
treatment. And yet I know there are people who would be made uneasy
in some fashion if sex gets into it, and yet sex has to be in it if
we're to have human beings...
SCHULMAN: I'm getting near the end of the third side of my
cassette; we've been going at it now for about three hours and your
voice must be getting pretty tired.
HEINLEIN: Has it been that long? I suppose so. Let's see.
As to other parts about me personally, you have some biog-notes
there. You no doubt know that I was born in Missouri, I'm sure you
know that I went to the Naval Academy and that I was disabled our of
the Navy. I'm one of a large family. I have two older
brothers--one of them is a general and one a professor--and one
younger brother who is a professor, and three sisters. It's a very
long-lived family. My mother is still living at ninety-four...And
[my grandfather taught] me to play chess when I was four years old
and we used to play.
SCHULMAN: Do you still play?
HEINLEIN: I haven't time. I haven't time. Chess and contract
bridge are both very entertaining and they are both compelling
time-takers. I've given up both of them because they take up so
much time. And, essentially there's nothing to either one of
them--I mean after you're through where have you been? Like the boy
who rode the merry-go-round. I just haven't time; there's too much
to do. No, I expect to take up both of them again when I do
finally retire--if I ever do.
SCHULMAN: I didn't know that writers did retire.
HEINLEIN: Well, Tony Boucher pointed that out to me years ago.
he said that there are retired everything else--retired
schoolteachers, retired firemen, retired bankers--but there are no
retired writers. There are simply writers who are no longer
selling.
SCHULMAN: I assume that you say, "Dammit, I'm going to retire"
and then two hours later you say, "Hey--I just got the greatest idea
for a story!"
HEINLEIN: Oh, yes. It's addictive. I didn't intend to stay
in the writing business more than a couple of years.
SCHULMAN: There's a statement made to that effect in your
forty-one Worldcon speech; you said that you'd probably be doing
something along the line of defense work.
HEINLEIN: Well, yes...
[Break in transcription as cassette ended. Question asked
before I realized it wasn't going dealt with whether he thought
events of today were indicative of a "future shock" similar to the
"semantic disorientation" of the Crazy Years in the "Future History"
series--JNS]
SCHULMAN: Okay. I think we're going again.
HEINLEIN: [Responding in the affirmative] A very easy example
is right there in Manhattan. Back in 1930 I had a studio down in
Greenwich Village and I never hesitated to be out at night any place
in Manhattan. Now when I go to Manhattan I am very, very careful.
The situation has changed. Even though that was during
Prohibition--the so-called gangster era--the streets were far safer
then than they are now. Mugging didn't even exist as a word in
1930. That's one illustration.
SCHULMAN: And certainly the word "gay" has changed in meaning
considerably.
HEINLEIN: Well, it has changed in the public meaning. "Gay"
had its idiomatic meaning in respect to homosexuality--"among the
gay"--as far back as 1930. I know, for of course Greenwich Village
even then had quite a lot of it, both men and women. But "gay"--now
the general public knows what it means. I mean the idiomatic
meaning has pushed the normal meaning aside. If you read over the
headlines that I put into the Crazy Years in Methuselah's
Children, some of them don't even look odd.
SCHULMAN: No, they don't.
HEINLEIN: They're not startling. But they were startling
when I wrote them.
SCHULMAN: Although nobody's talking about raising the voting
age to forty-one.
HEINLEIN: No, but they did the reverse of that; they lowered
it to eighteen, and they removed all possible impediments. I mean,
all you have to be is a warm body now. For example at the present
time, the student body down here at the University of California at
Santa Cruz is eligible to vote in the city election--any of them who
care to register for it--by the current rulings. This means the
student body can outvote the city itself on things like bond
elections. On the real property. And yet those kids down there are
transients. They're not permanent residents, they're simply there
to go to school.
SCHULMAN: I never did think voting was a very good way to
settle issues.
HEINLEIN: I don't either, and neither does Lazarus Long, as I
indicated in there. But the things that they've done about voting
are the reverse of what I had in there about raising the voting age
to forty. It would have fitted more if I had made it "lowered the
voting age to twelve."
SCHULMAN: Well there was a movie about that just a short time
ago.
HEINLEIN: Yes, I know. I didn't see the movie but I read an
account of it. I know that there was such.
SCHULMAN: Wild in the Streets.
HEINLEIN: Yes, Wild in the Streets, and they were
liquidating people who were over something or other.
SCHULMAN: I think it was thirty.
HEINLEIN: Something like that.
SCHULMAN: Taking them off to prison camps.
HEINLEIN: Yes. I remember the Wall Street Journal ran a
three line notice--sad note or obituary, or something like that;
this was four or five years ago--noting that the man who originated
the slogan, "Never trust anyone over thirty"!
SCHULMAN: Yes?
HEINLEIN: Had just had his thirtieth birthday. [Laughter]
This was four or five years back.
SCHULMAN: Tell me, what do you mean by a "mature society"?
You used the words differently on the "Future History" chart and in
Time Enough For Love. Like on the "Future History" chart you
refer to the semantically oriented society as a "mature" society.
End of human adolescence.
HEINLEIN: And in Time Enough For Love?
SCHULMAN: There's a sentence to the effect that in a "mature
society" civil servant is semantically equivalent to civil master.
HEINLEIN: Yes. Well, you can attribute that to the fact that
in the course of thirty years, I became some what pessimistic about
political solutions. Yes, I did use the word differently. At the
time I wrote Methuselah's Children I was still politically quite
naive and still had hopes that various libertarian notions could be
put over by political processes....It [now] seems to me that every
time we manage to establish one freedom, they take another one away.
Maybe two. And that seems to me characteristic of a society as it
gets older and more crowded and higher taxes and more laws. One
thing that I stuck in Time enough For Love on purpose without
calling attention to it had this twelve-year-old boy driving a car
in Kansas City? And Lazarus thought it was all right and legal at
that time in Kansas City. My next older brother drove a car
regularly--every day--when he was twelve years old in Kansas City.
There were neither driving examinations nor driving licenses. Nor
very much traffic.
SCHULMAN: I don't know. I'm sort of hoping that one of these
days we'll get the best of both worlds, the high technology that we
benefit so much by--which we need a fairly large population for--and
the libertarian society which I'm working for.
HEINLEIN: The question of how many mega-men it takes to
maintain a high-technology society and how many mega-men it takes to
produce oppressions simply through the complexity of the society is
a matter that I have never satisfactorily solved in my own mind.
but I am quite sure that one works against the other, that it takes
a large-ish population for a high technology, but if you get large
populations human liberties are automatically restricted even if
you don't have legislation about it. In fact, the legislation in
many cases is intended to--and sometimes does--lubricate the
frictions that take place between people simply because they're too
close together.
SCHULMAN: I'm sort of thinking the solution might come
through technology, if we ever get to the point where you have
some sort of, let's say, portable force-field which can physically
prevent a person from being harmed by somebody else.
HEINLEIN: Have you read The Caves of Steel and The Naked
Sun by Dr. Asimov?
SCHULMAN: No, I haven't.
HEINLEIN: I think they're in hardcover and in the library.
One shows a highly libertarian society and the other one shows
Manhattan even more crowded that it is now. And Isaac deals with
each of them--somewhat different in point of view from you or from
me--because Isaac actually likes big cities.
SCHULMAN: Well, so do I. One of my favorite lines in all your
writings is the description of New Chicago in Between Planets with
its decadence--"rotten at the core and skidding toward the
pit"--that's just the type of place I like. I guess I--like Dr.
Jefferson--"infest" New York.
HEINLEIN: You would find both those Asimov books interesting
particularly if you read them practically side by side. There's the
same historical background and one concerns an extremely loose
population and the other one concerns and extremely tight
population and how they deal with it. Isaac's stuff is always
stimulating even when you don't agree with it. Perhaps even most so
when you disagree with it.
Well, unless you have something else specifically to ask me, I
think we'd better simply adjourn.
SCHULMAN: Well, I just have one more question...Do you expect
a "false dawn" and eclipse in astronautics?
HEINLEIN: Oh, hell. [Laughter] That whole chart is
fictional. The stuff isn't history, it's fiction. Anybody who
would attempt to make a firm prediction about that with the amount
of data at hand would be reckless, to say the least. There doesn't
seem to be any great enthusiasm for space travel at the present time
in this country but I'm reasonably certain that the human race will
continue with it in the near future. Whether or not they'll do it
in English, or in Russian, or in Chinese, I couldn't guess. But I
don't think we've dropped the matter.
SCHULMAN: If you really ever get interested in the Prophet
again, I'm still waiting to find out about him. He interests me.
HEINLEIN: What--Nehemiah Scudder?
SCHULMAN: Yes.
HEINLEIN: Oh, I might some day. I don't know.
SCHULMAN: He's the one character you've created that we've
never met, yet.
HEINLEIN: That was intentional. One of the things I had in
mind was to do a story in which the lead character would never come
on stage. What you would feel is his influence. And I think I did.
SCHULMAN: Well, I guess I've sort of talked myself out. At
least for now...[Deletion of some technical conversation]
HEINLEIN: Well, I'll talk further if you want to at another
time.
SCHULMAN: Thank you very, very much Mr. Heinlein.
HEINLEIN: I look forward to hearing from you again. Goodbye.
SCHULMAN: Bye, bye.